Electric Circuit Rider

So, what was that demon doing in church?

In this coming Sunday’s gospel lesson, Jesus casts out an “unclean spirit” from a congregant while he is teaching in the synagogue in
Capernaum.

If the spirit was “unclean” what was it doing in a holy place on a holy day? “Unclean”, in the Bible, is the opposite of what is Holy. We know the Holy Spirit is present when there is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, faithfulness and self-control. “Unclean spirits” usually aren’t like that - and, on any given Sunday, a lot of us who show up for church may be filled with spirits that are anything but loving, joyful, patient and kind.

I can think of three possible angles for preaching on this gospel passage:

1. Knowledge that “puffs up” is an unclean spirit and love that “builds up” is Holy Spirit.

Note that the unclean spirit in Capernaum’s synagogue “knows” Jesus is the “Holy One of God.” Something no one else seems to know.

In the reading from first Corinthians for 4^th Sunday after Epiphany, Paul talks about the difference between love, which builds up, and “knowledge”, which “puffs up”. Love, since it is of God, is by definition, holy. Knowledge that makes us feel superior to others, even if we really are right and they really are wrong, is not holy. Therefore, in a sense, it is demonic.

One of the demons that come to Church is the demon who has all the answers, but no compassion; the one who knows every book in the Bible, but doesn’t love his neighbor as himself. I’m pretty familiar with that demon. He’s driven me to church on many occasions. Indeed, there are times when I think I went to seminary in order to be able to win arguments in Bible studies.

I have come to respect people who think Moses sailed an ark full of animals, but whose good hearts fill them with a kindness that I receive a lot more often than I give.

2. The second demon who often comes to church is the one that “fears” God like the Israelites at the foot of Mt. Sinai. In the reading from Deuteronomy, the people say to Moses that, if they ever again see the fire and feel the earthquake that marks the presence of the Living God, they will die.

The demon who cries out in the man in the Capernaum synagogue asks Jesus if He has come to destroy them.

We often resist Reality in worship. We are a little afraid of taking our religion too seriously. This demon who comes to church often manifests itself as boredom. It’s not that the Holy Spirit isn’t present; it’s that there is something in us that resists opening to God because it knows that no one can really encounter God and not be changed. The ego, especially, wants to preserve itself. Let the preacher take God seriously. Let the old ladies take God seriously. I’ll just sit here and think about how tedious this all is (and then I won’t be changed!).

3. Sometimes the demon is in the congregation as a whole. “Unclean” was a social category. Anyone could become unclean sometimes. Women were unclean during menstruation. A man could become unclean if he touched a dead body – which was sometimes necessary. A woman or a man could become “clean” again usually through a ritual bath in enough water to get completely immersed. (It was this bath that John the Baptist gave people in the Jordan to get them ready to meet the Messiah).

But some people could never get “clean”, like people who had the skin diseases loosely classified as “leprosy”. Shepherds were usually unclean, because they could never be sure that their animals were not “stealing” someone else’s grass. It goes without saying that prostitutes and tax collectors and other “sinners” could never be clean.

Sometimes people enter our church and they make everyone else uncomfortable. The rural community in which I grew up could be easily divided into people who went to church – or who would certainly be welcome in church if they came – and people who did not go. The second were often what Tex Sample calls “Hard Livers”.  Some of them had faces that my mother-in-law used to say, “Look like 40 miles of bad road.”

It would make “church people” uncomfortable if one of these folks showed up in church. It would be even more scandalous if that person stood up in the middle of the service and started talking to the preacher.

Congregations exclude some people because they believe those people will somehow infect the rest of the congregation with their sinfulness, or their craziness, or their sexual orientation, or even their physical illness, like AIDS.

Jesus was not afraid of being “infected” by the man with the unclean spirit. Instead, Jesus drove the unclean spirit out of the man (or out of the congregation).  That’s the way Jesus was. His spiritual, emotional and physical health wasn’t threatened by other people’s illnesses. His health threatened and destroyed the spiritual, emotional, and physical illness around him by infecting them with His wholeness.

Monday marks the beginning of the Chinese New Year, which, as anyone who ever ate in a Chinese restaurant knows, is marked by a sign from the Chinese Zodiac. This New Year will be the Year of the Ox. But this last year was the year of the Rat, and I am one of them.

It’s tough to be a Rat. Every time I’m in that Chinese restaurant, I scan the placemat hoping that this time they will have made a change and my birth year will no longer be the year of the Rat, but, no, there it is. I’m still a Rat.

This, supposedly, isn’t as bad in China as it is in the U.S. According to the Wikipedia article about the sign of the Rat, we Rats are “leaders, pioneers, and conquerors” who are “charming, passionate, determined, tenacious, intelligent, etc., etc. . . . the most highly organized, meticulous, militaristic and systematic of the twelve signs” – hmm, maybe I’m not a Rat, after all.

I mean I can own the “charming, passionate, intelligent” stuff, but “well organized?” I don’t think so.

Right after Christmas, I noticed on a friend’s coffee table a hilarious little booklet entitled, How to Become a Psychic”. Among the tips, it advised the would be psychic to always give people descriptions of themselves that they could identify with. For example: “You are thoughtful and very private, but there are times when you can be the life of the party.” I think horoscopes work the same way.

Nevertheless, if I’m honest, I can recognize my heart of darkness in the description of the Rat: “Power and control are two things a Rat both needs and wants, and it is impossible not to be struck, and even impressed, by the sheer ruthless, unapologetic and shameless way in which they may pursue their ambitions.”

The Bible has an ambivalent attitude toward astrology, which apparently has been practiced from time immemorial. The Magi or Wisemen, who come to visit the baby Jesus, say that that they “have seen his star in the East”. That may mean that there was some kind of supernova, a comet or some other spectacular phenomenon in the sky. But it could have been an astrological sign, perhaps the conjunction of Jupiter and Venus in Leo, which was associated with the Tribe of Judah in 3 B.C.

On the other hand, the Book of Deuteronomy recommends stoning for those who “bow down to the stars”. That does not mean that there are not spiritual powers at work in our world. Ephesians 6 speaks of “principalities and powers in the heavenly places”, but these do not have the final say over our lives, nor does our DNA or the environment in which we were raised. My DNA has determined that I am hard of hearing, but I can still choose to wear a hearing aid. My upbringing may have taught me prejudices against people who are different from me, but I can choose to be open. And being born a Rat may mean that I am capable of doing anything to get my own way, but I can choose to act ethically and fairly instead.

This is one of the many things we mean when we say, “Christ has set us free.”

I’m writing this just before the inauguration and less than a week after Airbus A320 crash-landed safely in the
Hudson River, and I’ve been thinking a lot about competence.

Analysts are saying that the passengers on Airbus 320 benefitted from the fact that their pilot was:

• The best aviator in his Air Force Academy class.
• A certified glider pilot
• An expert on airline safety.
• And he had almost 30 years of experience as an airline pilot.

Furthermore, the flight crew consisted entirely of women in their 50’s who had decades of experience as flight attendants.

One of the ferry boat captains who helped rescue the passengers said she did not have to issue any orders to her crew because they had trained and trained in rescue operations through the years.

As I look at the people President Obama is appointing to his cabinet, I note that he is placing a Nobel Prize winning Physicist in charge of the Department of Energy, which is responsible for America’s nuclear energy, among many other things that are also highly technical.

I spent a few days after Christmas visiting our friends Jim and Cathy in Key West. Jim is a retired pastor and journalist, although you can tell that journalism has always been his real vocation. I am always astonished at how perceptive are the questions that Jim asks when we talk, as we so often do, about the meaning of life.

Although my wife, Jacquie, no longer practices law, is nice to be married to a lawyer, not because she is going to sue people who bug me, but because she has been trained to spot problems and figure out ways to avoid them.

In Exodus 31, God tells Moses to choose Bezalel and Oholiab to oversee the creation of the Tabernacle, because they have both God’s Spirit and the skill required, this is one of the earliest incidents of what we call the “Wisdom” tradition in the Bible that finds its culmination in the Books of Proverbs, Ecclesiastes and Job, but many of the other books express an appreciation for those who are not only good-hearted, but also highly skilled.

Every profession and craft develops a certain kind of competence – even a way of thinking – that cannot be acquired without a lot of work and time. It takes longer for someone to move from apprentice plumber to master plumber than it takes someone to move from his or her freshman year in college to earning a master’s degree. That’s because it takes a long time to learn how to think like a plumber or a lawyer or a physician.

Where I come from, men would sometimes finish a job that they knew wasn’t quite up to standard by saying that it was “good enough for government work”.  That attitude certainly has pervaded public service for a good many years. It has always been far more important to appoint political supporters and their nephews to positions of responsibility in government than it has been to appoint people who actually knew what they were doing. The invention of the Civil Service was a reform that was supposed to fix this, but, as we know from the way FEMA handled New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina, even a professional organization can’t overcome the handicap of having a polo-playing political appointee at the top.

The church needs to think about how to develop and honor competence in its volunteers as well as its clergy and paid staff. Here are some of the competencies we need to develop:

• The ability to listen to God. This means both developing a spiritual life and being immersed in the Bible. Without this perspective the church is just another organization – and one that doesn’t really have much purpose.
• The ability to listen to people. Those who are leadership positions in the church need to be able to listen to people, to sort out varying viewpoints and to remember that God speaks through others – often through the most unlikely people.
• The ability to organize people. This requires being able to communicate what needs to be done and how to do it. It means being able to mesh the work of different people and different groups of people into a larger project.
• The ability to let go of the past. As important as tradition and roots are to our religious heritage, we need to be able to let go of those things that no longer have any meaning or purpose.
• The ability to face the future without fear. The biggest mistakes churches and church leaders make are always made out of anxiety and fear.

Repentance has become an ugly ritual in American politics. The politician drags his wife to the podium (I can’t think of one woman politician who has dragged her husband) and says that he wants to briefly address a private matter. He takes full responsibility for his actions, but is somewhat vague about what his actions were. He then promises to devote himself to rebuilding his closest relationships.

Is that what Jesus was calling people to do as he began his ministry?

How about the calls for America to turn back to God, Guts and Guns – our core values according to some. Is that what Jesus was talking about when he said, “Repent, for the kingdom of God is at hand?” The Aramaic word that he probably used did mean “turn around”, but did it mean to return to the [nostalgic] past without any close examination of what we have done or why we have done it?

Jesus was a Jew and so we look, first, to a Jewish understanding of repentance. In an interfaith dialogue with the Vatican, Rabbi David Blumenthal, a professor of Judaic Studies at Emory University gives five stages or characteristics of repentance:

1. Recognizing one’s sin as sin. That is, I realize that what I did was truly wrong. It wasn’t a “mistake” or an “oversight” nor was it “inadvertent”. I sinned. I violated God’s law and my own standards.  
2. Feeling remorse. This goes beyond saying, “I’m sorry”. It means really feeling sorry for what I have done. It may even involve feeling that I have abandoned my own moral principles and feeling some despair about myself.
3. Deciding to stop committing this sin. This isn’t a feeling; it’s an action. Whether we are talking about robbing banks or ridiculing children, I just don’t do it anymore.
4. Making restitution.  I pay for the broken window. I go back to the people I’ve told lies to and say, “What I told you about Joe isn’t true.” I let my wife know where I am and what I am doing 24/7.
5. Confession. This is both ritualistic and personal. I avail myself of my religious tradition’s means of making confession to a priest or a minister or in the prayer of confession in worship. And in my most private moments of prayer, I come to God admitting that I have committed this particular sin. This deeply personal and spiritual process, when done sincerely, creates real humility similar to that of the tax collector in Jesus’ parable.

But there is an even deeper meaning of “repent” in the New Testament. The New Testament writers choose, more often than not, to use the Greek word “metanoioeo” when they translate Jesus’ call to repentance.

You know that a caterpillar undergoes a metamorphosis in order to become a butterfly. You probably also know that “Morpho” means body or “shape”. “Nous” means “mind” or “soul”. So “metanoioeo” is as radical a change of mind as a metamorphosis is a radical change of shape.

A quote attributed to Albert Einstein says: “We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.”

Whether we are talking about the mess we make of our relationships or nuclear war, real change will only come when our thinking changes as radically as a caterpillar’s body turns into a butterfly’s. One example of such a change is the fact that human slavery no longer makes any sense to us. Our ancestors couldn’t imagine a world without slavery. We, on the other hand, recognize that slavery not only is immoral, but it doesn’t even make good economic sense.

The documentary Promises follows seven children on both sides of the Israeli/ Palestinian divide in Jerusalem. These children hate and distrust each other until they are brought together by the filmmakers. Then they begin to recognize that the kids on the other side are human, too.

Maybe you rememeber times in your own life when some experience completely changed your mind about something - or someone.

As they wrote their gospels, the early Christians were trying to convey the difference that Jesus made in their lives.
He didn’t come just to point out how sinful they were and make them feel sorry for their sins; to stop their sinning and make restitution for their sins. He came to transform the way they think.
He doesn’t call us to simply grit our teeth as we reach out to shake hands with our enemies, he offers us new minds and hearts that can really love our enemies.
He doesn’t come to give us cold showers. He comes to give us new minds and hearts that really don’t lust after other people to whom we might be attracted.

Leo Tolstoy, once a playboy celebrity writer in Imperial Russia, underwent this kind of radical change of mind and became a humble, simple person dedicated to bettering the lives of the peasantry with whom he lived out his life. He said of his conversion: “It was like going on a journey and deciding before reaching my destination that I no longer had any reason to go there. So I turned around and came home. The things that were on my right on the outward bound journey were now on my left and the things that were on my left were now on my right. In other words, the things I used to love, I now hate; and the things I used to hate, I now love.”

People often call a change of mind like this an “epiphany”.