January 31, 2021: Come Out!
Gospel Lesson: Mark 1:21-28
Rev. Rhonda Blevins
They went to Capernaum; and when the sabbath came, he entered the synagogue and taught. They were astounded at his teaching, for he taught them as one having authority, and not as the scribes. Just then there was in their synagogue a man with an unclean spirit, and he 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. They were all amazed, and they kept on asking one another, “What is this? A new teaching—with authority! He commands even the unclean spirits, and they obey him.” At once his fame began to spread throughout the surrounding region of Galilee.
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Growing up in a small town, one of the highlights of each year was when the carnival came to town. My family went religiously. We ate the cotton candy and the funnel cakes. We played ring toss, and milk bottle and balloon and dart game. But my favorite was the rides. We rode the Ferris wheel, the bumper cars, and the Scrambler. And then one year, the carnival brought a new ride to town. The Centrifuge! Excited to try this new ride, I entered the enclosed, circular-shaped chamber, leaned my back against the padded wall lining the outside of the chamber, and then the spinning started. Faster and faster, like a centrifuge, the centripetal force pinning my small frame to the pad, barely able to lift my arms or my legs. What started out as fun quickly turned sour, and suddenly, I wasn’t feeling so good. My head was spinning. My stomach was churning. I. Was. Sick. And there was nothing I could do about it except try not to throw up, imagining what the centripetal force would do with the contents of my stomach. When the ride was over, I stumbled out of the centrifuge, ran behind the ride, and puked my guts out. I would never step into another centrifuge for the rest of my days.
But for just a moment, I want to invite you to imagine yourself stepping into a centrifuge ride like the one I just described. It’s a large centrifuge, and we’re all stepping in together. But this is no ordinary centrifuge. Instead, it’s a time machine taking us to some unknown time and place in the future. As the spinning begins, we leave the old world behind, and we spin and we spin and we spin, trying not to toss our cookies, losing all sense of place and time, unsure of when or where we’ll be when we disembark.
Then the spinning stops. We look around, disoriented, at each other with wide eyes, anxious about what waits for us on the other side of the centrifuge walls. With no way to know what year it is or what place it is, we step out, one by one, and begin to look around for markers, signs to help us get our grounding. There’s nothing around to quickly indicate either time or place. One guy says, “Hey, let’s find a newspaper! That will tell us when and where we are!” Another guy says, “You can’t trust the newspaper!” One lady says, “Let’s find a computer, it will surely tell us what date it is.” Another lady says, “No, you can’t trust computers.” Someone says, “Let’s find a police officer.” Another says, “No, you can’t trust police officers.” One of the kids says, “Let’s find the local pastor, she’ll tell us the truth!” All of the adults reply, “You can’t trust a pastor, kid!” The child asks, “Then who or what can we trust?”
These days, it’s like we’re all in a great big centrifuge together—spinning, spinning, spinning—not knowing when it will stop or what the world will be like when we step off. We are living through tremendous political, economic, and social upheaval. We’re in different echo chambers inside the centrifuge, listening to different voices, trusting different sources. We no longer share a unified story about who or what we can trust or about who or what will be our authority.
If I read my New Testament correctly, it appears to me that Jesus began his ministry in this kind of social environment. The old Mosaic laws weren’t really working for the new reality. There were people in his day, just as in ours, trying to hold on to a social order that wasn’t working in the real world. So the Pharisees went around saying, “Let’s hang the 10 Commandments in the courthouse . . . that will fix the problem!” Ok, maybe not. Jesus stepped out of the centrifuge into his day saying, “You have heard it said,” (the old Mosaic law) “but I say to you.” For instance, from Matthew 5:38-39: “You have heard that it was said, ‘Eye for eye, and tooth for tooth.’ But I tell you, do not resist an evil person. If anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to them the other cheek also.”
And in our scripture lesson today, Mark tells us that Jesus’ teaching had authority. Nowhere in scripture does it say that Jesus set out to create a new religion, rather, he wanted to reform the old religion, Judaism, for the new reality. In this reforming process—this reshaping of the faith for the new social order, Jesus has to cast out some demons, both literally, as in the scripture text I read a moment ago, and figuratively. He must cast out a few “demons” from the religion of his forebears. Diving into the scripture lesson a little further, remember that Jesus is in the synagogue, the house of worship. That’s where he finds the demon-possessed fellow. The demon-possessed man asks Jesus a fascinating question, perhaps on behalf of all who were gathered in the synagogue that day, “Have you come to destroy us?” Have you come to destroy our religion? Our way of doing things? Our social order? Jesus told him to shut up. Then he said, “Come out!” to the unclean spirit.
Brilliant author and historian, Phyllis Tickle, suggests that every 500 years the church has giant rummage sale. We have to “cast out” what no longer works, the injustices, the misplaced values. So Jesus “exorcized the demons” from the faith he inherited. Then roughly 500 years after Jesus, the Roman Empire fell taking the church with it, and Christianity had to completely reinvent itself. That’s when Asian Christians splintered, and Oriental Orthodoxy was born. 500 years after that (in 1054) was the Great Schism, when Western Christianity and Eastern Orthodoxy split. Rome became the center in the West and Constantinople in the East. 500 years after that, on October 31st 1517, Martin Luther (tradition tells us) tacked his 95 Theses on the Witten-Burg Door. The marker in a much longer, larger process of re-forming the Church—what we now call the Great Reformation. Now, 500 years later, we’re in another upheaval. Not just the church, but society. (Church always reflects what’s happening in larger world.)
There are some fascinating stories from these splits within Christianity. For instance, in the runup to the Great Reformation, the church was divided, and two popes laid claim to the papacy—one from Italy and one from France. That lasted about thirty years, and then another fellow threw his hat in the ring. At one point, there were three popes, warring with one another, their followers following suit. Here’s what Tickle writes of that ordeal: “While having three warring popes all claiming to be the one, true Pope may seem somewhere between quaint and downright ludicrous to us now, it did not seem so to the Church and citizenry of the early fifteenth century.”[1] Tickle wrote that in 2008. It may not seem as ludicrous in 2021 as it did back in 2008. Tickle continues, “Two or three popes evoked the one question that is always present in re-formation: Where now is the authority?”
And since we’re diving into interesting stories from church history, check out this gem. In the 9th Century there was a pope, Stephen VI, who accused a previous pope, Formosus, of perjury and acceding to the papacy illegally. Pope Stephen wanted to put Pope Formosus on trial, but there was one problem—Pope Formosus had been dead for about seven months. Do you think that stopped Pope Stephen? No! Pope Stephen had the corpse of Pope Formosus exhumed, propped the corpse up on a throne, and tried the corpse for “high crimes and misdemeanors.” Apparently, the corpse didn’t have great legal counsel, and he was found guilty. The corpse of Formosus was stripped of its papal vestments, his three fingers used for blessing were severed, and all of his acts were rendered invalid. This crazy scene would become known as the “Cadaver Synod.”
So if you think things are crazy in the United States, at least we aren’t putting any cadavers on trial!
Whenever there are upheavals, like there have been in the church and in the world since the dawn of time, Tickle says the driving question is “Where now is our authority?” “Which pope is our authority?” was the question for a while. Then Martin Luther and others came along suggesting, maybe authority shouldn’t be a pope at all, but the Holy Bible. “The Bible or the Pope? Which is our authority?” Critics of where Protestants landed, choosing the Bible with their cry of “sola scriptura” (only scripture) suggest that Protestants traded a human pope for a paper pope.
Where now is our authority? This seems to be a pertinent question today. We no longer share a common story about what news can be trusted, what is true and what is false. We’ll eventually settle in and find a common authority once again, but I suspect it will be a wild ride until then. I suspect we’ll be hanging out in a centrifuge for a few years to come. (Anyone else feeling nauseous?)
Back to our scripture text. It was Jesus’ authority that set him apart from the other teachers of his day. “What is this?” the onlookers asked. “A new teaching—with authority!”
I, for one, think Jesus is an appropriate response to the “Where now is our authority?” question. Not all Christians agree with me. Good people of faith are looking to human leaders or to a paper pope or to the stock market or to others in our echo chambers— we’ve been in the spin machine so long, we’ve become disoriented and sick. Maybe we need to get out of the spin machine and find somewhere to throw up. Maybe, the Christian church in America needs a demon or two cast out of us.
“Come out!” Jesus commands. Yet we resist, saying: “Have you come to destroy us?” We don’t want to change! And so we pray:
Silence, Lord, the unclean spirit, in our mind and in our heart.
Speak your word that when we hear it all our demons shall depart.
Clear our thought and calm our feeling; still the fractured, warring soul.
By the power of your healing make us faithful, true, and whole.[2]
[1] Phyllis Tickle, The Great Emergence: How Christianity is Changing and Why,” Baker Books: Grand Rapids, MI, 2008, pp. 44-45.
[2] From Thomas Troeger’s hymn text, “Silence! Frenzied, Unclean Spirit.”