Message 06-24-07

 

Series:            Lectionary [Traditional Services]

Scripture:            Luke 8:26-39

 

Title:                            Though This World with Devils Filled

 

A lot of years ago, as a young pastor I was invited by the head of staff at the church where I was working at the time to go on a hospital visit with him. The primary reason he invited me along was because I was the youth pastor of the church and the man we were going to visit was the father of one of the young men in my group.

His name was Richard and he was in his 40’s, a hearty guy and a local plumber. He was a man who had inherited his trade from his father and the father’s name was still the name of the company. The reason he was in the hospital was because he had contracted Guillain Barre Syndrome. This is a devastating disease and over the nine years I was working at this particular church I met 4 different men who each contracted this. It comes on like a virus, but it is an attack on your peripheral nervous system. A tingling or weakness in your legs and arms can degenerate into paralysis. Essentially your own immune system starts to attack your body and it destroys your muscles’ ability to respond. When it moves into paralysis it is consider life-threatening.

We went to visit this man, Richard, in the hospital the day he was placed in ICU after waking up unable to move and almost unable to breathe.

As I stood at the end of the bed I couldn’t believe that this was the same man who had crawled around the basement of my house with me, helping to replace a heating system and pipes and just talking with me about the community and the history of the area. This was a man who had jumped into a playful wrestling match with some of the teenage guys in my youth group one night. He was trapped in this bed, unable to move and unable even to speak.

The head of staff began talking with him. He rested his hand on Richard’s shoulder and said, “You’re scared right now. You’re scared you’re not going to see your son graduate from high school. You’re scared you’re not going to be able to hold that little grandchild that’s on its way. You’re scared you’re never going to pick up a tennis racquet again.”
And he went on, talking this way. I have to tell you I couldn’t believe it. As I was looking down into the face of the man who could only move his eyes at that moment, I watched those eyes fill up with tears that spilled over and ran down his cheeks. The senior pastor grabbed a couple of tissues and wiped Richard’s face and then he said we were going to pray. And he prayed for God’s healing touch and for God to be with Richard and with his family. He prayed for Richard to be brought back to wholeness and full health. After the prayer we chatted only a little more and then we said our good-byes and left.

 

As we were going down in the elevator I turned to my senior pastor and said, “Listen, if I’m ever in the hospital with a life-threatening illness, send someone else to visit me, okay?”

 

He was stunned. “Why?” he asked. “Because I don’t think I could deal with you talking with me the way you just talked with him,” I said. “You thought I was hard on him.” “Hard on him? Ohmigosh.”

 

The pastor looked at me and said, “What’s the matter with you, Kohler? Don’t you read your Bible? Don’t you remember Jesus and the Demoniac? You have to name the demon before you can remove them.”

 

Our Scripture passage of the day, this one about the demons who invaded a man, was the one he was referring to. When I left the pastor that day I still wasn’t sure that I wanted him to visit me in the hospital, but I was thinking about what he said.

 

When I came back to Richard for other visits, I learned that other people had come to see him. One of them was a surgeon who had been paralyzed as well and was now back on his feet doing surgery again. He told Richard that he’d be up again, playing tennis again and not to worry. Other people came to visit Richard and they all told him that he was going to come back and be okay. Only my head of staff, as far as I know, talked with him directly about the fear that was deep inside him.

 

I said that four men in my church, over the time I was there, all contracted Guillain Barre Syndrome. No one knows exactly where this virus comes from or why some people get it. They don’t know how to cure it. They do know that therapy lessens the symptoms. They also know that about 80-85% of the people who get Guillain Barre recover for the most part. Some may get a relapse or still have times of weakness, but most people recover. Of the four men in my church 3 of them recovered and went back to living their lives. Richard was the one who did not.

 

He did gain strength back. Eventually he got movement back into his upper back and shoulders and neck. He could talk a little with difficulty and he could breathe on his own.  He got to see his son graduate from high school and he got to see his new granddaughter. He lived for another 4 or 5 years, but then the weakness overtook him completely. He lived all that time in a wheelchair or in a bed. And he was able to come to church only a couple of times. But he was able to acknowledge the fear he had carried.

So, when we hear this story, we might wonder about it. We tend to think of demons in modern terms, that is that they don’t exist, that they are the figments of ancient explanations of what people couldn’t understand.

 

But you know what I see here in this story? I see that Jesus understood evil. Jesus looked evil right in the eyes and that’s not easy. It’s not easy for me and I imagine it’s not easy for you. Evil is very powerful. People of Jesus’ time knew that evil was very powerful and that it was more powerful than them. We get that wrong sometimes in our society. We think there is no evil and that we just have to look at things from the right perspective, get the right point of view. We are retelling stories like The Wizard of Oz and turning it into Wicked – the story of the Wicked Witch of the West. That is a fun story and it’s a clever twist, but it sort of represents what we’re doing in real life. It’s all about spin. We want to spin everything, turn it around a bit so that it can mean something different. We want to say that evil isn’t really that evil. But what I learn from Jesus in this story is that evil is real, evil is scary but Jesus he could look it right in the eyes.

 

I want to remember that.

 

I also learn that if Jesus had to get the demon’s name to deal with it then probably so do we. When I think of Richard and see him lying in that bed listening to the words of the pastor I think of how scary his situation was, but I also think of how he really did get clear on what was next. Everyone else tried to fill him up with their most hopeful and kind words, but getting over the fear, crying out the fear, emptying himself of that fear was something Richard needed to do. He needed to be able to see it, face it and later talk about it. That wasn’t easy. Naming the demon is not easy.

 

And you may be thinking about that at this moment. You may be thinking about your demon and you may be realizing how difficult that is. It may be your wrath. You may be realizing that your wrath, the overwhelming anger that grabs hold of you may separate you from people. Maybe it’s your narcissism, your self-centeredness, your need to draw attention to yourself, to think about yourself, to admire who you are and what you have. It may be pornography or an addiction of another sort – alcohol, prescription medicine – that seems to be eating up your time and your life. It may be your insecurity. Your insecurity may be manifesting itself in a need to stockpile funds or to build walls around your house or to build invisible walls around your heart. Naming the demon is a scary, fearful and courageous thing to do.

 

Naming the demon gives us power over it. It gives us freedom. This is what Jesus did for demoniac and with Jesus we can bring that freedom into other people’s lives. We have to be careful of that because sometimes our demon is a critical spirit. A critical spirit can grab hold of us and make us feel like all we’re doing is sharing the truth with someone – we’re naming their demon for them. But what we’re actually doing is bringing brutal truth to someone and really what we’re doing is just being brutal. The difference in facing our demon or helping someone else to face their demon is that when it brings freedom we are drawn closer to God and other people. When it just critical it separates us from God and others. Like the man in the story we end up living away from others.

 

I’ve experienced this freedom. There was a moment, not long after I moved here to work. Tom Johnson, of our congregation, who passed away a couple of months back, bumped into me in the office, After we said hello, he said, “You’re what I’d call ‘Michigan Cool’.” I said, “Huh. And what does that mean?” And he went on, “Well, I was watching you a bit ago as you walked through the breezeway. There were a group of people there sitting or standing by one of the benches and they all looked up at you when you came by. There were going to greet you, but you had your head down and you just passed right by without acknowledging them. They just wanted to say hi, and I know what you were doing. You had your head down and you were thinking. You’re a thinker, I know that. But these people, they just wanted to acknowledge that you’re their pastor.”

 

He named my demon. He called it “Michigan Cool” and that was as good a name as any, but it was a good call on his part. It woke me up. It made me start thinking about what was going on around me and not to get so caught up in what’s going on inside me. It brought me freedom.

 

Evil separates us from other people. Grace, when we experience it, brings us back into relationship with others. Naming our demons gives us the power to overcome them, to drive them out. Evil is scary and that’s because it is so powerful. Good is even more powerful and that can surprise us. Power, whether it comes from evil or from good can disturb us. The people of the village saw the results of the power of Jesus; the demons were cast out of the man. When they came out they saw the man dressed, seated with Jesus and in his right mind.

 

The people had made this man an outcast. They had tried to control him, to bind him or chain him, but they had kept him around. Now they were suddenly presented with him as healed and their response was to ask Jesus to leave. It’s impossible to say for sure, but they it is possible that they didn’t want Jesus to mess with the issues of their own lives.

 

While the man was out of his mind they could point to him. They could claim that he was the source of the problems in their community. This dirty, obscene, crazy, homeless man could be pointed at as the reason things were going wrong or not working right. Or the people could compare themselves to him – “Well, my life’s a wreck but it’s not as bad as that guy.” When we can identify the troublemaker, the problem child, the black sheep then we don’t have to deal with our own demons. Suddenly the man wasn’t the problem any more.

 

Do you know what Jesus did? He gave this man freedom. He gave him back his real name, his own name, “child of God.” He gave him identity and he gave him the commission to declare what God had done for him. He was to go back to his community, to his people, to his family and declare what God had done for him. That’s what Jesus did for us too. He’s cleansed us, healed us and sent us back to our own people to declare God’s good work in our lives. Though this world or our lives were filled with devils, through Jesus, we can overcome them.