The 1st United
4th Sunday after
the Epiphany
Scripture
Hebrew Scriptures – Deuteronomy 18: 15-20[1]
15The LORD your God will raise up for you a prophet like me from among your own people; you shall heed such a prophet. 16This is what you requested of the LORD your God at Horeb on the day of the assembly when you said: “If I hear the voice of the LORD my God any more, or ever again see this great fire, I will die.” 17Then the LORD replied to me: “They are right in what they have said. 18I will raise up for them a prophet like you from among their own people; I will put my words in the mouth of the prophet, who shall speak to them everything that I command. 19Anyone who does not heed the words that the prophet shall speak in my name, I myself will hold accountable. 20But any prophet who speaks in the name of other gods, or who presumes to speak in my name a word that I have not commanded the prophet to speak—that prophet shall die.”
Gospel – Mark 1: 21-28[2]
21[Jesus and his disciples] went to
What
Have You to Do with Us, Jesus of
Years ago, when our daughter Allison was about seven or
eight years old, I was holding her in my arms as we were sailing with friends
on Trinity Lake up in Siskiyou County.
One moment, as we looked at each other, I playfully said to her,
"The next time that Skip brings the sailboat about, I'm going to throw you
in." She continued to look at me calmly
and said, "If you do, I'm never going to talk to you again." At that moment I think she meant to make good
on her threat. It must've worked because
I didn't throw her in (even though she could swim very well!). These kinds of mutual threats between my
daughter and me were always playful – not without a bit of an edge to them, but
clearly always made in fun.
A genuine threat, though, is never playful. The people of that ancient near eastern
culture that gave rise to the teachings in Deuteronomy, believed that God could
and did speak with a threatening voice when prophets proclaimed that
righteousness and justice were at stake.
If there is any lesson in this for us, it seems to me, it's that nothing
less than death and destruction await us if we claim to speak for God, when in
fact we're only speaking for ourselves. When
you and I become the source of such evil the threat is very real.
Here in the 21st century we've largely lost any
sense of the demonic. The teeming,
brooding world of evil spirits – once at the heart of the early Christians'
imaginations – is today mostly the stuff of cheap sensationalism relegated to
movies and television. Evil itself is
understood in an increasingly horizontal sense – at the Earl Lectures in
Berkeley this past week, one candidate for the ordained ministry defined it
simply as an "outrage."
Sometimes, for the most horrifying of outrages, we're tempted to apply
the metaphor "demonic," but it's still just that, a metaphor. We of the modern world have little feeling
for the spontaneous, magnetic power of evil that the authors of the Bible
believed existed, for that "outrage" whose origin lies far deeper
than any atrocities that mere human beings commit.
So, without that sense, we'll only have a partial
understanding of Mark's version of this episode in the life of Jesus. The story stands, but the power of its clout
is lost on us. If we simply translate
"possessed by unclean spirits" as merely a 1st century
description of mental illness, not only will we have missed the tremendously
dramatic and symbolic importance that Mark attaches to this event (coming as it
does at the beginning of Jesus' public ministry), but we'll have missed the
very contemporary questions that it raises for us.
The Bible, you see, doesn't shy away from the voices of
threat – some of these, supposedly, stated by Jesus himself:
"For
the wages of sin is death"[3]…"If
any of you put a stumbling block before one of these little ones who believe in
me, it would be better for you if a great millstone were hung around your neck
and you were thrown into the sea."[4]…"many
who are first will be last, and the last will be first"[5]…"Truly
I tell you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God like a little child
will never enter it."[6]
Nowadays most of us don't
talk like that – issuing threats of judgment and damnation – and yet the
reality of living in a world as broken as the one we now live in is that maybe
we should take a second look at such threats.
Playfully stepping off of a sailboat in the middle of a
lake with my daughter in my arms is one thing.
Stepping into the real world to bear witness to the teachings of Jesus,
in the midst of very real threats, is something else entirely. However we choose to name the
"demons" of our day, the threat and power of evil is real. And it's very strong. Mark had no delusions about either the power
of demons or the authority of Jesus.
Unfortunately, we're not so sure about that anymore. It could be that at no other time than when
our own peace and safety have been threatened do we come so quickly to who and
what we are. That's why our vengeful response
to the tragic events of 9/11 is something that I still find deeply
disturbing. What is the greatest threat
that we face today? What
"demons" possess us? Like that
unnamed man in the synagogue, we long for release! When will it come, and who will deliver us?
There are those, currently in political power in this
country, who claim that the answer is to establish – once and for all – a
Christian nation. As
Would you know a "demon" if you saw one? George Bush claims to be able to. The truly remarkable thing about this story
in Mark is that this "man with an unclean spirit"[8] is
portrayed as the first one to recognize Jesus.
He calls him by name in words that ring with numinous intensity:
What do
you want with us, Jesus of Nazareth?
Have you come to destroy us? I
know who you are, the Holy One of God.[9]
Only much, much later will
the disciples – Jesus' closest friends – stumble on that same realization. While the eyes of the crowd are still firmly
fixed on the mundane, the demonic pierces through it to recognize in Jesus
something of its own kin – to call him by his true name.
I don't know about you, but this kind of talk makes me
squirm, just a bit. When I was a little
boy I was taught some elementary ethical distinctions: demons are "bad," angels are
"good"; so how could the two possibly have anything at all to do with
each other? Aren't they at opposite ends
of the spectrum, and aren't we able to see that, clearly?
But teachers of the Christian spiritual tradition have
always been more cautious about the uncanny kinship that exists between the
holy and the demonic. All too often the
demonic comes to us wearing the garments of glory, wrapped in the flag of our
own country, offering us greatness, success, self-knowledge, power, spiritual
bliss – weaving subtle webs of seduction, spinning siren songs to the soul. So I am fascinated by Mark's portrayal of
Jesus exercising his authority. He calls
and people drop everything to follow him.
He speaks and demons are set loose.
He cures illness and goes wherever he wants. The people who listen to his teaching are
awestruck by his authority. So are the
demons.
"And the unclean spirit, convulsing him and crying
with a loud voice, came out of him."[10] In Jesus' presence, it seems, even the
possessed were given voice. They
screamed with recognition. They knew
whom they were seeing. Bodies were
tormented, convulsed, and "spirits" came out.
From this passage in Mark I understand that this possessed man
was in the synagogue. The narrative
reports that there was a service being held there on the Sabbath, a regular
weekly service, presumably, in
The story doesn't tell us where that spirit went. It just says that it "came out of
him." Where do demons go? Where do they find a home? In one biblical account they enter a herd of
swine.[12] In this story we aren't told.
What in the world are we to make of all this? We're a generation that has learned how to
split atoms, pierce the farthest reaches of creation and look deeply into the
face of the sun without going blind.
We've rolled back the boundaries of time and space itself to press the
limits of our knowledge of the cosmos.
Bearing down on ultimate scientific truths, we bear down as well on the
very real possibility of our ultimate destruction. We have the capacity to annihilate the very
earth that we stand on, to unleash its devastating energies in a way that no
one – not even our biblical forbears (with their wild but ignorant imaginations)
– could conceive. Like kids playing war
games on our computers, we roll blithely on, unaware of the depths of even our
own psychic turmoil, much less the powers and principalities swirling around
that threaten to undo us.
Now, don't get me wrong, I'm not advocating a return to the
superstitious anthropomorphisms of the past – a time of "ghoulies and
ghosties and things that go bump in the night."[13] But I am saying that we know very little of
power and powers, and in that Mark's gospel might have something to teach
us. In that bold greeting of the
"unclean spirit," that shrill perception of kinship, something very
real and shocking is said. At root
they're cut from the same bolt of sheer spiritual energy: the power that creates, the power that destroys;
the power of a biblical prophet that wakes new hope in us all – a Gandhi, a
Martin Luther King, Jr., a Mother Theresa – is kin to a demonic power that with
equal charisma – in a Hitler, a Jim Jones, a Pol Pot – twists and warps and
imprisons the human soul. We are in a
world of power run awry, of energies unleashed and roiling, of cosmic
detonations that we ourselves have set off, whose reverberations are as yet
unknown. We are playing with fire – we
who would know it all without offering compassion, we who would be master
without being servant. In this season of
light – of epiphany – we should pray for discernment.
It is, finally, about authority and trustworthy leadership.[14] A lot has been written and debated about what
authentic leadership is and how we're supposed to be able to recognize it. But always it's what someone does when he or
she is in a position of leadership that makes the difference. A man recalling an encounter that he had with
two shepherds while he was hiking in the mountains west of
Once, I watched a shepherd move his flock to a
higher pasture, as they do every spring.
He was walking behind them, prodding the stragglers along with his
stick. He had two dogs with him, one on
each side of the flock, to keep the sheep together and turn them at his
command. The dogs seemed to be enjoying
what they were doing, but the sheep did not.
They were all packed together, pushing each other. They were afraid of the shepherd and his dogs.[15]
Some
time later this same hiker came across another shepherd in the same mountains. He immediately saw that something was very
different about these sheep and about their shepherd. The first thing that he noticed was that this
flock was spread out over the whole meadow and just a single dog, wagging its
tail, trotted up to greet him as he came
near. The shepherd invited him to have a
cup of coffee with him. The hiker
remembers:
We
chatted for awhile about nothing in particular, but all the time we were
talking, he was constantly doing something with one or another of his
sheep. One old buck came up and
half-butted him, as if to challenge him, but he just laughed, grabbed the buck
by the wool on its head and wrestled with it.
I could see they were playing.
Then he rolled a young sheep on the ground, and spun it around and in
the process turned each of its ears inside out and looked into them – to check
for ticks, I suppose. He pulled
cockleburs out of the coat of a ewe, rubbed her head and patted the lamb she
was nursing. On and on, all the time we
were visiting, this shepherd was also…visiting?... with his sheep. Finally he said, "Well, gotta go. Been nice talking with you." He extinguished his fire, put the cups and
coffee-pot away, picked up his pack, and whistled – once. All over the meadow, the sheep stopped what
they were doing, raised their heads and looked at him. They converged behind him, into a close but
comfortably spaced flock, just as though each of them was tied to him by an
invisible rubber band.[16]
I would follow such a
shepherd.
I met, again, one of my favorite theologians at the Earl
Lectures this past week: Rita Nakashima
Brock. She's had something very
enlightening to say about our gospel reading for today. She said this:
The
image of Jesus as exorcist is someone who has experienced his own demons. The temptation stories point to the image of
a wounded healer, to an image of one who by his own experience understands
vulnerability and internalized oppression.
In having recovered their own hearts, healers have some understanding of
the suffering of others. Naming the
demons means knowing the demons….The Gospels imply that anyone who exorcises
cannot be a stranger to demons….To have faced our demons is never to forget
their power to hurt and never to forget the power to heal that lies in touching
broken- heartedness….Jesus hears, below the demon noises, an anguished cry for
deliverance.[17]
I would follow such a leader.
* * *
[1] Our central issue this Sunday is about authority: What is it? Who has it? How do we know what "the will of God" is? Whose voice should we listen to? Who has true authority? Unlike a popular misconception, prophecy is not about predicting the future – as if the prophet had a crystal ball into exactly what was going to happen – it's about evoking a perception of reality that's decidedly different from the one that the dominant culture claims.
This reading from Deuteronomy this morning is part of a large section which outlines a number of different laws reflecting community life in the 6th century BCE. The section on prophets begins with a warning against following the practices of the Canaanites. Oddly enough, it then goes on to say that there is a very simple way of judging whether or not a prophet's message should be believed: if it comes true, he was right; if it doesn't, he wasn't.
[2] The
people of
[3] Romans
6: 23a.
[4] Mark
[5] Mark
[6] Mark
[7] Cotton
Mather, quoted in a lecture entitled "
[8] Mark 1:
23b.
[9] Ibid., v. 24.
[10] Ibid., v. 26.
[11] Loc. cit., v. 23.
[12] This is
told later in the story of Jesus healing the so-called "Gerasene
Demoniac" in Mark 5: 1-13 (cf.
the other versions in Matthew 8: 28 – 9: 1 and Luke 8: 26-39).
[13] I don't
know the history or author (the famous "Anonymous"?) of this phrase;
but I have heard it quoted, in full: "From ghoulies and ghosties and things that
go bump in the night, Good Lord deliver us!" I wouldn't be surprised if it weren't penned
by some Scot – stories of haunted castles in the Scottish highlands were full
of chilling examples of paranormal phenomena!
[14] I write this on the eve of the stunning victory of
Hamas over their rival Fatah party in
[15] Colonel
Ben H. Swett: an anecdote quoted by
Michelle Hargrave in Homily Service
(Vol. 39, No. 2, Published by The Liturgical Conference, Taylor & Francis,
Inc., Philadelphia, PA, January 2006), p. 52.
[16] Ibid, p. 53.
[17] Rita Nakashima Brock, Journeys by Heart: A Christology of Erotic Power (New York: Crossroad, 1991) – and also quoted by Michelle Hargrave in that same issue of Homily Service, p. 53.