The shop was full of all kinds of intriguing, brightly colored devices, some of which cost hundreds of dollars. Those Technicolor wonders were beyond my means. But one of the fundamentals of stage magic is the art of misdirection, and one can master that with little more than practice.

So I learned to move one hand upward and outward with a flourish while palming a coin in the other. This basic move enabled a variety of tricks. I could, for example, seem to place a coin in your jacket pocket but at the end of the trick the money would mysteriously turn up in my other hand. This trick is well known and practiced by many, including the governments of most countries. My point is that the appearance of a situation and its reality are often very different things.

We are surrounded by an ancient, ongoing and very sophisticated magic show. Millions of people spend billions of dollars trying to project a view of the world that is in fact divorced from reality. We are continually being fed misinformation about value, money, sex, power, faith and God. Sometimes we are the ones wearing the top hat and waving the wand, and sometimes it is someone else who is palming the coin or in some other way misdirecting our attention.

We suspend disbelief and agree to participate in various illusions because we receive a benefit by doing so. Our illusions can help us feel good about ourselves in spite of either bad intentions or poor behavior, insulate us from the pain of others, and allow us to hold people who challenge us at a safe distance.

But our illusions also separate us from the real life into which God is inviting us. In that life the maintenance of relationships matters more than the acquisition of things and God is rightly acknowledged as the ground of our being. In that real life one knows that one cannot avoid some degree of suffering and loss, but paradoxically the willingness to move through it, with God's help, turns us into people worth being.

Whenever we forget that real life lies beyond the distracting flourishes of the daily magic show, we inevitably become like the cartoon character Wiley Coyote. Wiley would run after the objects of his desire without paying attention to whether or not there was anything solid underneath his feet. He never actually reached what he was pursuing, because at some point gravity trumped momentum and Wiley plunged into the chasm below.

Life is too hard, too short and too precious to squander our affections on illusions. One has only to look at the wildly divergent ways in which different societies at different times have valued things to realize how transient and arbitrary so much of it is.

A single tulip bulb sold for more than $35,000 dollars in the Tulip Mania of 1635. But the entire Dutch economy was wiped out a year later when the tulip market crashed in November 1636. By 1637 you could have all the tulips you wanted for a dollar. Had the essential nature of tulips changed? No. Reality collided with illusion and reality won.

In 1720 the economy of England tanked when those who were speculating over trading rights in the South Seas lost first their nerve and then their shirts. Sir Isaac Newton lost over 20,000 pounds sterling in the South Sea Bubble. In disgust, Newton stated "I can calculate the motions of heavenly bodies, but not the madness of people".

It is madness. What good is gold, an Emperor tulip bulb, or a rapidly appreciating stock if we lose our family, our friends, our mental health or our moral bearings in the pursuit? Over and over again envy, avarice and folly emerge from the dim corners of human souls and work their dark magic over our hearts and minds.

As C. S. Lewis pointed out in his book "The Screwtape Letters", Satan, the Father of Lies, is such a good illusionist that many people do not even believe in his presence. But still he lurks between the lines of type in the newspaper and the images on the internet. He whispers to our children through cable stations and sings lyrics that would make you blush if you could make out the words. He raises his hand with a flourish to lead all our eyes toward the pleasures of the moment even as he attempts to palm our souls and make off with them.

We do not have the strength to overcome the Principalities and Powers on our own. We cannot legislate societies into being good or scare people into being moral. But we can each be strengthened within and armored without if we will accept the strong gifts that God is offering.

How might we be strengthened from within? We can, as Moses counsels, watch ourselves closely, so as to neither forget the things that our eyes have seen nor let them slip from our minds. We know about the lure of tulips and Enron, the danger of avarice and deceit in our common life. But tulips do not bear arms and stock certificates do not break into our houses and make us give over our life savings.

Similarly infidelity, licentiousness and all manner of other character degrading activities begin as an inner impulse. The action- or the lack thereof- follows the decision to act. The things that defile and degrade us come, as Jesus says, from within our own hearts.

Temptation may have an external component, but the response, for good or for ill, comes from inside. We know, or can learn, the wisdom held in the stories of Scripture. We can make them known to our children and to our children's children. We can encourage one another to stay strong and to choose life.

Moses gave the Israelites one ark, two tablets, Ten Commandments and a means of seeking to stay on solid ground. The admonitions were true then. They are true now. Think about it. If one steals from one's neighbors that act violates the relationships, destroys trust and diminishes community. If one lies, it creates separation from others and blurs the communal sense of reality. If we put other things in the place that is rightfully God's those things will fall away at some crucial moment and we will find ourselves holding hands with Wiley Coyote as the ground rushes up to meet us. It will not be pretty, and real life consequences are so much worse than the ones in cartoons.

Ten Commandment, Ten Truths- each speaks of how to maintain healthy relationships with God and our neighbors. In fact in Godly Play, one of our Sunday School curricula for children, the Ten Commandments are called the Ten Best Ways to Live. We are strengthened within when we absorb, and follow, the wisdom Moses gave in those Ten Best Ways to Live.

And what about the armor of which I spoke earlier? Surely there is something we can do to protect us from pain and weariness- some way to avoid ever experiencing suffering or humiliation? Actually there really isn't. All claims to the contrary are false, even the ones wrapped in optimistic religious language.

The supposed armor that promises nothing but blue skies and fat bank accounts is simply one of the many magic tricks offered every day. Each morning I get as many as 100 e-mails that offer pills, devices, and schemes aimed at capitalizing on our fear of pain, loneliness and loss, or on our greed. But they are all a tissue of lies not a mantle of truth.

The armor of God is not a pill. It does not come in a tumbler over ice. We cannot put it in the bank or shoot it into a vein. It is not a magic Scripture to be written like some warding spell on our clothing. It is not a Gnostic prayer that will shelter us from all harm if it is just spoken earnestly enough.

It is no more and no less than what it says- "the armor of God," the strength of God's own power. It comes upon us as soon as we are willing to accept it- not as a possession but as a presence. Within God's armor we can stand even if we are bruised and we will live even if we die. So let us stand with nothing up our sleeves but wisdom. Let us stand firm clothed in Christ. Let us stand shoulder to shoulder and face real life with all its darkness and challenge- for we do not stand alone, and we shall not be overcome. AMEN.