January 31, 2021 | Worship

Not gonna lie, I’m a little excited to talk about demons and unclean spirits today. Did you listen to the song we sang just before the sermon? If not, pause this and go back. No shame, no judgment, I know that having online church where you can sort of choose-your-own adventure when it comes to which parts of the service to tune into is definitely one of the perks of quarantine, and I can honestly say that I’m grateful that you chose to click the link to listen to the sermon this morning when there are so many other things that could be vying for your attention at the moment. Writing the sermon, I had other things vying for my attention—I have a preteen slumber party taking place a room away and do you know how hard it is not to want to join in on the girls’ conversations? But I digress—hit pause now and go listen. “Silence, Frenzied, Unclean Spirit”—that’s a doozy of a song title, isn’t it? It almost feels out of place among “We are Living, We Are Dwelling” and “To Us All, To Every Nation” and many other hymns that share the same tune—Ebenezer—as this one. But here it is, all “Cease your ranting! Flesh can’t bear it. Flee as night before the sun.” and it is, honestly, a song I never would have actually wanted to click on if I had the option to skip it…so good on you if you listened to it before we paused here.

Today’s gospel text in Mark is an exorcism. I grew up in a tradition where we didn’t talk a ton about spiritual warfare and exorcisms, or even demons. I grew up in this tradition—United Church of Christ. It isn’t often we hang out and stay a while on the texts that really cause us to marinate in the supernatural. That’s what makes it even more fun and interesting for me when these texts come up in the lectionary. I’m sure some of you have a similar experience to me, while others come from backgrounds where the stories of demon possession and casting out of spirits are alive beyond myth and allegory, in which case I’m sure I have a lot I can learn from what you know about these kinds of scriptures. One thing I do know—there is so much richness in a text like this one today that it simply cannot be overlooked.

There is a tendency to want to tame texts like this. To look at a story about a man with an unclean spirit and give him an armchair diagnosis based on the very limited description given to us. But what do we really have to go on? Jesus came to the temple—this is the earliest act of his ministry in the Gospel of Mark—and while there he was confronted? Or he came across? The words are “just then, there was a man with an unclean spirit” so you kind of get the idea that he came out of nowhere, popping up from behind a chair saying “boo!” but that’s really it. We don’t have much. That’s the man’s introduction. Just then, there was a man. And really, it introduces the spirit more than the man. The man is just a carrier for the unclean spirit. A prop.

I’ve heard these kinds of stories explained away as “mental illness.” Maybe you have too. To be frank and transparent, as a person whose every day is impacted by mental health, that doesn’t make me feel any better, especially in light of the fact that it took two hours with a trained professional to obtain my diagnoses and a lot of follow-up assessments to make sure the diagnosis was correct, and yet we think we can ascribe mental illness to a man with a one sentence bio. I want to push back on this tendency that some of us may have to rationalize and play super sleuth detective psychiatrist when reading texts that have things that are so beyond what we can fit neatly into what is “known” to us. In her book, A Healing Homiletic, Kathy Black also issues this caution, saying, “ When a person has a form of epilepsy that cannot be totally controlled with medication or someone has a mental illness, and we preach these texts by implying that such people are possessed by demons, we add a tremendous burden to their already difficult lives.” I know, and we thought we had cracked the code, right? But our interpretations of scripture should never be at the cost of dehumanizing anyone else in our beloved community. To cherry-pick a piece of scripture and toss it down without context from our reading from first Corinthians, “Knowledge puffs up, but love builds up.” But really, assuming we have the answers and have rationalized this away only serves us, but taking a broader look with love as out guiding force builds up and strengthens our community by not making anyone who is already dealing with some stuff more vulnerable.

So these unclean spirits. What do we make of them? And why—why are they the only ones who seem to fully grasp Jesus’ authority? Isn’t that fascinating? I mean, in the Gospels, as we encounter unclean spirits and demons, we see again and again that even when the people around Jesus are questioning whether he’s the real deal, the demons always know. To quote this morning’s unclean spirit, “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.”

Then, just as quickly as they’re discovered, they’re rebuked and cast out. In this story, we never hear from them or the man again. Instead, this is used to show Jesus’ authority as he begins his ministry. As we read in our Hebrew Scriptures this morning from Deuteronomy, Moses is talking with the people about what to expect after he’s gone. He gives clear details for how to spot a false prophet. The issue of people proclaiming authority for person gain was a problem in Moses’ day as it was in Jesus’, and it can be argued—probably pretty successfully—that it’s a problem for us as well. As Jesus is starting out, establishing that he has clear and direct authority from God was important. Yet, even with this first miraculous casting out of a demon, people still would continue to question him. The demon saw through him though. So weird, right?

Not really. When I think about demons, I don’t really think about little guys in red with pitchforks dancing around on people’s shoulders. Maybe they’re more nuanced than that. I’ve never seen a demon—not like that anyway. And this man with an unclean spirit was already inside the synagogue. It’s not like he wandered in there with clear and obvious demons. He may not have even recognized that he had an unclean spirit. Maybe it just felt like part of him, something maybe he didn’t like about himself but it was too late not to try and change that part of who he was. Or like, a lot of work. Right? He was on the inside, though. This is important for a few reasons. This man was part of the community, and was allowed inside, impure and unclean as his spirit was. His unclean spirit didn’t bar him from spiritual life, BUT, the spirit was the one who saw Jesus for who he was, not the man. It is unclear about whether the man recognized Jesus afterward. The people in the synagogue were amazed, yes, but did this make them believe? Jesus attained fame at this point, word spread, but was it in a gawking, incredulous sort of way? As we see the challenges that Jesus encounters along the way, I don’t think that we can say that he made many believers at that moment.

That said, we who are believers and come to church weekly—nowadays in a more implied spirit than physical action—we are part of the church, we are inside. But what is keeping us from recognizing Jesus? What unclean spirits do we harbor, perhaps just below the surface, masquerading as part of our personalities or as a product of our raising? How are we unable to know Jesus because this little piece of “us” is seeing who Jesus really is and is cowering, terrified because once Jesus sees that little piece, it knows it will also have to be cast out? As I think about that reading from first Corinthians this morning, it addresses the ways which we might get in the way of others knowing God—this one in a less-than-timely illustration about eating sacrificial meat and whether that’s okay or not. We aren’t in danger often of eating food that has already been placed on the altar to someone else’s God, so it’s a little weird to try and figure this out, but what it does do is offer us advice on how to exist in a world that is not Christian as followers of Christ. Perhaps our unclean spirits that we need Christ to help us exorcise are the things that prevent others from being fully included in the family of God. Things that act as barriers to people feeling welcomed, or things that upon hearing the good news that God and Jesus love us, would be led to believe that the good news does not apply to them.

What can we do, as beloved children of God, to make sure that those unclean spirits don’t prevent us from recognizing Jesus ourselves? We must cease to assume we are the gatekeepers to God’s Kingdom, we must strive to recognize the belovedness in our fellow humans, and we must rely on Jesus’ healing power to help us through when separating ourselves from our unclean spirits proves to be too great a task on our own. To end with the last stanza of our hymn, “Clear our thought and calm our feeling, still the fractured warring soul. By the power of your healing make us faithful, true, and whole.” Amen.