Sermon, Fourth Sunday after Epiphany, February 1, 2015

Read before the sermon, an excerpt from Toni Morrison's Beloved.

It was in front of that 124 that Sethe climbed off a wagon, her newborn tied to her chest, and felt for the first time the wide arms of her mother-in-law, who had made it to Cincinnati. Who decided that, because slave life had "busted her legs, back, head, eyes, hands, kidneys, womb and tongue," she had nothing left to make a living with but her heart--which she put to work at once. Accepting no title of honor before her name, but allowing a small caress after it, she became an unchurched preacher, one who visited pulpits and opened her great heart to those who could use it. In winter and fall she carried it to AME's and Baptists, Holinesses and Sanctifieds, the Church of the Redeemer and the Redeemed.

Uncalled, unrobed, un anointed, she let her great heart beat in their presence. 

When warm weather came, Baby Suggs, holy, followed by every black man, woman and child who could make it through, took her great heart to the Clearing--a wide-open place cut deep in the woods nobody knew for what at the end of a path known only to deer and whoever cleared the land in the first place. In the heat of every Saturday afternoon, she sat in the clearing while the people waited among the trees.

After situating herself on a huge flat-sided rock, Baby Suggs bowed her head and prayed silently. The company watched her from the trees. They knew she was ready when she put her stick down. Then she shouted, "Let the children come!" and they ran from the trees toward her.

"Let your mothers hear you laugh," she told them, and the woods rang. The adults looked on and could not help smiling.

Then "Let the grown men come," she shouted. They stepped out one by one from among the ringing trees.

"Let your wives and your children see you dance," she told them, and groundlife shuddered under their feet.

Finally she called the women to her. "Cry," she told them. "For the living and the dead. Just cry." And without covering their eyes the women let loose.

It started that way: laughing children, dancing men, crying women and then it got mixed up. Women stopped crying and danced; men sat down and cried; children danced, women laughed, children cried until, exhausted and riven, all and each lay about the Clearing damp and gasping for breath. In the silence that followed, Baby Suggs, holy, offered up to them her great big heart.

She did not tell them to clean up their lives or to go and sin no more. She did not tell them they were the blessed of the earth, its inheriting meek or its glorybound pure.

She told them that the only grace they could have was the grace they could imagine. That if they could not see it, they would not have it.

"Here," she said, "in this here place, we flesh; flesh that weeps, laughs; flesh that dances on bare feet in grass. Love it. Love it hard.

Yonder they do not love your flesh. They despise it. They don't love your eyes; they'd just as soon pick em out. No more do they love the skin on your back.

Yonder they flay it. And O my people they do not love your hands. Those they only use, tie, bind, chop off and leave empty. Love your hands! Love them. Raise them up and kiss them. Touch others with them, pat them together, stroke them on your face 'cause they don't love that either. You got to love it, you! And no, they ain't in love with your mouth. Yonder, out there, they will see it broken and break it again. What you say out of it they will not heed. What you scream from it they do not hear. What you put into it to nourish your body they will snatch away and give you leavins instead. No, they don't love your mouth. You got to love it.

This is flesh I'm talking about here. Flesh that needs to be loved.

Feet that need to rest and to dance; backs that need support; shoulders that need arms, strong arms I'm telling you. And O my people, out yonder, hear me, they do not love your neck unnoosed and straight. So love your neck; put a hand on it, grace it, stroke it and hold it up. And all your inside parts that they'd just as soon slop for hogs, you got to love them. The dark, dark liver--love it, love it, and the beat and beating heart, love that too. More than eyes or feet.

More than lungs that have yet to draw free air. More than your life holding womb and your life-giving private parts, hear me now, love your heart. For this is the prize." Saying no more, she stood up then and danced with her twisted hip the rest of what her heart had to say while the others opened their mouths and gave her the music.

Long notes held until the four-part harmony was perfect enough for their deeply loved flesh.
  ~From Toni Morrison, Beloved (New York:  Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2007), pp. 58-60.

B Epiphany 4 BFC 2015

Mark 1:21-28

February 1, 2015

It is almost six months into my ministry here at Billings First Church, and I have yet to preach from the Gospels.  My hope is that if you regularly attend Sunday morning worship, I have provided some of the depth and contour of the stories and mythology in which Jesus was embedded.  For Jesus was a Jew, through and through.  The stories and mythologies of Exodus and Exile not only shaped him but they also shaped his family, his community, and the story tellers who reflected back on his life, mission, and ministry to say who Jesus was.  The writers of the Gospels looked back at Jesus within the context and matrix of the Jewish story and the story told about the Roman Empire. 

Which leads to the second reason I have not preached on the Gospels to this point.  I’m chicken; and these are radical texts.  I would rather that you like me, and these narratives, in our present day context, will fiercely challenge all of us.  If I preach them well and truthfully, their meaning and message make it almost impossible for you to like me. 

The gospels are written in the form of resistance literature.  Christian origins scholar, Richard Horsely, writes that the faith preached and lived out by Jesus can be summed up in two words: “anti-imperial.”  These are tough words for us, living in the world’s number one super power, a self-proclaimed empire. 

The Gospel of Mark begins, “The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.”  “Good news” or “gospel” was a term used to spread the news of Roman military victories.  And Roman subjects knew all too well who was to be considered the only, exclusive Son of God:  Caesar Augustus.  It was minted onto Roman coins.  It was chiseled into their architecture.  The author of the Gospel of Mark frames the narrative of Jesus of Nazareth with a direct challenge to Roman power.  The author says, in effect, “No, not there.  Here.”  And we are off on this crazy narrative, beginning with John the Baptist, who was eventually executed by a Roman client king. 

That is how the Gospel of Mark begins, one of the most radical books of our Holy Bible.  Steeped in the Exodus and the Exile story, informed by Wisdom Literature like the tale of Jonah, all the Gospel writers offer compelling narratives. 

The Gospel of Mark uses the words “immediately” or “at once” throughout to indicate the urgency of Jesus’ program.  Scholars have long argued what it means in the Gospel of Mark that Jesus seemingly wants nobody to know he is the Messiah—referred to as the Messianic secret.  I think it is self-evident why Jesus sought to eschew or keep such titles secret.  It meant he got to live longer.

  To be widely known as the Messiah would immediately tag Jesus with terms like “radical Muslim cleric” or “leader of the resistance.”  That Jesus did not want that widely published would simply mean he did not have a death wish.  Speaking to gathering crowds, being critical of the ruling elite, assembling a band of followers are all tickets to crucifixion.  And the God Jesus knew through story and song promised presence but not necessarily success.

In Mark, the earliest of all the Gospels, Jesus is, get this, an exorcist.  Jesus is an exorcist casting the Roman occupation out of the country so that life and well-being might return for the Jewish people. 

If you have heard a number of my sermons, you know I like to find modern cultural references that tell the Biblical story in new and rich ways.  While the rest of the Gospels, particularly the gospel of John, are often re-told in our popular culture, there are very few re-tellings of the Gospel of Mark. 

One of the re-tellings for the Gospel of Mark is Toni Morrison’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel, Beloved.  The novel begins with an epigraph dedication to the 60 million and more, referencing the amount of people with Black skin who died during the Atlantic slave trade.  Beloved is set outside Cincinnatti, Ohio, several years after the Civil War.  In Cincinnatti is a community of former or escaped slaves, always conscious that Ohio’s southern border allows for slave owners to cross and re-claim “their property.”  In that place, an “unchurched, uncalled, unrobed, and un anointed” spiritual leader, Baby Suggs, gives hope to her people in the spiritual place called the Clearing by letting her people know that they are good in their own flesh, their own skin.  Yonder, she would say, they don’t love your flesh.  So the only grace you can have is the grace you can imagine.  Baby Suggs opened her wide heart in the Clearing, and her people found their liberation and salvation. 

But it was not enough for Sethe when her former master crept acrossed the border.  An escaped slave, Sethe, has killed her eldest daughter believing that her whole family will soon be caught and sent back into slavery.  She has vowed that this will never happen again.  As a result, her dead daughter returns in the form of a haunting, an evil spirit, to vex and destroy Sethe’s life and all of her relationships. 

Slavery gets into Sethe in the form of a demon.  She needs it.  It gives her an odd comfort and helps her move about in the world. 

  Demons get into us and tell us not who we are as Children of God, but tell us who we are from someone who regards us with an arrogant eye. 

Morrison writes, “There is a loneliness that can be rocked. Arms crossed, knees drawn up; holding, holding on, this motion, unlike a ship's, smooths and contains the rocker. It's an inside kind--wrapped tight like skin.

Then there is a loneliness that roams. No rocking can hold it down.”[1]

In the end, the only thing that expels the evil spirit from Sethe’s life is a community of African-American women who arrive at the front of her house to liberate and save her.  Morrison refers to it as a baptism. 

Jesus arrives in the Gospel of Mark, uncalled, unrobed, and un anointed to exorcize the demons from the Galileean countryside.  The climax of the Gospel of Mark is found in Chapter 5.[2]

A Jewish man, living out in the graveyard, the place of death, who could not love his own flesh, was crying out and cutting himself with stones.  He comes running to Jesus.  The demons named themselves as “Legion”, an allusion to a division of the Roman military nobody hearing this story would miss.[3]  It is a reference to the poetic interplay between this man’s personal occupation and the public, Roman occupation of the Jewish homeland.

I use the words poetic and mythic quite a bit to describe Scripture so let me make it clear when we talk about demon possession and exorcism.  They are not some reference to the ancient world.  On the contrary.  Demon possession and exorcism are a common world-wide phenomenon throughout most of history.[4]  Historical Jesus scholar, John Dominic Crossan, states that two things must always be kept in mind with Jesus’ exorcisms:  “One is the almost schizoid position of a colonial people.  If they submit gladly to colonialism, they conspire in their own destruction.  If they hate and despise it [colonialism], they admit that something more powerful than themselves, and therefore to some extent desirable, is hateful and despicable.”[5]

Under the imperial and colonial rule of European nations for decades, the Lunda-Luvale people suffered from demon possession.  The demon was characteristically named bindele.  In their language, the word bindele literally means “European.”  Sufferers from the demon bindele are believed to be possessed by the spirit of a European.[6]

From that climactic exorcism in Mark, Chapter 5, flow the meaning of all the exorcisms Jesus does in the Gospel of Mark.  It is the body of the text.  The Scripture passage we have before us today acts as a topic sentence for Jesus’ teaching, mission, and ministry in the Gospel of Mark. 

Our passage today begins with Jesus teaching in the synagogue.  A man with an unclean or evil spirit walks into the synagogue and confronts Jesus.  And get this . . . this unclean or evil spirit has all the right head knowledge and even knows Jesus to be holy.  As in Mark, Chapter 5, this evil spirit refers to itself in the plural.  The demons protest, scream, yell, act as if they are the ones being persecuted.  They create a scene by shouting out their spiritual knowledge.  But Jesus is unmoved.  Using faith language does not make them any less evil spirits. 

Jesus tells them to shut up.  Button it.  He then exorcizes a demon which has come to confront him in his own spiritual home, among his own Jewish community.  The Jewish synagogue becomes the point of departure for all future exorcisms.  The good news begins and goes forward after Jesus exorcises the demons from his own spiritual home. 

There is a poetic pairing in the Scripture verse.  Jesus differentiates himself from the Scribes in this passage.  In the same manner, the demons differentiate themselves from Jesus.  The demons ask, “What have you to do with us?” or, literally, “Why bother us when nothing we do concerns you?”  In this pairing, the author of Mark may be sharing that the Scribes, the people responsible for communicating Jewish faith and tradition, are themselves the demons with in the synagogue. 

The Scribes are the intellectual elite, the people of letters.[7]  They have all the right head knowledge.  Then know what is holy and what is not.  But the Scribes have no authority because what they do does not exorcise the demons.  The people remain possessed.  The intellectual acumen of the Scribes, their head knowledge, does not free or liberate the people. 

As someone who gets jazzed by the intellectual grist of faith, this passage convicts me.  I cannot craft beautiful sermons, write compelling liturgy, pray splendiferous prayers, engage in meaningful dialog and expect that Jesus the exorcist will be satisfied with my intellectually gifted faith.  What Jesus wants is systems and structures that destroy people’s lives and create human suffering to be cast out so that whole peoples might be able to live in their own skin, their own flesh, fully aware and conscious of the goodness God intends for them. 

Too often our demons have offered us an odd comfort.  Too often I have let my love for the intellectual rigors of writing worship and studying Scripture get in the way of the courage required of me to shut up, button it, and drive out the demons in my own spiritual home.  We become comfortable with racism and wonder secretly if we might keep a little white privilege to ourselves.  We become comfortable with an economy that values consumption, debt, and greed and decide what was intended to be shared might best be hoarded and kept for ourselves.  We become comfortable as our society becomes more and more militaristic and violent because that militarism and violence seems to be protecting us, defending our property, keeping law and order, and is not aimed at us and our kin.  Though the demons isolate and exclude, consume and cut, destroy and deal death, it is almost as if . . . almost as if, the demons have our interests at heart. 

Maybe that makes the Gospel of Mark too hard for us . . . too difficult to hear and act upon.  Here’s the thing.  Here is why, though I think you might make my own words difficult for me, every Sunday I am working out my own salvation.  I am trying to make sure I love my own flesh, my own skin, and I sometimes do a horrific job of it.  But I do not want an odd comfort or an easy peace with the demons that dwell within me. 

I want the same for you, as a congregation that I love.  I want you to love your own flesh and extend that out to others.  I want you to work out your own salvation here so that we can be about this Christian enterprise together and give each other courage to live in the Clearing where Baby Suggs, pure and holy, opens up her wide heart.  Courage, sisters and brothers.  Courage.  For the world is forever trying to extend to us the solace and comfort of our own demons. My hope and prayer is, sisters and brothers, we will know that we are good in our own flesh . . . and spread and share the word.    Jesus, the exorcist, walks into our community, and we may know who he is, intellectually, but it is time to do something much more.  Amen.

---

[1] Ibid, p. 172.

[2] Mark 5:1-20

[3] Bruce J. Malina and Richard L. Rohrbaugh, Social-Science Commentary on the Synoptic Gospels (Minneapolis:  Fortress Press, 2013), p. 166.

[4] John Dominic Crossan, The Historical Jesus:  The Life of a Jewish Mediterranean Jewish Peasant (San Francisco:  HarperSanFrancisco, 1991), p. 317.

[5]Ibid, pp. 317-318.

[6]Ibid, p. 315, quoting Barrie Reynolds, Magic, Divination and Witchcraft Among the Barotse of Northern Rhodesia.  Robins Series 3, Berkley and Los Angeles:  University of California Press, 1963.

[7] “scribe,” HarperCollins Bible Dictionary, ed. by Paul J. Achtemeier (San Francisco:  HarperSanFrancisco, 1996), p. 980.