Contemplating Demons

Mark 1:21-28
They went into Capernaum and when the Sabbath came he entered the synagogue and taught. They were amazed at his teaching for he taught them as one having authority and not as the scribes.

Just then there was, in the synagogue, a man with an unclean spirit and he cried out, "What is there between us and you, Jesus of Nazareth? Have you come to destroy us? I know who you are – the Holy One of God!"

But Jesus warned him saying, "Shut up and come out from him!"

The unclean spirit convulsed him and crying with a loud voice came out from him. Everyone was astounded so that they asked one another, "What is this? A new teaching with authority! He commands unclean spirits and they listen to him!"

At once a report about him went out in every part of the region around Galilee.

I’ve got a confession to make this morning. It has taken me some time to come to this conclusion about myself, but it just can’t be ignored any more. My wife and children have known this about me for some time, but I need to come clean with you, too. I am…a theology nerd.

I’m telling you now, because the truth was going to get out. The other night I was found out by Bruce and Rebecca Jones as they came around to check that the building was locked for the evening. It was ten o’clock and the Staff-Parish Relations Committee members had left over an hour before. But I rushed back to my office because I knew I had a package waiting for me. On my desk was a box with a new book – a theology book. I tore into it like a kid (or an adult) with the latest Harry Potter book. A theology book! Filled with big fifty dollar, multisyllable words like theodicy and eschatology. For an hour solid I read and devoured this book until a flashlight shined in the office window. It was the lock-up crew and they caught me red-handed.

Now I sound like I’m ashamed of this, but I’m not. It’s not a bad thing to be a theology nerd. I think everyone ought to be a theology nerd, because even though they have forgotten how to speak normal English, theologians help us think through what it is that God is doing with us and with the world. Good theology helps us express our faith in God more clearly and coherently. Good theology trains our minds toward God and develops our love so that we can love the Lord our God with all our heart, soul, strength and mind [Luke 10:27]. Good theology may make you prone to overusing fifty-dollar words but when it is joined to a vital, living faith, theology can be a means of grace, making God incarnate in language – the Word revealed in words! You can tell I used to be a Ph.D. student in philosophical theology, can’t you?

Well, I tell you this because it may help you understand why it is that I have been thinking about demons this week. I have enough self-awareness to know that not everyone has been thinking about demons this week. With Pittsburgh playing Denver today…with SOL tests coming up at school…who’s thinking about demons? With basketball games and work to do…who’s thinking about demons? With the General Assembly talking about transportation and taxes and the Congress melting down in scandal and corruption…O.K., maybe we have been thinking about demons. But even there – even in our political systems and in the midst of wars and rumors of wars, how often do we use demons as anything more than a metaphor for what is wrong with the world? We are modern people…postmodern even! What have demons to do with us anymore?

But I have been thinking about them. And to look at our popular movies it seems I’m not the only one. Films like The Exorcism of Emily Rose and Constantine imagine worlds in which demons have a real influence on what happens in the here and now. Why are we so fascinated with demons?

Now I know what good theology says. Good theology knows that God is the ruler of all that is. Good theology knows that the battle is over, the victory won. Good theology says with Paul, "Where, O death, is your victory? Where, O grave, is your sting?" [1 Co. 15:55]. Jesus has dealt the final blow to evil and all of its denizens. The cross stands empty to the sky. The tomb lies open and vacant. We can’t imagine that evil or the devil or the demons have any force or any reality or any power to change what God has done and what God is doing in the world. God is on the march and we know the end of this story, don’t we? The kingdom of heaven…now that’s good theology!

So what to do with demons? Laugh at them because they persist in the ridiculous notion that they can resist God’s will. Pity them because they have forgotten that they are made to praise God. Don’t show them any interest because they don’t deserve it. That’s good theology, too. When we know the good news of Jesus Christ, the forces of darkness don’t deserve our fascination.

But I have been thinking about them because as a modern person, who can explain the world and how it works without once mentioning demons, I want to know why that is. As a pastor who sees people struggling with deep fears and powerful forces, I think about demons because it seems a proper name to give to those struggles. As a believer who celebrates the resurrection but who knows that death still comes, I wonder about the persistence of evil. As a theology nerd, I think about demons because even they have something to tell me about this holy and powerful God who is reconciling all things to God’s own self.

Of course, another reason I’m thinking about demons this week is because of the passage that we just read from the gospels. There are demons in this story – or at least unclean spirits – and Jesus confronts them directly. He is not embarrassed to call them out. And when he does, the people…well, listen to what happens here:

It is the beginning of Jesus’ ministry. As Mark tells the story in the first twenty verses of the first chapter, Jesus has been baptized by John in the Jordan, gone out into the wilderness to be tempted by Satan, returned to his home and begun a public ministry proclaiming repentance and good news, and gathered a group of fishermen as disciples. He’s been busy. Now he heads to the synagogue on a Sabbath and begins to teach and people are amazed at his teaching. He not only knows what he is talking about, but he has an air of authority about him. He is certainly not like the scribes, the teachers they are used to hearing.

But in the midst of teaching a man cries out. The Bible says he was a man with an unclean spirit and he recognizes Jesus’ authority, too, but unlike the rest of the people there in the synagogue he knows where it comes from and perhaps for the first time he knows what it means for him. "What is there between us and you, Jesus of Nazareth? Have you come to destroy us? I know who you are – the Holy One of God!"

Now that’s an interesting thing to say. "Jesus of Nazareth," the man calls him. But that’s not a very descriptive title. Jesus was not an uncommon name and Nazareth was a very common place. But even so the man – or the unclean spirit within him – knows that Jesus has the power to destroy. Jesus is the Holy One of God. God had said as much when Jesus was baptized. The voice came from the sky and spoke it out. But now the demons are saying it, too. Despite themselves they give witness to God. But what is there between God and the demons? The man doesn’t answer but we can fill it in for him – nothing. There is nothing between God and the demons and in the face of God, the demons must be gone.

So Jesus says, "That’s it. Be quiet and be gone." The unclean spirit gives one last cry and convulses the man, but it’s over very quickly. Now the people see that something new has entered the world – a new teaching that is not afraid to confront unclean spirits and evil and to expose them for what they are. And in the name of Jesus, all the demons will lose. From here on out, Jesus will be followed by people with leprosy, friends carrying a paralyzed man, and all sorts of folks in need of healing. And he will heal them.

It’s a very disturbing thing for us modern folks to read. We don’t know what to make of miraculous healings and wandering unclean spirits. It doesn’t fit our worldview. But then there is a lot that disturbs us, isn’t there?

With our wealth and our technology and our belief in progress, Americans have come to believe that we have conquered those things that have plagued us for so long. We have miracle drugs, but now we see drug-resistant diseases. We have a powerful economy, the strongest in the world, but when there is trouble in a far-off Nigerian oilfield it trembles. We have strength and security, but we know, after 9-11, how easily that is threatened. We have levees and forecasts and satellite imaging but the waves and the winds still blow where they will. We have seismographs, but they can’t stop the tsunamis they record.

So it’s not making sense. When bad things happen, they don’t make sense. And we think God should be doing something about it. Or at our worst moments we may think that God is actually behind it all, sending us bad things, maybe because we deserve it or maybe because God wants to teach us lesson. You’ve heard a variation on that theme from folks like Pat Robertson and the mayor of New Orleans, Ray Nagin, in the last few weeks. But I don’t believe that.

Actually, I think this is where it’s better to talk about demons or to talk about what evil does. God doesn’t want evil in the world. God comes to overcome the evil of the world. God doesn’t desire the suffering of a child or the devastation of a hurricane. God, in Jesus, welcomed and healed children and said to the waves, "Peace, be still." God doesn’t actively plan catastrophic events to teach us a lesson. God plans the new heaven and new earth where every tear will be wiped away and death and mourning will be no more. That’s the lesson we need to hear.

So what’s going on? Though God does not intend evil, there is a force that resists the reconciling movement of God. It has no ultimate power. It cannot separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus. It is a rearguard action as the world conforms to the shape of the coming kingdom. But as people living in the here and now, only glimpsing what is to come, it can still cause us pain.

It makes sense to talk about demons because we know that there is pain in our families and in our relationships that God doesn’t want and that God rejects. It makes sense to talk about evil because we know that we have loved ones in grip of things they can’t control, whether it be gambling or alcohol or drugs, and they need to be released. It makes sense to talk about the forces of darkness because even the natural world sometimes presents us with tragedies so big and so grand that we can’t reconcile them with a reconciling God who is making all things news. It makes sense to talk about demons because when we face cancer or heart disease or diabetes, even though we know we have scientific explanations for them, we also know that they are conditions that cry out for a savior who can cast them out.

The book I was reading that night in the office was a new one written by one of my former classmates in the theology program at UVA. David Bentley Hart is just flat brilliant and I hated being in class with him because he was the sort of student who would intimidate everyone else in the room into silence, including the professors. And it was totally unselfconscious – he was just being who he was – naturally brilliant. But after the tsunami last year he wrote an article for the Wall Street Journal that they asked him to turn into a book, which he did. It’s called The Gates of the Sea: Where Was God in the Tsunami?.

Hart is prone to those fifty-dollar words, but the argument he makes is just right to me. We don’t have to give up believing that God is making all things new just because we experience disaster and destruction. This is a broken, fallen world and the brokenness extends to time and nature. But we know that ours is a God who knows something about being broken. Jesus was broken on a cross to redeem this evil age and to overcome all that opposes God. God has never stopped loving this world and reaching out to us and redeeming this broken time. Where was God in the tsunami? Where God always is – drawing the world towards the future God intends for it and casting out the demons who would tell us otherwise.

So, yes, we should laugh at the demons and pity them and deny them the power they would have over us. But we should not let them pass without our rebuke. I don’t know what demons you’re facing today, but they don’t deserve to be there. You know what it’s like to live with them and you know how difficult it is to let them go. Sometimes we feel like we are possessed by the problems and the evils we face. God has come to cast them out. Jesus is capable and the Spirit is sufficient to release us from their power. What has God to do with evil in this world? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. God casts it out. What has God to with us in this world? Everything. Absolutely everything.

Whatever you have done, wherever you have been, whatever you are facing, whatever you are letting go, whomever you are and whomever you have been…it really doesn’t matter because the Lord of the Universe has come to town to look us straight in the eye – to see the things in us which would oppose God’s love – and to say to those things "Come out" and to say to us "Today, salvation has come to you and your house." Are you ready for the good news that casts out darkness? ‘Cause whether you use fifty-dollar worlds or not, God is doing it. And that’s good theology. Thanks be to God.