Sunday, February 1

Today’s Reading: Mark 1:21-28


Here's my reflection/sermon for the day:


Shortly after moving to Denver nearly ten years ago, I began a weekly ritual with my parents. Each Monday morning, around 10:00 AM Mountain Standard Time, I call them. It took a while for my folks and I to develop a format for our weekly conversation. At first, they would both get on one of the phones and race each trying to catch me up on the weekly happenings. A couple months into our calls, however, something happened that exposed our need to develop a new routine.

“I’ve noticed that in the course of your calls that about ten minutes into our conversation, you and your father start talking sports,” Mom said. “And you do it for about 20 minutes. Why do you have to waste perfectly good time and money talking about that stuff anyway?!”

I waited until dad excused himself to go to the bathroom, and then I explained it.

“Mom, let me explain something about men to you. You see guys are taught from day one not to have emotions. Problem is, we do. So how do we get them out? Well, we can’t actually express them, so we speak in coded language. When we say things like, ‘The engine in your car is purring like a kitten’, we are saying ‘I love you’. Or when Dad says, ‘The Houston Rockets are looking good this year,’ he’s saying ‘I’m proud of you.’ If you take away our sports talk, you would take away our ability to express emotions and we’d pop like an overfilled helium balloon at a kid’s birthday party.”

Ever since that day when I gave my mother a lesson on Guys 101, she’s has had a different attitude about the time my father spend talking about sports – for she has come to understand what sports represent for us.

I say all of this because the issue of what something represents has been at the forefront of my mind this week because of this week’s Gospel reading from Mark. And without realizing it, lots of modern folks who read the passage get a little cranky about its content – much like the way my mother got cranky about the content of my conversation with my father.

“The Gospel of Mark starts so beautifully with the story of Jesus’ baptism,” they say. “Why did they have to go and muck it up with all of that talk about primitive talk about demons? Can’t we just skip over the story and talk about something that speaks to us today?!”

If we were to do that – if we were simply take the words at face value and not think about them in a larger sense – we would miss out on what I feel is the greatest value of today’s story. For what those demons that Jesus’ expelled represent have meaning not just to those so-called primitive peoples who lived 2,000 years ago – they have meaning for you and I today. So let’s spend a moment thinking about what those demons might represent.

Kate Huey, in her wonderful commentary on this morning’s passage in the publication Weekly Seeds, suggests that if we want to get at what demons represent, we have to start by puting them into the context of their day. In setting that context up, she turned to the words of John Pilch, who tells us.

“Our ancestors in faith,” Mr. Pilch wrote, “believed that spirits were more powerful than human beings but less powerful than God.” Keep that hierarchy of power in mind: human beings, spirits, and God.

So when Jesus took on the powers of the spirit world, he was challenging those things in our lives whose power is greater than our limited capacity as human beings.

There’s one HUGE problem that we modern folks have in terms of understanding this. And it has to do with our denial. “Western tendency to rationalize the ancient understanding of spirits is rooted in the fact that Westerners have much more power over their lives and circumstances than the ancients believed they had.” In other words, we refuse to believe there is anything outside the realm of God that we don’t have power over. In other words, we’ve completely lost the realm of the spirit. And it shows.

Think about the way we approach the personal demons we face these days. Take addictions, for example. As folks wrestle with addictions to things like nicotine, alcohol, and narcotics – what does society tell us? “Just suck it up, exercise a little will power, and you’ll be fine.”

Really?

Think about how we treat those personal demons like anger, hatred, and jealousy? What are we told to do? Get them under control.

How’s that working for you?

And how about those socially acceptable demons we wrestle with – things like our desire for control and greed? What do we do with those things? We expect folks to manage them on their own.

The power of today’s story is that it has the audacity to remind us that there are things that we face in our lives that are beyond our control. Things that transcend our human condition. Things whose hold over us is often just a little less than God’s.

And while it is tempting to succumb to society’s message –that we should simply suck it up and exert control over our demons – we people of faith know better. For we know of that one place where we can turn that can help us overcome those forces in our lives that are bigger than ourselves – the one place that can facilitate the love, the grace, and the mercy of God that can help us overcome those demons once and for all?

That place?

In the God revealed through Jesus, the Christ.

Today, we once again have the opportunity to come to the table that Jesus set for us. And as you come this morning, I invite you to do something radical. Inside your bulletins, each of you has a picture of a cartoon demon. That figure represents one of the forces that you have been wrestling with that is far greater than yourself.

I invite you to fight your first tendency to manage that demon on your own. Instead, as you come to the Table, I invite you to come forward and lay that demon down on the floor in front of the altar as you have your own encounter with Jesus at the table. For once you have put it down and are fed at the Table – you just might experience the same thing the man in this morning’s story experienced: healing and wholeness.

Amen