Sermon Preached on the 4th Sunday after Epiphany

Sermon Preached by the Rev. Ruth Ferguson

Christ Church, Rochester, N.Y.

Epiphany 4, January 29^th, 2012

Collectively speaking, we no longer believe in ancient demonology. We read the Crucible or Rosemary’s Baby or watch the Exorcist with great thrill and horror – ghost stories and horror flicks satisfy our fascination with the numinous, but unclean spirits, demonic possession, is for many of us, an intellectual embarrassment. However.  A central theme and inescapable element of the New Testament was Jesus’ dealing with the demonic. At the heart of our lesson today is a mysterious and obscure (because the language is not ours) story of an unclean spirit cast out of a convulsing man. Primitive thought was that spirits, when cast out, would wander to dry places. “When an unclean spirit has gone out of a man,” Matthew writes, “he passes through waterless places seeking rest, but he finds none.” I think of Lent approaching and Jesus meeting Satan in the desert. Luke tells the story of a man whose village kept him bound in chains because of his demonic possession, a man who was so full of demons that when Jesus asked the unclean spirit for its name, it replied “Legion.” Jesus casts them out and into pigs, and the pigs run into a lake and drown along with, presumably, the demons. Which makes you wonder… if unclean spirits were inclined toward waterless dry places and these pigs ran into the lake and drowned, then let’s hear it for the pigs.( Biblical interpretation of pigs has, to say the least, not been favorable.)

We are told there is an unclean spirit possessing the man in the synagogue at Capernaum. In the most fascinating (and chilling) way, the spirit has latched on to the identity of Jesus, has looked into Jesus’ own depths and identified who Jesus really is. (We’ll always wonder, won’t we, about how or why unclean spirits and demons recognize what is of God before we do).  Either the man, or the unclean spirit, or both, cry out: “What have you to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth?” And he – or they - become afraid: “Have you come to destroy us?”

St. Paul came along with his own theology of evil “For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places. “ This theology is more palatable to the modern mind because we take it to mean that evil is located in the human heart, particularly in the will to power, and that spiritual wickedness in high places has to do with human governments that oppress other human beings.

Whether we are talking about evil in terms of unclean spirits, demonic possession, or powers and principalities, most of us would say the forces against us are not merely physical but also spiritual. I say merely physical because we know today that much of what the ancients would call “demonic” is in fact traceable to genetic make up and brain chemistry.  People whom we know to have epilepsy or depression or Alzheimer’s dementia – to name just a few - would not have received pastoral care from the worshippers in the Capernaum synagogue. Christianity has to look its own past in the eye and rebuke itself for that – that these would have been believed to have been possessed. And to some extent, they are because we all are, whether we are possessed  by anger or money or ambition or someone else or addiction or disease …possessions, most of which, are forms of self-possession.  Reinhold Neibuhr wrote that “Human personality is so constructed that it must be possessed if it is to escape the prison of self-possession..such possession of the self is destructive if the possessing spirit is anything less than the Holy Spirit.”

My father, who was an Episcopal priest and was diagnosed early in life with Parkinson’s disease, eventually had to tell his parish that he was sick. And in his letter to his congregation he wrote this: “I have befriended the enemy, so to speak, I have embraced this disease and it no longer has power over me. I have come to believe that I have an illness, but that it does not have me.” In the latter stages of his disease, though, we watched as dementia overcame him. I remember his struggling to articulate, spiritually, what was happening in him chemically. He said over the phone one day, “I don’t think I am a crazy person, but there is in me something I can’t recognize.” At the time, I tried to remind him of what he’d written in his letter years before: he has an illness, but the illness does not have him. But I knew, and more importantly, God knows, that the reality of dementia did not allow him much comfort in my reassurance. And he eventually slipped away from us, surfacing now and then to laugh at a joke, remember a song, or say “thank you” to a glass of water. But this I’ve come to believe. Human personality escapes self-possession and all possession and invasion by illness or demon or whatever when it is possessed by the Holy Spirit, AND… we don’t make that happen by ourselves.

As Jesus looked into that man and screamed back at the thing that was convulsing him – the thing no one else but the man and Jesus could see –I believe Jesus took over with this thing that was happening inside my father – this terrible, unholy thing that only he – and Jesus – could see and live inside.  Many of you know that one of the most painful realities of having a loved one with dementia is that when they are suffering, you can’t always reach them where they are. And this is not just a medical reality, it’s a spiritual one. So I’ve come to believe that God was possessed my father – possessed his dementia – in ways that weren’t visible to the rest of us, that he took over embracing the illness when my father could no longer, possessing it, inhabiting it, inhabiting my father. Because God does this all the time. Because the glory of God is a human being fully alive (Irenaeus), and where we can’t be fully alive, because it is chemically or spiritually impossible, God will inhabit us and live for us. You can bet your life and the life of the created universe on that. Sometimes we will see and hear it and it will astound us: Be silent – come out of him!  And sometimes, many times, we won’t..because the Holy Spirit often intercedes for us invisibly with sighs  and groans too deep for words.

I don’t know what demons are, but I believe in them, only because I have seen the power of God overcome them where the rest of us never could.