4 Epiphany B
Mark 1:21-28
January 29, 2012

Not Like Those Teachers

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, Iowa

The Gospel of Mark begins and ends with the sound of tearing. At the end it’s the curtain in the temple, the curtain that serves the double purpose of protecting the innermost part of the Temple, the Holy of Holies, from contamination by people or things from less holy parts of the Temple and of protecting people and things from being overwhelmed by the presence of unbearable holiness. At the end of the gospel many things are in turmoil: death is no longer reversible, a Gentile, and a tough old non-commissioned officer at that, is found to give a faithful witness while even Jesus’ closest followers have either denied him or fled the scene, and the categories of holy and the ordinary no longer hold.

With this sort of disruption to the world going on perhaps we shouldn’t be so surprised that the first tearing in the gospel is a tearing of the firmament of heaven itself. At Jesus’ baptism the heavens are torn open, permitting God’s voice and the Spirit’s dove to descend. The voice addresses Jesus directly and only Jesus sees the heavens torn and the dove descending. We hear about it as the gospel is read, even if we can’t yet see these things. With the very fabric of the universe torn, we know that we are in for turmoil.

There is no time in Mark’s gospel for a leisurely contemplation of Jesus’ life and ministry. It’s one thing and then another right on its heels. John is baptizing and people are coming to him. Jesus comes, is baptized and is then driven out into the wilderness by a dove who has suddenly become quite aggressive. There he remains for forty days and nights, but it only takes one verse to tell us about that. And then it’s Jesus in action, announcing “Here comes God’s kingdom! Change your hearts and lives, and trust this good news!”

It is indeed good news, but first it’s disruptive news that is announced while the echoes of the heavens being torn open still sound back and forth in our heads.

Jesus, it seems is not among us to uphold the way things are. He is not in service to the powers that be. “Comfortable” is not an attribute of the life that he seeks or into which he seeks to invite us.

We see that immediately. Jesus is walking along the Galilee Sea and comes upon Simon and Andrew and then James and John. If he were interested in comfortable lives for them he would have done something about the number of fish to be found in that over-fished lake. He would have made it easier for them to extract a living from waters.

But that’s not what he did. Instead of making their lives easier he called them into a new life altogether. There would be some resemblances, to be sure. They would still be fishing, but no longer for fish. They walked away from their jobs and their homes and their families. It might have been an adventure, but the one thing we know about adventures for sure is that our comfort will be left behind.

Here it is just twenty verses into Mark and the heavens have been torn open and Jesus has torn four men from their families and disrupted two businesses.

Surely there must be some place where people can be safe from a world that is being torn apart. Surely there must be some refuge from a world that is changing too fast. Maybe that refuge can be found in church. Maybe church will let us hang on to the past a little, to give us the comfort of a world that doesn’t change.

Not so. Come Sunday and Jesus was in church. Actually it says, “Immediately on the Sabbath Jesus entered the synagogue...” Does that mean that he came in after the announcements. I don’t know, but he wasted no time in taking over. He started teaching. People were amazed. Actually that word is little weak and much too positive to describe what was going on. The word means “to strike out of, drive away from, or expel” and when it’s used the way it’s used in our reading it means to be driven “out of one’s senses by a sudden shock.”¹ Amazement is what happens to us when we find ourselves in a maze and are unable to know where to go or how to get there. Amazement is very close to panic. Amazement is not fun.

Not even in church could they find some refuge from change. And then, to make matters worse, a man “with an evil spirit” started screaming.

I have to admit that I neither understand nor am I able to explain what is happening right here in the story. I don’t know what Mark (and the other gospel writers) meant by “an evil spirit.” There is, to be sure, a literature among anthropologists that tells us that spirit possession is something that is found most often among people who are suffering from severe oppression. This could be any condition that leaves people powerless and unable to act for their own or their community’s good. They are in effect possessed by an economic, political or social situation. Spirit possession offers people in these situations an escape—for a time they can act in ways that are normally quite offensive and could land them in trouble, but for which they are not directly responsible.

In our culture some mental illness functions in a similar way, but does that mean that what Mark calls having “an evil spirit” is what we call neurosis? No, I can’t really say that. It seems to be something different even if it accomplishes some of the same things, but beyond that I really can’t explain. The best I can do is to ask us to pay close attention to what happens in the story.

The man with an evil spirit started screaming. That’s the way the narrator describes it. Jesus, however, does not speak to the man. He speaks only to the spirit (or spirits). It is as if he looks at the screaming man and sees that the man and the spirit that he has are two different things. And he knows that at that moment it’s the spirit who is acting, not the man. What Jesus sees that the narrator missed is a false self that overlies the true self. Jesus separates these selves and banishes the false self.

Maybe this is not entirely outside of our experience. I recall a conflict in church between two women. One had made some decisions about Sunday School that the other did not like, or maybe it was about the Christmas program. But rather than share her opinion in a way that would have let them come to some common understanding, the other woman kept it bottled up. Then she started collecting grievances and adding them to a list of reasons for being angry. One day she exploded in anger and dumped it all. Her explanation for this damaging way of dealing with her own anger was, “I can’t help it. I take it until I can’t take it any more and then I blow. That’s just the way I am.”

She excused her behavior by attributing it to a part of her personality that she had no control over. Others concluded that blowing up periodically was part of what she did. If you were around her a lot you would see it and you hoped that it wasn’t aimed at you.

Maybe Jesus would have seen that this “angry spirit” stood between her and a truer way of living in the world. Maybe he would have seen it as a false self that she had constructed to avoid dealing with her anger in more difficult but more productive ways.

We all do that in some ways. To protect ourselves from a world with real hurts and dangers, we build masks and false selves, a sort of emotional armor. This is understandable but armor is stiff and heavy. It keeps us from living fully. We can’t dance in it, for example, and swimming is right out. Taking off our armor, separating true and false selves, is hard work. If you’ve ever done this in therapy, say, you know that this is not fun and it’s anything but comfortable.

That church might be a place where Jesus aims to banish our false selves for the sake of setting our true selves free is a scary notion, but that’s certainly what happened that Sabbath for the man with an evil spirit.

Yes, Jesus has been very disruptive so far. As Shane Claiborne an important figure in what is called the emerging church says, “Jesus ruined my life.”² I’m sure that Simon and Andrew and James and John would understand what Shane means. Maybe the man with an evil spirit would, too.

Which brings me to us this morning and leads me to ask the question, Why do we want to baptize our children?

We have already seen that Jesus did not come in order to keep things the way they are. He is quite willing to disrupt our plans for ourselves and for our children. He is willing to set aside our cherished masks and armor and to do it with neither warning nor informed consent. He is willing to tear apart our world in order to bring forth the reign of God.

Far from being a protection against danger, baptism is an open invitation for Jesus to come and ruin our lives. It’s like a brand or an ear tag. It’s like an ID chip implanted in our dog or cat. It’s an invisible tat that announces that we don’t belong to ourselves or to our parents. “I have called you by name,” the God of Jesus says, “You are mine.”

That’s an awful lot to lay on a couple of babies. They’ve done nothing to deserve that.

It’s a lot to lay on their parents, too. We have our hopes and dreams for our children, but those hopes and dreams aren’t all that important to God, I’m afraid to say. God’s claim supersedes ours. We will do our best to leave a good world in our children’s hands, but we cannot decide what they will do with it.

And here is something else: because Jesus lives under the burden and gift of proclaiming the coming of God’s reign, he sees things differently. He is able to see the heavens being torn open and a dove descending. He is also able to see the gap between the false and true self of the man who is screaming in church. In little ways any who follow Jesus learn to do the same thing. We see the world differently. We see through some of the masks and armor that people wear, and even some of our own.

Someday, these children who are so utterly dependent on us now, will see through our masks and our armor. They will see our false selves. And to their glory and our horror, they will name them. They will be the agents to bring us closer to God’s kingdom. It won’t be comfortable or fun for them or for us, but it becomes an expectation when they are branded with this brand, tattooed with this tat, baptized with this baptism.

I don’t say that you shouldn’t do it. In fact I am charged with encouraging you to bring your children. But I entertain no illusions about what we are doing here today and I don’t want you to entertain them either. This thing we are doing will change their lives. It will mark them for ever. It must not be done lightly. But if you are willing to surrender them into God’s hands in this way, then I invite you to bring them forward with their sponsors while the choir sings.

©2012, John M. Caldwell. Permission is given by the author to reproduce and distribute the unaltered text of this sermon provided this notice is reproduced in full and provided that this sermon shall not be offered for sale, nor included in any collection or publication that is offered for sale, without the express written permission of the author.

1Πλήσσομαι, Henry George Liddell and Robert Scott, Greek-English Lexicon, with a Supplement (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968).

2Shane Claiborne, The Irresistible Revolution: Living as an Ordinary Radical, Soft Cover. (Zondervan, 2006).