God at work

God at work 020115   Mark 1 21-28

Not a very modern text at first glance----an exorcism, who does that anymore?  Surely this has no relevance for us.    google search for images said otherwise—more of that later.....but we think its old fashioned stuff so lets see if we can hear any relevance as I move through the text…..

Setting….here we see Jesus the good Jew attending the synagogue, the gathering place of learning, the community of faith away from the central temple.   It’s a pretty normal kind of setting, very familiar to everyone.   And this new rabbi gets a chance to teach, and he’s pretty impressive.  With authority, suggests he had his own authority, not like the scribes whose authority was scripture, in fact Moses. First hint something different is happening

And in that comfortable familiar setting there is a man with an unclean spirit, perhaps we might call it mental illness, we don’t really know, but it was something that possessed him, controlled him.  He may not even have known it was in control of him; people are pretty good at hiding what festers inside, and he may well have been a regular attender—up till now there had been nothing in that faith community to confront it

But in the presence of Jesus something stirred this inner thing….and we see it’s something that had a life of its own.  It recognizes Jesus as someone threatening to the status quo, have you come to destroy us?  I know who you are, holy one of God! Stop meddling.

Shut up, and come out of him, Jesus says….come out where we can see you, name you for what you are and we’ll see just how powerless you actually are.

Imagine the shock for the gathered faithful!   Not what we expected this morning in our comfortable community of faith!  Number two surprise of the day.  This Jesus doesn’t just have some new authority, but he has power, the power they knew comes from God.

Clearly Jesus is some kind of conduit for the power of God in practice as well as in theoretical teaching.

See/hear anything relevant, or pertinent to today (not a rhetorical question)…

Now fast forward 2000 plus years.   That google search I mentioned earlier shows that there is still a deep seated belief in some kind of demonic possession, a dark side of the spiritual life albeit couched in fictional fantasy…and most of the images I found were pretty ugly.

I choose to assume many of us don’t watch that stuff on tv, because I want us to look at something more reality based.

Here we are, gathered as a faith community – pretty comfortable in our life. Nobody really expects anything different this morning.  We hope we’ll get a Jesus word of grace to help us through the week, a word of comfort or reassurance perhaps.  Nobody expects Jesus to show up with power that is transformative, that might actually be able to change us!

But, getting real, as someone told me this week, everybody has something…something that possesses or controls us:  whether tangible addictions like food or medication or alcohol, or invisible ones like worry and anxiety, resentment, fear of failure, financial striving or ambition, all the demons of a consumer society……

In the presence of Jesus this morning, something may be stirring within us: that ‘demon’, or addiction, or behavior, or dependence or striving that has a life of its own and is controlling us.  Something that says, stop meddling with me, I don’t want to hear it.   Is it stirring in you?  Can you name it?  Take a moment to be honest……..

it can be very scary.   But I can tell you from personal experience that Jesus still has power, the very energy of the universes, that can free us from those things that have control over us.  Jesus was and is committed to doing God’s work of liberation, committed to making people whole.

God does NOT stay away from us because of these things; it is precisely in these fearful honest realizations that God draws near. 

If there is something stirring in you that you’d like to let go, I invite you to come to the rail while Nicole plays, kneel if you are able, and we will pray with you.

God is still at work, casting out the unclean spirits of our lives and our world.  May we let God in, our demons out, so we might become the whole, transformed, called and beloved disciples God dreams for us.