I’ll give this introduction to my sermon series “Nobbling the Hobgoblins” at the beginning of each sermon, for the benefit of any person who starts the series in the middle, or even at the end.
It all began one Saturday morning a few months ago. A man rang the manse doorbell. At first, I assumed he wanted some emergency assistance and prepared myself to hear his story.
Instead of requesting assistance, however, the man came with an offer of assistance, even if the offer sounded somewhat strange to me. The man claimed to be an exorcist, and he said that he had assisted a number of churches to rid themselves of various “demons”.
Walking past St. Andrew’s, he noticed four “demons” lurking about and offered his services in ridding ourselves of them.
Being rather sceptical of such things, I took it all with the proverbial grain of salt, thanked him politely, and encouraged him on his way.
Not long after that, when preparing a worship service, I was reading John Bunyan’s hymn “Who would true valour see …”, and came
across the classic affirmation that:
Hobgoblin nor foul fiend
can daunt their spirit.
In this context, I thought of my Saturday morning visitor and thought that, even for those of us - like myself - who don’t believe in literal “demons”, there are those symbolic “demons”, those symbolic “principalities and powers”, those symbolic “hobgoblins”, if you will, that plague the life of all people, including the life of people of faith.
I thought of a few “hobgoblins” that were particularly relevant to mainstream Christian churches in our own time and place, and named these “hobgoblins” after a few figures from our popular culture:
• from English literature, a “hobgoblin” named Ebenezer Scrooge;
• from Australian bush verse, a “hobgoblin” named Hanrahan;
• from television, a pair of “hobgoblins” named Alf Garnett and Hyacinth Buckét.
In all of this, I hope to provide some encourage for us as we seek to nobble the “hobgoblins” in our life of faith.
At the end of each sermon, we’ll sing Bunyan’s classic hymn and affirm Christ’s victory over each of these “hobgoblins”.
Copyright: Robert J. Faser, 2011.
