There are all kinds of stories about the attempts of Satan to control God. I found this story called “The Devil and One Word.”

STORY: “The Devil and One Word”

God, as everyone knows, created the heavens and the earth and everything in them. And, as we are now aware, He created them through the use of words, for words, of course, are power. “Let it be done,” God proclaimed, and it was done. And everything God made was good.

Well, God was especially proud and loving of the man and woman God had made, because God had breathed into them a part of the Divine, the Spirit of God. But, not surprisingly, the devil was jealous and angry. So one day when God was enjoying the man and woman, the devil casually happened to walk by. He sauntered up to God and asked, “What do you like so much about these creatures?” And when God opened the divine mouth to speak, the devil craftily put a bond upon God's tongue so God could not speak! God could not talk! And since God's creative power was in the divine words, the devil had bound that power.

Well, the devil laughed at God and quite had his way with the man and the woman. Well, as some eons went by, the devil came back to mock God – he couldn't resist, such is his nature. So he came back to mock God. He scoffed at the silent deity and taunted this helpless God. God responded to all this by holding up one finger.

“One!” asked the devil. “Are you trying to tell me that you want to say just one word? Is that it?”

Yes, God nodded, pleading with soft eyes and urgent hands.

The confident devil thought to himself, “I don't suppose that even God could do very much harm with one word. Ok.” So the devil removed the bond from God's tongue.

And God spoke one word, in a whisper. God spoke it for the man and the woman, and it brought great joy. It was a word that gathered up all the love, forgiveness, and creativity God had been storing in the Divine heart during the time of silence.

The word God spoke was Jesus! (1)

The power of Jesus. Even just the name or word has power. Not even the devil and demons of evil have power over Jesus. In fact, they are afraid of the power of Jesus. God through Christ always wins in the battle with evil; always. That's one of the lessons in today's scripture.

As we consider today's Gospel reading, I have to admit that I've always been sympathetic to those pigs. What did those animals do that they deserved death? Did Jesus really have to send the demons into the pigs so that they killed the pigs? I know that to a Jew, pigs were unholy animals and totally worthless; but these pigs were on non-Jewish territory, and even though they belonged to a non-Jewish person, I also have to feel sorry for the owner who lost valuable property. Yet, since this isn't a story about economics and ownership, but a story that uses the area and its inhabitants as props to tell the real story of Jesus power, we'll deal with the power of Jesus over evil and let the scholars deal with all of the incidentals. I'm still sympathetic to the pigs and their owner, though.

So what's going on in this story? The power of God in Jesus confronts a madman or a man filled with demons. Here is a person whose life is totally out of control, who can't live among people or even live in a sane way with himself. And when the very presence and power of God shows up in the form of God's Son, Jesus, the demons not only know who Jesus is, but they are afraid of this power and what this power can do to them.

Do we get the message? When the power of God through Christ Jesus confronts evil, evil always know it's powerless. Evil is scared to death of Jesus the Christ. And they way you can tell it's scared is because evil will become loud and boisterous, it will do outrageous and horrible things, it will go to extremes to destroy everything around it. It's then that you know it's really scared.

Several weeks ago, people in our nation were remembering D-Day, the invasion of Normandy, in the battle to stop a madman from killing and destroying everything with which he came into contact. Perhaps if the rest of the world had understood this principle, then we would have confronted Hitler's actions (and those of the other aggressor nations) sometime between 1933 to 1938 as evil not only out of control but running scared in the face of righteousness, D-Day never would have need to happen because there would have been no WWII. This is a fantasy and a simplistic way of looking at events 60-75 years ago, but what if we people of God stood up to evil the first time it reared its head? Maybe we would avoid a lot of bloodshed, destruction, and tortured lives.

So the demons try to negotiate with Jesus: “Don't throw us into some place where we will be lost. Put us where we will feel at home; we'll be glad to leave this man if you want.” So Jesus takes the unholy demons and puts them into the unholy pigs who go insane with so much evil that they end up killing themselves to get rid of this overwhelming demonic power.

Now this scares the keepers of the herd of pigs. The townspeople are immediately amazed, but then they too are scared and want Jesus out of there. They had learned to live with evil, they put up with this crazy man, but when Jesus got rid of the evil and radically changed their culture, they didn't know what to do. Jesus had just turned their world upside down. They wanted the comfort of the life they knew, even if it was filled with evil; they did not want the uncertain future in which they did not know what would happen next.

You see, not only is evil scared of the power of God through Christ, but so are those people who don't know Jesus. They've learned to live with evil and they're just as scared of the power of Jesus as evil itself is scared. My friends, are any of us dissatisfied with the illnesses and evil running rampant in our society and in the world? Then why don't we let the power of God through Christ throw the demons out? Why? Because most of us are content that some people should be poverty stricken and unemployed, hungry and homeless, filled with drugs and violent rage, hateful and lost; that our world isn't so bad even if it does have greed, injustice, and war; as long as the rest of us can have more than we need, which is usually interpreted as we always want more because we don't believe we have enough. You see, if the people of God truly trust in God and God's grace, we will not allow our fellow human beings to be less than we are, because to do so would let evil have control. But the power of Christ can and does, has already in fact, defeated evil. Evil can never win.

With the release of the demons from the man, the man was healed and came to offer himself to Jesus. And what does Jesus say? “Tell everybody what God has done in your life.” Tell everybody what God has done in your life. And evil doesn't like that either. Because once people find out about God, people's eyes are opened to the fact that evil's power is an illusion, that it's a fraud, that it has no power of its own, that it never delivers on its promises.

You want to get rid of evil in your community? Tell people what God has done in your life. Tell them about the saving grace of Christ Jesus. Show them how to live the grace of God through Christ, and evil will get scared and beg to leave. And your community will be claimed for Jesus.

The presence and power of Christ is right here in the midst of the life of evil, in the lives of the people of our community, in the lives of those whom evil has claimed. Christ is right here, and Christ has the power to conquer evil and to set all things right. Evil knows that, and it's about time we knew it too. So declare how much God has done for you and watch evil disappear.

(1) William J. Bausch, A World of Stories for Preachers and Teachers (Mystic, CT: Twenty-Third Publications, 1998), pp. 234-235.
(2) Ideas for this sermon were taken from Marion Soards, Thomas Dozeman, and Kendall McCabe, Preaching the Revised Common Lectionary: Year C: After Pentecost 1 (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1994), pp. 48-50.