Deception is two-fold. . .

The Hollywood image of the devil is a red suited demon with a tail and a pitchfork.  He is cartoonish and that makes him seem less than real to many of us.  On the other hand, more serious attempts to define him head down the path of the Exorcist and others of its genre.  There the devil is no buffoon but real power and evil seemingly without match.  The devil wants to make you bad.  Does he?  I am not so sure he cares if you are a fine upstanding person or the scum of the earth.  So long as you reject God, the devil is happy.  Whether you ignore God or abhor Him is not the important point.  How he gets you there or keeps you there is important.

When we call the devil the great deceiver or the father of lies, it might seem like he tells tall tales.  Would that this were the extent of it.  The devil works to make you question truth and accept what is not true as truth.  It does not matter what it is about, only that you believe what is false and hold false what is true.  All his deception seems to work around these parameters.  The devil works very well at crafting words which we are susceptible to believing.  He knows us and plays to whatever bias or vulnerability lives in us.  His lies are shape shifters and they are different from person to person while being the same in purpose and end.  He tailors the lies or deceptions to us like a fine fitting suit of clothes.

He purposefully makes dense what is plain and plain what is dense.  In this way we reject the obvious truths out of hand because of imagined complexity.  Surely the whole gender fluid business is making more dense and complex what is really rather straightforward.  Biology tells us what is the norm and what is the exception but the devil turns that upside down by making us think the exception is the norm and has been all along except for the conspiracy of power and control to corrupt the natural truth.  Furthermore, he works very hard to make simple what is not.  God must be a larger version of us -- complete with all our flaws -- so that you trust Him no more than you would trust any stranger you do not know.  His mastery of Scripture makes us question what is clear and pursue with abandon what is not revealed to us.

The devil also works by carefully making his point with words that just seem to fit.  Purgatory is a perfectly logical idea -- the final cleansing of the sinner before Paradise.  Lord know, we think we need it.  It is an absolutely reasonable idea but it did not come from the mouth of God and is alien to what God has said. An idea like this takes hold because the devil is really good at hammering home what should be and conveniently silent about what is according to God's own Word and promise.  He can craft the argument and the words to shift us away from the sufficiency of Christ alone or from the need to live within the Church where His Word and Sacraments deliver to us His gifts of grace.  So, having been artfully tutored in words that God never spoke with the plot line and skill of a master author, the devil leads to trust ourselves and doubt what God says.  It certainly helps his cause when we are alienated from others and live alone with our screens and our truth.

He does not need to make us sex addicts or money lovers or mass murderers or drug dealers or athiests.  All he wants or needs is for us to doubt and deny and learn to live without any god but especially the God who sent His Son to save and redeem us captive to sin and the power of death.  He deceives with truth that has been turned into lies and lies that are paraded as truth along with the crafty discernment to know when to switch gears and what cracks make us vulnerable.  God's Word is our only refuge and strength.

Brave new world. . .

As the calendar tells me 2025 is over and a new year is begun, my mind wanders around the disintegration of community, church, and family and how it bodes for the years to come.  I watched as a child the first mall near our small town come to life and was dazzled by its offering of stores, goods, and eateries.  It was a very small enterprise by American standards but decent enough for the small city of 20,000 people serving a wider area of very small towns.  My parents did not greet the new mall with the same enthusiasm I did.  When Wal-Mart and Shopko built down the street, they were not nearly as enamored with the idea of plenty cheap goods as I was.  I chalked it up to the age difference -- they were from another era.  It was that but more.  Now in my 72nd year, I have learned to see what they saw.

The mall offered a different main street than the one where my dad's hardware store sat but they were related.  At this point in time, the little village of 700 or so boasted a car dealership, an implement dealer, a half a dozen gas stations, two grain elevators, two grocery stores, three produce stations, a handful of taverns (beer bars since we had no liquor by the drink), a dry goods store, a Ben Franklin, several barbershops (one with bath facilities), a couple of lawyers, two banks, a bustling cafe, several meat markets, a boat builder, a lumber yard, a paint store, a vet, several insurance offices, and a host of things I have forgotten to name.  On this main street everyone knew each other and they shopped with friends and neighbors in businesses owned by friends and neighbors.  It was a reciprocal arrangement in which we all scratched each other's backs.  But the mall was not like that at all.  Nor was Wallyworld.  There the people in the aisle were mostly strangers and you not exactly feeding the community by your purchases as you were feeding the Walton enterprise.  The main street was community.  Every age was there and the old were not segregated to institutions nor were the young shipped off to daycare.  We all lived on main street no matter what our address.

Nearly everyone I knew went to church.  I would be hard pressed to name who did not.  The funeral home had no room for a real funeral -- only for some visitations.  Everything from life to death took place in the churches.  The combined membership of the two Lutheran congregations (one Swedish and one German) was nearly double the size of the town.  A small Methodist and Evangelical Covenant Church congregation completed the roster.  Every kid I knew went to some Sunday school.  Confirmations were major events.  After a wedding at one of the churches we pulled the fire trucks out of the station and ate, danced, and drank beer in the empty space. The pastors of the churches were held in high esteem -- even by those who disagreed with their public doctrine.  There was no discipline problem because the whole community, with the congregation, doubled as the extension of mom's frown or dad's voice.  With this came a deep respect for authority -- even the authority with whom you disagreed.  God was everywhere and morality was shared even by the sinners who fell before temptation regularly.  We knew what sin was and we knew the value of forgiveness early on in life.

What was true in the small towns across America was also true in the urban neighborhoods -- sometimes called urban ghettos of people with a common ancestry, language, and religion.  People did not life in the city.  They lived in their neighborhood, went to school together, shopped on their version of main street, and played in streets while we played in fields and big back yards.  It was different and yet the same.  Until it was not.  The mass suburban exodus offered them the promise of space but at the cost of the communities they had known and enjoyed.  The exodus from rural America to the factories and suburban life offered the same promise but at an equal cost. We have become so mobile now that the question where are you from has become a joke.  Who knows anymore?   Urban churches have become apartment buildings and their neighborhood markets cannot compete with big box retailers or the abundant online availability of goods and services.  The decimated main street of rural America is matched by the loss of shops and shopkeepers from the urban and suburban landscape.  

I am not saying it is all bad.  We enjoy an abundance of cheap goods that none of us wants to give up.  We have people delivering things right to our doors that no retailer would ever stock.  But think of the loss of community, the emptiness of churches, the lack of order, the loss of a shared morality and a common bond of language, culture, and religion.  It is a brave new world but we are sheltering more and more in our homes, behind our screens, trusting no one but AI, and complaining that we are lonely and depressed.  Are they related?  No one believes we will ever return to what was.  I certainly don't.  But perhaps we all need to slow down the pace of change, work to restore through other avenues those things we have lost but need, and figure out a way forward to build into our modern world places for us to connect.  The church was one of those places -- not because we had a program to foster fellowship but because we came early and stayed late and these things happened.  Boys met girls there whom they would marry and girls met the boys who would become their husbands and they all sat with siblings, parents, grandparents, and extended family in the pews.  I am not sure that the church was the center of our lives because we sought community or community was the fruit of our common faith.  But as we make our way into 2026, I pray that some of what was lost might be found again and the church is key.  We have to give up a me and God kind of religion and find again the faith that binds with baptismal water those who are not kin by blood.  

A blessed New Year to you all!