As I have said many times, I find myself marveling that we come together and listen to words written two thousand years ago. But it really isn't so strange that we do so. The words of Scripture have changed people's thinking and influenced history over centuries. We need look no farther than our celebration of Black History Month to acknowledge the impact of the Bible on the leaders of the twentieth century Civil Rights movement in this country and the Abolitionist movement of the nineteenth century.
We listen. We reflect, and something happens. What happens is different for different people in different circumstances. But frequently what happens is that something new comes into being; something comes alive that was lying dormant.
The first time Nancy and I went to Ghost Ranch, the Presbyterian conference center in northern New Mexico, we discovered that to get there, you fly into Albuquerque, take public transportation to Santa Fe, where you will be met by a van from the ranch. The shuttle bus we took from the Albuquerque airport was called the Jack Rabbit, and we were the only passengers on it. The driver was quite friendly and invited us to sit in the front seat across from him so we could see the desert scenery as we rode to Santa Fe. The driver told us he had driven through a heavy thunderstorm on the way to the airport a couple of hours earlier. He said we were very lucky because the rain in thunderstorms enables wild flowers in the desert to bloom briefly but very colorfully. And he was right. In all the years I have gone back to Santa Fe, I have never seen the desert as colorful as it was that day after the thunderstorm.
I think hearing verses from the Bible can be like that if we are open to their truth. They bring life where there was dormancy, color where the landscape was dreary.
The eight verses we heard from Mark's Gospel, the first of the four to be written and the simplest of them, tell us about the beginning of Jesus' ministry. He went to the local synagogue, where spiritually sensitive people would have gathered, and he taught them. The result was that the people were "astonished at his teaching, because he taught them as one who had authority...." (Revised Standard Version)
Halford Luccock, a Methodist minister who taught preaching at Yale Divinity for many years, observed that the Christian life begins with hearing what Jesus taught, and only when his teaching has been internalized does it move to action. I very much agree. Jesus built on the foundation laid by the great prophets of Israel, refining their message into a clear statement about God's love. It was in reflecting on Jesus' teaching that one of his first followers wrote the simple sentence, "God is love." That truth changes people when they hear it, begin to understand it, and let it do its healing work in their lives. Only then are they equipped to participate in great social causes in ways that bring about lasting change.
The first thing in this morning's Gospel reading that grabs my attention is the people's awareness of Jesus' authority. Mark mentions it twice in these eight verses. The first time he writes, "...they were astonished at [Jesus'] teaching, because he taught them as one who had authority." Then later Mark writes, "What is this? A new teaching—with authority! He commands even the unclean spirits, and they obey him."
Authority! I've been thinking about it, partly because of preaching on this text, but also because of what I see in Barack Obama—a quality that comes across as authority. Not authority dependent on guns or tanks, not authority based on physical stature or strength or attractiveness. Authority that comes from knowing who you are and being totally comfortable with that.
A few days ago Anthony Tommasini, music critic of the New York Times, wrote about a similar kind of authority. Commenting on the performance of the mezzo-soprano Stephanie Blythe as Orfeo in Gluck's opera Orfeo ed Euridici, Tommasini observed that she is not a singer who could get work as a model as some other singers could, but that she radiates authority (my word, not his). His words are "...her performance demonstrates a timeless truth: that conviction is everything in acting.... Ms. Blythe takes the stage as if she owned it. With every gesture and movement she seems to be saying, 'I am Orfeo.' [and] You believe her."
Authority. I think of Rosa Parks, a woman of color refusing to give up her seat to a Caucasian, as was the custom in the American south of the 1950's. As a child she attended a school that taught its students to believe in their worth as human beings, something that was re-affirmed in the churches she attended and in her joint activity with Martin Luther King, Jr. Authority manifests itself in many ways.
The authority people saw in Jesus of Nazareth surely came from his clear understanding of how much God loved him. In the times of his greatest testing he engaged in prayer, renewing his trust in the Higher Power that was there for him in all of life and in death. He learned to call that Higher Power "Father." We can name that power "Mother" as well as "Father."
The other thing that grabs my attention in our Gospel reading is what happened while Jesus was teaching in the synagogue. Jesus experienced every preacher's nightmare. While he was speaking, a man in the congregation interrupted him, crying out loudly and belligerently, "What have you to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth?" People have been asking that question throughout history, often defensively: What does Jesus with his idealism have to do with politics or economics?
The other people in the synagogue knew that the disruptive man had a history of trouble. He had acted strangely for a long time. According to the way they understood such things, there was a demon living inside the man. The demon caused the man to act in ways the man would not choose for himself. My own life experience leads me to be more understanding of their explanation than I was when I was young. My life has been affected by a demonic disease that inhabited someone I loved. Don't tell me there are no demons.
Ask someone who struggles with addiction whether there are demons. Ask someone who battles depression day in and day out whether there are demons. Ask someone who wants desperately to lose weight and cannot whether there are demons. Ask anyone who lives with a rage-a-holic whether there are demons. We may not see illness the way people saw it two thousand years ago, and we may not understand evil the way they did. But the word demonic is very much a part of our vocabulary.
As Mark tells the story, Jesus spoke to the demon in the man, and the demon left its tormented victim, not easily but without great delay. For me the centerpiece of the story is not the exorcism of the demon, at least not for its own sake. At the center of the story for me is the authority of Jesus. I think it is the focus of the story for Mark also.
Jesus made it clear that his mission was about far more than wonder-working. He came to reveal the heart of God, to make known the nature of the power at the center of the universe. Jesus didn't heal all the people who were sick in his region during the years of his ministry. As Jesus' life unfolded, it became obvious that not even people of faith got all their requests granted. What they got was the assurance that the power of love, God's love and human love at its best, is stronger than anything life can hold. There is no circumstance, no situation, no difficulty that is beyond the scope of God's care.
In yesterday's New York Times, Bob Herbert's column, always worth reading, was about the casting out of the demonic. He wrote about the movie "Pray the Devil Back to Hell." It is about a woman whose family suffered the agony of civil war in Liberia a few years ago. Charles Taylor was the tyrannical president, and some brutal rebels were trying to get him out of power.
Herbert says the violence was excruciating—murder and rape were commonplace. In 2003 a woman of faith, Leymah Gbowee, had a dream in which she heard a voice telling her to organize the women of her church to pray for peace. "...Ms. Gbowee not only rallied the women at her Lutheran church to pray for peace, but organized them into a full-blown all-woman peace initiative that spread to other Christian churches—and then to women of the Muslim faith."
The women prayed, sang, and demonstrated at the open-air fish market in Monravia, the capital of Liberia. Neither the president nor the rebels showed much interest in peace. But the women prayed and persisted. Eventually the dictatorial President Taylor and the terrorizing rebels met with the women to hear their concerns.
Peace talks were held in Ghana, and when it looked as though they would break down, Ms. Gbowee and two hundred of her followers staged a sit-in at the site of the talks, demanding that the two sides in the conflict stay together until agreement was reached. Soon afterward Mr. Taylor went into exile in Nigeria. Three years ago on January 16, 2006, Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf was sworn in as President of Liberia, the first woman ever elected president of a country in Africa.
That's casting out demons, my friends. One woman, acting with integrity shaped by her faith, gained authority recognized by her peers, and brought down a violent, corrupt government.
The authority that people saw in Jesus is the authority of one who knew his value in the sight of God, who knew the One who is the author of history, the source of existence—and who was not afraid, because he trusted the God of love. The good news we celebrate in this church is that God's love is available to every human being. It can heal, deliver, empower anyone who is open to it. It transforms us and sets us free, free to enjoy life in all its fullness, free to work for a more just and peaceful world.