Demons that Go to Church
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 4th 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.
