"This Isn't My Demon" (Mark 9:14-29)

"This Isn't My Demon" (Mark 9:14-29)
Preached 2/19/18 at St. Peter's United Church of Christ (Carmel, Indiana)

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Jesus Heals a Boy Possessed by an Impure Spirit

14 When they came to the other disciples, they saw a large crowd around them and the teachers of the law arguing with them. 15 As soon as all the people saw Jesus, they were overwhelmed with wonder and ran to greet him.

16 “What are you arguing with them about?” he asked.

17 A man in the crowd answered, “Teacher, I brought you my son, who is possessed by a spirit that has robbed him of speech. 18 Whenever it seizes him, it throws him to the ground. He foams at the mouth, gnashes his teeth and becomes rigid. I asked your disciples to drive out the spirit, but they could not.”

19 “You unbelieving generation,” Jesus replied, “how long shall I stay with you? How long shall I put up with you? Bring the boy to me.”

20 So they brought him. When the spirit saw Jesus, it immediately threw the boy into a convulsion. He fell to the ground and rolled around, foaming at the mouth.

21 Jesus asked the boy’s father, “How long has he been like this?”

“From childhood,” he answered. 22 “It has often thrown him into fire or water to kill him. But if you can do anything, take pity on us and help us.”

23 “‘If you can’?” said Jesus. “Everything is possible for one who believes.”

24 Immediately the boy’s father exclaimed, “I do believe; help me overcome my unbelief!”

25 When Jesus saw that a crowd was running to the scene, he rebuked the impure spirit. “You deaf and mute spirit,” he said, “I command you, come out of him and never enter him again.”

26 The spirit shrieked, convulsed him violently and came out. The boy looked so much like a corpse that many said, “He’s dead.” 27 But Jesus took him by the hand and lifted him to his feet, and he stood up.

28 After Jesus had gone indoors, his disciples asked him privately, “Why couldn’t we drive it out?”

29 He replied, “This kind can come out only by prayer.”

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“This Isn’t My Demon”

Last week, we celebrated the weirdness of Transfiguration Sunday. Jesus is on top of a mountain with Peter, John and James and partakes in an almost supernatural interaction with Moses and Elijah. Whatever it was that we saw, we knew it was special. We know that Jesus is the chosen representative of God and, as we start the season of Lent, we await the final narrative of his life, teachings, death and resurrection. The stories about the miracles and healing powers Jesus possess are behind us. Except for in Mark’s account this morning. Mark, instead, gives us a spooky account of Jesus performing one last exorcism, for a boy supposedly possessed by an evil spirit. We’ve gone from weird to crazy.

In Mark’s account, Jesus descends the mountain to find chaos unfolding before his eyes. Imagine having just experienced something as opulent and mysterious as the Transfiguration and then being faced with the same stuff you’ve been dealing with throughout your ministry - evil spirits, masses of people who just don’t get it and Disciples who seem more inept at every turn. What I love about the Gospel of Mark is that Jesus is often portrayed as cranky and impatient. Knowing his own end is near and looking at the chaos around him he can’t help but exclaim, “how much longer must I be around you.” It must be a magnified version of how we feel when we have an amazing vacation just to be greeted on our return with 100 unread emails, the latest drama from our family and friends and people who can’t relate to the experience you’ve just had. What was bright and beautiful now seems dark and gloomy.

As we think about how Jesus may have felt approaching the scene, let’s also build a mental picture of the scene itself - a crowd of people surrounding a father and child, the child violently possessed by something. The crowd is going wild, probably hurling insults at the father and child in the midst of their pain. The people you respect or, at the very least, who claim to have healing powers - the people you place your hope in - try and continually fail to intervene on behalf of the child. Then, seemingly out of nowhere, someone claiming to be the son on God - you might believe, or you might be skeptical, waltzes in, heals whatever is wrong with the child (without ever really diagnosing it by the way - remember, seizures were more of a catch all phrase than the disease we associate with it today) and then proclaims that prayer was all that was needed to make it so. The child is left so relieved the crowd thinks he could be dead.

There are many places you might find yourself in this passage.

Maybe you can identify with the crowd - ignoring your own issues, choosing not to engage with the world in a meaningful way. Watching or resisting the change happening around you.

Maybe you are the father - willing to do whatever it takes, endure any ridicule to get our child the help they need- regardless of what is wrong with them.

Maybe you are the child - regardless of your age - rendered lost, oppressed, sick by something you know little about - maybe you can’t figure it out at all. Maybe it has rendered you so tired you’ve removed yourself from the community all together.

Perhaps you are a Disciple - doing your best to implement what you’ve learned but failing time after time.

There is one person in the scene whose role most of us can’t identify with - Jesus. The savior - pun intended - who calmly walks up, takes care of the situation, and then nonchalantly tells us how he did it as though the answer was completely obvious all along. We can’t identify with this power, this sense of being and that is entirely the point.

Jesus represents the coming new realm, a universe that we - stuck in our old world ways - find completely inconceivable. Even more daunting, we’re told that the way to new world is through prayer.

We say we pray all the time. I’m not sure we do, but we say we do. Before meals, before bed, silently throughout the day, when politicians tell us to - we pray all the time. Why isn’t it working? Why are we stuck in the old world? It’s almost become cool to dismiss prayer precisely because it doesn’t seem to work most of the time. Every time a major act of violence occurs, I’m shocked at the number of people - including my fellow progressive Christians - who take to social media and straight-up make fun of prayer. We’ve seen it this week with a popular meme of an empty truck of prayers showing up in Florida.

What I want to suggest today is that when Jesus said “this type of healing can only happen through prayer,” he wasn’t talking about the words in our prayers, he was talking about the subjects within them. In our prayers, are we aquitting ourselves and indicting everyone else? Dear God, help our politicians fix gun violence while I buy my kid a violent video game for Christmas. Dear God, help us survive President Trump, while I make no effort to get to the bottom of why people were attracted to him in the first place. God, do this, God, give me that. Are we thanking ourselves for righteousness in the comfort of our mcmansions, cathedrals and ivory towers? Dear God, please help make everybody perfect...just like me.

Friends: The problem isn’t prayer, it’s our prayers.

The traditional exegesis of this text is pretty straightforward: We find belief through prayer and, with that belief, amazing things are possible. It’s a great story, but I’m left wanting so much more.

An interesting bit of history is that evil spirits weren’t seen as something of the demonic until relatively late in the life of the church. People in antiquity might have viewed an evil spirit as an agent of God. One of my professors likes to call them “God’s prosecuting attorneys.” I like the analogy of an undercover detective … inserted into a situation to keep things on the up and up, to challenge us to be better people. With that spirit in mind, maybe our intended lesson can be reimagined into something a little bit deeper.

What if … what if there isn’t anything wrong with the child at all? What if the old world, that doesn’t mean a particular date by the way, it means an approach to life ignorant to the power Jesus brings, we are the old world...What if the old world is crushing him down so much because of who he is that he takes on the outward appearance of being possessed.  What if he is a person of color, constantly wounded by systems of oppression he can’t get away from. What if he is gay, still told by parts of the church that he is less than human. What if he is a refugee, stuck in the wrong place at the wrong time. He doesn’t need our prayers, we need our prayers.

The healing prayer Jesus was talking about wasn’t something we needed to give, it was something we needed to receive - to see the potential of the new realm, to see something better for ourselves and our families. To see that we aren’t restricted to the oppression of the old world. To see that we are welcome in Christ’s new covenant, whomever we are. Period. End of story. No exceptions.

This call is difficult. It’s more difficult than standing in crowd, it is more difficult than ridiculing from a distance, it is more difficult than trying the same things over and over again.  But it is so worth it. The boy in this story... Imagine the sense of calm he felt when his oppressors were removed. The story says he was so calm people thought he was dead. Have you ever felt that way? It was how I felt when I finally accepted that I was gay. On the outside, I had it all. Family, career, money, possessions, everything. On the inside, I felt like the world was out to get me - I was angry all the time at the silliest of things. I thought God, if present at all, was pure evil for putting me in this situation. I thought every next achievement would be the solution, and it never was. I began to buy into the narrative that  I was the problem. Today, with the benefit of hindsight, healing, and counseling, I know there was nothing wrong with me. What was wrong was centuries of church and political leadership that chose to continue living in the old world. They needed the prayers, not me. When I realized that, when I got a glimpse of what the new world could be like even if I couldn’t fully be in it, my life was transformed and, for a brief time, I felt a sense of calm that might have looked like death.

You see, the child in this story wasn’t dead, he was alive for the first time in his life. He was just getting started. There was something dead though - one more relic of the old world.  This type of feeling, this type of action, this type of transformation is only possible through prayer because it is so foreign to our human existence.

Jesus healed the child, of course he did,  but he did so by healing the crowd, by healing the disciples. Jesus shows us - again and again - that we need only have the courage to see the demon flying away. A vision of the new world starts with prayer, a prayer for the transformation of ourselves - may we have the bravery to look within. Amen.