Fifth Sunday of Epiphany
February 4, 2024

Sermon

Rocky Supinger
Associate Pastor

Mark 1:29–39

---

The word demon occurs nearly 100 times in the Bible.

Only six of those are in the Old Testament, and four of those refer to “goat-demons” of Canaanite religious rituals.

The vast majority of the Bible’s references to demons come from the four Gospels. In Mark alone, there are sixteen references to demons or demoniacs — that is, people who have demons. We just heard four of them.

Another four of Mark’s demon citations come in a single story in chapter five, the story of the Gerasene demoniac, a man who “night and day among the tombs and on the mountains was always howling and bruising himself with stones.”

When the man sees Jesus, the demons are cast out of him and sent into a herd of pigs, who promptly rush down a steep bank into the lake. John Darnielle of the band The Mountain Goats refers to it at the beginning of a song as “The story of the pigs who ran straightaway into the water and their, uh, great triumph.”

But can I tell you something about myself? Demon stories are my least favorite kind of Gospel stories.

I just don’t like them. They make me tense up.

Demons are a problem for me.

You might find talk of demons in the New Testament problematic in the same way and maybe for the same reason as I do, but, for me, one reason is that demons are not part of my lived experience. I don’t know that I have ever had a demon, and I can’t really imagine how I could.

Demons and demonic forces are not part of my mental map of the world. They’re not for most (what we would call) stable, balanced people. I mean, we live in a highly technologically advanced civilization in which science and the scientific method has long served as the dominant expression of reality.

We know what we can experience with our physical senses, what we can observe and measure. Even though technologies like artificial intelligence are making it harder to trust our senses, so that we have to increasingly ask if some video or photo is real or AI-generated, those determinations rely on distinguishing between things that are actually possible; nobody is going to be fooled by a Photoshopped image of a demon, because the existence of such a thing isn’t generally regarded as a real possibility.

If I’m making myself clear, Gospel stories about demons pose a problem for me because it feels a little embarrassing, in the year 2024, to be talking — seriously! — about demons as something real that people actually experience or that people have ever really experienced.

That’s my problem. You might relate to it or you might not, but I’m owning it as my problem.

But who am I to say what’s real and what’s not?

The other reason these demon stories are such a problem for me is that I don’t like the modern, scientific, explanation of these stories that I’ve often heard: that what the Gospels call “demons” is actually mental illness or some other explainable medical condition, that the witnesses who described the experiences of these people around Jesus in Galilee and Judea were subject to superstition or delusion or a supernatural view of the world that we, in our technological sophistication, have outgrown.

That explanation feels shortsighted to me and, frankly, a little arrogant.

Somebody spoke to me for close to an hour not long ago about their experience of racism and bigotry and isolation, but the language they used was spiritual language. They talked about feeling attacked by forces of darkness and hatred, pursued by a spirit of fear and negativity, and they yearned to be free of it.

If I subscribed to the view that such talk isn’t “real” but is instead some kind of psychological projection, what would I tell that person?

Would I tell them that what they were experiencing was not, in fact, what they felt in the core of their being it was — an attack from spiritual forces — but actually something else? That, in reality, what they were experiencing was the impact of systemic inequities or internalized white supremacy or depression?

No question, that way of explaining his experience would be right: systemic racism is real, and its impact is devastating for individuals, communities, countries — the planet! But what if we don’t have to choose between that explanation and his? What if they are both true?

The church my family attended when I was a child practiced exorcism. It was actually a pretty common occurrence in Sunday worship for someone to come forward with a complaint that they had a demon.

Sometimes that complaint was accompanied by biblical-style behavior: wailing and flailing and screaming, but in my memory that wasn’t always the case.

People would often calmly describe having a demon that overwhelmed them with sadness or despair; a demon that made them do things they didn’t want to do, things with drugs or alcohol or sex; a demon that was making them hate another person and filling their heart with bitterness; a demon that was making them sick in a way doctors couldn’t diagnose.

The pastors and the elders would come around that person, lay their hands on them, and rebuke the demon in Jesus’ name and command it to come out.

And what I recall about those scenes is the calm that would come over people afterwards. I remember people in tears, embraced by their fellow church members, smiling and thanking God with whispers and shouts and songs of praise.

I spent a lot of time since then thinking that “demon” was a convenient stand-in for the real cause of peoples’ misery: capitalism or media, brain chemistry or bad luck, bad decisions.

But I’ve come to regard that thinking as shortsighted. I’ve come to embrace the possibility that the forces I want to point to as explanations for those peoples’ sufferings are real and that they are spiritual, that you can even describe them — seriously — as “demonic.”

For me, it comes down to this: Jesus changes people.

Sometimes Jesus changes our minds with his teaching, and sometimes he changes our bodies through a healing touch. Sometimes Jesus changes our heart by welcoming us to a table that has been denied us.

And Jesus changes our spirits by delivering us when we find ourselves afflicted by powers that feel bigger and stronger than us and seem to have taken hold of us.

Simon’s mother-in-law: the fever leaves her, as if it’s an evil spirit in its own right.

Fever, back then, was not a symptom of something deadly; it was a deadly force in its own right. When Jesus enters that house, death is in the next room kneeling on somebody’s chest.

And so Jesus does what Jesus does when he finds himself sharing space with the forces of death, whether the story calls those forces diseases or demons: he comes to the one oppressed, takes her by her hand, and lifts her up.

Jesus heals our body and our spirit at the same time.

In the summer of 2022, my wife’s best friend and her family came to visit us. We hadn’t seen them since 2018 — they live in France, where Meredith grew up — and we spent months planning their two-week visit and all the things we were going to do with them: the Art Institute, a baseball game, dinners at home that lasted late into the night, several days in Michigan.

Planning that August visit and anticipating it sustained us through the winter and through a busy summer work schedule.

But on the second morning of their time in Chicago, Meredith tested positive for COVID. I probably don’t need to tell you the blow that was to all of our spirits, as the hosting role she had prepared and planned for herself was immediately converted to something else: isolating in bed while our guests fended for themselves.

When Simon’s mother-in-law is delivered of fever, she begins to serve Jesus and Simon, Andrew, James, and John. That is the proof of her healing right there, that she is restored to the dignity of being a host, and, what’s more, lifted up into the ministry of Jesus.

At first it seems kind of wrong that this woman who a moment ago was on her deathbed suddenly is serving her guests (all men, we should add). One commentator observes a little tongue-in-cheek that she’s “healed just in time for supper.”

But here’s something important: that word, serve.

To the Gospel, service isn’t servitude but ministry. The verb serve is only applied in the Gospels to women, to angels, and to Jesus himself (never to the disciples).

When Jesus heals Simon’s mother-in-law, he does more than make her well physically. He delivers her from a power that holds her captive, and he frees her to take her place as a leader in the community of Jesus himself. He not only gives her health but a new identity.

And then he does it over and over again for many, many people, the whole town crowded around the door of Simon and Andrew’s house.

He escapes before dawn the next morning to pray in a deserted place, which seems to upset Simon and company, because they come out to track him down and bring him back to Capernaum, where “everyone” is still searching for him after the previous day’s display.

And his answer to them is that they need to move on, actually, so that he can proclaim the message elsewhere, because that is what he came out to do.

What message? Mark didn’t record a single word of Jesus in narrating the previous day’s healing and exorcising. What message could he be referring to?

Exactly.

You may have heard the expression “the medium is the message” before. It’s attributed to the twentieth-century media theorist Marshall McLuhan. It was his way of explaining that a medium of communication, say a printed book or a YouTube video, affects the meaning of what is communicated just as much as the content does.

So the medium of casting out demons is Jesus’ message just as much as is the content of that message: the kingdom of God has come near.

When Jesus goes throughout Galilee proclaiming that message and casting out demons, he’s not doing two separate things. Because the announcement that God’s reign is here makes forces of captivity and intimidation to flee.

And because staring down demons in whatever form they take — whether systems of oppression, isolating loneliness, or any force that keeps people from flourishing as the free children of God they are created to be — staring those demons down is to announce that a new day is coming, in fact is already visible, when the blind will be made to see, captives are released, the oppressed are freed, and the poor receive good news.

The medium is the message.

Everything we do as people of faith communicates the message of God’s liberating love: the way we welcome strangers and love enemies, the way we advocate for victims and tend to those in need. The medium of our lives in Christ, when we’re together here and when we’re dispersed out there, is the message that nothing can separate people from God’s love. Nothing.

And so when we gather for worship we celebrate the Sacrament of Communion, because a sacrament is as powerful a medium of that message as there is. All are welcome to this table, where the bread is whole and nourishing and where the cup runs over with goodness. It’s not an experience we design but a mystery we receive, and in that mystery is our healing and our freedom. Amen.

---

Sermon © Fourth Presbyterian Church