SunFeb12009
Scripture: Mark 1:21-28
Text: Just then there was in their synagogue a man with an unclean spirit, and he cried out, “What have you to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth? Have you come to destroy us? I know who you are, the Holy One of God.” (Mark 1:23-24)
In a Sentence: Jesus did not come to destroy us because we are evil, but rather to separate us from the evil in our life that will eventually destroy us?
Mark 1: 21-28 (The Message)
Then they entered Capernaum. When the Sabbath arrived, Jesus lost no time in getting to the meeting place. He spent the day there teaching. They were surprised at his teaching—so forthright, so confident—not quibbling and quoting like the religion scholars.
Suddenly, while still in the meeting place, he was interrupted by a man who was deeply disturbed and yelling out, “What business do you have here with us, Jesus? Nazarene! I know what you’re up to! You’re the Holy One of God, and you’ve come to destroy us!”
Jesus shut him up: “Quiet! Get out of him!” The afflicting spirit threw the man into spasms, protesting loudly—and got out.
Everyone there was incredulous, buzzing with curiosity. “What’s going on here? A new teaching that does what it says? He shuts up defiling, demonic spirits and sends them packing!” News of this traveled fast and was soon all over Galilee.
Our Christian Bible is divided into two major sections, the Old and New Testaments. The New Testament can also be divided into two segments. One segment includes the gospels Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, and deals with the life and teachings of Jesus. The other segment, beginning with Acts and ending with Revelation, deals with the growth, development and teaching of the early church during the mid-to-latter part of the first century.
The New Testament reading this morning comes from Mark’s gospel. Mark is a gospel of action. Fully one-third of it deals with the last week of Jesus’ earthly life. While Matthew and Luke spend a good bit of time telling us about Jesus’ birth, Mark begins with Jesus being baptized in the Jordan River as an adult. His baptism at perhaps 30 years of age launched a brief ministry that lasted all of about three years and altered the course of human history. By midway through the first chapter Jesus has been baptized by his cousin John, tempted in the wilderness by Satan and he has called the four fishermen, Peter, Andrew, James and John, to be his disciples.
That brings us to the lectionary reading for this morning. It is the sabbath, Mark tells us, and Jesus is in the synagogue in the town of Capernaum teaching. It was a common practice in those days to offer a visiting teacher an opportunity to ply his trade and Jesus, it seems, blew the assembled synagogue crowd away. “They were astounded,” the NRSV translation has it. Eugene Peterson’s contemporary paraphrase, The Message, says his teaching was “so forthright, so confident—not quibbling and quoting like the religion scholars.”
Suddenly, while he is teaching, a disturbed man (demon possessed, according to many of the translations) interrupts him. In the middle of his discourse the troubled man cries out: “What have you to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth? Have you come to destroy us? I know who you are. You are the Holy One of God.”
Stop the action! Freeze the frame! Hit the pause button! This portion of today’s scripture reaches out and grabs me. A man out of control, overwhelmed by the dark side of life, cries out to Jesus: “What have you to do with us?” It is a question which confounds and astounds – Why does God care about us human folks, so petty at times and prone to failure? I don’t know why God does. I just know that God does. It is part of the good news or good tidings, which is the meaning of the word gospel. The good news Jesus was proclaiming in the synagogue liberated a deeply disturbed man that day in Capernaum.
Jesus’ message still has the power to liberate. In the 1980s, Gordon MacDonald was one of the shining lights on the church scene. He was pastor of a large evangelical church in Lexington, Massachusetts, not far from where we lived. Author of several best-selling books, he lectured throughout the country. Eventually, he left the Lexington church and assumed leadership of World Vision, a large, internation Christian relief agency. Later he became the president of InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, one of the nation's largest collegiate missionary organizations.
Then in 1987, anonymous letters accusing MacDonald of an adulterous affair arrived at the offices of religious publishers. When confronted, he quickly and publicly acknowledged his guilt. Overnight, he lost his job, his standing, his reputation.
"I am a broken-world person because a few years ago I betrayed the covenants of my marriage," MacDonald said. His lifelong friend Vernon Grounds spoke of him as, "one more conspicuous casualty in the never-ending battle all of us carry on against evil within and without."
In time, MacDonald regained nearly everything he had lost – from the love and respect of his wife and friends to his place on the bestseller list. His restoration and eventual return to ministry involved a course of reflection, confession and change requiring time, discipline and a two-year separation from his daily duties. A group of elders from his former church stepped into their ex-pastor's life. They imposed a nearly year-long period of isolation from the public eye and a series of other measures designed to heal and restore him.
After several years, he returned to pastoral ministry in a small New York City congregation and eventually was called back as the senior pastor at Grace Chapel, his former church near Boston. In August of last year, following a lengthy and effective ministry there, he became the interim president of Denver Theological Seminary in Colorado.
Like Gordon MacDonald and the man in our story today, all of us wrestle with the forces of darkness and sometimes we lose. Few of us have the notoriety that prompts the local and national news media to broadcast our moral failures to the world, as financial fund manager Bernie Madoff and preacher Ted Haggard have recently. Nevertheless, it behooves us to resist becoming overly confident in our ability to go up against the demons in our daily lives alone.
In his letter to Christians in first century Corinth, the Apostle Paul warned , “if you think you are standing, watch out that you do not fall.” He goes on to tell them, you will encounter no type of trial that others have not encountered and God will help you get through it (1 Cor 10:12,13).
My friends in Alcoholics Anonymous know the truth of Paul’s words: Step 1 in their 12 step recovery program says: “We admitted we were powerless over alcohol--that our lives had become unmanageable.” Step 2, “We came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.” Step 3, “We made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.”
I know countless people in that program, who are in a life and death struggle with the demon of alcohol addiction, who have come face to face with the life-changing power of God or, as many say, their Higher Power, and have had sanity restored to their lives. When it happens, it is nothing short of a miracle.
A couple of days ago a friend forwarded an email to me by Rick Warren, the well-known pastor of Saddleback Church, a megachurch in southern California. Warren is the author of the phenomenally successful book, "A Purpose-Driven Life." He made headlines recently when Barack Obama invited him to give the invocation at his presidential inauguration. In the email he reflects on the ups and downs in life. He writes of two major events that happened around the same time in his own life. One was his wife's diagnosis with a serious and life-threatening form of cancer. The second was the success of his book.
“You have to learn to deal with both the good and the bad of life,” Warren writes.
He continues:
Actually, sometimes learning to deal with the good is harder. For instance, this past year, all of a sudden, when the book sold 15 million copies, it made me instantly very wealthy. It also brought a lot of notoriety that I had never had to deal with before. I don't think God gives you money or notoriety for your own ego or for you to live a life of ease. So I began to ask God what He wanted me to do with this money, notoriety and influence. He gave me two different passages that helped me decide what to do, II Corinthians 9 and Psalm 72
First, in spite of all the money coming in, we would not change our lifestyle one bit. We made no major purchases.
Second, about midway through last year, I stopped taking a salary from the church.
Third, we set up foundations to fund an initiative we call The Peace Plan to plant churches, equip leaders, assist the poor, care for the sick, and educate the next generation.
Fourth, I added up all that the church had paid me in the 24 years since I started the church, and I gave it all back. It was liberating to be able to serve God for free.
We need to ask ourselves: Am I going to live for possessions? Popularity?
Am I going to be driven by pressures? Guilt? Bitterness? Materialism? Or am I going to be driven by God's purposes (for my life)?
When I get up in the morning, I sit on the side of my bed and say, “God, if I don't get anything else done today, I want to know You more and love You better.” God didn't put me on earth just to fulfill a to-do list. He's more interested in what I am than what I do. That's why we're called human beings, not human doings.
If I could put this sermon in one sentence, it would be this: Jesus did not come to destroy us because we are evil, but rather to separate us from the evil in our life that will eventually destroy us, if it is not dealt with.
John wrote in the prologue to his gospel words we read every Christmas eve: “The Light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it,” It happened for a man in a synagogue in Capernaum many years ago in Jesus’ day. It happened for Gordon MacDonald in Boston a few years ago. It happens frequently in the halls and classrooms and meeting places where folks in AA gather – “The Light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it.” May it happen for us in those times and places when darkness is creeping into our lives and threatening to overwhelm us.