Come Out!

A sermon by Dr. Jim Somerville
Pastor, Richmond’s First Baptist Church
Richmond, Virginia
February 1, 2009
Fourth in the Series, “The Seven First Words of Christ”

Mark 1:21-28

          When Jesus was just getting started in the ministry he went to the synagogue in a little fishing village called Capernaum where they were good enough to let him preach.  They were glad they did, too, because he was like no other preacher they had ever heard.  He didn’t spend all his time quoting from the commentaries or telling them what other people had said about the Bible: he just told it like it was, and what it was, was good.  You got the feeling, when he said something, that it was God’s own truth and not just his or anybody else’s opinion.  When he finished they looked at each other and said, “Have you ever heard anything like that?  This man preaches with authority, and not like our scribes.  They’re always talking about how things were.  He tells it like it is!”

          But while they were still bragging on him the door of the place banged open and in came a man possessed by an unclean spirit.  His eyes were wild!  His whole was body twitching.  There were flecks of foam around his mouth.  He came right up to the front of the synagogue and pointed at Jesus, shouting, “What business do you have here with us, Jesus?  You Nazarene!  I know what you’re up to.  You’re the holy one of God, and you’ve come to destroy us!”  But Jesus wouldn’t have it.  “Quiet!” he said, like a man calling down a dog.  “Get out of him!”  And the man went into spasms, his arms and legs jerking violently, his eyes rolling back in his head.  And then, with a sudden surprised gasp, as if he had just been punched in the stomach, he crumpled to the floor and lay there like a dead man.

          You could have heard a prayer shawl drop.

          And then a woman came out of the crowd, pushed her way forward, and dropped to her knees beside him.  She cradled his head in her lap, wiped the foam from his mouth with the hem of her skirt.  “Samuel?” she whispered.  “Samuel?  And then his eyes fluttered open and he looked up at her as if she were vaguely familiar, as if he had met her somewhere years before.  And then his eyes went wide with recognition.  “Mother?” he said.  “Mother?!”  And she sobbed and hugged him to her breast as the room began to buzz with curiosity.  “What is this?” the people wondered.  “A new teaching, with authority.  He commands even the unclean spirits and they obey him!”

          When I was just beginning my ministry I went to a church in a little town called New Castle, Kentucky, where they were good enough to let me preach.  On my first visit the search committee showed me a pictorial directory and I pointed to a picture on the first page.  “Who’s this?” I asked.  “Oh,” they said, embarrassed.  “You don’t have to worry about her.  She doesn’t come anymore.”  But then they went on to tell me the story about this woman, how she had been diagnosed as paranoid schizophrenic, how she used to carry a gun in her purse when she came to church.  You can imagine how surprised I was when I stepped up into the pulpit on my first Sunday as pastor and saw that woman sitting on the second pew with a great big purse on her lap.  Several times as I was preaching she thrust a hand down into that purse, and each time I imagined the headlines in the next day’s newspaper: “Baptist minister shot dead during first sermon.  Woman claims she ‘didn’t care for his exegesis.’” But she didn’t shoot me dead, and after that first nerve-wracking encounter I got to know, and came to love, Helen.

          She was paranoid.  She would call me from time to time cussing and fuming and claiming that someone had been in her apartment and stolen everything she had.  When I would go down there to see what she was talking about she would show me.  “See?” she would say, as if it were obvious to everyone.  “This stack of towels used to be right here.  Somebody has moved it over here!  And this jar full of pennies?  It used to be right here on the front of my dresser.  Somebody has shoved it all the way to the back!”  You couldn’t argue with her about these things.  You just had to listen and nod.  If it was real to her it was real.  But then the phone calls started coming more and more frequently until I had to propose a radical solution.  “If you would just give your things away,” I said with a smile, “you wouldn’t have to worry about anyone stealing them.”  Christy and I got a good bit of Tupperware that way, a collection of steak knives, and a full set of stainless steel flatware with the letter “A” on the handle—the first letter of Helen’s last name.  We used that flatware for years, and when people asked me why it had an “A” on the handle instead of an “S” I just smiled and said, “We’re collecting the whole alphabet.”

          If the truth be told, there were plenty of people at New Castle Baptist Church who wished that Helen would just go away, again.  She would get up during the worship services to take her medication, and that was OK.  Everybody wanted her to take her medication.  But she would wander down to the front of the church when she did it, stopping sometimes to rearrange the flowers on the communion table before going out the side door to the water fountain.  It was a little distracting for all of us.  And then there was the singing.  Helen loved to sing but she just didn’t have the voice for it.  Her voice was loud and harsh and toneless, and when she sang it sounded like someone yelling hymns through the intercom at the McDonald’s drive-through.  One member of the choir got particularly upset about that and finally announced: “I’m just going to tell her not to come back.  She’s loud and she’s crazy and she can’t sing.  We’d all be better off if she’d just go away.”  And I said, “Be careful.  Be careful.  There’s a person in there.”  Because I knew some things about Helen that choir member didn’t know.

          I remembered, for example, the night she had called me to ask if I would take her to Shelbyville to get a refill on her prescription.  It was a cold, rainy night.  Shelbyville was thirty miles away on a twisty two-lane road.  I didn’t want to go.  But she said she needed her medicine and I knew just how much she needed it.  So I put on my coat, got in the car, and went to her apartment.  Helen was in a foul mood: angry and complaining all the way to Shelbyville, telling me how mean her neighbors had been and all of the things they had done. 

When we got back in the car to head home I decided to change the subject.  “Let’s sing,” I said, and started right into “Amazing Grace.”  It took her a while to get into it but eventually she did, singing right along with me in that terrible voice of hers.  We sang “The Old Rugged Cross” and “Power in the Blood” and “Shall We Gather at the River.”  And then she looked over at me and asked, “Do you know that song, ‘When I Take My Vacation in Heaven’?”  I said that I didn’t and so she sang it for me, the whole thing.  And then she asked, “Do you know that song, ‘Will I Shake My Mother’s Hand in Heaven’?”  I swallowed hard and said no, and then she sang that one for me, too.  When she got out of the car she was all smiles, and thanked me for the best evening she’d had in a long time.

          It was not long after that that she gave me the hand-written manuscript of a book she was working on.  It was called “A Life without Love,” and it chronicled the abuse she had received as a child, the divorce of her parents, the death of her mother.  It was just about the saddest thing I had ever read, and it made me think that if I had been through what she had been through I might be paranoid, too.  She told me once that her favorite Psalm was Psalm 31, and when I looked it up this is what it said: “I am the scorn of all my adversaries, a horror to my neighbors, an object of dread to all my acquaintances; those who see me in the street flee from me.  I have passed out of mind like one who is dead; I have become like a broken vessel.  For I hear the whispering of many—terror all around!—as they scheme together against me, as they plot to take my life” (verses 11-13).

          Whatever else he may have been, the man with the unclean spirit who came into that synagogue in Capernaum that day was someone like that: the scorn of all his adversaries, an object of dread to his acquaintances, someone from whom everyone flees.  But Jesus was able to see immediately that it wasn’t the man himself who was the problem: it was that unclean spirit inside him.  If you could get that out the man would be fine.  This is one of the things I love most about Jesus, that he sees the person before the problem.  Where we say, “He’s a thief,” Jesus might say, “He’s a child of God.”   Where we say, “She’s an alcoholic,” Jesus might say, “She’s a human being.”  Where we say, “He’s a sex offender,” Jesus might say, “He is no less precious to God.”  It’s not that Jesus excuses our bad behavior; it’s just that no matter how badly we twist and bend God’s intentions for our lives Jesus knows who we are: he can see the person in there.

          So when the man with the unclean spirit came charging into the synagogue in Capernaum Jesus saw him for what he was: a man.  And he saw the problem for what it was: an unclean spirit.  He didn’t confuse the man with the spirit any more than a dentist confuses a man with a bad tooth.  “This thing’s got to come out!” the dentist says.  But that’s not what we say, is it?  We put the two together.  We wring our hands and say, “This man is an alcoholic.  Isn’t that a shame,” instead of saying, “Quick!  Alcohol is trying to kill this man!  We’ve got to do something!”  Jesus saw what this unclean spirit was doing to the man and also saw what needed to happen: that spirit needed to come out.  He wasn’t confused about it for a moment, didn’t spend any time trying to reason with the man—he spoke directly to the spirit.  And in language stronger than he would have used with any human being he said, “Shut up and come out!”  And the spirit came out.  And the people were amazed.  “What is this?” they said.  “A new teaching, with authority!  He commands even the unclean spirits and they obey him.”

          I’ve told you before that in Greek the word for authority is exousia.  It means “out of the substance.”  In Jesus’ case his authority came out of his own substance.  He wasn’t like those scribes who were always quoting some respected rabbi.  He just said what he meant and meant what he said.  And when it came to casting out unclean spirits he didn’t need to consult the manual.  He just said, “Be quiet and come out.”  Because, as one of the old creeds affirms, the substance of which he was made was the substance of God himself, and when he spoke he spoke with God’s own authority.  He could see that man in the synagogue for all God had made him to be, and could also cast out of him everything that kept him from being that man. 

He can still do that. 

          I don’t always tell this story but once Helen called me at church just after worship.  She was furious about something, ranting and raving and yelling into the phone.  I decided I would go down the hill to see her but I didn’t want to go alone so I asked one of my deacons—Roger—to go with me.  When we got to Helen’s apartment she was storming from room to room, screaming about all the things that had been stolen from her and the dastardly wretches who had done it.  Roger and I listened carefully but as she pointed out examples of how this had been moved to there and that had been moved to here we realized this was just one more of her paranoid episodes.  I finally asked if I could pray with her, thinking it might calm her down, but she didn’t want me to pray for her.  She wanted me to find the people who had done this and bring them to justice, to call the police, to call her lawyer!  But at last she fell into a chair exhausted and I put my hand on her shoulder and began to pray.  I didn’t know what to say.  I just asked the Lord to do for her what I couldn’t—to give her peace of mind.  As I prayed I felt her body relaxing under my hand, and when I said “Amen” she looked up with a sweet smile and thanked me for coming as if I had just stopped by for a glass of iced tea. 

          We went out and got in the car and Roger, who had grown up in the Pentecostal tradition, asked me if I had seen what he had.  “What was that?” I asked.  “While you were praying for her,” he said, “I saw a big snake come out from under her chair and go out the door.   Didn’t you see it?” 

          “No,” I said.  “Some people close their eyes during a prayer.”

          To this day I don’t know what Roger saw, or if he actually saw anything.   He had quite an imagination.  But I do know that when we invite Jesus into the room incredible things happen.  We hear things we have never heard before.  We see things we have never seen.  And like that congregation in Capernaum we are often left speechless, astounded, amazed.  “What is this?” we say.  “A new teaching, with authority.  He commands even the unclean spirits and they obey him.”

—Jim Somerville, © 2009