Fourth Sunday after Epiphany

While we would like to relegate evil, demons and spirits to the silver screen and bad television, when we take a look around us, we have to acknowledge that they aren’t just the stuff of fiction.

Earlier this week, a Kentucky community suffered the eleventh school shooting that has happened since the new year.[i]

Closer to home, a man randomly shot and killed a nineteen-year-old in York County, South Carolina, and even before that happened, not one, but four, of the county’s sheriff officers were shot in a separate incident that wounded three and killed Detective Mike Doty.

And a different kind of violence kept the spotlight on USA Gymnastics this week. When I was thirteen, I wanted to be an Olympic gymnast, and when Casey was thirteen, we even went to Philadelphia to watch the Olympic team trials in person.  But the attention this week wasn’t about girls realizing dreams; instead they were re-living nightmares. Dozens of young women who had been involved in women’s gymnastics addressed their abuser after he was convicted of his crimes against them. Altogether, more than one hundred sixty women were assaulted by a person whom they had been taught to trust.

And before we join the refrain, “What is this world is coming to?”, let’s confess just how short our memories are.

Kyrie eleison. Lord, have mercy.

Thankfully we have truth tellers who will hold us accountable to our promises to “never forget.”

A project in Montgomery, Alabama is memorializing the four thousand lynchings of African-Americans that took place between 1877 and 1950. 

And just yesterday the world marked the international remembrance of the holocaust - 73 years after the liberation. Six million Jews, 200,000 Romas and 200,000 disabled Germans were exterminated by the Nazis.[ii]

This litany has a point.

The death of schoolchildren and innocents, violence against a community and its first responders, the abuse of trust and the corruption of power — these examples remind us that evil and brokenness in the world are not new. They are part of our human condition that separates us from the good God wants for all creation.

So, when we hear the Mark text this morning, while we may not know exactly what kind of demon or unclean spirit is being described, we certainly recognize that we too face un-godly things we cannot understand in our lives today.

In our text, Jesus is teaching in the synagogue. In Mark’s gospel, this is really where we see Jesus’ first act of public ministry after calling the disciples. Teaching in the synagogue, already, his listeners are commenting on his teaching because they recognize a difference between him and the scribes, the knowledgeable religious experts who had taught before him. And then the text turns to the man with the unclean spirit.

And the very first thing Jesus does is confront the evil that inhabits the man.[iii]

I think there are at least two reasons why it is important that Jesus confronts the un-godly in a synagogue.  First, it’s a reminder that our religious structures and institutions don’t protect us against evil and the ungodly.

Faith is neither a talisman nor a charm that wards off demons.

And, second, in keeping with the popular quote that “the church is a hospital for sinners, not a museum for saints” no one told the man he couldn’t come in or he had to leave. God works in us in spite of our brokenness. We cannot wait and only come before God when we have it all together. That day will never come, and, besides, when we think that way, the only one we are really hiding from is ourselves! God already knows and loves us!

But God doesn’t leave us to struggle alone. In his book Night, writing about the holocaust in World War II, Elie Wiesel tells the story of a man facing the gallows and asking, "For God's sake, where is God?"

Wiesel writes, “And from within me, I heard a voice answer: " This is where--hanging here from this gallows..."

Facing the man with the unclean spirit, Jesus doesn’t look away uncomfortably, look past him or ignore him. He doesn’t avoid the man or the spirit’s presence, wrapping up his teaching and calling it a day. He doesn’t employ euphemisms or niceties to talk around what he sees happening right before him.

No, unequivocally, with unwavering confidence in his authority, Jesus renounces the power of the unclean spirit, silencing it and freeing the man from its clutches and restoring him to life.

In our affirmation of baptism, we claim that same authority – God’s authority – and we renounce sin, the devil and all the forces that defy God. That is what it means to be children of God.  

So, why is it so easy to forget God’s promises and desires for us in the face of evil?

This morning, the Gospel reminds us that this is the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God. (Mark 1:1) As we go back out into the world, we may be bold like Jesus and confront those things that would rob us of abundant life in Christ.

Let’s name the people, the conditions, and the behaviors that tell us — you or I or any other child of God — does not have God’s love and mercy.

And empowered by God’s authority, let’s renounce all that threatens to diminish the good that God desires for each of God’s children.

Let us pray…[iv]

Holy God, Thank you for the gift of your Son Jesus. You put your holy words in His mouth, and at His word even the demons fall silent. When he was killed, you raised him to life, and now it is through Him that we exist, and in Him, that the crippling grip of death is broken forever. Empower us by your Holy Spirit to live free in faith and the knowledge of your abundant love and mercy.

Amen.

---

[i] https://www.npr.org/2018/01/24/580433745/a-look-at-all-11-school-shootings-that-took-place-in-the-first-23-days-of-2018

[ii] http://www.un.org/en/holocaustremembrance/PDF/Introduction%20to%20the%20Holocaust.pdf

[iii] David Lose. “In the Meantime.”

[iv] Adapted from Laughing Bird Liturgical Resources