Liberating Power

Scripture:  Deuteronomy 18:15-20  Psalm 111

        I Corinthians 8:1-13   Mark 1:21-28

What do you expect when you come to church?  To see your friends from church?  To sing some hymns – maybe your favorites, maybe not.   To hear the Scriptures, and a sermon that may help us apply it to our lives – or not.   And at the end, a closing hymn,  a benediction, and some coffee and cake downstairs afterward.

We probably don’t expect to hear someone stand up in the middle of the service and start screaming at the top of their lungs.  Now, in some churches, that wouldn’t necessarily be out of place.  In Pentecostal churches, parishioners may cry out, speak in tongues – which may sound like gibberish to others but carries deep meaning to them - dance in the aisles, even fall backward in a faint – the phrase for it is “being slain in the Spirit”.  But here at Emanuel, as in most mainline churches, while worship is heartfelt, it also tends to be quiet and orderly.  Hopefully not so quiet and orderly as to induce sleep, but quiet and orderly nonetheless.

Our reading from Mark’s gospel takes place just after Jesus gathered his first disciples.  They attend a synagogue in Capernaum, and Jesus stands up to teach.  We’re not told what Jesus said, only that his words carried a ring of authenticity, of lived experience, that those gathered in worship were not accustomed to hearing.  They were doubly astonished because Jesus was essentially a nobody from nowhere, a nobody from the nearby town of Nazareth, with no formal training.

It is at this point, as Jesus was teaching, that a man suddenly stands up and starts screaming at Jesus, veins standing out in his neck, eyes blazing with rage, his arm extended and finger pointing directly at Jesus, looking like he’s about to explode:  “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!”  Jesus takes charge of the situation, saying, “Be silent, and come out of him.”  The spirit both disobeyed and obeyed, coming out of the man, but making a lot of noise on the way out.  And the people are in awe, saying “What is this – a new teaching, with authority!  He can even command the unclean spirits, and they obey.”  And then they sang their closing hymn, went downstairs, drank coffee and ate cake, and went home.  Well, actually, probably that’s not what happened.   What had started as an ordinary worship service had been transformed.  Though Jesus tried to keep his actions under wraps, news of this healing spread throughout the region.

It may be difficult for us to relate to this story.   Many of the symptoms attributed to demonic possession in Jesus’ day seem recognizable to us as symptoms of epilepsy or mental illness, medical conditions that respond to medication or talk therapy or both.  For many of us, talk of unclean spirits may call to mind images from the long ago movie The Exorcist, with Linda Blair spewing vomit and spinning her head around.  Or if we’re more architecturally minded, we may gravitate toward movies like the Amityville Horror, in which a house rather than a person is possessed by evil. 

The way I can connect to this text, at least at this point in my life, is to think of other examples in which people are seemingly driven by forces beyond their control.  For example, an addict, aside from the addiction, may have as much capacity for kindness and caring as anyone else.  But an addict desperate for a fix will lie, cheat, steal, manipulate, threaten, neglect family members and children, and even put the lives of others in danger, until the addict’s need is met.  And we know that over time as the body’s tolerance increases, the fix has less and less effect, the addict needs more of the drug and needs it more frequently, and the vice tightens until the need for a fix takes over the addict’s entire life.  And like the man in our gospel reading, even though on some level the addict knows he or she needs help, if help is offered, it will be resisted mightily.  The addict may wonder if, aside from their addiction, they still exist.  Are they holding the bottle or is the bottle holding them.  And if the bottle is taken away, will there be anything of them – their pre-addiction personality – left?  Or, if they give up their addiction, will they disappear, or turn into joyless zombies with no feelings, with no capacity for relating to others and enjoying life.

A key insight of the twelve step programs is that addiction is not just about a physical craving for a controlled substance, but a symptom of a deeper spiritual sickness – and if the person succeeds in quitting cold turkey without undergoing a spiritual change, their lives will still be distorted.  In AA, such people are called “dry drunks” – people who do not drink but still act out all of the distorted, immature, self-centered thinking of an active alcoholic or addict. As Jesus said elsewhere, if a demon is cast out of a man, but the man has nothing in his life to fill the emptiness, the demon will return and invite its friends.  If only it were as easy as Jesus laying his hands on someone and casting out a demon….I’d gladly walk down Kensington Avenue, laying hands on everybody as I went.  But only Jesus gets to be Jesus, and it’s not that simple, though if anyone wants me to lay hands on them and pray, they have only to ask.  But recovery is not the work of a moment but of a lifetime.  The mental and spiritual distortions that underlie addiction develop over a lifetime, and may take a lifetime to unwind. The twelve steps provide a guide for doing the spiritual work – spiritual inventory, confession, attempts to make amends, spreading the message.  And if the spiritual work is done, there can be great reward.  I was at a funeral years ago for a longtime AA member, with decades of sobriety, who had been an anchor at many groups around the city.  It was said of him that he took the raging torrents of his own life, and poured them out as cups of cool water to quench the thirst of those around him.

There are other ways in which we can find ourselves caught up in forces beyond our control.  We’ve all heard stories of group behavior that got out of hand – celebrations of sports victories in the streets that resulted in property damage and physical injury, fraternity hazing rituals that led to alcohol poisoning and death, bullying so pervasive as to drive the targeted person to suicide, flash mob attacks that send victims to the hospital.   Those who get caught up in such behavior may as individuals have little capacity or desire to hurt others.  They may wake up the next morning, perhaps at home, perhaps in jail, drowning in regret, wondering what on earth possessed them to act as they did.  Indeed, that’s exactly the right question: what possessed them.  But in that moment, somehow the aggression and suppressed hostility within each individual took over, and the whole became greater than the sum of its parts.

And it’s not just small groups.   Institutions, communities, can become enmeshed in evil.  Theologian Walter Wink wrote that at various places in Scripture, churches and even nations are said to have angels representing them before God, and that Paul warned of powers, principalities, spiritual wickedness in the heavenly places.  Wink interprets this to mean that institutions and even nations carry a kind of collective spiritual force, that can work for good or for bad.  And so, entire political and economic systems can be dominated by evil.  We have only to look at 1930’s Germany, when an entire country and culture, including its churches, collectively gave themselves over to humanity’s worst impulses.  On the surface, daily life went on much as it always had, with only subtle, gradual changes, but under the surface, the collective soul of the nation had been driven by a charismatic leader into captivity to evil.   And again, that included all but the tiniest sliver of the churches.  Martyrs such as Dietrich Bonhoeffer were the rare exception, not the rule.  Even activities that seemed good or harmless only served to mask monstrous crimes against humanity.  And similar horrors can happen anywhere, in any country, including our own.

How can we avoid getting caught up in collective evil beyond our control?  I think the key is to remember who we are, and whose we are.  The forces that would enslave us want us to forget, to forget who we are as individuals and as a society.   They want us to forget who we are so that they can define us as they want us to be.  As people of faith, we need to remember that both we and our neighbor are equally children of God – regardless of race or nationality or gender or faith tradition.  As Christians, we need to remember that Christ calls us to love God and neighbor, and that our neighbor is anyone in need.  We need to remember our baptismal vows to serve God and resist evil.   We need to remember Jesus as described in the Gospels, and as those around us compromise themselves, to ask, What would Jesus do?

Power is often used to enslave, to limit, to dominate, to coerce.  But for the writer of Mark’s gospel, Jesus used his power not to enslave, but to liberate; not to force people into some predetermined mold, but to free them to live out their true selves, to live with authenticity at their deepest level.   Mark recorded the casting out of the unclean spirit early in his gospel, not just as an individual miracle, but to set the tone for all that followed.

May we accept the liberation Jesus came to offer.  May we offer this same liberation to others in our lives.  May we remember who we are, and who our neighbors are, as precious children of God, created in God’s image, carrying something of God within us and them.  Amen.