Pam's Sermons

In the Presence of My Enemies
January 29, 2012
Rev. Pamela Shepherd

Our Gospel reading from Mark’s first chapter launches Jesus into his ministry of healing just after he’s spent forty days in the wilderness wrestling with demons of his own. Just so you know that Jesus was a sane man, he did not volunteer to go into the wilderness; the text is specific—Jesus gets thrown there.

Mark says, The Spirit immediately drove him out into the wilderness. And he was in the wilderness forty days, tempted by Satan; and he was with the wild beasts; and the angels ministered to him.

Jesus learned in the wilderness what 20th century concentration camp survivor, Corrie ten Boom, learned in the Nazi death camps. For the rest of her life she preached everywhere, there is no pit so deep that God is not deeper still.

Today’s reading begins with Jesus returning to Capernaum, a beautiful village on the Sea of Galilee. Jesus is teaching in the synagogue and a man with an unclean spirit cries out, 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.

It’s interesting in the Gospel of Mark that a demon, an unclean spirit, is the first to name who Jesus is. Wouldn’t you expect it would be someone like a missionary or a Sunday School teacher? Jesus rebukes the unclean spirit, saying, Be silent and come out of him! The demon comes out of the man and he’s healed.

Mark’s point, most scholars agree, was that Jesus is one who has real spiritual power and authority, and that the teaching he brings is a new Word from God. That’s probably what the people who wrote this text thought was important about this story. Look, this man has the power to heal the broken—surely God’s kingdom is breaking in now.

I should have stuck with that message this week, but I got side-tracked by the demon. All week I’ve been asking people about this demon thing. Is there such a reality as the demonic? Are demons real? Are there spiritual powers at war in the universe, a cosmic struggle between good and evil, of which we are some small part?

This question about demons is not one first century people would ever have asked. People of every faith and culture knew demons were real, just as we are sure about gravity. What was new in Jesus, was a human being with the power to call those demons out.

I don’t know anything about demons or the demonic. I always thought that these were ancient ways of talking about what we would call psychological conditions. What ancient Christians called demonic, my Buddhist friends call “unskillful behavior”.

Now that seems like an understatement for some evil that I’ve seen. Calling death camps or child abuse or violent psychosis unskillful doesn’t really sum it up. So I don’t really know what to make of the demon thing.

But after a week of thinking about it, I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s just not my business. That’s above my pay grade, as President Obama says. If cosmic good and evil are warring, something bigger than me must be working that out.

I do know that what we put our attention to grows. And it is also true we become what we think about. That’s why conventional wisdom reminds us to beware that we don’t somehow become the evil we’re fighting. War is the perfect example of how we keep forgetting that.

So forget about demons “out there.” If demons are real, they are just not our business. What I want to talk about today are demons within us. We have enemies within us; I am certain about that. And one of our inner enemies’ favorite tricks is to get us to look for evil in others.

The Church throughout history, from the Book of Revelation to the Spanish Inquisition, to centuries of witch burnings, to pogroms against Jews, to modern day gay bashing, has been a little too quick to name the demonic as belonging to others, while staying blind to what is broken in ourselves.

I was surfing the internet this week looking for articles on how the church has historically understood demons, and because I was trying to avoid crazy websites, I Googled: demons+UCC.

Usually if I attach UCC to a search, I’ll get hits from other UCC ministers or Theologians on some topic I’m trying to learn about. But this week I went plunk into a crazy, scary website where I learned that the United Church of Christ itself is in fact demonic, along with the Episcopal church, the Unitarian Universalists, Roman Catholics, Buddhists, Hindus, Muslims, Judaism, Mormons, Lutherans, Russian Orthodox, and Mother Teresa.

I didn’t delve into the proof of the demonic nature of all of that, but I was touched that proof for the UCC consisted first of all as simply a link to our national website, ucc.org. This guy is so sure we’re demonic that he just links our website and says, Go look at it.

And then he offers a second “proof”: a photograph of three banners at our last national synod—3 commas in a row, along with a banner that says, God is Still Speaking.

That, by the way, is a quote from the comic, Gracie Allen, who wrote to her husband, George Burns, just before she died, Never place a period where God has placed a comma. God is still speaking.

God is definitely NOT still speaking, the website writer says. God said all he had to say in the bible. But the real proof of our demonic nature takes an expert to reveal. He says, do you not see that if you turn the three commas upside down, the Banners read 666?

I didn’t make this up. You can Google it yourself if you want to get afraid. The reason I’m telling you this is not to make fun of someone else’s paranoia. (Okay, I am enjoying it just a little bit. It’s so rare that mainline Protestants get to be scary.) My main point is to remind us that all of us are susceptible to demonizing others, and so really the only safe place to go looking for demons is inside our own selves.

Feminist Theologian Rita Nakashima Brock talks about the demons of internal oppression. We all know the demons of Fear and Pride, Self-righteousness, Self-loathing, Depression, Jealously, and Rage. Brock points out that Jesus could only heal the demons that held others in bondage because he had already wrestled with those demons in himself.

Years ago a friend of mine who prays the 23rd Psalm every day came into a meeting really excited. She said, you know that line that says, “Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of my enemies.” I just figured out this morning that my enemies are in my head. My thoughts are always my worst enemies. And all these years I’ve been looking outside me.

Brock writes, Naming the demons means knowing the demons, and she says, anyone who wants to heal others cannot themselves be a stranger to demons… She writes, 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 brokenheartedness.

Brock says that Jesus can hear, below the demon noises, an anguished cry for deliverance. He can hear and heal the brokenness of others because he’s heard and known it in himself. Once we’ve been thrown into the wilderness and battled the enemies in our own heads, the wounds of others become much less scary; they lose the power to frighten us.

We remember, because we are always forgetting, that God is not afraid of the dark and the broken. And God can separate us from our woundedness. That’s what it means to be healed.

Will you join me in prayer?

Beloved God, help us keep our eyes and our minds on our own demons. Help us to trust that you are already holding in love our brokenness and the brokenness of others. Help us to remember that, “there is no pit so deep that you are not deeper still.” Help us to remember that you are with this world and in it, always calling us to wholeness; always calling us to life.

We pray this in the name of the man who knew demons. Help us to know our own. Amen.

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