Mark 3: around him, he said, Here are my mother and my brothers! 35 Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother.

Transcription

1 Mark 3: And the crowd came together again, so that they could not even eat. 21 When his family heard it, they went out to restrain him, for people were saying, He has gone out of his mind. 22 And the scribes who came down from Jerusalem said, He has Beelzebul, and by the ruler of demons he casts out demons. 23 And he called them to him, and spoke to them in parables, How can Satan cast out Satan? 24 If a kingdom is divided against itself, that kingdom cannot stand. 25 And if a house is divided against itself, that house will not be able to stand. 26 And if Satan has risen up against himself and is divided, he cannot stand, but his end has come. 27 But no one can enter a strong man s house and plunder his property without first tying up the strong man; then indeed the house can be plundered. 28 Truly I tell you, people will be forgiven for their sins and whatever blasphemies they utter; 29 but whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit can never have forgiveness, but is guilty of an eternal sin 30 for they had said, He has an unclean spirit. 31 Then his mother and his brothers came; and standing outside, they sent to him and called him. 32 A crowd was sitting around him; and they said to him, Your mother and your brothers and sisters are outside, asking for you. 33 And he replied, Who are my mother and brothers? 34 And looking at those who sat around him, he said, Here are my mother and my brothers! 35 Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother. He s Lost His Mind So, as most of you know, it s not unheard of for me, especially when I decide to preach on the lectionary reading for a given Sunday, to think that I have my sermon all planned out, but then wind up going in a completely different direction than I first thought. Well, that s what s happened this morning, so the title no longer fits (at least in the way I intended hopefully you won t think now it applies to me). As I continued to sit with this passage, I found myself confronted with something that is so prevalent in the gospels but that we usually tend to gloss over. It s something we don t talk about. It s something we usually don t even think about. So this morning, I want us to sit with it for a few minute, not because I have anything profound to say about it, but simply because if we re to take the gospels seriously, we can t ignore it. I remember the first time I saw the movie The Exorcist, based on the 1971 novel by William Peter Blatty. At the time I was either a freshman in high school or possibly even still in middle 1

2 school actually I m pretty sure I was still in middle school. I say that now, and as I m about to become a father I think, Would I really want our son to watch The Exorcist when he s in middle school? I seriously doubt it, but I m pretty sure that s when I saw it for the first time. There were certain advantages to having a brother a few years older than me who way back in the dinosaur days of the VCR was pretty adept at taping movies that came on too late for us to stay up and watch. I knew The Exorcist was a horror classic with such iconic scenes as the possessed girl Regan s head spinning all the way around and, of course, the wall covered in split-pea soup. (If you ve seen it, you know what I m talking about; if you haven t, that s probably all well and good.) I knew it was a horror classic, so I just had to watch it. Ever since about middle school I ve been a fan of well-crafted horror stories. Not the shock-and-awe slasher flicks that don t take any nuance or craft to make, but well thought out, psychologically complex horror I just can t get enough of. As I think back on it, maybe the reason I love horror stories so much now is because I was absolutely terrified by just about everything when I was little. Maybe I reached a point when something deep inside finally said, Scary or not, I want to know what s there. But that s a whole other conversation. So there I was. I was sitting in our living room all alone in the house. My brother probably would have flipped if he d known I d gone into his room to get one of his tapes. But I remember having that glee that I m sure most of us got when we were young and we were doing something we really wanted to do even though we knew weren t supposed to. I turned on the T.V. I put the VHS tape, which had been carefully labeled with masking tape, into the VCR. I sat down on the couch, fast forwarded through the last couple minutes of whatever was on TV right before the movie, and then I hit play. And for the next two and a half hours (give or take) I sat there completely transfixed by what I saw. Not just because of the horror or the gross-out scenes that any thirteen-year-old boy would love, but because the story I saw unfolding on our TV set, with the occasional grainy tracking lines migrating from the bottom to the top of the screen, was a complex story about faith and reason and the dangers that result when either one is taken on its own without being tempered by the other. The character I was fascinated with was Damien Karras, the Jesuit priest Regan s mother turns to for help in a last ditch effort to find out what s wrong with her daughter. He s lost his faith, and yet he s confronted with something his reason tells him is not possible. The story stuck with me. 2

3 And many years later when I read the original book during my sophomore year of college, I devoured the novel in two sittings as the story I had enjoyed so much in the movie took on new form in my own imagination. And returning to The Exorcist in this way as a young adult, with two years of a theology major under my belt, Father Karras struggle between faith and reason, or faith and science, or more specifically, faith and psychology, echoed for me questions I was asking in my own faith. What is the line between the spiritual and the merely psychological? And how do we know the difference? Now why do I bring all of this up? I bring it up because, for us, stories of demons and exorcisms are sensationalized Hollywood affairs even the ones that seek to explore genuine and profound questions of faith, as is the case with The Exorcist, they are still highly sensationalized spectacles. But this is the exact opposite of what we usually find in scripture. Take today s passage from Mark for example. Here we have Jesus. He s already started his ministry; he s just appointed the twelve disciples, and already he s running into problems with the religious leaders and not only them, but his own family. Here we have Mary, and Jesus brothers and sisters, coming to take Jesus away because people are starting to say ( and this is a very loose paraphrase from the Greek ) his cheese has slid off his cracker, he s lost his marbles. (More literally) He is out of his mind. To which the scribes say, You re absolutely right. He is out of his mind. He s possessed! It s by the power of the devil that he s able to cast off the power of the devil! Now, if I were writing the gospel, at this point Jesus eyes would narrow as he looked at them, waiting for them to realize how stupid of a thing they ve just said, and as they take in a breath to flounder through a recovery, we d cut to the next scene. But Mark didn t ask me how to tell this part of the gospel so he goes on to give us Jesus response. But notice here that for the scribes, they re not debating whether or not Jesus was, in actual fact, casting out demons and performing exorcisms. That wasn t the issue. Everyone agreed on that as a given. They d seen it. What the scribes took issue with was their understanding of how Jesus was able to do it. That s all well and good, but for us today, I think our question would probably be the exactly the opposite. Living today, as we do, long after Jesus resurrection, affirming Jesus as the living Son of God, the second Person of the Trinity, we d say, Of course if Jesus was confronted with 3

4 a demon he d be able to cast it out. But living today, in a time when so much of what has traditionally been called spiritual is often explained away by chemical reactions in the brain and individual psychology I think of how there s a link to the side of nearly every article having anything to do with religion on npr.org that says, Is This Your Brain On God? and above it there s the image of a brain with a bubble that says, The Temporal Lobe: The God Spot. in a time when so much of what used to be called spiritual is so often paired away simply to be neurological or psychological, the question we would often want to ask might not be how Jesus was able to cast out demons, but simply, was Jesus really casting out demons at all? In mainline protestant Christianity we don t often talk much about the whole demon possession thing, but if we re to take each of the gospels as a whole and not simply cherry pick what we want out of them, exorcism was a huge part of Jesus ministry. In the gospel of Mark alone: In chapter one Jesus starts his ministry and they all go to Simon s house. The whole city comes to him and Jesus casts out many demons. (1:32-34) Then a few verses later he goes throughout Galilee proclaiming the message and casting out demons. (1:39) Then just before our passage for today, when Jesus appoints the twelve, he appoints them so that he can send them out to proclaim the message and cast out demons. (3:15) In chapter five Jesus heals a demon possessed man and sends the man back home to tell everyone what s happened. (5:1-18) In the next chapter, the disciples are sent out, and what do they do? They cast out many demons. (6:13) Then a bit later, the disciples get all upset because they see someone else casting out demons. (9:38) And finally the only bit of Mary Magdalene s story which we get in Mark is right at the end, and we find out that that she had been healed from seven demons. (16:9) 4

5 Casting out demons wasn t just something on the periphery here. Casting out demons was integral to Jesus ministry. Everywhere he went he was confronted with not just one or two, but many people who were possessed by demons. But here s the thing. We hear the word demons and we re conditioned immediately to think of spinning heads and split-pea soup. But if these were all William Peter Blatty, The Exorcist, Hollywood sensationalized kinds of demons then it sounds like Judea really would have been a pretty terrifying place to be. If this were the case, we could probably think of the gospels as a cross between The Greatest Story Ever Told and The Walking Dead. But that s not really the picture we get. So what do we do with all these demon possessions, all these exorcisms, that took place anywhere and everywhere, living like we do in a time where we don t worry that the girl walking down the street might be about to turn her head all the way around and give us a smile? Well, the more I read in scripture and the more I come to learn about scripture, the more I am coming to believe a couple things. The first is that God is just as active and present today as God was in biblical times. And the second is that God was just as active and present in biblical times as God is today. Now, from a logical standpoint, those two statements are essentially the same. But when taken by themselves, they have two very different feelings, don t they? If I were just to say the first part, that God is just as active and present today as God was in the bible now that s exciting! We read how God acted in the bible: seas parting, bushes burning, voices from the sky, clear lines of good and evil, and, as we re finding out, exorcisms on every corner. That s the faith we want to be a part of. Those are the experiences of faith we want to see, and if we believe it long enough, who knows, maybe we will get to see those things. But if we take the second part by itself, that really God was just as present and active in biblical times as God is today well that can leave things a little lack luster, can t it? I confessed a couple weeks ago at Pentecost that I ve never spoken in tongues. Today I ll confess that I ve never seen the seas part; when I was younger I did light a bush on fire, but that was my own fault and I certainly didn t hear any voices coming from it (except for the voice of my friend who was in the bush at the time everyone turned out okay.) ; I would say I ve felt God s leading presence, but never literally in an audible form from the sky, only ever as an inclining in the 5

6 back of my mind, and good and evil, right and wrong, I think most of us understand that those are usually pretty nuanced things. One of the easiest traps for the church to fall into is to emphasize one of these ideas over the other. Some parts of the church emphasize God s work as interpreted in scripture, the way God worked in the bible, to the point that if we don t experience God s work that way today, then there must be something wrong with our faith either individually or corporately, there must be something wrong with our faith. If we re not seeing seas part and casting out split-pea soup vomiting demons, then our faith must be subpar. The other trap is to look at the world around us with all of our scientific knowledge and turn the bible into nothing more than a moralistic collection of fairy tales fanciful stories that really just boil down to leading a virtuous life. It s easy to emphasize one or the other God s work as we experience it today with all of its uncertainty, or God s work as recorded in scripture with all of its supernatural appeal. So back to The Exorcist. And I ve said this about some movies before and I ll say it again. Don t go running to watch this if you haven t seen it before just because I ve mentioned it in a sermon. The Exorcist is in a genre that not everyone enjoys, and a genre that, quite frankly, isn t beneficial for everyone. But I m glad that I saw The Exorcist at the age I did, because it presented me with a story where the line between the scientific and what I guess we would call the spiritual were very definitively blurred. And while there could certainly be, and most probably were, psychological definitions for what happened to Regan in the book and film, - especially in the book we re left with doubt on both sides the reality of Regan s experience of those events could never fully be able to be expressed in simply clinical terms. Her experience of those events could never fully be expressed, simply in clinical terms. For her, and for everyone involved, there was far more to it than that. There was a spiritual dimension as well. So could we distill all the stories of demon possession in the gospels to simply psychological problems, emotional problems, neurological problems. Maybe we could. Maybe. But no matter what we continue to learn about the beauty and complexity of how we have been created physically, biologically, and neurologically clinical definitions of who we are and our emotional experiences will never do justice to our experience of existence. Sometimes, the only way we can understand our experiences is to use very evocative and traditionally 6

7 spiritual images. Maybe that s what we have in the gospels, because I don t think Judea looked like the aftermath of the zombie apocalypse. And if that s the case, then just maybe our world is still just as full of angels and demons as it was in the gospels. And with that thought, let us now rise and sing our closing hymn (which has absolutely nothing to do with today s sermon): We are God s People, #2220 in The Faith We Sing. Rev. Nick Preuninger June 10,