About the Author: Sunday Sermons from Sell Chapel are written by Rev. Preston Van Deursen, Director of Pastoral Care at the Masonic Village at Elizabethtown.
My wife will tell you that I can’t bear to watch anything but the sports channels. Maybe your husband is like that but Linda says her husband Mitch has four TV sets placed throughout their home in suburban California, a fifth in the garage, a sixth on the patio and a portable TV in the car.
I keep telling Brenda we need one for the bathroom
Your husband watched sports on your honeymoon? At the wedding altar itself, their minister talked about Mitch’s love of sports. At the reception, her new hubby, who by the way owns a sporting-goods store, kept slipping away so he could catch the big game on TV.
Your man played golf while you were sick with the flu? On a day five years ago when tests showed Linda, now forty-two, might have a kidney tumor, Mitch picked her up at the hospital, dropped her at home with her mother, his mother and their three-week-old baby, and went on to his regular Friday afternoon golf date with his friends. (Fortunately, Linda did not have a kidney tumor.)
Linda could not top the jaw-dropping news out of Jonesboro, Georgia, during one Super Bowl: When a woman committed suicide that Sunday, her husband waited until the game was over to call the authorities.
This is how the coroner’s investigator expressed his perplexity at the delay: “I can’t explain it,” he said. “That game was SO boring.”
Our lesson for today’s Gospel doesn’t take place in a football stadium, but in a synagogue. And the scene is anything but boring. In fact, it sounds like something straight out of one of television’s spooky shows: Jesus and his disciples were in Capernaum. On the Sabbath, Jesus went into the synagogue and began to teach. The people were amazed at his teaching, because he taught them as one who had authority, not as the teachers of the law. A man in their synagogue who was possessed by an evil spirit suddenly cried out, “What do you want with us, Jesus of Nazareth? Have you come to destroy us? I know who you are–the Holy One of God!” Now, that’s spooky. And it makes us wonder sometimes what gets into people:
I am always asking myself that question about people. Perhaps you heard about the census worker in the who approached a house in her territory very slowly? There was a fence around the house and the worker was terribly afraid of dogs. She opened the gate ever so quietly and hurried stealthily up to the house and rang the bell. She breathed a sigh of relief when the lady of the house opened the door. She felt safe now. Whereupon the lady of the house promptly bit her! It’s true. The census worker required medical attention for a human bite.
When a dog bites someone we might ask, what got into Rover? We are more likely to ask, however, what got into Ronnie or Rhonda or Randy or Ramona. Humans are far more unpredictable than animals.
What is it that gets into people? What is it that gets into people that causes them to jeopardize their jobs and their marriages? What is it that causes a man to go on a rampage and murder his former boss and several coworkers before killing himself as we read about almost every single day. What gets into a young person that causes him or her to experiment with dangerous drugs and run around with the wrong kind of people? What is it that causes a woman to make one wrong choice after another in the kind of man she marries? What gets into a man who abuses his wife and his children? How do you explain it? What gets into us?
Some would say, “The devil made me do it.” That reminds me of a story about a little girl who got mad at her younger brother. She pushed him down, called him a name, and then spat on him. Her father got onto her and said, “Honey, I think the devil made you do that.” The little girl answered, “The devil might have made me push him down and call him names, but I thought of spittin’ on him all by myself!” Some would say with regard to our destructive impulses, “Satan made me do it.”
And There are others who would trace aberrations in human behavior to a chemical imbalance in the brain.
The causes of human behavior are very complex.
There is, however, inappropriate behavior for which there is no chemical or physical explanation. I suspect that this was true concerning this wretched man that Jesus met. The Bible says simply that the man had an unclean spirit. Today we would probably say the man had a mental disorder. Maybe he was in the habit of harassing people who went to the synagogue. Today we have people with unclean spirits who paint swastikas on synagogues.
Mark is not specific about the man’s symptoms. All we know is that the man cried out, “What have you to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth? Have you come to destroy us? I know who you are, the Holy One of God.” But Jesus rebuked him, saying, “Be silent, and come out of him!” And the unclean spirit, convulsing him and crying with a loud voice, came out of him.
What impressed the people who heard Jesus teach was He taught as one with authority. Some people have that, don’t they? There is something about their demeanor, something about their tone of voice, that inspires action.
Some people seem to have that kind of authority. Jesus spoke with authority, but his was an authority of another kind. Even unclean spirits recognized the authority of Jesus! Even Pilate, when he ordered that sign placed above Jesus’ head on the cross, ‘King of the Jews,’ may have recognized Jesus’ authority. Jesus’ authority came from his relationship with the Father. His was Divine authority.
THE SECOND IMPRESSIVE THING ABOUT THIS STORY IS THE POSSIBILITY OF DELIVERANCE. Jesus delivered this man with the unclean spirit. He has that authority today. He can deliver us from whatever may get into us. It is sad that so many people even in the church only give lip service to the authority of Jesus. They really don’t believe that he can deliver them.
There is an old story about some linemen who were busy putting up telephone poles through a farmer’s fields. The farmer ordered them off his land, whereupon they showed him a paper giving them the right to plant poles wherever they pleased. Not long afterward a big and vicious bull charged the linemen. The old farmer sat on a nearby fence and yelled: ‘Go ahead and Show him yer papers, see if he cares , show him yer papers!'”
To many Christians Jesus’ authority is only a paper authority. It is something we study for inspiration, but we really don’t believe it applies to our situation. For many of us Jesus’ authority doesn’t extend to putting a marriage back together or a family. It doesn’t mean curing an addiction or healing a character flaw. Maybe 2,000 years ago he had authority, but not today.
Some have only a tepid faith in Jesus’ authority. Others outright rebel against that authority. Francis Schaffer tells us that Vincent Van Gogh abandoned Christianity believing it to be irrelevant. He believed that he could set up a new religion in which sensitive people (artists) would blaze the trail. He dreamed of starting this religion in the artistic community in which he lived. After Paul Gauguin joined him, however, his dreams for a new religion among the sensitive crashed. He and Gauguin quarreled violently. Many believe that Van Gogh committed suicide because he was mentally ill, or because he lost his lover to fellow artist Gauguin. But there may have been a deeper reason. Van Gogh may have died from disillusionment and loss of hope.
Deep within the soul of every person is a longing for hope and purpose. That means you and I. Some disguise it, others seek it out in the wrong places. We need to believe there is hope in this world. There is help. There is deliverance. It is found in the person of Jesus. He has authority! This brings us to the final thing to be said from this text. SURRENDER IS ESSENTIAL.
You and I are not slaves to some primordial instinct that drives us to inevitable destruction. We are free moral agents. We can choose, but choose we must.
If we want the healing of Christ, we must open ourselves to the Spirit of Christ. We must yield ourselves to the authority of Christ. Some of us want a nodding acquaintance with him. We want to be counted in his company, but at a distance. It cannot be done. Regardless of how hard or harsh it may sound, sooner or later we must confront our personal Gethsemane and pray either “My will” or “Thy will” be done.
As he came to the end of his distinguished ministry at City Temple in London, the great British Methodist preacher Leslie Weatherhead said: “I am to be asked shortly on a radio program to answer the question, ‘What have you learned from life?’ Well, I have learned a lot of things from life, but from my own failures, from the confidences of innumerable men and women, from the rough and tumble of forty-five years in the Christian ministry, and from my observations as a student of personal, national and international affairs, I will tell you the outstanding thing I have learned. It is this: Life will only work out one way, and that is God’s way. He made it like that. Every other way has across it a barricade bearing a notice which says, ‘No thoroughfare this way.’ If you surmount the barrier, there is a precipice. Men will not learn the truth of half a dozen words: ‘OUTSIDE GOD THERE IS ONLY DEATH.’ After all, Jesus did say, ‘I am the Way.’ Perhaps He meant it. Perhaps He was right after all.”
Friends, Jesus has the authority to deliver us from whatever may get into us. This is not to say we don’t need our medicine if our problem is physical. Neither is it to say that we should not seek human counseling for our problems. It is to say, however, that we will go through things far beyond human understanding and medical fixes. At times such as these, there is only one who has the key that unlocks the doors to peace and serenity.
He alone has the authority to say to the unclean spirits, “Come out!” He alone has the power to take us by the hand and say Arise. He alone fills us with a hope and joy that this is not all there is.
