"The Dream Come True"
The awesome power of God.
Sermon Preached by
The Reverend Dr. Andrew Stirling
Sunday, April 17, 2005
Text: Mark 1:21-28
A couple of weeks ago, when I was in Ottawa for the National Prayer Breakfast, I had the opportunity to renew acquaintance with a number of my friends in the ministry. A friend and I were reminiscing about meetings that we had attended or been involved in over the years, such as a very famous lecture at St. Paul's University by an outstanding scholar and a famous church historian, from Yale called Jaroslav Pelican. As we reminisced about that great event, we thought of how complex and how deep his message was.
We joked that this is the kind of man who when he goes to a restaurant orders in Greek and thanks the waiter or waitress afterwards in Latin. Ironically, while we remember the magnificence of his lecture, we can't recall a single thing that he said in it.
We were in awe of this great man, and we remembered the lecture fondly. It brought to mind a Peanuts cartoon in which Lucy and Linus and Charlie Brown are staring up at the sky. They see in the sky the most incredible cloud formations, and Lucy wonders whether Linus sees anything in them.
Linus looks up and says, “Well, actually, yes. This cloud on the left looks like the outline of British Honduras; and the middle one looks very much like a painting by Thomas Eakins, the great sculptor and painter; and that one over there looks like a depiction of the stoning of Stephen, with Paul standing to one side looking on.”
Well, Lucy is amazed! She says to Charlie Brown, “Charlie Brown, when you look up at the clouds, what do you see?”
He replied, “Well, I was going to say a duckie and a horsie, but somehow, I've changed my mind.”
Well, after this magnificent lecture by Jaroslav Pelican, my friend and I felt we had been seeing duckies and horsies, and had to change our minds.
Sometimes in the presence of great intellect, great knowledge, great ability, great art and great thinking, words cannot express our response. They fail us. We simply are overwhelmed by the enormity of what we see, and all we can articulate is duckies and horsies, when there is something much, much deeper present.
I think those who encountered Jesus in our text this morning felt exactly the same way. In the beginning of the Gospel of Mark, at the first encounter of people with the teachings of Jesus, you can see that they don't know exactly how to respond to what they see and hear - they are filled with shock and awe! The language in Mark's gospel gives us some sense of how they perceived him. They say that they were amazed at what they had seen; that in fact their words almost failed them, which is the sense that you get when reading the Greek.
They were in awe of his authority and his ability to speak. It is no coincidence that on this first occasion of Jesus teaching in the Gospel of Mark, we find him in a synagogue, the place where the word of God was to be heard and read and spoken; where others had given commentaries on biblical texts and on the Torah. Jesus goes into the synagogue in Capernaum and the people are overwhelmed by what they hear and what they see, because Jesus, unlike all those they had seen and heard previously, taught with authority. He taught with something special in his demeanor, his manner and the content of his teaching, so much so that crowds began to follow him and his fame started to spread throughout the land. This was not just because of his teaching, but also because of the things he did to demonstrate that authority, and to show that he was different.
That is what happens in our text this morning, where a man with an unclean spirit comes to Jesus in the midst of all of those in the synagogue and starts to disrupt the talk being given. I ask, what is it about that event that speaks to us today? Is there anything now 2,000 years since that event, that can still grasp us, still help us and still move us? I think there is.
The first thing that comes to mind is that this was ultimately an encounter with evil. We are told that this man had, to use the phrase from the Gospel, “an unclean spirit;” that he came into the presence of Jesus with the sole purpose of disrupting his speech; that he didn't want Jesus to be heard and so, to deflect attention from Jesus to himself, this man begins to interrupt the speech that Jesus was giving and the teaching that he was offering.
Now, had you asked me 20 years ago whether this would have resonated with our day and age and with our culture, I probably would have said, “No.” Why not? Because the spirit of modernism and rationalism still prevalent 20 years ago looked at this whole notion of possession and dismissed it as not important. What we really need to do, said modernism, is just find a reason for this man's madness, and if we can find a reason, we can then interpret this story and move on.
It is just over the last 20 years in particular that a sense of the occult, a sense of spirit existing in disembodied form, has entered the mainstream of our thinking and our writing. You can see it in every thing from movies such as Harry Potter, right through to many current television programs that deal with angels, witches and the paranormal. There is among the modern population, particularly those 25 and under, almost an obsession with spirits and spiritualism and disembodied beings: They are becoming very real. Not only that, but they are taking people to a deeper appreciation of things that they don't see. The problem is that some people are becoming obsessed with the supernatural. It is entering the mainstream to the extent that it is affecting people's consciences, and their consciousness. Now, in the time of Jesus, this was also a very real thing. This was also a time when people believed in disembodied spirits that floated throughout the universe.
Some Jews in the time of Jesus believed there were seven-and-a-half million of these beings floating out there in the ether; they were known in Hebrew as the “mezzikim.” These “mezzikim” would float in the ether until they attached themselves to someone who had died and came back again to influence the living.
It was believed that the fallen angels of the Book of Genesis, Assael and Chemanschai, came back again and multiplied and affected people's lives. Thus, in the time of Jesus, when a man came into a synagogue and started to take on Jesus, people believed that this man had one of these unclean spirits, one of these spirits of the dead. It could be male, and would be called a “Shadim” or a female and called a “Lilin,” from where we get the word “Lilith,” but it would come and permeate the spirit of a person and cause trouble. For the biblical writers, this man coming into the presence of Jesus was probably someone who was afflicted by one of these disembodied spirits.
However, if you think that was then and this is now, and that we have different attitudes today, well certainly in some cultures we do, but not in others. For example, once when I was in South Africa I was invited to be a juror for the trial of a person accused of having negatively influenced the health of a young boy. Part of the debate was whether or not a spirit had made this boy ill. A Bantu tradition says there is a sovereign above all the spirits called a “Leza,” and under the “Leza” there are other spirits: Sometimes they are the spirits of dead ancestors that come back, or sometimes they are the spirits of more recently dead family members.
They believe these things to be real. The real question that was before us when we heard the testimony of one of the diviners was whether the boy was ill by virtue of the existence of an evil spirit, or because there had been malpractice and the medical people hadn't done their work properly. Now, you can imagine a jury having to deal with such an issue! I had to read up so much on the myths and the legends and the traditions of that culture just in order to understand the nature of the testimony. It was amazing to think that it came down to those two choices: Was it a spirit or was it a medical problem that had caused this young man to be ill?
Even just recently in Chile I saw on the sides of the roads things called animistas. They are like little mini-shrines, and if someone has died a terrible death in a car crash, it is believed that you can pray at their animistas for that person's soul to go to Heaven. If you put enough flowers down and say enough prayers, you can influence the spirits of the dead. There is also a thing that is known as the mal de oyo or the “evil eye” that some people possess, that they use to cause you grief and trouble. That is why one of the things those people pray for is a guardian angel.
Now, I say all this for a simple reason: Underlying all of these situations is a sense of fatalism, a sense that we human beings are mere pawns in the game of existing spirits who dictate our lives. If you think that's too farfetched for the modern rational mind to believe, let me tell you there are many people, even in our own culture, who honestly believe that they are pawns in a chess game being moved around by some spirit, and with that sense of fatalism and powerlessness they live their lives in fear and bondage. This man who came into the presence of Jesus was one such man.
In his soul, he believed that he was being controlled, and those around him felt that they were being controlled. And then something happened: He encountered Jesus. What is fascinating about this text is that there is no sense of Jesus understanding or trying to describe the underlying malady and the struggle in this man's life. There is no account of how Jesus saw such things: all Jesus was interested in was in making him whole again, in taking this man who was deeply troubled in his soul and bringing him to a point of grace. Only Jesus was able to do this; only Jesus was able to bring him back and to give him that hope. It is a powerful thing when it happens, because it shows that we are not just pawns in a game of fate: we have a loving and a gracious God who is there and desires for us to experience shalom, wholeness, peacefulness, God.
A couple of weeks ago, just after Easter Sunday, I was sitting at home contemplating how I could improve my golf game. I came to the conclusion that I needed another woman in my life - desperately - to help me. Not that my wife isn't an exemplary partner in so many ways, but I needed somebody else to help me with golf. So, I went on the Web and I started to research - and there she was, waiting for me! Big Bertha, made by Calloway, the best driver imaginable! This was my hope, I believed, and as I was becoming extremely worldly and obsessed with the great golf games that lay ahead of me, the phone rang.
The call came from a man in a phone booth in Niagara Falls. He started out by saying. “You don't know me and I don't know you, but I was listening to you on the radio yesterday. You see, these last two days I have been gambling, and unfortunately, something terrible has happened.”
He continued, “I have gambled away the down payment for our new home, and today, I have to go home and see my wife and children and tell them what I have done.” The young man said, “I had nobody else to call; I don't know any other minister; I heard you and I looked you up in the phone book; I found your name and I hope I have reached the right person.”
We began to talk. I said to him, “It seems to me that there are a couple of things you have to do. The first is that you have to go home and tell your wife,” for he was thinking of just driving off and trying to avoid the confrontation.
“You can't do that,” I said. “You must be honest, and you must also realize that while you have lost something, right now you have not yet lost everything, but you will lose everything unless you do something. You need to go home, but you also need to do something else: You need to think seriously and pray hard about what it is that got you in this position in the first place.”
For, by the way he described it, he just got “taken over;” he just couldn't resist any more. His addiction was so strong that he lost all reason, everything went out of his mind. He had no sense of grace, no sense of hope, no sense of even what he was really doing. It was always going to be the next game that was going to bring it all back!
Thus, with him in a phone booth in Niagara Falls and me still on the Internet with Golftown, I prayed with him. As I prayed with him, it became very obvious to me that here was a man who was absolutely gripped by something and he needed it to let go.
People get gripped by many things: things that are very destructive; many behaviours that are very painful. There are people who can get so psychologically caught up in their work, or their pursuit of material success, or their friendships, that they become different to what they originally were. They find themselves turning to all manner of things to either kill the pain or to make things easier or to find a better way.
Sometimes, my friends, it is like they are in the grip of evil, and so it seems to me that at times like that, they need to look at this story, because in many ways, when we fill ourselves with all these ideas of evil spirits, when we fill ourselves with fatalism, when we feel ourselves out of control of the situation, we then have no room in our heart and our soul for God's grace. Christ, when he sees this, wants to break all of that down. He wants to change all of that. He wants to destroy what it is that holds people's lives in thrall. When he does that, these people find the environment around them is different.
Bill Moyers tells the story of how he met a man called Jacob Nettleman, who told him about the launching of Apollo 17. Bill Moyers tells how Nettleman viewed the night of the launch: Many of the reporters were blasé about it all; they weren't talking to one another; they were having a smoke, drinking their tea or coffee, and keeping to themselves. They behaved as if none of it really mattered. They found themselves uninterested, sorry that they had to stay up at night to cover a story.
Then, something happened: The moment the rocket blasted off, the sky went orange from the engines being ignited. Into the dark sky, there came this blast of light and a whoosh over their heads in a millisecond. All of a sudden, the universe seemed to turn blue, and there was this most incredible sight in the upper atmosphere, and then the rocket was gone. Jacob Nettleman said it was amazing that suddenly, all those who had been covering the story changed. They began to talk to one another; they held the door for one another; there was a buzz; they realized that they had seen something so awesome and so great that their words could not in any way describe it. They had seen something that was beyond their experience or their anticipation, and they were changed because of it.
For those who saw Jesus of Nazareth in the synagogue at the beginning of his ministry, there was that same sense of awe, that same sense that they were witnessing something that they had never seen before. They were seeing God's grace burst into the world in such a way that brought wholeness and healing and restoration to a broken man, a man tormented in his soul, a man wrestling with fate, a man who came to disrupt Jesus in what he was doing, but found himself cured, released, renewed. Such is the power and the grace and the love of God! For those who saw it, it was like a dream had come true. They had been seeing the world and the universe as if it were nothing more than duckies and horsies, and now they were seeing something more than their eyes could comprehend: They had witnessed God in his wholesome grace. May you and I and everyone in brokenness experience this power. Amen.
This is a verbatim transcription of the original sermon.