What Have We to Do With Jesus?
[This reflects most of what the sermon was about though much was told 'story-style' and is not written here.]
Mark 1:29-39
Jesus left the synagogue at Capernaum, and entered the house
of Simon and Andrew, with James and John. Now Simon's mother-in-law was
in bed with a fever, and they told him about her at once. He came and
took her by the hand and lifted her up. Then the fever left her, and
she began to serve them.
That evening, at sundown, they brought to him all who were
sick or possessed with demons. And the whole city was gathered around
the door. And he cured many who were sick with various diseases, and
cast out many demons; and he would not permit the demons to speak,
because they knew him.
In the morning, while it was still very dark, he got up and
went out to a deserted place, and there he prayed. And Simon and his
companions hunted for him. When they found him, they said to him,
"Everyone is searching for you." He answered, "Let us go on to the
neighboring towns, so that I may proclaim the message there also; for
that is what I came out to do." And he went throughout Galilee,
proclaiming the message in their synagogues and casting out demons.
(NRSV)
I want to do some weaving this morning. I want to weave a
story. Let’s begin with the Bible story we just heard. It’s
the second half of a two-part tale. It actually begins in the
synagogue.
Jesus comes on the Sabbath to the First Jewish Church of
Capernaum. The Torah is read and Jesus sits to teach. Mark
doesn’t record his words but does tell us that he taught “as one having
authority, and not as the scribes.” [The curse of preaching—folks are
impressed (or not) with the sermon but no one remembers it a week
later!]
Then something memorable happens. “Their was in the synagogue a
man with an unclean spirit…” WHAT is HE doing here? We know
them when they come in—or do we? We just wish they wouldn’t
disrupt our nice, peaceful, orderly liturgy!
Somewhere, in the depths of being, their spirit calls to ours—the
spirit of our own darkness that we suppress so well.
“But Jesus rebuked him, saying. ‘Be silent; come out of him.’ And
the unclean spirit, convulsing him, and crying with a loud voice, came
out of him. They were all amazed.”
They kept asking, “What? A new teaching—with authority! He commands even the unclean spirits—and they obey him!”
There we have it—the warp, the under girding of our stories—put them
together and we see Jesus exercise this power to set free—first in the
congregation, then in Peter’s home, and finally in the community.
The woof, the pattern thread for my weaving comes from some of my own
experiences these last couple of weeks. Hard to believe that just
two weeks ago we were driving through the Texas Hill Country—in mid-80s
temperatures at that! From that to a week of life in a survival
mode; calling my kids in Michigan and Texas just to get OUR weather
report and news about Northwest Arkansas. But those are things we
were all doing—just think of the great stories we can tell in years to
come about The Winter of ’09!
We were in the Hill Country to attend an Elderhostel, a sort of
floating Chautauqua for folks with gray hair and, I think, a bit of
hearing loss. This particular Elderhostel was at Mo-Ranch,
a Presbyterian Camp, and featured learning modules entitled Mavericks
of the Bible, Storytelling, and Texas Cooking. Add to that
picture that on the way down we saw The Bucket List and, on the way home, A Prayer For Bobby. These are a couple of high impact movies. Finally, I also read Brother to a Dragonfly, Will Campbell’s story of growing up poor in the South in the 30s & 40s. Talking about priming the preacher’s pump!
In one of the sessions on storytelling, we were talking about sources
for stories and targeting our audience. The leader, herself a
Presbyterian minister and accomplished storyteller, described a
problematic situation. There was, she said, a minister who used
deliverance from alcoholism to illustrate his sermon—and told the story
of alcoholism in the first person. It was the congregation’s
reaction to his story that captured my thought.
Attitudes toward the minister began to change and people whispered
about “what they hadn’t known” about him. The implication was
that his relationship with the congregation was sorely damaged.
But the aspect that stirred me was our facilitator’s assessment—though
in fairness to her, I must note that she was responding from a
storyteller’s point of view, not from that of a pastor—that the
minister erred in telling that as about himself. My immediate
thought was that perhaps the congregation erred in judging and
condemning him!
It is not a difficult stretch to imagine what went through the minds of
those sitting—or standing more likely—in synagogue as Jesus sat to
teach. Crazy Abe loses it and begins to keen, to wail. A
true spiritual teacher has set off a spirit—a demon—within Abe and he
responds. The men there that day surely reacted to him: “Oh
no! Not Crazy Abe! Who let him in?”
But Jesus sees things in a different light. He know s that the
spirit that holds Crazy Abe in its grasp is binding him, keeping him
from blossoming into the flower that God created him to become,
stymieing his entrance into the Kingdom of God—not because that Kingdom
is closed to him but because he is hampered, hurt, and halt. I
know this story because I have lived it—not in a synagogue in Capernaum
but in an AlAnon meeting in Waco, Texas. I discovered and was
freed from a demon as binding as the one that must have gripped this
man.
So Jesus commands the spirit to come out—and it does! But it
takes a parting shot with a shout:”What have you to do with us, Jesus
of Nazareth?”
Mark then moves the story from synagogue to Peter and Andrew’s home
where Jesus heals the fevered mother-in-law of Peter. Thence, he
moves to an ever-wider field of deliverance and healing.
But I wonder—in the presence of this power and authority, were they all
freed from the evil spirits/ From things like judging
&condemning, failure to love up to false standards we create for
ourselves and others, bitterness, anger, fear, …
Paul, writing to the church in Corinth and to the Romans (in the 14th
chapter), warns of passing judgment on our brothers and sisters—leave
that to God he says, rather, do not be a stumbling block.
I learned something new about myself this week. Here is a first
person confession that IS about me: as days without electricity wore
on, a diminishing propane and water supply threatening survival, I was
fretting about the loss of food stocks from our overloaded freezer and
refrigerator. I began to realize that my trust in God has
limits! I was hoarding food—against what: A famine! To ‘save’ a
few cents by stocking up on ‘sales’? But it’s not about the
food. At a deeper level, I ask exactly how much trust do I have
in God? Am I more focused on physical needs or those things which
feed my spirit? Needless to say, I have tapped a reserve of
spiritual meat on which to chew in the approaching Lenten season.
And my question to you today is, “What have we to do with Jesus?”
Are we willing to let him exorcise the evil spirit(s) within? Are
we open, as a church, to being a place of healing? Or, are we as
a church trying to be a refuge against the demands and demons of the
world? Are we quick to love, slow to judge or do we whisper, “I
didn’t know that about him—or her” to the detriment of building
relationships. Do we let the lifestyle of those who walk a
different path become a cause for division or do we open ourselves to
the Kingdom of God in its full array of expression? Do we take
the healing we receive into our homes and into the community?
What have we to do with Jesus?
The Rev. John Dryden Burton
St. James
Eureka Springs
Feb 8, 2009