St. Mark’s Presbyterian Church

February 1, 2009

Mark's Gospel portrays the beginning of Jesus’ public ministry with a scene that reveals not the meek and mild Jesus who is so popular in our churches today, but rather a Jesus who is a disturber of the peace. Here in this opening scene, Jesus strides into the symbolic center of Israel's society, the sacred space of the synagogue in the sacred time of the Sabbath and He teaches as one with authority and power. Almost immediately Jesus is confronted by a demon who attempts to name and therefore dominate him. Jesus casts out the demon and everyone is amazed and they say what is this? With authority he commands even the unclean spirit. Here in the 1^st chapter of Mark we encounter the opening salvo of Jesus ongoing confrontation with the powers and principalities. For such a confrontation to take place in sacred time, the Sabbath, and in a sacred place, the synagogue was astounding. Mark by locating this first exorcism where he did has launched a broadside, a radical critique of the religious establishment of his day. But this text has nothing to do with the superiority of the church over the synagogue or of Christianity over Judaism. It seems to me that to hear what this text is saying to us today, what we really need to do is to substitute church for synagogue and ask ourselves What are the demons that inhabit the church today and what would it take to cast them out? How do we experience captivity to the powers and principalities in our own lives and in the life of our faith community?

The exorcism in the synagogue begins with the anguished cry of the victim, no longer in possession of his or her own life. The Gospel story describes the person possessed by a demon as controlled and dominated from outside them in a way that robs them of their freedom, violates their identity, inflicts suffering on them and marginalizes them from community. When I was living in DC before I moved to Tucson, I was working with mentally ill homeless folk in a halfway house setting. I will never forget a conversation I had with a middle-aged woman who seemed much older than she was. Her story was a story filled with terrible struggle to regain her freedom. She shared with me that she had been a heroin addict for many years of her life. And as difficult as it was to kick that addiction to heroin, she said it was nothing compared to the struggle to escape an abusive relationship with her ex-husband. What sobered me about this conversation was her testimony to the power of the demonic to enslave human beings. And yet in spite of the evil’s power to control and dominate, somehow this woman through courage and grace had been able to break free. Throughout Mark's Gospel, we see a pattern of escalating conflict as demons attempt to maintain their control over individuals, families and whole communities whom they have victimized. And Jesus responds to this human anguish and brokenness with compassion and with a divine determination to set that person free. It is the anguished cry of the possessed that compels Jesus to wage nonviolent conflict with the demonic.

Perhaps the most important lesson that we can learn from our text in Mark’s Gospel, is that a demon must first be named before it can be cast out. As long as the demonic goes unnamed, their power is unthreatened, and they can operate with impunity. But once brought into awareness, once named, the demons know their days are numbered. To name the demons will involve an act of confession as we acknowledge our own powerlessness before the demonic and our complicity with the powers and principalities. I think of the twelve-step program of Alcoholics anonymous and how that spiritual discipline has led to the release of millions of captives from the addiction of alcohol. First step: We admitted we were powerless over alcohol-that life had become unmanageable. And the second step. We Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to our sanity. 3^rd step: Made a decision to turn our will over to the care of God as we understood Him. And the 4^th step: We made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves. I am reading a book entitled Thirst: God and the alcoholic experience by Dr. Jim Nelson who is a retired seminary professor living in Tucson. Jim’s book is first an unflinchingly honest testimony about his own personal struggle with alcoholism and his hopeful path to recovery and wholeness. But this book is also a theological and spiritual exploration of alcoholism as a longing for the Holy that is at the heart of every addiction. Whether or not our demon is alcohol the twelve step program of AA offers us some important spiritual clues about the path toward liberation. As people of faith we must be about the work of self-examination to understand how we may be enslaved whether it is an addiction to power, to control or to the materialism of our consumer culture. For as Rollo May once wrote, to be born in the United States is to be born addicted.

There is another very important clue here in Mark’s Gospel portrays Jesus ministry of exorcism. In Mark’s Gospel, the appearance of an individual demon is always a sign of a larger oppressive system, what scripture calls the powers and principalities. In the midst of the anguished cry of the victim we detect the sound of a larger system or entity which has the victim in its clutches. I am not saying that an institutional system for example the banking system of the United States is demonic in and of itself. But I am saying that evil can invade and degrade such a system so that it becomes an instrument of oppression. An example of what I mean here can be found in the Grapes of Wrath, Steinbeck’s classic novel about the great depression in America of the 30’s. In the Grapes of Wrath, Steinbeck tells the story of the foreclosure of countless farms across the country. He paints a portrait of one farming family watching from the doorstep of the farmhouse as the men-folk talked to the owners who had driven up in their big cars. Some of the owner men hated what they had to do and some of them were angry because they hated to be cruel. And some of them were cold because they had long ago found that one could not be an owner unless one was cold. And all of them were caught in something larger than themselves. If a bank or finance company owned the land, the owner man said, the Bank needs…the bank, insists, the bank must have …as though the bank were a monster which had ensnared them. The owner men sit in the cars and explained: you know the land is poor. You’ve scrabbled at it long enough. The squatting farmers nodded and drew figures in the dust, thinking if we could only rotate our crops. Well it’s too late the owner men said as they explained the workings and the thinking of the monster that was stronger than they were. Because you see a bank is not a man because it doesn’t breathe air. A bank breathes profits. And if they don’t get them they die the way you would die without air. We’re sorry. It’s not us. The owner men say, it’s the bank, Yes but the farmer says, the bank is only made of men. No you’re wrong there. Men made the bank but they can’t control it. The next scene is one of the bulldozer coming to knock down the farmhouse while the family watches. The monster that sent the bulldozer out had somehow gotten into the driver’s hands, into his brain and muscle, had goggled his mind and his perception, and had muzzled his speech and his protest. The driver of the bulldozer is enslaved by the monster. He has lost his ability to live humanely.

Our situation in the midst of this economic crisis is very different and yet very much the same as what this country experienced in the Great Depression. We have all become possessed by a economic realities that it is very difficult to name or to understand. But we do know very well how it affects us? Each of us can tell stories of our own family or families close to us – of losing a home or a job or a retirement fund. And we can feel the pain of that dislocation even if it has not happened to us. But do we yet understand this perfect storm of economic crisis? Do we understand the many layers and dimensions of it? Recently a group of clergy associated with Pima County Interfaith council got together to talk about how the economic crisis is affecting our congregations. Each of us could tell painful stories. And we all agreed that we needed to move beyond the individual stories to a greater understanding and analysis of what we are facing as a nation. Through study sessions, house-meetings and conversations with public officials PCIC leaders have gained a deeper level of understanding of what contributed to the collapse of Wall Street and how it affects us locally. This perfect storm has many different dimensions: a national trend of growing economic inequality, the self-perpetuating dynamics of a recession. The culture of financial speculation in which the value of things is so inflated that we no longer know what value it is. And corruption and greed. It is easy to decry individual instances of corruption and greed but more difficult to name how the system itself has been designed to make greed and corruption systemic. And then we must understand how all this will affect us locally. Here in Arizona, we have a state budget of 11 billion dollar and we are told that we need to cut 3 billion. And look at what is on the chopping block according to the Arizona Daily Star: K-12 education. Health Care for uninsured children, our universities. What I appreciate about PCIC is that not only are they assisting us in the work of responding to the immediate economic concerns of the families in our neighborhood in our plans for a neighborhood economic resource fair. But they are committed to helping churches become more economically literate. We must begin to find that balance that has always been difficult for the church, between compassion for the person who has been victimized, and confrontation toward the systems which creates victims. We must join with other faith communities to name confront the larger demonic powers that are assaulting the people.

We break the silence and begin to name the demon when as a community we start asking questions that disturb the status quo. I was watching bill Moyers journal this past Friday night. Thank you God for bill Moyers. And he quoted an article in the NY Times that was completely overlooked with all the fanfare about the Inauguration. “This from Boston Private Wealth Management, a healthy bank that was handed $154 million: "With that capital in hand [...] we'll be in a position to take advantage of opportunities that present themselves once this recession is sorted out." Once this recession is sorted out? Those funds are supposed to generate loans for people and small businesses in trouble — not to help banks ride out the recession on a cushion of cash. Then there's this bit of Simon Legree mustache-twirling from the chairman of Whitney National Bank in New Orleans. They've received 300 million dollars in bailout boodle: "Make more loans?" he asked. "We're not going to change our business model or our credit policies to accommodate the needs of the public sector as they see it to have us make more loans." I'm not making this up — Flushing Financial crowed that it was newly flush enough to use the bailout bucks to raise the ante and buy new companies: "We can get $70 million in capital," their CEO said. "So, I would say the price of poker, so to speak, has gone up." And, so to speak, he's playing with our chips! The final parting shot of the Bush Administration it seems was to negotiate a bailout of the banks that will do very little to help the American economy turn around. This week we learned that banks and lending institutions that received tax-payer bailout money awarded their managers with 18 billion dollars in executive bonuses, a move that was strongly criticized by Pres. Obama and led Tonight Show’s Jay Leno to wonder how much they would have received if they had done their jobs well. Pulitzer Price winning Joseph Stieglitz attending a World economic forum meeting this week in Geneva and came away stunned by the lack of responsibility that the world economic elites feel for the economic travails that have been visited upon the global economy. In this culture of arrogance, they just don’t get it.

But let me say this to you today. It just does not have to be this way. The moment we begin to believe that it must be this way, the moment we give in to cynicism or indifference or despair is the moment that we too become captive to the demons. To effectively engage the powers and principalities will mean that as the church we must deepen our understanding of the systemic nature of evil. We live our lives moving in and out of a complex web of political, economic, and social systems and spiritual realities which effect and determine our lives, shape and misshape our humanity. Until we name the demons we will not have the power or authority to subdue them and to liberate ourselves.

What must we do to claim the messianic authority given by Jesus to us his disciples to cast out demons? Some two thousand years ago, Jesus of Nazareth walked into a sacred space of a synagogue in Capernaum, in the sacred time of the Sabbath and by casting out a demon, served notice on the powers and principalities that their rule was finished. Today, the Risen Christ is in our midst in this sacred space, in this sacred time still disturbing our peace. And with power and authority the Risen Christ speaks that liberating word to us. To the demons that whisper fear and cynicism in our hearts, to those demons the Risen Christ says, SILENCE! To the demons that keep us enslaved to self-destructive behaviors and addictions, Christ says COME OUT! To the demons that mute our voices, that make us deaf the cries of our neighbors; to the demons that paralyze us, that make us afraid to risk ourselves, to act, to hope, to dream, Jesus says to these demons, SILENCE; COME OUT! BE GONE! And Jesus says to each one of us: Come, follow me and find your true freedom in the struggle to liberate ourselves and the world.