Sermons from the Pulpit

     Now here is a curious thing: Why do you suppose a person possessed by an unclean spirit or a demon would voluntarily go to a synagogue on the Sabbath? Seems irrational, going into such an uncongenial environment. Asking for trouble.

     I can think of two possible reasons why an unclean spirit might actually choose to go to God's house or a demon might come to church. The first is kind of obvious: Asking for trouble may be an essential and natural activity if you're an unclean spirit.

     But beyond that, I'd question the question. Why shouldn't the demons and unclean spirits feel right at home in church? Contrary to all those 19th-century Gothic novels like Dracula and for that matter all those 20th-century novels by Stephen King and others, the human race can't be neatly divided with the good folks over here and the evil ones over there. No place or person is purely good, and no place or person is purely evil. If you had to be pure and good to come to church, think how many of us wouldn't be here! (I'm tempted to ask for a show of hands, but I won't.)

     Martin Luther went so far as to say that Satan has his very own altar in every church, and he wasn't just talking about the Roman Catholic church when he said that. Heck, every Lutheran knows that the devil is a churchgoer and fellow Lutheran, and I only hope that we in the United Church of Christ have not lost our own historic Reformed consciousness of the permeating presence of sin and evil.

     Anyway, as we heard, Jesus performs this exorcism. He commanded the demon to shut up and come out of the man, and it obeyed him. It came out with a convulsion and a loud cry. Exorcisms seem to be messy, noisy, violent and painful, in the Bible no less than in the movies. This also makes perfect sense, in light of what we just observed: The good and the bad of who we are are so intertwined that they can't be separated from each other cleanly. If someone were to cast out my demons, a good deal of me would go with them, and it would hurt.

     One thing we can learn from this story is that unclean spirits do not lie low in church. Possibly you already know this from personal experience. This one couldn't contain itself. It moved the man in whom it dwelt to interrupt the Sabbath service with his babbling, bringing the worship of God to a grinding halt and making himself the center of attention. "What have you to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth? Have you come to destroy us? I know who you are."

     And Jesus says, "Be silent." Actually, that's putting it too politely. The Greek for what Jesus said would be better translated with some rougher turn of phrase, such as "Shut up." Shut up and go away. It's not true what someone's grandmother said, that Jesus was a gentleman.

     Wouldn't it be great, since we are all such sinners, if we had some inner voice that would tell us at appropriate times to shut up? And to tell you the truth, I think most of us do, but we're not much good at listening to it. The unclean spirits in us think they know everything and are eager to display the fact, so they babble on and are not willing to be contained.

     Some people equate the Biblical unclean spirits with mental illness. I have trouble with that. I think there are better definitions. I agree with whoever it was who said an unclean spirit is the power in us that isolates us, that separates us from community, that robs us of our identity as members of the larger body and robs us also of our ability and authority to speak and participate as authentic members.

     What matters, what makes it unclean, isn't the thing itself, it's the power we allow it to have over us, the power to take our very selves away from us. It's not alcohol or drugs as such, for example, but addiction to them. It's not conservatism or liberalism or any other ism, but the surrender of one's powers of discernment to an ideology. It's not living by the rules and it's not throwing away the rulebook, it's believing that either law or freedom is salvation.

     Which brings us to our text. Knowledge puffs up, but love builds up. One of the most inflammatory sentences Paul wrote, and he wrote quite a few. You want to challenge him. You want to ask him, What's so bad about knowledge? And if you did, he'd say, Nothing! He was quite knowledgeable himself, proud to be a Pharisee among Pharisees, easily as clever as any of those folks he was putting down for their cleverness.

     He's not some red-neck Luddite know-nothing. He's not against knowledge as such. He's against know-it-alls. The ability to learn and know about things is a gift given by God, and we are stewards of it, trustees, temporary in possession for the Giver's purposes and not our own, as we are of all God's gifts.

     Paul was addressing himself in this letter to folks who thought knowledge was everything. That's as far off the mark as making a virtue of ignorance. It's demonic, but it's only one example of the demonic. The demonic impulse in us treats a good thing as if it were the only good, a part as if it were the whole, the means as if it were the end. And it lives in every one of us, and it is as close to the surface as the next breath we are going to take, because we love it. It gets us off the hook, it rescues us from the responsibility of finding our way through all life's messy little situations, it spares us from having to pay attention to each other.

     As the demons themselves pointed out, their names are legion. The human mind can turn anything at all into an idol, a false god, a substitute. Even Christian religion can be made into an idol. Even the church of Jesus Christ can be perverted to puffing up instead of building up. Surely that's not because Jesus is an agent of Satan, although there were those who said he was. Rather it's because Luther was right. Satan has his own altar in every church, and it's God's own faithful people who have built it.

     The detractors of religion say it's a cowardly escape from reality. Well, it will be, if we let it, or it can be the relentless brave plumbing and probing of deepest truth that clearly the Scriptures reveal it to be. It's up to us.

     Well, not really. If it really were up to us we'd be up the creek, wouldn't we? But thanks be to God, the grace of God and the love of Christ and the words of Paul are already at work here, have been for a while, and they are bearing fruit that you can see.

     I mean, look! The Moderator has asked us to red-pencil all the dumb mistakes in the Annual Reports in her special sacrificial copy on the round table instead of bringing them up at the meeting to show the whole church how smart we are, and we're going to do it, right? And that's only the beginning. We're all, every one of us, going to put our considerable knowledge to work as the servant of our love for one another and for God. We're going to wish each other well, and listen to each other, and contain our little demons, and not get bogged down in the little stuff, and remember our baptism, as Luther always admonished himself whenever he was ready to let 'er rip, and discern God's will for us together, and clarify who we are and why we're together and where we're going. And this Annual Meeting is going to show us how it is that in all things, love builds up. Isn't it? Thanks be to God!

     Amen.