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Unclean Spirits in the Body Politic Mark 1:21-28 Today I want to with you about unclean spirits, devils, and demons. You may not believe those things exist anymore. You may have consigned devils and unclean spirits to the ancient past, but I hope you’ll reconsider today. Because I believe we live with unclean spirits, and I believe Jesus has the power to set us free. Let us pray. I knew a man once who was a saint to virtually everyone who knew him. His children adored him; he loved them unconditionally, and he doted on them, and they knew that he thought the sun and moon rose and set over their heads, wherever they happened to be. His wife idolized him. He had saved her from a deeply dysfunctional family, where most weekends were spent fighting and drinking, and love was hard to come by and. She thought he could do no wrong. He was an elder in his church, present most anytime the doors were open. In fact, he had a key and was often the one to open those doors. He was a friend to the pastor; he helped to care for the families in the church; and he was always ready to do more when the church needed help. He was a saint to virtually everyone who knew him. His adult daughter took me aside one day, and asked if she could talk to me about her dad. She said, “I’m worried about my Dad. I know everyone loves him and he loves us, but there’s something that most people don’t know. My dad…I hate to say it this way…but I don’t another word for it, my dad is racist. He’s always been racist. He’s never liked black people or Hispanic people, or anybody but white people. The older he gets, the more it just consumes him. If we’re driving down the road and somebody pulls out in front of him, or if we’re watching a ball game, or out shopping – he can just fly into a rage. He just hate. I’ve never known him to be so mean, and I don’t know what to do. It’s almost like he’s has a demon in him.” Demon, devils, and unclean spirits. Jesus went to the synagogue in Capernaum and taught. It was a synagogue like you would find anywhere in Galilee. There were people coming and going, ordinary folks. The scribes were teaching and preaching, must like pastors do today. They were reading scriptures, and giving interpretations. And, like existed in many synagogues and communities, there was a man there who was possessed by an unclean spirit. That’s where our story gets interesting. Apparently the unclean spirit was unfazed by the teaching of the scribes; their preaching and interpretations of scripture didn’t bother the unclean spirit in the least. (That’s a humbling word for us pastors and preachers, that our preaching may lack the power to trouble the 2 unclean spirits.) The unclean spirit was very happy to come to the synagogue and listen right along with everyone else. Until Jesus got there. Jesus taught and the people were astounded at his teaching, because he taught them “as one having authority.” Authority means the “right” to teach, and it also means “the power” to teach. The scribes had the right to teach, but they did not have the power of teaching that Jesus had. Jesus words had power to do something, His words had the power to accomplish something. Jesus words meant what he said and did what he meant. The folks in that synagogue had not experienced words like that. The unclean spirit that lived in the man who went to that synagogue could not handle these words– they had too much power. So the unclean spirit cried out, “What have you to do with us, Jesus? Have you come to destroy us? I know who you are, the Holy One of God.” But Jesus was unafraid of this unclean spirit. He told him to be silent, and come out of the man. He used the same word he used to calm to stormy sea, “Peace be still.” Be silent, and come out. The people were amazed, and grateful for this kind of authority. They had lived with this man for years. They knew something was wrong with him, they knew he was not whole, he wasn’t right. But they didn’t know what to do. Jesus restored to their friend, their brother, their father to them. He restored the man to himself. Again they said, “What is this! A new teaching with authority?” Jesus spoke with the power cast out the unclean spirit and make this man well. In his story, Mark uses the term unclean spirit, though he could have used evil spirit or demon or devil. Those terms are synonymous in scripture. We must be careful to understand that we’re not talking about any medical condition. Over the centuries, people have tried to associate the unclean spirits of scripture with medical conditions such as epilepsy, or schizophrenia, or bipolar disorder. By doing that, we have marginalized and diminished those who live with illness and made them feel as if God had cursed them. So we need to be careful here – unclean spirits in scripture have nothing to do with mental or physical illnesses. If Mark had meant to talk about that, there were other words in the Greek vocabulary he could have used. Mark uses unclean spirit because he wants us to understand the spiritual dimension, not the medical dimension, of what is going on. In our modern, enlightened world we like to think that unclean spirits don’t exist anymore. They were a quaint feature of the ancient world. I was with a person yesterday who just returned to the US from working as a missionary in Africa. We were talking about this text and pondering it, and she said, “You know, I’ve seen this. People in the West think this is a myth, but I’ve seen people possessed just like the man in this story. But no one here believes that happens.” In our rational and enlightened culture, we don’t see the spiritual dimension as clearly. These unclean spirits don’t show themselves in the same way. But they are with us and they are in us. As I stand here today, perhaps the strongest instance of a pervasive unclean spirit that I can name is the spirit of racism. 3

This demon of racism is alive in our society. We see it in the news, we see it in the policies of our governments, we hear it from the mouths of our elected officials. But it is not new, it was been with us in American society from the beginning. Sometimes it is more out in the open, and sometimes it is more suppressed, but it has always been with us. When Barack Obama was elected president, some people thought this demon of racism was finally exorcised from the American body politic. But it wasn’t. Demons aren’t exorcised by popular vote. They don’t go that easily. In a marvelous historical study called, Bind Us Apart, Nicholas Guyatt tells the story of how racism and racial segregation was embedded into the founding of America – not just by slaveholders, but even by those who had the most noble of intentions of their day. The founders of this nation knew that they were living with a deep contradiction: they knew that “all men are created equal” and “these men are property” are two ideas which do not go together. But they did not know what to do about it because they could not envision a truly multi-racial society. The demon of racism blinded them to the possibility. So the most enlightened and well-intentioned people, Guyatt tells us, formed colonization societies. They encouraged black people, who had lived in America for generations, to go back to Africa and start a new nation of Liberia. They could not envision a multi-racial society, they could only imagine “separate but equal.” The most enlightened and well- intentioned people encouraged the removal of Native Americans to the West so they could form a Western nation and thrive separate from white people. The Cherokee Indians were marched out of our very mountains. Or was it, their very mountains. Even the well-meaning, enlightened Americans at the founding of this nation could not imagine a multiracial society. So they invented racial segregation. Those spirits of racial segregation have lived in the American body politic, and today come to us in the effects of unequal neighborhoods, and unequal school systems, and unequal economic environments. Those spirits of segregation are convulsing our body politic today, like we are possessed. That’s how unclean spirit work. They blind you, even when you have the best of intentions. They distort and twist your perspective, even when you think you are doing well. A good friend of mine is a Methodist teacher from Alabama. He tells the story that when he was in school, he went on a United Methodist Men’s retreat. A white man who taught sociology of religion at an African American seminary said to the Methodist men without blinking, “If you are a white male raised in the South [which most of them were], you are racist. I am a racist. We can’t help it. In fact, we can never completely escape it. But there is something you can do about it.” My friend said, at first he was angry and rejected what the man said completely. He had been raised in the south, and he had seen and experienced so much racism that he hated racism. He and others expressed this to the teacher. “It is good you hate racism,” the teacher said. “But it won’t make much difference unless you admit that you hate something that is in 4 you.” The sociology professor spent the rest of the weekend showing those men the ways that they held racist attitudes without knowing it. They way they walked past people without realizing it. The way they unconsciously trusted some people, and were skeptical of others. We call this unconscious or implicit bias. It’s the way that racist stereotypes can pop into your head faster than you can blink and without your control, and how they can affect the ways you see people and treat them – even if you don’t realize it. In the January series, we heard a lecture by Harvard sociologist David R. Williams, who studies public health. He told us about a large-scale study, conducted in emergency rooms in Los Angeles and Atlanta. In Atlanta they were studying a population made up mostly of whites and Hispanics. In Los Angeles, mostly white and black. They wanted to know the likelihood that a person would receive pain medication for large bone fracture while waiting in the ER. What they found was that a white person had a 50% chance of receiving pain medication for a large bone fracture, while a person of color had a 24% chance. They controlled for everything they could: language ability, age, work related injury. The only factor that would account for the difference was the color of the person’s skin. How, they asked, could well meaning, loving, well-trained, medical professionals live out that kind of bias? They could, because we all do. It is unconscious bias, it is formed in us in ways we don’t realize and don’t recognize, and affects us faster than we can blink. That’s how unclean spirits work. We must realize, I believe, that in the struggle against racism we are struggling not only against culture and history and sociology and psychology. It is more than that. We are struggling not only against how we were raised, or what we were taught, or what we’ve experienced. It is more than that. We must realize, I believe, that the struggle against racism is not condensed to a political party, it’s not condensed to certain politicians, it’s not isolated in certain hate groups. It’s deeper than that. It’s more pervasive than that. The struggle against racism is a spiritual struggle against an unclean spirit that lives in and among us. In the words of Paul, we contend not with flesh and blood, but with powers and principalities of the air. Jesus of Nazareth, the son of living God, has the unique authority to call out unclean spirits. Truth be told, the unclean spirit in Mark’s story had it exactly right – “Have you come to destroy us?” Yes, Jesus had come to destroy them. Jesus Christ, the crucified and risen one, seated at the right hand of God the Father, has already destroyed the unclean spirits of the age. They are brought into submission before him as Lord of all. Jesus of Nazareth, who speaks with power, has called them to come out and has banished them forever. This is the good news that we they church must share with the world. We do not have to live in the grip of unclean spirits. We do not have to live in the grip of the experiences and 5 attitudes and prejudices we inherited. We do not have to live in the grip of a pervasive and entrenched racism that destroys communities and diminishes people of every color. The father I mentioned at the beginning, who was a saint to his church and beloved by family. He did not have to live in the grip of the racism that consumed him with hatred and meanness. He did not have to live tormented by private thoughts and inner judgments. He could be set free. It may not happen in one dramatic exorcism. Usually, exorcising the demon is a long- term project. With self-awareness, and with truth-telling, with dialogue, with confession, with love and tenderness and grace, Jesus Christ will call the unclean spirit out. Unclean spirits cannot stay long in the presence of Jesus. They have no place in the world that God loves, and that is why Jesus has destroyed them. We, the church, the body of Christ must say it clearly, with passion and conviction. When the demon of racism raises its head in our politics, in our public policies, in our national dialogue, in our churches, in our neighborhoods, in our clubs, in our families – in the gray cells of our own minds. We must say it. Because we have been gripped by the powerful love of Jesus Christ, we must say, “Come out. That has no place. In the name of Jesus, come out.”

Rev. Patrick W. T. Johnson, Ph.D. First Presbyterian, Asheville, North Carolina. January 29, 2018