DO YOU BELIEVE IN MONSTERS?
A Sermon by the Rev. Dr. Jack E. Skiles

February 1, 2009

Mark 1:21-28

Do you believe in monsters?

I am a Dad, so I have had recent experience with children who truly believed in monsters in the closet, under the bed and in the basement. In addition, they both believed at key points in their childhoods that monsters existed everywhere in the dark of night. As with all parents, I have had my repertoire of books that I have read to my children to help them cope with monsters. I have explored the depths of closets before bedtime and I have crawled under beds to demonstrate that they were monster free zones.

It has helped tremendously that we have developed in our world a menagerie of monsters that are friendly and helpful as opposed to them all being hideously ugly, frightening and desirous of eating little children. The Cookie Monster is not cute and he eats cookies. Oscar embodies ugly and mean and stays contained to the garbage can. And best of all, I think, Elmo, has become a cute cuddly monster who loves and is very lovable.

But, even with the advent of so many nice monsters, in my day as a dad, I was very very good, using biblical language at rebuking the evil monsters that lurked in all those unsavory places. My children believed I had the authority and I exercised it wisely and my kids survived childhood; I lost none to monsters.

But there are still monsters in the world, are there not? As we mature as individuals and as a species we understand that there are people, some as individuals and others as corporations and others larger still as national groups who do monstrous, ugly, devastatingly evil things. I must confess childhood monsters were more easily defeated by my authority as Dad than are many of the more monstrous, evil, scenarios my adult children face today, along with the rest of us.

As most of you might well surmise, I don't believe in demons and monsters, as in the supernatural kind. I have run into what I presume has been my fair share of people doing devilish acts of evil, both intentionally and otherwise. I personally do not need a supernatural construct of angels and demons to understand how the world works for both good and evil. I believe that we human beings construct enough evil that will last forever and we also do phenomenal acts of good and love. There are times that the balance between the two is out of whack, unbalanced, and it is up to us adults to bring our lives and our nation and our world back into balance and even to work toward producing a surplus of good so that the seemingly inevitable scales of balance do not so easlly swing toward evil.

It is safe to say that in Jesus' day and for much of the next two thousand years after him, the majority of the world's people have preferred to believe in a supernatural battle going on between God and God's legion of angels over against the Devil and the Devil's pool of demons. And when we want to make a point and draw people's attentions together it so easy to demonize our adversaries, our enemies. Those of us on the political left have in the past eight years demonized neo-conservatives. If you listen to the am radio on any afternoon you will hear Rush Limbaugh demonizing the political left from the political right. After 9/11, in our anger and grief, we saw the demonization of most Arab and Muslim people. It happened after Pearl Harbor when we did it to the Japanese. The Nazi Party in Germany demonized the Jews.

We don't need an actual devil to do evil. But the Devil is handy. We can project out into this mythical horned and tailed creature all the evil that we dream up and it keeps us from being ultimately responsible for ourselves.

We have this morning in our Christian Scripture lesson a story at the beginning of Jesus' public ministry, and I would beg of you to never think of it again in the same way or allow others to do so either. In the story we are given, which has been crafted together by the author of Mark's gospel, Jesus is said to have astonished the local crowd by teaching with such authority and by rebuking an unclean spirit from a person who was in the synagogue that day.

Every preacher I know wants to preach at least one sermon that astonishes people. Jesus is presented as doing so nearly every time. Well, there is that time that Jesus preaches in his hometown and he is nearly run off the cliff at the edge of town. But, 99.9% of the time, Jesus' preaching is astonishing, we are told.

In Mark's gospel, which we are working from this year in our lectionary cycle, the earliest of the four gospels, we are told Jesus is a teacher who teaches astonishing things. However, Mark rarely tells us what Jesus taught, only that the crowd thought whatever it was he said was astonishing as he

taught as one with authority.

Jesus did not write Mark's gospel. Mark did and Mark had a purpose and a mission and Mark establishes it early on, like here in chapter one. Mark's Jesus comes teaching that the world is changing and that God's realm is near and that God's realm is different than the way the Roman Empire and its minions have arranged to control and use people for their own national interest. Jesus is going to show God's way, the preferred way and Mark is going to say that all who stand in Jesus' way are demons.

Jesus was not nearly as dualistic, good-doers verses the evil-doers, as was the man who penned this gospel. A foundational understanding I have of Jesus that I find so very problematic in my life is that Jesus seemed to believe, among others things, that we should not strike back at those who do us harm, but that we should love them. He says, “Love your enemies.” He says, “If someone strikes you on one side, turn the other cheek and let them have a whack at the other.” He says we should be willing to die for others. I can't find it where he says we should ever go off and kill others. Jesus does not ever give us a doctrine of justifiable war. I laugh inside myself ever time I think of former Attorney General John Ashcraft covering up the bare breasts of the statue of the Lady holding the scales of Justice. Ashcraft is a deeply faithful Christian conservative who seems to have forgotten that if we see something with our eyes that offends us, we are not told to condemn that which see and cover it up for modesty's sake, we are to pluck out our own eye. And my most problematic saying of Jesus is that no matter how many times you sin against me, Jesus says I need to basically forgive you, like forever and always. It is also implied in this that we are to forgive ourselves forever and always, like God does.

So Jesus appears in this first Gospel giving his sermon in a synagogue in Galilee . He is announcing that God has drawn very close, very close indeed and that in God's realm God's faithful will not ever be supporters of the Roman Empire, the empire that arranges for the few wealthy to have resources at the expense of the multitudes who are desperately struggling simply to survive and whose survival is threatened day by day by the existing status quo.

And this guy in the synagogue stands up and says, “You may be the Son of God, but if you keep talking that way around here you are going to get us all killed. We've worked hard to go along to get along with the Empire. You think we like making concessions just so we can eke out a meager living and pay taxes that we never see any return on? At least with the arrangement we have we can worship God as we please in this synagogue, you crazy young preacher.

And Jesus rebukes him. Jesus says with authority that too many concessions have been made and this is no longer God's place, this is a place of compromises. I have come to teach that you might have life and have it abundantly. The old is passing away. You are old wine skins and the new wine of God's realm will make you burst at the seams if you don't change. Come and follow me!”

And the people gathered in the synagogue that Sabbath day looked around and said, “Ooooh Baby, that was good stuff!” And it was.

But now fast forward with me forty years and Mark is writing this story down. Jesus has died at the hands of the Romans, who found Jesus to be a problem that they dealt with very expediently. The Romans have just torn the whole of Jerusalem down to mere rubble, perhaps within one or two years of this writing. The Romans are hunting out Jews like rabbits to be slaughtered, and Mark is setting up the development of Christianity…, saying, Jesus tried to rebuke the evil out of you and you didn't listen and look at what has happened and what is happening. You are a monster, you're evil, you are the devil's spawn. You are nothing more than a tool of the empire and look what you've gotten for it—all of Israel is perishing under the Roman boot and sword because you failed to listen to Jesus.

The silly way that life works out is that it became politically expedient for Mark's community of Jews who followed Jesus, to blame the traditional Jews for Rome 's problems and separate from the Jews and become Christians. The Romans were not hunting for Christians, but for Jews. Mark starts in this gospel by naming the Jews as being haters of Christians, and those who followed Jesus. Mark has Jesus call the traditional Jews demons who needed a good rebuking. I don't think Jesus would have been pleased. It misses the Good News and misses how totally Jewish Jesus was. The Romans were not fooled and they killed a phenomenal teacher of a Way that really did call for the Empire to give allegiance to God and God alone and to care for the massive multitudes with justice and compassion and mercy. And the Romans said no way.

The Good News of Jesus our Christ is yet to be fully lived and fully realized. Are we empire people or people of the Way of Jesus?