4 th Sunday after the Epiphany, January 29, 2006
Sermon on Mark 1:21-28 by Luke Bouman
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Like one possessed

I can hardly remember what my life was like before ten years ago this day (January 29). My life before that day seems a distant memory fading before the ongoing rush of life. It was the day that I received a new calling, a very different calling. It is like I had been possessed by passions and patterns and plans a desires for my life that until that moment had gone unquestioned, unchallenged. But ten years ago that all changed. Much of who I am has remained the same, of course. But much of who I am was called out of me. From that moment on I would be a different person.

Now, this is not the calling of my baptism. That call came when I could scarcely do anything but eat, sleep, cry and soil my diaper, though I have been living into it ever since. It was not the call of husband, a call that came clearly as I committed myself for life to my wife Kathy in 1983. It was not the call to ordained ministry, which came in fits and starts since I was a teen, and was answered reluctantly through seminary and finally ordination in 1987. No, there was one yet to come, equally life changing, infinitely more challenging. Ten years ago this day I became a father.

Like all my other “callings” this one came with preparation, yet was a surprise when it finally arrived. It was an unusual day, six weeks before the Doctor’s estimated due date. I was preparing to drive some miles to a conference in a distant city. I was packed and ready to go when Kathy called my name with more urgency than usual and announced that she thought her water had broken. Plans changed very quickly. I cancelled one trip and arranged another, to the hospital, where some 15 hours later, our child arrived. Nathaniel, we had agreed to call him, “gift of God.”

I realized very quickly, and nothing since has discouraged this notion, that I was being called to fatherhood, and in that acknowledged role, much of what I had been would pass forever away. My life was now full of love for this tiny (not for long) child whom I held amid the tubes and the machinery attached to him those first few days. And in loving him, I would now be vulnerable to his hurts and sufferings. I was free to love, but this love made me captive (willingly) to another who would need me for a lifetime. I could no longer afford the guilty pleasure of selfishly ignoring the noises in the night. I knew an intense possessive love, that rises inside me still at the very sight of the boy. He’s MINE. Well, his mother’s and mine. Well, God’s and ours.

In that moment I was called into parenthood, and called out of myriad other “hoods” in which I had taken up refuge. It is and inescapable part of being called, you see. We are called OUT of one thing, and IN to another. And in my case it allowed me, if for a moment, to see more clearly what God was up to in my life. I remember experiencing an explosion of creativity in the time that immediately followed. I wrote poems and song lyrics, stories and hopes and dreams for Nathan, as we called him. But I also had a life that I did not expect, especially in the midst of the exhaustion that was mine as it is every parent’s. God had given me the grace to SEE, FEEL, TOUCH, yea even to SMELL his love in the form of my son, in ways that were both like and unlike anything I had experienced before. In many ways, this has continued until this very day, ten years later. And it came with a price. There are some people who have noticed the difference in me and are not sure it was for the better. They suggest that I have been “possessed” in the process by something. I would say they are almost right. I have been “possessed” again, by someone, by God himself.

Called out

You might be asking what any of this has to do with today’s text. But I tell you it is more than just the rambling of a proud and awed father. It has everything to do with the deepening understanding that Mark’s Gospel is leading us to as we move from the story of the calling of the fisher folk to this text of the demoniac in the synagogue. Mark helps us to see more deeply what it means to be called by Jesus, at the same time as we begin to have deeper questions and suspicions about the Jesus who calls us.

So far, in our lessons from Mark this season, we’ve heard the voice of God say some extraordinary things about Jesus at his baptism. Last week, we saw evidence that the disciples are willing to invest their lives in Jesus when they leave their boats and nets and families to follow. But this week, as we consider what it means that Jesus is calling us we have a unique juxtaposition. First Jesus is “called out” by the demoniac, then Jesus calls out the demon and sets the man free.

In our culture when someone is “called out” they are called upon to back up something they’ve said or done. For example, when someone has been bragging about their basketball skills, they might be “called out” to back up what they’ve said in a game. Another example might be that a person has behaved badly and is “called out” or reprimanded in front of others.

While Jesus is wowing the people of the synagogue in Capernaum, he is “called out,” confronted by the man with an unclean spirit. Let us be clear that we don’t know much about this man, either before or after this incident. We don’t know what it means when the text says he had an unclean spirit. I am particularly averse to the idea, popular among some preachers, to equate his possession with mental illness. The connection of today’s mental illness with “evil” or “uncleanness” is unfortunate at best, and harmful at worst to those who struggle with mental illness. We also do not need to explain away or understand all of the puzzling things about Jesus or those who meet him in the Gospels. To do so is to get hung up on the details and lose track of the import of the story.

In this story, it is important to the listener to note the contrast. The “religious” in they synagogue do not get who Jesus is or what he is up to. He taught them “as one with authority, and not as the scribes.” He did not go running to the tradition of the elders to understand scripture, but instead was able to teach on his own, something that was unheard of in his day. He did not need support or authority to undergird what he says as we would today. Still, the leaders of that synagogue did not know what to do with him.

The unclean spirit, on the other hand, knows exactly who Jesus is, and what he is about. He challenges Jesus, and identifies him, correctly, as the Holy One of God. He questions, rightly, if Jesus is there to destroy evil and its power in the world. He sees Jesus clearly and understands the implications of Jesus’ presence in that place. Jesus is “called out” by the unclean spirit, a challenge to his honor, and so he responds immediately. For all his trouble, the unclean spirit is evicted, violently, from the man. Jesus, in effect, calls the spirit out of the man and leaves the man changed, freed, whole.

The implication for our lives is clear once we discover that we live, much like the man with the unclean spirit, in between. We live between death and life, we live between darkness and light, we live between what we are and what God has called us to be. We are, as Luther said, simultaneously sinner and saint. And when Jesus comes calling, as Jesus surely still does, we repeat with our sinful lives the words of the unclean spirit, “What have you to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth? Have you come to destroy us? We know who you are. The Holy One of God!” This is both statement of defiance and cry for help and Jesus has promised not to disappoint. Through our very baptismal call we are called out of this life and into the new life with Christ. We called to leave the life we have known and to live the coming Kingdom of God.

It is in this process that we realize that we have clarity in these moments that make us new and make us whole that we become suspect to the world. We see our savior clearly, first as a threat to the part of us that would hang on to the old, then as a blessed release and source of healing. But the explosion of excitement should cause the world around us, perhaps even those closest to us to question our behavior. For we will see things that are not there, at least not to those others: things like God’s forgiveness and love, and transforming presence.

The invisible pattern laid bare

I was standing at some distance as a group of students walked and prayed through a “prayer labyrinth” recently. Another observer suddenly broke the silence and started laughing. She stopped herself and kept silence with the group until all were done, but her Cheshire Cat smile spread broad across her face long enough for me to ask her what has tickled her fancy so. She replied simply that as the people twisted and turned through the labyrinth, walking different directions at different times, if she forgot for a moment that there was a pattern on the ground, it looked to her, for all the world, like the inmates in an asylum, walking randomly in the courtyard. (But remember the warning about unclean spirits and mental illness!). She reflected that maybe those in the asylum were not as “crazy” as they were made out to be, but rather were able to see and walk a pattern that was not available to the rest of us.

In test we have something akin to this. What we see here, though the eyes of the demoniac, is the very stamp of the eternal God walking and talking and breathing here on earth. Even after the man is “cleansed” the crowd in the synagogue still cannot see who it is. From the very beginning, we who are Mark’s readers are let in on a great secret, the identity of the one who makes the world whole, who makes us whole. We see the pattern as it unfolds, though the unlikely eyes of the man with the unclean spirit, and through other unlikely witnesses as the Gospel goes on, all the way through the centurion by the cross and the women at the empty tomb. We see the pattern that might have gone unnoticed by others.

But unlike the one here who is commanded to be silent, we are commanded to speak. We are called out by God and let in on this secret creative force let loose among us so that we might bear witness to its power in our lives and celebrate his presence in our midst. We, like Mark, are here to let others know what God is up to, to show the pattern in the ground that we walk, to give praise to the God who shapes and reshapes our lives.

For Jesus has indeed called us out with his love, broken though our lives may be, and called us into his presence to heal us and restore us. He who bears our pains and our broken lives, calls us to bear witness to his presence out of both our pain and our restoration. He is present and visible in all our fears as well as in the joy of life in relationship, just as he was present in my initial fears when my son was born, and in the joy that has been mine since. And while this may cause some to look astounded and question the sanity of the God that I follow, I know that in all my callings, as father, pastor, husband and especially as child of God, there is no other way.

Rev. Dr. Luke Bouman,
Tree of Life Lutheran Church, Conroe, Texas
lbouman@treeoflifelutheran.org