One of the things that poses the preacher problems is when he arrives at texts like the one this morning.  What in the world do you do about the demons or as the scripture actually says of this poor soul’s dilemma, those who are possessed by “an unclean spirit”?  If I was preaching the way I did when I first started I would just nod at this text as I passed on to some place in scripture that would lend itself more readily to a nice devotional application.  But, when you follow Jesus from birth to death to resurrection and stop at all the places He did along the way you eventually have to face some demons.  What in the world do we do with them?  They didn’t seem to give Jesus near as much trouble in exorcising them as they give us in explaining them.

My personal experience with demons or “unclean” spirits has been quite limited, to say the least.  I’ll have to admit that the closest I ever came to seeing what those looked like was about twenty-five years ago when The Exorcist came out.  But, even then, I was a preacher boy at a Baptist school and we couldn’t be seen going to R-rated movies.  To tell you the truth, I’ve never gotten around to seeing The Exorcist to this day though I’m told that it, in terms of gore and shock value, it pales in comparison to a lot of stuff that’s only PG-13 these days.

Now, if I were going to take advantage of the most obvious preacher humor, I would say that, while I’ll never seen a demon-possessed person, I have been to some deacons meetings that gave me pause.  But, the truth is, I’ve never had a bad deacons’ meeting.  Not in all my years of ministry have I been to one deacons’ meeting that was negative or ugly.  So, I’ll joke about it from time to time but, the truth is, my experiences in working with deacons have been very pleasant and Cliff Temple has been no exception.  Besides that, at least to the first-century church, demon-possession was no joking matter. 

As a rule, what the scripture would define as a person who was demon-possessed or controlled by “an unclean spirit” the modern mind would classify as a superstition long ago out-grown.  Most educated people probably reduce such possessions to nothing more than a first century way of describing either severe mental illness or some kind of physiological anomaly such as epilepsy.  The best I can tell you is that, for me, the jury is still out for several reasons.

For one thing, demon-possession, specifically, is only mentioned twice in the Old Testament and twice in the New Testament outside the gospels.  But, when Jesus is on the scene physically, there seem to be an unusual number of cases reported that the New Testament writers clearly distinguished from what we would call mental illness or epilepsy, for example.  In Matthew 4, just before Jesus started preaching the Sermon on the Mount, Matthew records that those coming to listen to Jesus brought with them those they thought Jesus could heal and that group included “those who who were afflicted with various diseases and pains, demoniacs, epileptics and paralytics and he cured them.”  (Matthew 4:24)  So, at least to first century believers, there was a difference between what we would classify as a mental illness or physical disability that might cause a person to experience the kinds of behaviors commonly identified with demon-possession and the actual experience of an individual being invaded by a force of personal evil so great that it totally dominated him physically, mentally and spiritually.

For another thing, Jesus seems to have believed demons were real.  I guess someone could argue that He was just accommodating the ignorance of His day.  But, what kind of arrogance is it that says just because we are the most educated people who ever lived that necessarily means we are the most intelligent or the most spiritually perceptive?  Any chance Jesus knew something we don’t?  In more than one instance, where the demons recognized Jesus for who He was, Jesus would, for some reason, forbid them to reveal His identity to anyone else.  Even in the passage we read this morning that kind of interaction took place.  Apparently, with the “unclean spirit” doing the man’s talking for him, this one says to Jesus, “’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.’  But Jesus rebuked him saying, ‘Be silent, and come out of him!’” 

The demons knew who Jesus was and felt threatened by His presence.  Jesus knew who demons were and felt compelled to deal compassionately with those afflicted by them.

Now, all of this still doesn’t solve my problem.  I’ve never met a demon that I knew it and never seen a demon-possessed person that I knew it.  Quite honestly, my religious upbringing and educational background have not only left me suspicious of the whole issue of demon possession but suspicious as well of those who seem preoccupied with discussing them.  I have come far enough in life to know, however, that my experience is not the center of all reality around which all other reality should be defined.  Which all goes to say that there are forces of evil I cannot explain even in terms of extreme mental illness. 

I know there are things such as mental illness that can so totally dominate a person that the result is evil in some form or another.  And, I’ve lived close to mental illness and seen what it can do to a family.  I can still remember sitting on the edge of my mother’s bed crying with her while my father was on the telephone making arrangements for her to be hospitalized for depression that no one seemed able to deal with.  She was gone for a long time.  And, when she came home she wasn’t really there.  There are whole chapters of my childhood that are nothing more than a void to me because of my mother’s emotional absence even when she was physically present.  And, this was in a time, not that long ago, when things like depression were simply not discussed especially not in public and often as not people who suffered with it were simply medicated into oblivion or electro-shocked out of reality.  Only in my adult years have I been able to finally come to terms with a great deal of that.

Please don’t misunderstand.  I don’t want to even inadvertently be heard trying to make an association between what is clearly a physiological or psychological disorder and what the scripture calls demon possession.  But, what I am saying is that the impact of those disorders in a family, especially on small children, can be its own form of hell.  A child, for example, may never know why his father or mother drinks too much and then gets violent.  But, even if the child knew the roots of her parent’s pain that he tries to dull with alcohol, it wouldn’t lessen the impact of the pain she feels when daddy gets ugly. 

Which brings us full circle.  There are two ways to read this text.  One is historical.  We can just simply observe what happened and brush it aside as an interesting story but one with little relevance for our day.  Or, we can observe a couple of other things that make it very relevant.

The first would cause us to ask what it is in this man with the “unclean spirit” that so revolted at the presence of Jesus.  The least we have here is a clear picture of what happens when absolute holiness and absolute evil come face to face.  If we wanted to get really personal with ourselves, we ought to ask what it is in all of us that gets anxious in the presence of God.  As painful as those things may be, if we can face them, they hold the greatest possibility for our own healing and potential wholeness.  This man was healed not because he just eventually got better but because the worst of what was ugly in him came face to face with the One who loved him most and the only One ultimately capable of dealing with evil.

To make it simple, if you have the courage, stop and ask yourself sometime what it is that makes you uncomfortable in church or even uncomfortable praying or at the thought of having to read scripture.  If you can eventually stop masking those things in the presence of God you may find Him calling out of you some uncleanness that prevents you from experiencing the life for which He created you.  If we read this text only as history, then we will likely dismiss what happened here as only a first century event and fail to confront the evil that can live in any of us.

And, there is another way to look at this text, too.  We call ourselves disciples or followers of Christ.  We say that what Jesus said is our standard of truth and how He behaved is our standard of ethics.  So what Jesus did or said in this passage ought to become the standard by which we measure our steps.  We certainly don’t have Jesus’ perception of all things.  But, can we claim to have His Spirit in us unless we respond compassionately to those around us who are overcome by any form of evil?

Sometime last year I told you the story of a man in my very first church who had a son with some kind of what appeared to be mental incapacity.  After I had been this man’s pastor for a while he told me the story behind it all.  Some years before he and his son had been out working on their ranch clearing some land.  The boy was down in a hole when, for some reason, a huge boulder rolled over on top of him.  The boulder was many times the size a normal human being could possibly hope to lift.  But, with the adrenaline of parental fear coursing through his veins, this father jumped down in the hole and single-handedly lifted the boulder off of his son’s back.  The son suffered terrible injury to his head but he did live.  Reflecting on that experience, this father told me that the only way he could have lifted that boulder was because his love empowered him to do something in that moment that, under normal circumstances, he would have found impossible.

You don’t have to look very far beyond the doors of this church to see people who are overwhelmed.  Evil has taken many forms in this community.  I know I’m a relative newcomer here so I want to be careful.  But, there is something deeply troubling to me, as I’ve shared with you before, about the fact that children go to bed hungry in the shadow of one of the wealthiest business districts on the planet.  There is something deeply troubling to me about the fact that children in some neighborhoods are not given the same educational opportunities as are others served by the same tax dollars.  There is something deeply troubling to me about a nation that is now discussing what to do with its multiple budget surpluses while, at the same time, it turns scores of mentally disturbed patients out of overcrowded and understaffed health care institutions to fend for themselves on the street.

Which all goes to say that, we may only have one vote per person on what happens with tax dollars, but with the Spirit of Christ coursing through our veins, we have much more power to affect change and lift the burden of injustice off the backs of the oppressed who live in the shadow this great church than our numbers might indicate.  We will never come to the end of discovering new ways of doing that.  But, one thing we cannot overlook is the incredible opportunity we have to partner with great institutions like the Salesmanship Club and Buckner’s and others that have already put their shoulder to the boulders of oppression at our doorstep.

Isaiah’s prophecy records that the work of God’s spiritual Kingdom would involve someone getting their hands dirty.  It was the work of Jesus.  It is our work now to “bring good news to the oppressed, to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives and release to the prisoners.”  (Isaiah 61:1)

So, that’s the way I see the meaning of this text for us this morning.  Jesus moved with compassion to relieve those oppressed by evil in any form.  If we call ourselves His disciples can we be busy doing less? 

I don’t even pretend to understand evil spirits or demons.  But, what frightens me more is whatever it is in me that can sometimes turn a deaf ear to those who cry and a blind eye to those who stumble under the oppression of injustice.  I don’t know what that is, for sure.  But, what I am certain of is that whatever it is in me that is still capable of sometimes turning my back on those who suffer is the only demon I know.  And, I know I’ll never be whole until I am willing to face it and let the Jesus who is Lord of all finally bring it into submission.

In the movie, Angela’s Ashes, Frankie McCourt’s true story of his Irish upbringing, the family is abandoned by an alcoholic father and living in a hovel on the very edge of starvation.  They eventually wind up being evicted and having to live in the downstairs portion of an alcoholic cousin’s apartment.  This man not only stays drunk most of the time but takes sexual advantage of the mother as one way of letting her pay rent.  In one particularly poignant scene, he sits and eats his fish and chips right in front of the starving children.  When I watched that scene I found myself asking how in the world someone could stuff their face to excess while hungry children looked on across an empty table.  I don’t know. 

How do we do that?

Amen.