4th Sunday after the Epiphany, Year B, January 29, 2012

O God of blessing, grant us the wisdom, the strength and the courage to seek always and everywhere after truth, come when it may, and cost what it will.

For those of you who have been following along in the Gospel of Mark, we have arrived at verse 21 in the first chapter! (If you blinked, you missed the first 20 verses.) I’ll summarize: John has appeared in the wilderness, calling for repentance for the forgiveness of sins quoting the prophets Isaiah and Malachi. He has announced that one is coming who is greater than he; has baptized multitudes in the Jordan, including Jesus. Jesus has experienced the pleasure of God and the temptation of Satan; he has been with the wild beasts and messengers sent from God served (or deaconed) him.[1] John has been arrested and Jesus has taken up the same call for repentance, proclaiming the good news that God’s love and justice are so close. Jesus has recruited two pairs of brothers for companions. He has promised to show them how to fish for people! And, now it’s as if the Gospel writer leans forward and says, “watch this!”

According to Mark, the first day of Jesus’ fishing for people ministry is a Sabbath. That’s a nice touch. That’s the day for the largest possible crowd because folks are keeping the day Holy by not working. And, Mark says, Jesus did some astonishing teaching on that Sabbath day at the town’s gathering (or the synagogue) in the lakeside town of Capernaum. But Mark doesn’t tell us what Jesus was teaching, because Mark wants to get right to the important thing – the first of a dozen specific healings – or maybe it would be better to call them “freeings.” All Mark says about Jesus’ synagogue teaching is that Jesus displayed a sense of authority unlike other teachers they’d heard. And here Mark takes a regrettable potshot at the scribes, the religious scholars of the day. It’s unbecoming at best, and it signals a trend that will eventually grow into deadly Christian anti-Semitism. I don’t want to linger there, and yet I cannot skip over it without comment. We do well not to scorn the scribes because we are quite like them. Scholarship matters to us. Tradition matters to us. Expertise matters to us. Believe it or not, the authority of scripture actually matters to us.

So Jesus did some memorable teaching. And just then – there’s that word that I was talking about last week that means “right away,” a guy started shouting – or rather, an unclean spirit in a guy started shouting at Jesus. The unclean spirit in the guy asked Jesus, “have you come to destroy us?” And Jesus tells the unclean spirit – the demon – to be silent and come out of the man. In other words, yes, Jesus has come to destroy whatever accommodates unclean spirits. Actually, what Jesus tells the unclean spirit is “shut up and get out of him!”

Now, when I was growing up, there were certain things that could never be said at our house – and the words “shut up” and “get out” were high on list of things we did not say. I was a compliant child (at least in my early years) and I certainly didn’t ever say inappropriate things! I don’t know about you, but I think being compliant can get so tiresome after say 20 or 30 years. So imagine my surprise and delight when I encountered this passage from the Gospel of Mark in my own translating exercise fifteen years ago. I saw that in Greek Jesus says, “Shut up! Or literally, “put a muzzle on it” and “Get out of him!” This is not the Jesus I met in Sunday School – gentle Jesus meek and mild. Mark’s picture of Jesus is not at all pretty. His story and his Jesus are austere and abrupt – staccato if you will. In fact, this Jesus is a little hard to look at. Jesus is kind of a jerk in the Gospel of Mark, as easily enraged at human misery and injustice as he is at what he finds to be just plain stupid. (Stupid. That’s another word that we didn’t say at my house.)

Mark is setting out to introduce Jesus as someone with remarkable skills both in teaching and in sending demons packing. It’s a kind of show and tell scene – or tell and show in this case. The amazing teaching part is easy enough to believe, isn’t it? We’ve all experienced that at one point or another in our lives. (At least I hope we have.) The exorcising demons part is a little sketchier. People in my generation might think of the horror movie/or horror novel of the early seventies, The Exorcist. And if it’s not The Exorcist, I bet you’ve seen at least one science fiction film in the same genre. There’s a way in which those sci-fi stories operate to dramatize oppressive forces (demons) that are much more subtle in polite society – demons that we all live with, which keep us from enlarging our capacity to give and receive love.

You know, in Mark, demons always know that Jesus is the Holy One of God – the disciples don’t seem to get it, but the demons always do. In fact, in Mark, one real sign of the effectiveness of Jesus’ ministry is when oppressive forces start screaming bloody murder. And Jesus demonstrated surprising authority over those oppressive forces that backed people into narrow places, that pushed people down, that put the squeeze on, that limited life and freedom. Jesus wasn’t only proclaiming freedom – he was enacting it. In his book entitled, A Costly Freedom, Brendan Byrne asserts that “unless we make some effort to relate [the conflict with the demonic] to our world we shall not really come to terms with the gospel [of Mark] at any great depth. He goes on to define what he means by demonic: “the control of human life by forces, frequently transpersonal and socioeconomic, that stunt human growth and freedom, alienating individuals from each other and from their own true humanity.”[2]

I bet many of us believe in the demonic when it’s put that way – “forces that stunt human growth and freedom, alienating individuals from each other and from their own true humanity.” We don’t have to agree on the sources of the forces to agree that human growth and freedom is not what it ought to be – we’ve all seen and experienced this! So I wonder, how do we get what terrifies us or shames us into alienation, into division and estrangement, out of our heads, out of our communal or corporate psyches? This is tricky territory because I don’t want to suggest that we should all become Jerks for Jesus. We’re Episcopalians after all. But I often wonder if, in our disdain of over-confident Christians, we become under-confident about our own God-given authority to set others free.

What if we stopped shrinking from or negotiating with or tolerating those unclean spirits – those oppressive forces — those demons – that terrify us or shame us into alienation, separation and estrangement? What if we could get more clear that the forces which alienate and diminish the dignity of human beings are decidedly unwelcome? What if we could figure out assertive and non-violent responses to the diseased spirituality that shouts in our own heads, in our homes, in our parish, on the street – wherever?

Some of you know my story of a friend who was driving down Route 1 south of Alexandria, Virginia. It’s like Route 1 almost anywhere on the east coast – four to six lanes of divided highway, lined with semi-abandoned strip malls. She and a companion were headed out to lunch when they saw a traffic accident across the divided highway. They saw cars stopped, a crowd gathering, and one man hitting another man over the head with a tire iron. My friend drove across the grassy median strip, while her passenger, cried out in alarm, “what are you doing?” Without a word, she stopped her car, jumped out, ran up to the two men. The man with the tire iron was showing no signs of slowing down. The gathered crowd was wide-eyed and paralyzed. While everyone else watched, the woman shouted at the man with the tire-iron the only thing she could think of to say: “What is your religious affiliation?” (true story) The man with the tire iron paused, tire iron over his head, and said, “Uh, Baptist?” She asked, “What do they teach you about this in the Baptist Church?” In the moment of his incredulity, he had stopped long enough for other people to grab the tire iron away from him. The police and an ambulance arrived. The injured man did survive the beating (just barely). And of course the official police statement on the local news that evening, directed at anyone who might intervene in such an altercation was, “don’t try this.”

Some years later, I was walking in Harvard Square and I happened upon a scene where a woman had gotten out of her car which was still running. She was kicking a man who was, in turn, hitting her with his bicycle. I tried to walk by. I really did. But I recalled the tire iron story and I thought, “I have to stop.” I couldn’t bring myself to ask the religious affiliation question, so I shouted, “Do you need me to call the police?” They both stopped their hitting and kicking long enough to explain to me why they were hitting and kicking each other. I interrupted them and repeated my question: “Do you need me to call the police?” And they each said “no.” With my heart about to pound right out of my chest, I asserted in my bravest voice that they should probably move along, and to my surprise and relief, they did!

Where did that sense of authority come from? I don’t know. I think it got passed on to me from hearing the first story. And maybe I’m passing it on to you. And I bet you you’re your own stories of exorcism. Exorcism is an act of liberation from a spirit that has gotten separated from the Holy One for whatever reason: enmity, cruelty, jealousy, greed, disregard, domination, the list goes on and on. By contrast, exousia – the Greek word here for authority, means the power of choice – of freedom. It comes from truth telling, accountability, the assertion of human dignity, giving and receiving love in the midst of struggle. Asserting exousia recalls the spirit back to its divine task, which is to serve the well-being of the world.

After this encounter that Jesus had in the synagogue, right away, Mark says, right away the word began to spread. In the epilogue to his book The Powers that Be, Walter Wink wrote: “The passion that drove the early Christians to evangelistic zeal was not fueled … by the desire to increase church membership or to usher people safely into a compensatory heaven after death. Their passion was fired above all by relief at being liberated from the delusions being spun over them by the [demons – the spirits which have been separated from the Holy One].” Being freed compelled them to set others free.”[3]

I’m going to end by reading you a poem by Jan Richardson called “Blessing in the Chaos,”[4] because this is where it begins, according to the Gospel of Mark.

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