"Recognizing Demons"
January 29, 2006: 4th Sunday After Epiphany, Year B
The Rev. John MacIver Gage, pastor
United Church on the Green, UCC: New Haven, CT
www.newlights.org
Scripture:
Mark 1:21-28
[Jesus and those who followed him] went to Capernaum; and then the Sabbath came, he entered the synagogue and taught. They were astounded at his teaching, for he taught them as one having authority, and not as the scribes. Just then there was in their synagogue a man with an unclean spirit, and he cried out, "What have you to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth? Have you come to destroy us? I know who you are, the Holy One of God." But Jesus rebuked him, saying, "Be silent, and come out of him!" And the unclean spirit, convulsing him and crying out with a loud voice, came out of him. They were all amazed, and they kept on asking one another, "What is this? A new teaching—with authority! He commands even the unclean spirits, and they obey him." At once his fame began to spread throughout the surrounding region of Galilee.
Sermon:
This morning's scripture reading continues in the very first chapter of the Gospel According to Mark, picking up where we left off last week. Jesus has been baptized in the Jordan by John, where he receives also the baptism of the Holy Spirit that marks him indelibly as God's beloved. After a subsequent sojourn in the wilderness, during which he experiences both intense testing and blessing, Jesus reemerges to proclaim that "the time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near," urging all who listen to "repent and believe in the good news." Four fishermen brothers, Peter and Andrew, James and John, hear his call to follow and leave their nets and their lives to do just that.
So they follow this mysterious stranger, not very far at first, only into the nearby lakeside town of Capernaum. And seeing as it's the Sabbath, they follow him into the synagogue to pray. But there in the midst of the service, wonders begin to unfold around them. You see, Jesus teaches. And Jesus teaches not as the scribes do, when they recite with their lips the dead letter of the Law, but as one for whom the scripture is meaningful, powerful, alive and growing in him. He teaches as "one having authority," one to whom the Word of God belongs and who himself belongs to the Word.
This really is the heart of the story, the revelation that Jesus does indeed have a special relationship to the Spirit of God that breathes through the Word of God. This is the "something special" those first disciples sensed in him as he called to them along the lakeshore, the thing they couldn't quite put their finger on, but here it is, revealed now for first time in public as he opens the old, old story of God's saving love and makes it fresh for his hearers. He receives the tradition of his ancestors in faith and within its dusty scrolls finds the gospel spirit that makes it both good news and good news. This is what amazes and astounds the crowd so, and it's how the writer of Mark chooses to set up his telling of the rest of Jesus' ministry to follow.
But for modern readers, there is still that little matter of demon possession to clear up. Because, you know, we don't hear so much about demon possession these days, not really, not outside the occasional horror movie or the pages of the Weekly World News. What's the average lay person to make of such a story? Or the average clergy person, for that matter? That's the question that's been burning up the Connecticut U.C.C. clergy internet listserv in the run-up to this Sunday's reading.
Now don't look at me like that! Yes, ministers are online... some of us... and when we're not busy blogging or downloading music or selling our personal effects on eBay, some of us are actually talking to one another. The Connecticut Conference of the U.C.C. has set up this particular listserv to help us overcome the Lone Ranger-ism that tends to pervade ordained ministry. Now, without leaving the relative comfort of our offices, we can check in with one another and compare notes, particularly around the preaching we all do together alone in our respective pulpits, every Sunday.
A couple of weeks ago, a young associate minister wrote in saying he was preparing to preach on this text from Mark and asking for help in thinking about demons. I was surprised when another pastor wrote back to suggest that our young colleague do his best to ignore the unclean spirit in this "silly story" and try to focus instead on Jesus. I was surprised because (a) how do you ignore a demon running wild right there in the middle of the story—I mean, people are bound to notice a thing like that, you know—and, well, (b)... a silly story? Like what, "This morning's scripture reading comes from the Silly Story According to Mark, chapter one, verses twenty-one through twenty-eight"?
I don't suppose I should be so surprised, though, not really. Ever since the Enlightenment of 18th Century Europe kicked off the grand project of dissecting the world with that marvelous new invention, the scientific method, we've run into trouble with demons. And miracles. And faith in general. Countless philosophers, theologians, and other scholars have joined the effort, working feverishly to exorcise those hard-to-swallow and harder-to-explain elements from the Biblical narrative. U.S. President Thomas Jefferson did so quite literally. He took a pair of scissors to the pages of his New Testament in an effort to remove anything that did not meet with the measure of his rational intellect. The virgin birth, the feeding of the five thousand, walking on water? Gone. The resurrection? Gone. So of course neither angels nor demons made the cut, either. Which makes sense, in a way. Such supernatural elements are difficult for us to understand and so tempting for us to dismiss. We prefer to believe that we live in a world free from such mythology, a world that operates according to rules we can discern and describe and in ways we can predict and control.
There's just one problem: it doesn't, and we can't, not all of it, not nearly as much as we like to think. Not that I'm not thankful for the fruits of scientific inquiry. I for one am not ready to abandon electricity or antibiotics or the flush toilet. But science can't tell us everything we need to know about the world. We may be able to map the chemical changes in the brain that occur when we are in love, but we cannot predict or control love, for instance. Or hope. Or faith. They belong to a wholly other category of experience that is oh-so-real but not the least bit rational. They are, by definition, super-natural, as supernatural as demons or angels or... God's Own Self. I am not willing to abandon love, or God, simply because I cannot measure them, predict them, or describe how they work. Heck, if that's the benchmark of belief, I shouldn't believe in television either.
Folks who would later come to be called "Fundamentalists" first discovered this shortcoming in the scientific mindset way back in the 19th Century. They recognized that science was being touted not as just a tool useful for augmenting our understanding of the world around us but another system of belief entirely. For many, particularly among the educated classes, it was quickly becoming not just a supplement to faith but a substitute. And so those proto-fundamentalists dug in their heels and refused to go along. They rejected the efforts of the modern, scientific worldview to swallow up the life of faith; in fact, they went to the opposite extreme. For them and their ideological heirs today, faith became a matter of believing only the unbelievable. Forget evolution, or the Big Bang, or birth control. The strength of your faith seems to be measured by how many impossible things you can believe to be historically-factually true before breakfast.
I myself would like to ground my faith somewhere between these two poles, someplace more temperate and more conducive to growth. I accept that science is a handy tool in many, many areas of life, but I also believe there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in that philosophy, things like emotion, imagination, art, and faith—things that may not be historically, factually true, but are real and powerful nonetheless. And yes, that includes demons, or at least the category of the demonic.
Which of course begs the question: Just what does the demonic look like? Little Hotstuff devils with horns and pitchforks? Hardly. Small girls in Georgetown apartments levitating the bed? Not likely. Satan, a personified source of sin who oh-so-conveniently takes away our responsibility to reject evil and choose good? No. But destructive forces within us and within our human institutions—our families, our governments, our societies—that possess us, mind, body and soul? You betcha.
For me, any supernatural, or if you like, super-rational force that prevents even a single one of us from experiencing the full humanity God intends for all God's children is demonic. Simply put, it's an unhealthy way of relating to God, our fellow human beings, and even our selves, that has taken root in us, taken on a life of its own, and threatens to take us over completely. The ongoing psychic damage caused by sexual assault or childhood abuse is demonic for individuals and their families. Addictions to alcohol, drugs, gambling, and unhealthy relationships destroy whole constellations of lives. The evils of racism, sexism, and homophobia haunt our communities down through generations. A culture of violence strangles peace a-borning. Systemic poverty enslaves millions around the world and across the street, keeping them uneducated and unemployed, homeless, hungry, and hopeless despite an overabundance of resources, while greed and apathy feed the machine. By contrast, AIDS in itself is just a disease, but our stubborn refusal to meet it head on and with honesty and the full force of our collective will in Africa or Asia or right here at home is purely demonic. In the same way, a hurricane is not demonic, though it is a terrible natural disaster. But it may, as it has, expose some of the demons that prowl the shadows of our national life.
This is hardly silly stuff. Sure, the first hearers of this morning's Bible story may not have had the benefit of our sophisticated understanding of germ theory or mental illness or social dynamics, but they knew demons. They recognized the power of an unclean spirit to bind a person and a community in pervasive patterns of pain and suffering. And they trusted in the power of the Holy Spirit to set them free. So over and over again throughout the gospels, Jesus is depicted not just as a teacher, healer, and spiritual friend, but as an exorcist, one who has authority over even the demonic powers and principalities of this world and who, by the power of the Holy Spirit within him can break those chains and set us free. Jesus confronts the demonic wherever it rears its ugly head, whether stalking around the fringes of society or even, as in this story, inhabiting the very heart of the community of faith. He calls it out and casts it out. He says the word, the Word of life, and sends the demons running.
And if we are disciples of this Jesus, then we are called to do the same. We are called to confront the demonic in our own lives, in our selves and our communities. Relying on God's grace to give us insight and courage and, always, the humility that starts at home, we are called to name the powers that bind our lives and the lives of our sisters and brothers. We are called to name the abuse, the addictions, the racism, the homophobia, the sexism, the violence, the poverty, the greed, the apathy, and every other demon that haunts this old world. This is part of what it means to follow in the way of Jesus.
Now, I'm not suggesting we all put our hands on the television set and pray the demons out of Betty Sue—or out of the city of New Orleans, for that matter. I hope perhaps we can develop a more nuanced understanding than that. But it's clear that the world is not merely the sum total of its scientific parts. We need to recognize that though not every shackle is solid iron, not every prison door is hardened oak, still they bite just as deep and bind just as sure. And we are called to break every chain, to set every captive at liberty, to speak with confidence the Word of life shared with us in Christ, and always, always to work like hell for the transformation of the world—a super-natural transformation, really, when you think about it—the salvation whose beginning and end we have glimpsed in the ministry of Jesus of Nazareth, in whom the Spirit dwells richly, powerfully, with authority and with grace.