A Sermon by Pastor Tom Lacey . . .
Jesus of
Mark 1:21-28, Preached at Congregational
The preacher asked an elderly lady how it was with her soul.
"Oh," she replied, "the old devil has been giving me a rough time." Immediately
her husband protested. "Now hold on," he said, "she's not too easy to live with
herself."
There was a cartoon in a magazine a while ago. It is a drawing of a boy
in distress yelling to his dog: “Lassie, get help!” In the next frame, Lassie is
lying on a couch in a psychologist’s office. Well, Lassie got help. Not everyone
needs a psychologist, but all of us need a bit of help every once in a while.
Perhaps women understand this more easily. Most men will avoid doctors,
dentists, and counselors until their pain becomes unbearable. Dr. Steve Stephens
tells about a time when he was about ten. He was out in the woods with his
cousins picking berries. His Uncle A. J. came up to them and said, “Don’t eat
those; they’re poisonous. They’ll kill you.” Stephens’ cousins threw their
berries on the ground, but Steve had already eaten several handfuls of them.
They were bitter, but they didn’t taste that bad. He now faced a quandary: Does
he tell his uncle that he’s already eaten a bunch of berries so he can rush him
to the hospital to get his stomach pumped, or does he just die? He wasn’t sure
how to tell Uncle A. J. And besides, he was afraid his uncle would think less of
him. So he decided to die. That night he organized his possessions, told his
parents how much he loved them, and went to sleep, never expecting to wake up.
The next morning he was shocked to be alive. He thanked God for saving him. The
moral of this incident is that many guys would rather die than admit they have a
problem.
The Wounded Warrior
Sometimes we face fights that are stronger than our individual strength. Find
help. You aren’t meant to carry the world on your shoulders. Remove what isn’t
yours to bear. There is no challenge God hasn’t overcome. There is no problem
the Lord hasn’t solved. Jesus is the reason to believe in God’s power that
brings healing to the hurt and victory to the almost vanquished.
Now in our passage, the man with the unclean spirit at least knew he needed help. So he forced himself to meet Jesus. Jesus shows up at the synagogue on the Sabbath and preaches an unusually powerful sermon. Rather than leaving the congregation bewildered by spending his time parsing Hebrew sentences, splitting theological hairs, and quoting fifteen other rabbis, each quoting someone else, Jesus simply looks them in the eye and preaches from the heart. What concerns the gospel writer here is not the content of Jesus' message. We are told nothing about what Jesus said or what texts he read. For Mark the significance of Jesus' teaching is the authority with which he speaks and the power of his words.
Right at the end of Jesus’ sermon, just as people are leaning over to whisper to each other that it would certainly be nice to have preaching like that every week, the spell is broken by the appearance of a demon-possessed man. Where he came from, God only knows. Mark doesn’t say. Mark just uses one of his favorite words: immediately. "Immediately there was in their synagogue," he says, "a man with an unclean spirit," which is Mark’s way of sweeping his hand across the table, knocking off whatever was there before and saying, "You think that was something; look at this!" So the people couldn’t waste too much time thinking about that good sermon, because they had an "immediately" on their hands, and, in this particular case, the "immediately" was a raving man in the middle of church shouting vague threats at the young preacher who had just done such a fine job with the sermon. Jesus reprimands and rebukes the demon saying, “‘Be silent, and come out of him!’ And the unclean spirit, convulsing the man and crying with a loud voice, came out of him.” Jesus exudes such authority that even demons obey.
Today we think that the type of demon exorcism Jesus practiced
in
Look, even though the description of what happened in worship
that day seems almost amusingly understated, the congregation at
Tom Seaver, the legendary baseball pitcher, once asked Yogi Berra, "What time is it?" Yogi replied, "Do you mean now?" Yes, God has the power now. The only question is do we have the will.
Think sick, be sick. Doctors are beginning to sense that there’s a connection between the two. About a decade ago, researchers made a surprising discovery: Women who believed that they were prone to heart disease were nearly four times as likely to die as women who didn’t hold such fatalistic views. Their risk factors were the same: age, blood pressure, cholesterol, weight. So their higher risk of death had nothing to do with these usual heart disease culprits. Instead, the only difference was their beliefs, whether or not they believed they were at risk for heart disease. Bottom line: They thought they were going to get sick and die, and so they did. The term “nocebo” (Latin for "I will harm") was chosen by Walter Kennedy, in 1961, to denote the counterpart of placebo (Latin for "I will please"). In these cases, there is no "real" drug involved, but the actual harmful, unpleasant or undesirable biochemical, physiological, behavioral, emotional, and/or cognitive consequences of the administration of the inert drug are very real. They presume the worst, health-wise, and that’s what they get.
Actually, the only question is do you have Jesus. Do you have Christ? Do you believe in Jesus? Do you believe him? Is there love for the Lord in your heart? Do you believe he heals, and forgives? Do you believe Jesus helps the lame to walk, the deaf hear, blind people see? Can Jesus take a dead girl touch her hand, talk to her, and raise her to her feet? Absolutely. Does he cure mothers-in-laws from fevers, women from bleeding, and lepers from their diseases? Definitely. Can you trust Jesus with what pains you, what knocks you to your knees, and steals your spirit from your heart? Without a doubt. When you find yourself getting negative, when you find yourself feeling blue, thinking dark thoughts, trapped in air-tight compartments of logic where there is no longer a savior to save, you forget that Jesus is real. But I want you to know that Jesus isn’t a fantasy good only for Sunday mornings. These aren’t tales told to children in Sunday schools and adults who haven’t grown up. The last word isn’t a demon’s. The story doesn’t end in disaster. The final grade isn’t failure. No, far from it…far from it, when you believe in Jesus. Far from it when your heart grows toward Christ and embraces the Lord’s love for you. Jesus is much, much more than we can imagine.
Two friends go to a library. One of them comments excitedly on the great "how-to" books he's finding. The second replies bored and cynically, "Oh, yeah. Well I'm looking for the 'why-bother' books." Ouch. That’s a bad attitude. Forget that. Let go of negative thoughts. Get out of the box of disbelief. There is something better still coming.
A woman in her fifties went into a church and sat down in the sanctuary for awhile. She took out a piece of paper and a pencil and began writing down a long list of things that she promised she would do to change her life, a whole page of things, and she signed her name at the bottom. She walked up to the chancel, placed it on the altar, and sat down again in the sanctuary. As she was sitting there, she began to sense a teaching. The more she listened to it, the more she heard God saying to her, "You've done it all wrong. I want you to go back up there, get the piece of paper and tear it up. And then I'll give you another instruction." So, she got out of the pew, walked up to the altar, and did as the Lord told her. She then sat back down. Nothing happened immediately, but finally the word came through. "Now take a piece of paper, sign your name at the bottom, and let me fill in the rest."
Where there is the Lord, there are lots of good things still to come.
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