DEMONS

A Sermon by Dean Scotty McLennan University Public Worship Stanford Memorial Church June 24, 2007

Demons are the subject matter of today’s gospel lesson,i as you’ve just heard. A man is possessed by demons, Jesus calls them out, and the man is healed. Most of you sitting here today, though, probably don’t believe in demons. It’s likely that you look at this Bible passage in much the same way one of the commentaries I use describes it: “In the first century…in the understanding of many, the world was populated by demons, spirits, nymphs, centaurs and angels, who controlled natural processes and often took possession of persons or controlled their fate…In our day, we have become far more accustomed to attributing…disorders…to internal mental or emotional problems. The remedy is not exorcism but counseling or medication.”ii A modern scientific explanation, therefore, might be that the man whom Jesus encountered had bipolar disorder, which is also called manic-depressive illness, and he was just ending a manic phase when he met Jesus.

But it’s too easy to write off this Bible story that way. We still speak of demons which possess us, even if we don’t believe in them in a literal sense, and we mean that far beyond the realm of mental illness. These are the demons of arrogance and envy and lust and anger and greed.iii These are the demons which Dostoevsky wrote about in a book by the same name, including materialism and nihilism.iv The demons in today’s gospel lesson are called “Legion” and that has a double meaning: they are many, but they also relate to the Roman legions, the military overlords, who were then subjugating and oppressing the people of Israel – in particular the Tenth Legion which had been stationed in Jesus’ area since 6 A.D. and used a wild pig, a

1 boar, as its symbol on its standard. It’s not coincidental that the demons come out of the possessed man to enter a large herd of pigs who are then drowned.v The Roman Legion conjures up a whole other arena: the demons of war, like brutality, cruelty, vengeance, and wanton destruction.

In this present day of violence and terrorism and genocide in so many parts of the world,

I’d like to talk with you about some of the demons that follow in their wake: demons of hatred and revenge and guilt. And I’d like to offer Christ’s central message of repentance and forgiveness, as well as his prophetic demand to do justice, as the antidotes or bases of exorcism for these demons. In doing so, let me summarize briefly a story that Holocaust survivor Simon

Wiesenthal relates in his autobiographical book, The Sunflower.vi

Wiesenthal was facing annihilation in a concentration camp in Poland when he was taken to the hospital room of a dying 21-year-old German SS officer. This Nazi wanted to confess to a

Jew, any Jew, of a wartime atrocity he’d committed a year before. He explained that he wouldn’t be able to die in peace if he couldn’t repent and receive forgiveness from a Jew. He had grown up as a Roman Catholic and thought of studying theology, but instead he joined the

Hitler Youth at the age of 15. About a year before this meeting with Wiesenthal, he had been fighting in Russia when he was ordered by superiors to herd some two or three hundred Jewish civilians – primarily old men, mothers and children, including infants, into a house. The doors were locked, a machine gunner was posted outside, the house was drenched with gasoline and set afire. The young Nazi especially remembered a child who had leapt burning into the street with its mother. The small child reminded Wiesenthal of a six year old Jewish boy, Elijah, named for the prophet in our Hebrew Bible reading this morning, who used to look on Nazis from the local ghetto gate with large, questioning, accusing eyes that one never forgets. This SS officer had

2 been told that the massacre of the Jews was in revenge for German soldiers’ deaths from Russian bombs – although he felt that the connection didn’t make any sense. However, his superiors kept telling him that Jews were the cause of all the German’s misfortunes, that they were not human beings, and that they must be gotten rid of. Now, the Nazi was begging forgiveness from this

Jew, Simon Wiesenthal. Wiesenthal didn’t condemn him. He simply chose to listen, to remain silent, and then to leave the room. Presumably the demons were not exorcised for the dying

Nazi.

More than half of The Sunflower consists of responses that Wiesenthal sought, starting in the 1960’s, to the question of whether or not he did the right thing. There were opinions expressed by Robert McAfee Brown, who used to teach Religious Studies here at Stanford, by the child psychiatrist and Christian author Robert Coles, by Bishop Desmond Tutu of South

Africa, rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel and his daughter, Dartmouth professor Susannah Heschel, by rabbi Harold Kushner, the author of When Bad Things Happen to Good People, and more than forty others, including the Dalai Lama and convicted Nazi war criminal Albert Speer.

Many said that Wiesenthal did exactly the right thing. How could he possibly offer forgiveness for these heinous crimes against humanity, especially since he had no relation to the victims himself? He had no power to grant forgiveness, even if he’d had the inclination.vii The former Nazi, Albert Speer, explained that even after twenty years of imprisonment by the

Nuremberg war crimes tribunal, he could never forgive himself: He stated: “My moral guilt is not subject to the statute of limitations, it cannot be erased in my lifetime.”viii

But Desmond Tutu, who wrote that he had been “overwhelmed by the depth of depravity and evil that has been exposed by the amnesty process of the Truth and Reconciliation

Commission” in South Africa, also pointed out the breathtakingly unbelievable nobility of spirit

3 of victims who had been made to suffer so grievously and yet were able to forgive. Tutu described often feeling that he should say, “’Let us take off our shoes’ because at this moment we are standing on holy ground.”ix Many of these victims were Christians who said they followed “the Jewish rabbi who, when he was crucified, said, ‘Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.’”x Yet, Tutu also pointed out “there are others who say that they are not ready to forgive, demonstrating that forgiveness is not facile or cheap.”xi

Robert Coles imagines that, put in Wiesenthal’s position, he “would have turned away in a tearful rage – even as I (that is, the person I was brought up to be) would pray for the Lord’s forgiveness of that apparently repentant Nazi.”xii Yet, Coles warns those of us now living a comfortable, privileged life far from the horror of the Nazi Holocaust not to succumb to smugness and arrogance in professing the Christian ethic of forgiveness.xiii Robert McAfee

Brown also worries about imagining “that the universe has a moral escape valve labeled

‘forgiveness’ that permits evil not only to survive but to thrive.”xiv Instead he calls us to the words of the Jewish prophets, including Jesus, who counseled justice, loving-kindness, and walking humbly with our God. Then, Brown suggests “just perhaps, a world will begin to emerge in which we do not have to ask unanswerable questions [like Wiesenthal’s] any more.”

I rather like how former Catholic priest, now Episcopal priest, Matthew Fox struggles with Wiesenthal’s challenge to put ourselves in his shoes and decide what we would do. Fox points out that “Some sins are too big for forgiveness, even for priests. Public penance is required,”xv which this young Nazi was in no position to do. So it may be that Wiesenthal gave this German “the only penance available to him to bestow: Silence.”xvi He “let the man speak his heart.”xvii Wiesenthal’s “decision to walk out in silence” meant that he “kept his soul and the young soldier may have saved his soul… Call it tough love or call it non-sentimental

4 compassion…Be with your sin…Be with your conscience. Be with your victims. Be with your

God.” Fox reminds us that in his autobiography Wiesenthal recounted that he did take the Nazi’s hand and hold it, and in that sense he was “being present and being human…[H]e stayed in the room and listened. Listening was his gift.”xviii And as a result, “Some kind of mysterious grace seems to have passed between these two young men.”xix

Fox goes on to suggest that this story “disturbs us so deeply because, like any true morality story, it applies to today as much as to yesterday.” We are still possessed by demons now. “Human capacity for evil is not just about isolated, individual decisions and acts. This story – the entire Nazi story – lays bare the sins of complicity and the sins of omission and denial that render our participation in evil so profound.” Darfur is our current genocide. AIDS in the undeveloped world is a plague we can cure. Unprecedented civilian deaths and a massive refugee crisis have resulted from our nation’s invasion of Iraq, supposedly to protect ourselves from terrorism. The governments of Afghanistan and Pakistan have recently complained that we are indiscriminately killing civilians in their countries.

Nazis we are not. But from Hiroshima and Nagasaki to May Lai to Abu Ghraib we are capable of incinerating, massacring and terrorizing civilian populations. In Africa we’re able to turn our eyes away from genocide, starvation and disease. As Christians, we need Christ’s compassion and forgiveness: “Let whoever is without sin throw the first stone…I do not condemn you; go and sin no more.”xx But, that is, go and sin no more, if the demons are to be exorcised. We must also heed Christ’s prophetic demand that we feed the hungry, care for the sick, and welcome the stranger.xxi “Blessed are the peacemakers,” he said. “Love your enemy and pray for those who persecute you.”xxii

5 The story of Simon Wiesenthal teaches that even if we are not Christ-like enough to forgive those who sin against us, we can at least not condemn them when they try to repent. We can be present, listen to them, and at least give them the gift of silence. Then, what about our own sins… our own demons? Jesus teaches that we can be assured of God’s forgiveness when we confess our sins and humbly repent. “Turn back, turn back, forswear thy foolish ways.”xxiii

“Return to your home,” he tells the man who had been possessed by demons, “and declare how much God has done for you.”xxiv Then, part of that declaration is acting as Christ and the prophets have taught: doing justice, loving kindness, and walking humbly with your God.xxv The prophetic claim is that “Earth shall be fair, and all its people one; not till that hour shall God’s whole will be done.”xxvi

6 NOTES

7 i Luke 8: 26-39. ii The New Interpreter’s Bible (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1995), Vol. IX, p. 188. iii “Deadly sin” in Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (Springfield, MA: 1997), p. 295. iv Fyodor Dostoevsky, Demons (New York: Vintage, 1995), as reviewed by Kirkus Associates, 1995 at www.amazon.com/Demons-Fyodor-Dostoevsky/dp/0679734511 v The New Interpreter’s Bible, Vol. IX, p. 187 and Vol. VIII, p. 584. vi Simon Wiesenthal, The Sunflower: On the Possibilities and Limits of Forgiveness (New York: Schocken Books, 1997), vii See the responses of Abraham Joshua Heschel, Susannah Heschel and Harold S. Kushner on pages 170-173 and 183-186 of Wiesenthal, The Sunflower. viii Albert Speer in Wiesenthal, The Sunflower, p. 245. ix Desmond Tutu in Wiesenthal, The Sunflower, p. 267. x Ibid., p. 268. xi Ibid., p. 267. xii Robert Coles in Wiesenthal, The Sunflower, p. 127. xiii Ibid., p. 128. xiv Robert McAfee Brown in Wiesenthal, The Sunflower, p. 121. xv Matthew Fox in Wiesenthal, The Sunflower, p. 145. xvi Ibid., p. 144. xvii Ibid., p. 145. xviii Ibid. xix Ibid., p. 146. xx John 1: 7, 11 (slightly rephrased) xxi Matthew 25: 35-36, 42-43. xxii Matthew 5: 9, 44. xxiii Clifford Bax, “Turn Back” in Singing the Living Tradition (Boston: Beacon Press, 1993), #120. xxiv Luke 8: 39. xxv Micah 6:8. xxvi Bax, “Turn Back.”