Unclean Spirits in the Body Politic Mark 1:21-28 Today I Want to with You About Unclean Spirits, Devils, and Demons

1 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.

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