In the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Amen

Our text for this morning is Mark 1:21-28-the story of the man with the evil spirit. It is a story dealing with individual demonic possession. It is a story in which we once again enter into “the strange world of the Bible.” As the story opens we find Jesus in the synagogue at Capernaum teaching the people his message concerning the Kingdom of God. The people are amazed at the authority that Jesus conveys.

Suddenly the man possessed by the evil spirit cries out, identifying Jesus as the Holy One of God. Jesus silences the spirit and casts out the demon. Once again his authority amazes the people and news of Jesus begins to spread throughout Galilee. 

Approaching this text from our modern/postmodern perspective it is easy for us to dismiss this story of demonic possession out of hand. Do some demythologizing and simply put it down to the uninformed worldview of a primitive people who saw demons everywhere.

For we are a modern people who have embraced the myth of progress. Using our faculty of reason to fill in the gaps of our ignorance, to push back the darkness of our world so that our future grows ever lighter. It is a myth or modern dream that was borne of the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century, nurtured by the Romantics of the nineteenth century and mechanized by the technological revolution of the twentieth century.

In 1904 Prime Minister Wilfrid Laurier declared, “The 19th century was the century of the United States. I think we can claim that it is Canada that shall fill the 20th century.”

In fact the 20th century was proclaimed to be the “Christian Century” when the whole world would be won for Christ. All talk of the devil, of demons and evil spirits were carefully shelved away-the drunken uncles of the twentieth century kept out of sight so as not to embarrass our modern sensibilities.

But when we look back at the century just past we have to admit that things did not go according to the Plan. Our future has not grown ever lighter as the myth of progress predicted.  In fact the twentieth century claimed some of the most bizarre and tragic examples of individual and collective possession in human history. The psychoanalyst Carl Jung acknowledged with deep disquiet the way his German patients in the period after the First World War were having disturbing, mythological dreams of violence and cruelty that seemed to go well beyond the limits of the personal unconscious.

In the words of the theologian Walter Wink, “The demonic (was) an inescapable fact of the twentieth century.”  We were wholly unprepared for it. We are still unprepared for it. We are still dismayed by the reality of evil, death and the demonic. They just shouldn’t be. But the Canadian general Romeo Dallaire met this reality in Rwanda and it is appropriate that he entitled his memoirs “Shake Hands with the Devil.”

Now I am not suggesting that our world “is in the power of the evil one.” But the evil that we have witnessed in the twentieth century and are witnessing is too big, too tragic and too heinous not to once again take the category of the “demonic” seriously in describing certain events that have taken place and take place in our world.

We must demythologize our Liberal belief in the myth of progress so that we can acknowledge that there are spirits present perhaps as old as creation itself which possess individuals and groups of people, which rebel against God or oppose God’s will of justice and of love. Spirits that play upon fear, repress humanity and courage and mask reality with untruth and lies.

CS Lewis, who is enjoying a renewed popularity, once wrote “There are two equal and opposite errors into which our race can fall about the devils. One is to disbelieve in their existence. The other is to believe, and to feel an excessive and unhealthy interest in them.”
So how do we walk this fine line between disbelief and unhealthy interest?

The early church regarded everyone prior to baptism as possessed by virtue of the fact that they belonged to a world in rebellion against God. Baptism was more than a rite of membership into the church, it was an exorcism. And we have maintained this concept in the Presbyterian liturgy when we ask individuals to “renounce evil and all powers in the world that rebel against God or oppose God’s rule of justice and love.”

Turning again to our Gospel reading from Mark, we see that Jesus in dealing with the man possessed acknowledged the presence of the evil spirit. He entered into the reality that was presented, neither ignoring, nor seeking to hide it away. This is what we are seeking to do by once again reflecting upon the “demonic” as a category within our worldview.

It is a process of spiritual discernment in which the presence of evil is determined through the power of the Holy Spirit. For evil/demonic is a parasite, it must have a living host, which it can possess. So in first facing the reality of the man’s situation the demonic madness is exposed. It is named for what it is.

Once the madness is exposed, Jesus silences the spirit and does not allow it to speak. He then exorcises the evil spirit and it comes out the man with a shriek. A new possibility of sanity is realized and the man is made whole. Once again the people are amazed. In this confrontation Jesus has an authority, a power that is greater than the evil spirit which controls the man. It is a power that is connected with the Kingdom of God.

Our task then as the church is to discern the presence of the demonic. To have the courage to expose the madness. It is then that the liberating Word is spoken grounded in the divine that is stronger than evil. Now waving holy water over Auschwitz would scarcely have stopped the Holocaust.

But what if both the Roman Catholic and Protestant churches in Germany has staged ritual protests outside the gates. What if in churches all over Germany, ministers and priests had read from their pulpits prayers exorcising the demonic-the spirit of evil from the national psyche?

And yet there have been moments in both individual experience and social history when the demonic madness has been exposed and a new possibility has been realized.
Each year a group gathers in October at the White Sands Missile range near Alamogordo, New Mexico, at the site where the first atomic bomb was tested in 1945.

The group that met in 1984 was led in a rite of exorcism by a Roman Catholic priest from the Franciscan school of Theology in Berkley, California. The prayer called on “God who stronger than sin and death to “seize from Satan’s power the weapons that now threaten our destruction… to deliver to perdition all nuclear weapons and their means of delivery….to deliver to perdition the tragic pride that first made these weapons and the mutual fear that continues their manufacture.”

To be face to face with such powerful delusions is to be humbled. There is no way to claim that we do not need a power that lies beyond our human capacity. God must be with us in order to win the struggle. Jesus taught and cast out evil because of his authority. It is that authority in which our hope lies. It is that authority which is able to claim victory over evil, by whatever name it inhabits our world.
THANKS BE TO GOD, AMEN.