5 February 2012

“Bedeviled by demons”
Fifth Sunday in Ordinary Time / Season of Epiphany
Mark 1:29-39 / 1 Corinthians 9:16-23
Confirmation of Devon Williams
10.30 am sermon
5 February 2012


As we continue through this first chapter of Mark’s gospel here in these first Sundays of the new year … the Epiphany season … and what the church calls “Ordinary Time” … we are hearing some stories which are far from ordinary.
There is a thread of illness and healing here. Last week, Jesus healed a man who, as Jesus entered the synagogue in Capernaum, met him with these words:

Just then, there was 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.”

That man’s loud words, they probably caused embarrassment to those people there, honored as they were to have Jesus be there among them.
Ah, but this week’s text, picking right up where we left off last Sunday, this text is an embarrassment to many of us, we who gather in worship every week hoping, praying to hear a word that speaks to us in our own situations, a word we can freely share with others without fear of embarrassment or ridicule, or sounding like we’ve checked our brains at the church door.

That evening, at sundown, they brought to [Jesus] all who were sick OR POSSESSED WITH DEMONS … and he cured many who were sick with various diseases, AND CAST OUT MANY DEMONS; and he would not permit the DEMONS to speak, because they knew him.

Demons. That’s an offputting word for us, post modern mainline Christians … moderate to liberal Protestants.
It’s offputting and offensive to some of us, because it reeks of … primitive culture. A time and place, back then, long ago, people who didn’t understand illness and health the way we do today, and so they blamed mental, physical, emotional illness on the work or possession of demons. You can see something of this line of thinking portrayed in this artwork inside our bulletin today … the scene depicting, in medieval painting, Jesus casting a demon out of a woman … you can see the little black winged figure flying out of her as she collapses in a heap, and someone has to come to her aid.
Talk of demons causing people to feel or behave badly today probably sounds plain stupid and foolish to us … nowadays we have names for these illnesses, like schizophrenia and depression, cancer and colitis; and medications which can control, treat, or even cure people of these chemical imbalances or bacterial or viral infections.
Labeling truly ill people as “demonically possessed” brings up all sorts of painful memories. Here in the Northwest in particular, we’re reminded of our reprehensible history in dealing with and treating the mentally ill. Oregon and Washington have an absolutely atrocious record when it comes to how we’ve chosen to work with the public health issue of mental illness. My father used to tell me stories of driving through Salem, Oregon’s capital, in the 1940’s, and being scared to death when they went past what was known just 60 years ago as the State Insane Asylum, the inmates leaning out the barred windows, yelling and screaming at anyone and everyone who would hear them. Others of us remember the stories of Frances Farmer or “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” … coincidentally enough, that movie just aired on channel 9 Friday night.
These are parts of our Northwest history we’d certainly rather forget … today, we aren’t this horrid in how we treat the mentally ill, but we still have a long, long way to go in serving these brothers and sisters with the dignity and compassion which they most certainly deserve.

To others of us, though, talk in an ELCA Lutheran church of demonic possession aligns us far too closely with our evangelical brothers and sisters (and here, I use that word not in the classic but the received sense, in which it is used today … referring to conservative, literalist, even fundamentalist churches) and the way they use that word, demonic … (even though in our own theological history, Martin Luther used the word in the same way)… pointing to Satan as Devil, evil incarnate, in the body, in the flesh, an opposite to God, a dualist demiurge, if God is the source of all that is good and right and true, then the Devil is the source of the exact opposite. And so the Devil or his army of demons gets blamed for everything bad we think or say or do … “the Devil made me do it” … and worse, far far worse …our enemies, “them,” those who see things differently from “us”, politically, economically, morally, they get the label of “Devil” or “evil” slapped on them, too … this or that is labeled “the work of demons” or “demonic.”
A story from my own recent past comes to mind.
Several years ago, you may remember that a tattoo business opened a little way north of here, on 140th. Though I thought this location rather odd, I didn’t give it much more thought.
However, some did. Shortly after the tattoo business opened, I was visited by a member of our community who was trying to rally all the pastors in the area to stage a boycott and protest against the tattoo parlor because of what “they” were doing, “foisting off on our community,” “tempting our young people” with what was positively “demonic” and it had to be stopped.
I listened politely (all the while thinking of the many Lutherans … parishioners and pastors … I know who themselves are tattooed … one of whom I know quite well … none of them have sprouted horns or are spinning their heads around as they spit pea soup)… I thanked this neighbor for her visit … and that was it.
There was no protest. No boycott. No campaign of terror against another neighbor-business.
And that was because … there was nothing inherently demonic about that business up the road. The woman who came to visit me, she just didn’t like the idea of a tattoo shop opening up in our neighborhood, so she demonized them, to try to run them out of the neighborhood and out of business.
But that is so NOT how we as Christians are called to be politically active. You may have heard that yet another Christian pastor is in the news this week, demonizing a Certain Large Local Coffee Company, encouraging a Christian boycott because of a political view that Large Coffee Company holds.
Again, that’s just plain wrong. In our free-enterprise democracy, if it’s a political point of view with which you don’t agree … please, don’t bring demons into it.
We Christians, like everyone else who lives in this country, will rely on the market to make the decision, as to whether a business fails or succeeds.
If you’ve noticed, the tattoo parlour up the road went out of business. Not because of demonization and boycott by the local Christian clergy. But because their business just didn’t fit in here in Fairwood. The market took care of things. Or, as we Lutherans would say, the First Use of the Law … supply, demand, How Things Work in the World.
But what about Martin Luther? you might ask. After all, he called his opponents “Devil” and “demon,” especially the Roman Catholic church and the Pope.
Luther certainly wrote and said and did many good things in his work as one of the founders of the Christian Reformation. His pejorative use of the label “devil” and “demon” against his opponents is not part of that good work. These words of Luther have caused much harm. Modern Lutherans separate ourselves from, we condemn, Luther’s pejorative, damaging writings … his demonization of Roman Catholic clergy … and especially Luther’s writings against the Jews; which we could indeed label as demonic, for they laid the foundation for Nazi Germany and the Holocaust.

So what do we do with a text such as this, which is before us today? Do we just throw it out, as a backward relic which embarrasses us because of its simplistic explanation of larger problems … or worse, words which cause us much grief over the harm they have caused, and continue to bring upon our world?
Well, I don’t think we need to be that drastic.
If we return to the core meaning of “demonic,” we find that it’s simply “that which goes against or blocks God’s good and gracious will for the life of God’s creation.” “That which goes against or blocks God’s good and gracious will for the life of God’s creation.” Or, in the words of another definition which I found this week: “Anything that keeps us from being the individuals or the community that God wants us to be, is demonic.”
Now a LOT of stuff can fit in this broad, deep basket … illness, disease, war and suffering, hatred, fear, crime, economic poverty, spiritual anguish and pain, death itself. Everything, anything that comes to us as “bad news,” bad news for us in this life here on earth.
Many of us get that … and thus we can more readily, compassionately understand how people and cultures without the medical and technological advances we have today used the word “demon” as a way to comprehend and communicate this bad-ness which was greater than what they could deal with, what they could fix.
We also “get” that bantering around “demonic” as some kind of a sledgehammer against our opponents on the one hand … or, on the other, saying that God sends what is truly “demonic” … illness, tragedy, global catastrophe … upon his beloved creation … both those extremes are not Christian behavior. They are anathema to Christians … the total opposite of what we’re about … and we shall not cease to speak out against such blatantly slanderous, sinful words and actions being done in the name of Jesus.
But there is an even greater Word for us here.
Note that what the text says Jesus does with the demons of his day is “cast them out.” Jesus “casts out” demons … he sends them away from the people to whom he ministers and for whom he cares and loves and shares his life.
As God’s chosen people through the waters of Baptism, Jesus has entered and daily enters our lives with a name for us and a claim on us … “beloved child of God” … that is our first name and our first vocation and our first calling in life. And so the “demonic” forces in life … “anything that keeps us from being the individuals or the community that God wants us to be” … those forces have been dealt a death-blow and put on the run from us, “cast out” by the Watering Word sprinkled, poured, enveloped around us through God’s gift of Holy Baptism.
Every day as we hear Jesus’ call to remember our Baptism … every time we dip our fingers in this font and trace the sign of the cross on our foreheads … every time we confess our sins and hear the words of forgiveness … every time we gather around this table and eat and drink that Word into us … Jesus casts out the demonic … “anything that keeps us from being the individuals or the community that God wants us to be” … Jesus casts that out from us.
Jesus casts out … the fear which holds us back from making life choices that draw us closer to the Kingdom of God for us individually… career choices, relationship choices, economic choices.
Jesus casts out … the fear which holds us back from life choices that draw us closer to the Kingdom of God corporately … choices about giving and serving, witnessing and standing in justice and love with and for others, especially the others who are under the thumb and pressed down by the selfish powers of this world and this life.

Devon, this is what it means for you when in a few moments you stand up here and join with all of us, in the historic words of our Christian liturgy, as we renounce the devil and all the forces that defy God … the powers of this world that rebel against God … the ways of sin that draw you, draw us from God … and then, turning, affirming your Baptism, confessing your Word-Watered faith which Jesus has planted in you and which your parents have nurtured and for which this faith community has worked and prayed and which you have wrestled with and tossed around and thought about and will, we hope and pray, continue to wrestle with and toss around and think about and grow in all the days of your life. Confirmation … your public affirmation of your Baptism … means we draw around you and uphold you and support you and walk with you … us, together, against the demons … yours, mine, ours, and the world’s.
When they draw close to you, know that Jesus Christ is closer, and that he has the ultimate power over everything, everything that would hold you back from becoming the person our God would have you be. And know that, wherever you are, wherever you go, you carry this Word of promise and hope with you … for you, and for the sake of the world God loves … baptized, beloved, child of God, one with us in God’s promise, sealed by God’s Holy Spirit, and marked with the Cross of Christ forever.

Jesus still casts out the demons of this world. Whatever we choose to call them … poverty, injustice, mental, physical and emotional illness, political strife, economic slavery, untrue words about God and God’s people … Jesus calls and sends his Word-Watered people into those places and to those brothers and sisters who need to hear the Good News that in Jesus, God is calling us to bring the Word of love that life is more than our bad situations, more than being defined by our illness or disease, more than being trapped in a series of bad choices, more than being frozen or strangled by fear … Jesus calls and sends us there to point to, to enflesh, to be the hearts and hands and feet of the Kingdom of God come near
… until that day when Jesus Christ is all and all is Jesus Christ and everything is made right.
And until that day, we all have something to say … we all have something to do … in Jesus’ name.
Amen.