Grace, mercy, and
peace to you in the name of Christ our Saviour. Amen.
A
few years ago, I was working a shift at St Boniface Hospital during the first couple
of months of my clinical pastoral education practicum. For the practicum, we
are assigned a ward, or two, given a list of patients, and taught how triage
patient visits. During this particular shift, I was standing at the end of the
hallway, with my list in hand, when suddenly I couldn’t catch my breath. I was
shaky, and sweaty, and just couldn’t bring myself to set foot onto that ward. Instead,
I sat in the stairwell, trying to regain my composure, and then spent the rest
of that shift doing a bunch of online training. I had no idea what was going on
or why I reacted in this way. Turns out, I live with a not-formally diagnosed
general anxiety disorder. It’s my demon that I discovered in that hallway all
those years ago, and it’s a demon I continue to battle today.
Demons,
or unclean spirits, come up in today’s gospel reading. Last week, Jesus rounded
up his ministry team and now he can start his preaching and teaching. He
decides to start in Capernum. It’s the day of Sabbath so Jesus takes his team
to the temple. I suppose he would have been considered a guest preacher at the synagogue
that day. Few, if any, had ever heard of him before and once they looked at the
bulletin and saw he was from Nazareth originally, not a few perhaps groaned
inwardly. (Does anything good come out of Nazareth?) But then he started to
teach and although he was no John the Baptist full of theatrics and arm-waving
fire-and-brimstone rhetoric, there was something striking in the very way this
Jesus spoke.
The
people were astounded at his teaching. He really knew his stuff! He brings scripture
to life, not like those other boring scribes. It wasn’t just that his ideas and
vocabulary were fresh and innovative. There was something in the very presence
of the man that made you want to sit up straighter. This man had authority. He
had a moral gravity, a weightiness and substance to him that people found
difficult to explain. Somehow, they sensed that this man and the message about
God’s kingdom he was talking about were one and the same thing.
Everyone
was leaned in, listening intently, when suddenly a man in the back row starts
yelling and causing a ruckus. The man began heckling Jesus, “What have you to
do with us, Jesus of Nazareth? Have you come to destroy us?” The text says that
the man had an unclean spirit, that he had a demon inside of him.
When
we hear about demons or unclean spirits in the gospels and throughout the
bible, often people will link that concept to mental illnesses like schizophrenia
and autism or medical conditions such as epilepsy. These are medical diagnoses
that are relatively recent so it’s not surprising that the folks in Mark’s
world would have attributed someone having a seizure or schizophrenic episode to
demonic possession.
But
we are so much more educated now, and when we talk about demons or unclean
spirits, things like mental illness and physical disabilities aren’t even part
of the conversation anymore. We all have demons inside of us if we are honest
with ourselves. We have become good at hiding them, organizing them, justifying
them, making them presentable. These demons are things like disbelief, loss of
faith, homophobia, transphobia, racism, sexism, religious intolerance, abuse,
violence, terrorism, war, greed, ignorance…
It's
important that we name these demons because it’s a way of recognizing that they
exist. Unless we name the demons, they will name us; they will control us and
destroy us. People suffering from demons lose the ability to control their voice
and their actions. A demon is anything that has power that is not of God, and
that keeps a person from living a fully abundant and loving relationship with
God and with others. It can be something personal like anxiety and depression
that, at times, can be crippling. Or something systemic like oppression and
discrimination, the voices that advocate against women, people of colour, and 2SLGBTQ+
people.
We
don’t know what kind of demon was in the man at the synagogue that morning. But
something about what Jesus was teaching made that man react by lashing out. And
how does Jesus react? By calling the man out, with authority. Jesus teaches in
a such a way that makes his audience think of things in new ways. He teaches in
such a way that gets us to name the demon and cast it out. He teaches about a God
that breaks the boundaries in our lives.
So,
what does this text promise us today? What does this story mean for those who
don’t share the worldviews of the gospels, where it comes to understanding what
makes human existence perilous, where illnesses come from, and what it means to
acknowledge that some powerful forces appear to remain stubbornly beyond our
ability to control?
This
text today promises that Jesus reveals to us a boundary breaking God. Each and
every boundary we try to put in place, we think is in place, even that which we
perceive as impenetrable, God bursts through. Political, social, religious,
ethic, racial, sexual, gendered, cosmic, even death. Jesus is telling us that
God is here, breaking through the barrier that holds at bay the unclean, the
evil of the universe, the places and spaces where it seems God could never be.
This
text today promises us that God is in all that possesses us. Depression and anxiety?
God is there. Grief, loss, and sorrow? God is there.
Looking
at the world around us, it is hard to believe that God is anywhere in all of
this anxiety, and hatred, and oppression, and discrimination. The truth of the unconditional
acceptance of God can evoke dark opposition from the destructive forces in the
human spirit that seem to prefer bondage and oppression over liberation and
freedom.
So,
what do we do? We name these demons, we recognize that they exist, we listen to
Jesus’ teachings, and we pray. Praying is not a simple giving in to God’s will,
or an exercise that puts our minds at ease. It is a way for us to look inside ourselves,
at our own demons, and to resist the despair that causes us to practice
unbelief, and to abandon or avoid the way of Jesus. In other words, it is the
struggle to believe that change can really happen, that a better world is
possible.
Progress,
whether in self or in society, is not just destroying the demons that are
there. It’s a dismantling of the causes of those demons. That is what Jesus was
teaching at the synagogue that morning – that progress can happen if we address
our demons, the causes and the symptoms, with the goal of liberating the
individual and reconciling with ourselves, our community, and with God.
May
we all have the courage to address our demons, to name and acknowledge them,
and to respect the doubt and disappointment that may come along side of them. May
we also have the strength to still utter these words of truth, “God is here.” Amen.
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