“A Temple on the Move” - March 4, 2018

John 2:13-22

            I can open up any modern book and read the copyright and printing dates.  We cannot do that with the gospels.  Scholars have to make some informed guesses about the place and time of their composition based on language, contents, where they are quoted outside the Bible, and so forth.  John, unlike the other three, seems to have been composed after the Romans destroyed the Temple in Jerusalem in the year 70, and that makes a difference.  The story of Jesus’ cleansing of the temple shows up in all four gospels.  John differs from the other three in that he puts it toward the beginning of Jesus’ active ministry, not at the end, which sort of surprises me because it makes sense to me that something like that would be the last straw for the authorities, as it is in the other three versions.  John, though, uses events from Jesus’ life to make a point more than the others do.  Instead of threatening the end of religious observance, he is promising an ongoing access to God that no catastrophe can change.

            We have our holy places.  There are buildings that matter deeply to Christians.  The Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem occupies the probable site of Jesus’ crucifixion, burial, and resurrection, and people have been traveling to worship there for sixteen hundred years.  Various branches of the Church have been arguing for nearly that long about who has jurisdiction over the place and there are elaborate agreements that leave some parts of the building in the hands of the Roman Catholics and some parts in the care of the Greek Orthodox and relegate a section of the roof to the Ethiopian Coptics.  But last week, as part of a protest over confiscation of other church properties by the Israeli government, the building was closed for awhile.  I saw some pictures of pilgrims kneeling outside the locked doors. 

Allowing worship to stop, even temporarily, in the Temple was unthinkable for the Jews of the first century.  Josephus, who wrote a history of the war in which the Romans sacked Jerusalem, says that the priests

“carried on their religious service uncurtailed, though enveloped in a hail of missiles.  Just as if the city had been wrapt in profound peace, the daily sacrifices, the expiations and all the ceremonies of worship were scrupulously performed to the honour of God.  At the very hour when the temple was taken, when they were being massacred about the altar, they never desisted from the religious rites of the day.”[1]

The scriptures we know as the Old Testament had anchored the worship of God on Jerusalem and on the Temple as the place where, out of the whole earth, God had directed his people to gather and where he had said he would meet them.  To destroy that would, they thought, destroy God’s promise.  Imagine – as an analogy – what would happen to Islam if Mecca were wiped off the map, and the Ka’aba that Muslims face to worship, wherever they are in the world, were turned into a hole in the ground?

The Temple had been destroyed once before, and the people had felt themselves totally cut off, especially those who had been carried away as prisoners.

“By the waters of Babylon –

there we sat down and there we wept

when we remembered Zion.

On the willows there

we hung up our harps.

For there our captors

            asked us for songs,

and our tormentors asked for mirth, saying,

            ‘Sing us one of the songs of Zion!’

How could we sing the Lord’s song

            in a foreign land?” [Psalm 137:1-4]

For two generations, their focus was on trying to get back, and Nehemiah led them in the effort, inspired by Isaiah and guided by Ezra.  Zeal for Jerusalem and for the Temple was the burning motivation of their lives.

            On the other hand, if the Vatican or Canterbury Cathedral or St. Basil’s Cathedral in Moscow or every church building on the globe were to disappear, we would be deeply upset and mourn their loss but it would not go to the heart of our faith.  It’s fair to say that we have John’s account of Jesus cleansing the Temple to thank for that. 

“The Jews then said to him, ‘What sign can you show us for doing this?’  Jesus answered them, ‘Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.’ The Jews then said, ‘This temple has been under construction for forty-six years, and will you raise it up in three days?’ But he was speaking of the temple of his body. After he was raised from the dead, his disciples remembered that he had said this; and they believed the scripture and the word that Jesus had spoken.”

Our access to God is through Jesus, who has risen from the dead and ascended to heaven, whose Holy Spirit is everywhere, not just in one designated spot, however beautiful or time-honored.

            In fact, the Bible calls the Church his Body, and reminds us of Jesus’ own words:

“Where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them.” [Matthew 18:20]

Sometimes it’s catastrophes that reveal that.  I’ve seen it happen on a plane when it hits turbulence.  I have felt Jesus’ presence standing on a corner by a vacant lot during an anti-drug vigil in Philadelphia.  Mother Teresa knew that she could find Jesus sitting beside people dying in the streets of Calcutta and Dietrich Bonhoeffer shared communion with other believers in a Nazi prison.  Julia Ward Howe looked out from a rooming-house at the Union troops guarding Washington during the Civil War and said,

“I have seen him in the watch-fires of a hundred circling camps;

They have builded him an altar in the evening dews and damps.

 I can read his righteous sentence by their dim and flaring lamps. 

His truth is marching on.”

Even so, in the everyday and in the safe places, too, Jesus is right there in the ordinary unremarkable.  He’s there when a family bows its heads to give thanks at the dinner table, and when parents are saying prayers with their children at bedtime.  He’s certainly here with us as we gather at this table in his name.

---

[1] Josephus, War I. 148, cited in E.P. Sanders, Judaism: Practice and Belief 63 BCE-66CE (London: SCM Press, 1992), 92.

“Loss and Gain” - February 25, 2018

Mark 8:31-38

            We often forget, perhaps willingly, that slavery was once legal throughout the American colonies, Pennsylvania included.  I’m going to read in a few moments from the Journal of John Woolman, who was a Quaker born in New Jersey in 1720.  He became one of the earliest and most effective abolitionists.  Still, it wasn’t until 1780 that the commonwealth passed a “gradual emancipation” law that declared that children born to enslaved women in were to be considered free.  Those held as slaves continued as such until freed by the slaveholder or by death.  And slavery was as brutal in the North as in the South.  In the mid-eighteenth century a black man was convicted of a crime and executed in Perth Amboy by being burnt alive, with persons of color from all neighboring townships forced to witness the execution.

            Looking back on those times, we want to ask how people could have allowed it.  We want to think that we would have been the ones who would have stood up and said, “No!”  Woolman’s Journal gives an insight into how even somebody who knew, deep down, that the customs and law of the time were wicked could calm and soothe his conscience.  As background to this passage, it helps to know that Woolman was a notary who was paid to sign off on transfers of property of all sorts.

“My employer, having a negro woman, sold her, and desired me to write a bill of sale, the man being waiting who bought her. The thing was sudden; and though I felt uneasy at the thoughts of writing an instrument of slavery for one of my fellow-creatures, yet I remembered that I was hired by the year, that it was my master who directed me to do it, and that it was an elderly man, a member of our Society, who bought her; so through weakness I gave way, and wrote it; but at the executing of it I was so afflicted in my mind, that I said before my master and the Friend that I believed slave-keeping to be a practice inconsistent with the Christian religion. This in some degree abated my uneasiness; yet, as often as I reflected seriously upon it, I thought I should have been clearer if I had desired to be excused from it, as a thing against my conscience; for such it was. Some time after this a young man of our Society spoke to me to write a conveyance of a slave to him, he having lately taken a negro into his house. I told him I was not easy to write it; for though many of our meeting and in other places kept slaves, I still believed the practice was not right, and desired to be excused from the writing. I spoke to him in goodwill; and he told me that keeping slaves was not altogether agreeable to his mind; but that the slave being a gift made to his wife, he had accepted her.”[1]

“I’m only doing my job.”  “It could have been worse.”  “It wouldn’t last long.”  “It was my wife’s decision.”  “I needed to keep peace in the house.”  “I didn’t want to offend anyone.”

            Let’s talk about Jesus.  He confronted some of the most entrenched abuses of his own day, practices that had their justifications.  Roman coins had the image of Caesar stamped on them: Augustus Caesar, who claimed the title divi filius, “son of a god”.  Images and idols could not be carried into the Temple, so moneychangers were needed to prevent that.  Likewise, if the Law required animals to be sacrificed, a pilgrim coming from North Africa or Persia couldn’t carry a cage of pigeons that whole way.  It made sense to set up a few stalls where they could buy them right there.  So far, so good. 

But we all know what happens when people bid for the contract and sweeten the deal, right?  Kickbacks, exploitation of those who could least afford to be there, artificially high prices, the poor being elbowed out of their place as part of the congregation, the sellers forgetting why they were there in the first place, and who-knows-what-else Jesus saw going on. 

“And he entered the temple and began to drive out those who were selling and those who were buying in the temple, and he overturned the tables of the moneychangers and the seats of those who sold doves; and he would not allow anyone to carry anything through the temple.  He was teaching and saying, ‘Is it not written,

‘My house shall be called a house of prayer for all

the nations’?

     But you have made it a den of robbers.’”

[Mark 11:15-17]

Yes, there were times that Jesus expressed lenience, as when hungry people plucked grain to eat on the Sabbath, or when a sick man whom he healed took up his bed and walked away with it, again on the Sabbath.  But when what was going on destroyed people’s relationship with God or degraded them as human beings, he had no patience.

            Jesus emphasized that it is one thing to be stuck without good choices, but it is another to deny that you have choice, or to sell out.  When you do that, what you sell is more than you will ever realize.

“He called the crowd with his disciples, and said to them, ‘If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it.  For what will it profit them to gain the whole world and forfeit their life?”  [Mark 8:34-37]

(Now, I warn you, I’m going to stop preaching and start meddling.)

            I’ll start with myself, though.  I have to admit that I am where I am because of how unfairly others have been treated.  William Penn may have made his treaties with the Indians, but for the most part, this land was not borrowed.  A big chunk of the wealth that built our economy came from slave labor.  As for myself, specifically, I can point to scholarships that helped me out in seminary that came from the Duke Foundation (as in Duke University), whose money ultimately derived from James Duke’s ability to encourage smoking and sell a lot of cigarettes in China.  My education is tied to an increased rate of cancer and emphysema.  Do I not, then, owe it to someone to say that I cannot undo the past, but I refuse to repeat injustice in the future?  So hear this: “Don’t smoke, don’t vape, don’t chew, don’t juul.  Just don’t.”

            Jesus’ words also mean that what we think is to our benefit may not be worth anything in the long run, so be prepared to forgo what you consider to be owed to you, because you might lose your soul over it.  You may have a legal right to say anything, but if it is hate speech, or even simple gossip, you don’t have any moral right to open your mouth.  Maybe people have a legal right to own an assault rifle, but children deserve safe schools more than you deserve whatever warm and fuzzy feeling you get from having an AR-15 in the house.  Maybe you don’t own any weapon like that, but do you have stock in a company that sells them?  There are places in the world where prostitution is legal, but what does it do to everyone involved in the business?  There are spots where you could farm poppies for opium and heroin production.  Could you look into the eyes of someone whose child has overdosed?  These things give fuller meaning to “making a killing”.

            Just be aware that you kill yourself at the same time.  And for what?  There’s a scene in A Man for All Seasons where Thomas More is on trial for treason that he has not committed, but Henry VIII wants him found guilty.  One of More’s former proteges steps forward and gives false testimony against him that everyone in the court recognizes will guarantee conviction and a death sentence.  More notices that the witness is wearing a chain and badge identifying him as the new attorney-general for Wales and says to him, “Richard, it availeth a man nothing to sell his soul for the world.  But for Wales?”

            An English teacher I had in high school told us on the first day of class, “I want you all to know that I can be bribed – but that none of you can afford my price.”  I hope nobody else ever could, either, for their sake as well as for hers.

---

[1] The Journal of John Woolman and A Plea for the Poor (Secaucus, NJ: Citadel Press, 1961), 14-15.

“Between the Beasts and Angels” - February 18, 2018

Mark 1:9-15

            Temptation is one of the simplest and one of the most complicated aspects of life.  We all know what it is and can see it plain as day and at the same time we don’t always recognize it when it’s right in front of us.  Temptation is serious, because one wrong choice that looks small (and maybe is small) often has consequences larger than itself and before you know it, you’re stuck in a situation that is beyond you and even your efforts to get out of it just seem to make things worse.  Try out this poem by C.S. Lewis, and see if you don’t know what he’s talking about:

“Nearly they stood who fall.
Themselves, when they look back
see always in the track
One torturing spot where all
By a possible quick swerve
Of will yet unenslaved–
By the infinitesimal twitching of a nerve–
Might have been saved.

Nearly they fell who stand.
These with cold after-fear
Look back and note how near
They grazed the Siren’s land
Wondering to think that fate
By threads so spidery-fine
The choice of ways so small, the event so great
Should thus entwine.

Therefore I sometimes fear
Lest oldest fears prove true
Lest, when no bugle blew
My mort, when skies looked clear
I may have stepped one hair’s
Breadth past the hair-breadth bourn
Which, being once crossed forever unawares
Forbids return.”

            When the gospels of Matthew and Luke talk about Jesus being tempted, they do it in a way that illuminates the ways in which evil disguises itself as good and the importance of staying close to God’s teaching for our own welfare and safety.  But the gospel of Mark describes Jesus’ temptation in a way that, while less precise and less extensive, seems to me to go to the heart of what it can be like to be in the midst of it for the rest of us and what it was also like for him.

“He was in the wilderness forty days, tempted by Satan; and he was with the wild beasts; and the angels waited on him.” [Mark 1:13]

When temptation comes to someone, it’s like being in a wilderness, alone.  It’s like being surrounded by all the dangers that are out there, some of which give themselves away and some of which lurk quietly for the chance to pounce.

            There was a guy named Colin who I knew in Middle School.  He was two years older, so we weren’t buddy-buddy, but we lived in the same neighborhood.  Around that time he got into some trouble and was in a serious fight with a kid from another school.  He was in the hospital for awhile, and after that just sort of faded out and I never really paid attention; I had my own friends, like you do at that age.  Somewhere around ten years ago, somebody passed along a brief obituary with Colin’s name at the top.  At the end it said memorial contributions could be made to the Caron Foundation, so I figured that he had died of substance abuse of some sort.

            Last week I attended a presentation that the bishop arranged at Hempfield UMC, west of Lancaster.  The speaker spoke about opioid addiction, and why it is so hard to get out of it.  He explained that the opioids do some unusual things to the human nervous system.  They can block pain, which is what they are prescribed to do.  They increase a sense of pleasure, which is part of what gets people hooked.  In so doing, however, they destroy the receptors for naturally-occurring dopamines, which are the substances that allow us to feel good in non-harmful ways, like when you feel a sense of accomplishment or when somebody gives you a hug or you feel good after exercising.  These receptors can grow back, but it takes months.  So if somebody gets off the abused drug that they were using to kill pain or make themselves feel good, there will be a long period afterward where they will feel nothing.  They will be emotionally blank or worse.  Meanwhile, the part of their brain that is still craving the drug that destroyed the receptors will keep calling to them and creating physical desire for another hit.

            In the lobby after this, I was talking with someone who is friends with Colin’s mother, and she brought him up.  “You know that’s what killed Colin,” she said.  “He had been clean for a good, long time and was doing okay at work and so his mother and stepfather thought they could go away for a couple of days, and when they got back…” and then she described a scene that I’ll spare you.  The wild beasts: sometimes you hear them out there, howling like a hungry coyote; sometimes they are like a copperhead waiting under a log.  Jesus was out there in that wilderness, and is there now.  He’s the Good Shepherd who leaves a flock of ninety-nine sheep who are all accounted for just to find the one that is missing and may not even know the dangers it faces.

            That brings me to the other part of Mark’s description of what goes on.   Jesus

“was with the wild beasts; and the angels waited on him.”

The word “angel” simply means “messenger”.  Angels are messengers of God.  They might be supernatural or they might be natural.  Like temptation, the message might be loud or it might be subtle.  If you want loud messengers, take the Ten Commandments.  They are pretty straight-forward.  The quieter messengers are there, too, those little voices and gut reactions that something is just a little out of line, and it’s good to listen to them, too.  I disagree with Mike Pence in a lot of ways, but I will give him credit for one thing that he’s taken some heat for.  He says he will not dine alone with a woman other than his wife nor attend functions without her if alcohol is being served.[1]  If he knows his weaknesses, he pays attention to them, and that makes sense. 

            There’s a danger of legalism, too, of course.  Nobody said it would be easy.  In fact, Jesus himself said that

“the gate is narrow and the road is hard that leads to life, and there are few who find it.” [Matthew 7:14]

It’s easy, again, to point fingers or to identify one or two activities that are sinful and to say that as long as you stay away from those, you do no wrong.  I had a textbook for an ethics course one time whose title was Money, Sex, and Power.  What if it had been called Making a Living, Relationships, and Getting Things Done?  That would be a little less catchy, but not off-target.  Life is tricky and complex.  No wonder Jesus taught us to pray,

“Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.”

They are out there, both temptation and evil.  Let’s not sugarcoat it, or pretend that we don’t face temptation, when even Jesus did.  We fool ourselves if we think the beasts don’t leave us with plenty of bites and scratches along the way.  But let’s not forget that Jesus is out there, too, and he knows the way when we don’t.

            East of the Jordan, in the wild lands where Jesus may have spent those forty days, is an area that was once called Gilead.  It was known as the source of a medicinal plant, Pistacia lentiscus, that contributed to an antiseptic, anti-irritant ointment called “Balm of Gilead”.  Out in the wilderness, where Jesus has been, the wilderness where we also find ourselves sometimes, there is also healing for the deepest troubles, the things that lead to addiction or despair or to seeking power over others, the things that warp the way we see ourselves or the way we see God, the things that we allow to come between us and his love.

“There is a balm in Gilead to make the wounded whole.

There is a balm in Gilead to heal the sin-sick soul.

Don’t ever feel discouraged, for Jesus is your friend,

And if you look for knowledge, he’ll ne’er refuse to lend.

There is a balm in Gilead to make the wounded whole.

There is a balm in Gilead to heal the sin-sick soul.

If you can’t preach like Peter, if you can’t pray like Paul,

Just tell the love of Jesus, and say he died for all.”

---

[1] http://www.latimes.com/local/abcarian/la-me-abcarian-pence-marriage-20170405-story.html

“The Glory of God” - February 11, 2018

II Corinthians 4:3-6

“Thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory.”

“Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.”

“Glory to God in the highest!”

What exactly is glory?  In its fullness, it’s an attribute of God unlike other attributes in an important way.  Most of the time, we want or need those things that pertain to the divine.  God is merciful, and we need mercy.  God is patient, and we ask him to bear with us.  God is love, and we all need that.  But God’s glory is different.  It can be dangerous to experience.

Paul talks about knowing “the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ” [II Corinthians 4:6]”, and he speaks of that in a positive way, but as I recall, when Jesus appeared to him directly on his way to Damascus, the sight blinded him. “For three days he was without sight, and neither ate nor drank.” [Acts 9:9]  It sounds to me like that one, short encountered had left him stunned and shocked, and that came to an end only when God sent someone to heal him.

On the mountaintop where Peter and James and John were given a glimpse, just a glimpse, of Jesus’ glory, it was enough that “they were terrified” [Mark 9:6].  In traditional depictions of the transfiguration, Jesus is shown in a blinding light, with these disciples huddled on the ground, with their faces to the earth.

“Immortal, invisible, God only wise,

In light inaccessible hid from our eyes.”

Glory overwhelms one who experiences it.  In the science fiction novel, A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams describes a torture chamber known as the Total Perspective Vortex.  “The prospective victim … is placed within a small chamber wherein is displayed a model of the entire universe – together with a microscopic dot displaying the legend ‘you are here’.  The sense of perspective thereby conveyed destroys the victim’s mind; it was stated that the TPV was the only known method of crushing a man’s soul.”  That actually isn’t too far off from Psalm 8:

“When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers,

the moon and the stars that you have established;

what are human beings that you are mindful of them,

mortals that you care for them?” [Psalm 8:3-4]

That’s just looking at God’s creation, not God’s own self, beside which the universe itself is nothing.  Even so, God shows us his glory, not to crush our souls, as it easily could, but to save them.  That is where Jesus comes into the picture.

            I know this comparison is flawed, so bear with me on it.  Nothing we say or think can adequately describe the Infinite, which is sort of the point here, anyway.  Think, if you will, of a television or computer that is showing a view of the sun.  It already has had to be filtered to avoid burning out the lens, but it jumps out at you with such brilliance and intensity that the only way to look at it is to turn down the brightness on the screen.  The entire picture is there in all its detail, but it has become toned down just to the point that it doesn’t burn out the screen and that a human eye can look at it.  In a similar way, God’s full glory is right there in Jesus all the time, but in such a way that we are not destroyed by that which is too great for us.  Again, even when we cannot stare at the sun, we and the whole world, human or not, still need its light and warmth simply to survive. 

Shown to us in the person of Jesus, God’s glory builds up our souls the way that sunshine makes the plants grow.  To get to know God in his fullness is what we are made for.  In the words of an early Christian writer, Irenaeus of Lyons,

“The glory of God is a living man, and human life consists in beholding God.”[1]

Or, as a group of English and Scottish Puritans wrote in 1647,

“The chief end of man is to glorify God and enjoy him forever.”[2]

We come alive in God’s glory, by his grace, even when we might find ourselves so totally overwhelmed that we could burst.  I want to go back to a psalm that I quoted earlier, Psalm 8.  After it describes how small a person can feel in the face of all that God has made and the sweep of the universe around us, asking,

“What are human beings that you are mindful of them,

            mortals that you care for them?”

it continues,

“Yet you have made them a little lower than God,

            and crowned them with glory and honor.

You have given them dominion over the works of your hands,

            you have put all things under their feet.” [Psalm 8:5-6]

God rescues us from our smallness and powerlessness, simply by counting us in.  By coming to us in Jesus, God entrusts his glory to as mixed-up a species as us.  Can I explain that?  No.  But I can point to the effect of what he has done.

The glory living in Jesus is also shown in us.  At the transfiguration, the disciples heard God’s voice say,

“This is my Son, the Beloved; listen to him!” [Mark 9:7]

And when people do listen to him and follow his ways, God’s glory shines through, and it remains dangerous to the ways of the world.  There are those who have no interest in God’s ways.

“In their case the god of this world has blinded the minds of the unbelievers, to keep them from seeing the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God.” [II Corinthians 4:4] 

Yet Jesus is the one who, time and time again, brings that kind of blindness to an end.    

“For it is the God who said, ‘Let light shine out of darkness’, who has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.” [II Corinthians 4:6]

When people who hate are met with love and really do get it, when they recognize that it is God acting through the person in front of them, the glory of that moment knocks them back like it bowled over the disciples. 

That was the power of the Civil Rights Movement, with its insistence on nonviolence.  Like Jesus, it insisted that the enemy is not the person, but the sin within them.  Get that person to see Jesus, to see God’s glory, and life will be transformed.  Martin Luther King, Jr. said it well.  Every person without exception is

“an upstanding human being whose vision has been impaired by the cataracts of sin and whose soul has been weakened by the virus of pride, but there is sufficient vision for him [or her] to lift his eyes unto the hills, and there remains enough of God’s image for him to turn a weak and sin-battered life toward the Great Physician, the curer of the ravages of sin.”[3]

To offer pardon and not be limited by old hurts and resentment, to forgive as Jesus forgave, that brings life and is part of God’s glory.  Replacing hatred with friendship, as Jesus did, is part of God’s glory.  It is part of God’s glory for people to sing together, as the Bible tells us that Jesus and his disciples did; or, like them, to share a meal.  It is God’s glory when people just go for a walk together, when they pray together, or whenever they go about their daily work with a desire to please God in whatever they do.

---

[1] Irenaeus of Lyons, Against Heresies, IV.20.vii.

[2] from the opening of the Westminster Small Catechism.

[3] from “The Answer to a Perplexing Question” in Strength to Love (New York: Harper & Row, 1963), 123.

“Dealing with Squatters” - January 28, 2018

Mark 1:21-28

            The gospel of Mark shows Jesus confronting the underlying evils that get into human life.  Let’s call them “unclean spirits” [Mark 1:2].  And before we start pretending that we modern people are so much more enlightened than our ancestors, consider how of late we understand the world at large.  We may not often speak of demons and devils at work, but when we see the chaos we face we have no trouble blaming malignant forces working behind the scenes, whether that means the conservatives or the liberals or the Russians or the Chinese or the hate groups or the Koch brothers or Monsanto or CNN or Fox News or the 1% or whoever. 

Also notice that those dug-in manipulators of human life are just fine with business as usual.  They are quite comfortable doing what they do.  It’s only when Jesus shows up that the trouble begins, and the demons know it and throw a tantrum.

“They went to Capernaum; and when the sabbath came, he entered the synagogue and taught. They were astounded at his teaching, for he taught them as one having authority, and not as the scribes. 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.’ But Jesus rebuked him, saying, ‘Be silent, and come out of him!’ And the unclean spirit, throwing him into convulsions and crying with a loud voice, came out of him.” [Mark 1:21-25]

When evil is confronted and told to go away, there will be convulsions and shouting, and maybe what we are living through is the exit of a whole lot of long-term resident demons from the body politic.  That would be a good thing.

            But Jesus also tells a parable about such confrontations, and it’s a good idea to keep it in mind.

“When the unclean spirit has gone out of a person, it wanders through waterless regions looking for a resting-place, but it finds none. Then it says, ‘I will return to my house from which I came.’ When it comes, it finds it empty, swept, and put in order. Then it goes and brings along seven other spirits more evil than itself, and they enter and live there; and the last state of that person is worse than the first.”  [Matthew 12:43-45]

Remember that evil does not belong in the human soul, or anywhere in God’s world.  It works like a squatter who finds an empty place and settles in, slowly destroying all that is around it.  Yet squatters can be turned out, even when they have taken over.

            We are facing an opioid-addiction crisis right now.  It’s serious.  More people are dying per year in Pennsylvania by overdose than died of AIDS-related illness any year during that epidemic.  Thirty years ago, we faced a surge of addiction when crack became available and there are a lot of similarities.  Let me share a story about that, and about how Jesus works to bring wholeness, not just in the past, but in our own day.

            At the time that crack cocaine appeared on the streets, I was with the Frankford Group Ministry, which was four United Methodist churches who worked together closely in that section of Philadelphia.  Two blocks down from Central United Methodist Church there was a row of houses that was owned by an absentee landlord who lived in Florida and did not particularly care what happened up here as long as the rent was collected regularly.  The neighbors did care.  The church cared.  We had kids who came to our after-school program who lived in two of those houses.  Let me add that the school also cared, and so did the business-owners who backed up to these places.  They had become crack houses.  People were going in, smoking a pipe or two, then spreading out into the neighborhood, desperate to find money for their next hit.  Prostitution was up, and disease with it.  Robbery and burglary were up.  And, just like today, babies were being born, addicted to illegal drugs from the womb.  Have you ever held a child like that?  The withdrawal symptoms linger on for years, and the side-effects for a lifetime.

            The neighbors came to the church to ask for help.  The church contacted the city’s Bureau of Licensing and Inspection, and they went through those buildings with a fine-tooth comb.  Six months later, when there had been no proof of remediation on the many violations they cited, we loaded up this old junker of a 21-seat church bus and drove down to Center City with signs and matching T-shirts to attend what would otherwise have been a routine license approval hearing.  The judge who was presented with the list of code violations looked up at the group and said, “This isn’t about the missing smoke alarms, is it?” then proceeded to issue the maximum fine for every item on the list.  Three months later, the fines were still unpaid, but a deal had been worked out whereby the properties were donated to Habitat for Humanity, squatters were evicted, and owners-to-be worked sided-by-side with volunteers to rehabilitate the houses and make them into homes.

            Even so, let me say this: that was a partial victory only.  There is also the question of the people who had squatted there.  Are they not also like empty houses where something terrible was happening?  They moved somewhere else, but their problems went with them.

It is not enough simply to address their drug use or anyone else’s and say, “Stop!” although you have to begin there.  You have to ask what it was that led them to make the foolish decision to start down that path and then address that; hence Jesus’ warning that if you don’t keep watch, the demons’ return is worse than the original situation.  Until someone is given hope of a way out of poverty, both economic poverty and poverty of the spirit, they will stay stuck.  Until someone grasps the depth of their dignity as a child of God, they will lack the self-respect to say, “No,” to someone who would draw them into self-destructive ways.  Until people hear that message clearly and unambiguously, we’ll just go from one addiction crisis to another.  “Just say no,” doesn’t prevent anything.  “You are better than that, and here’s why,” is what makes a difference.

Nor is it just about drug addiction.  There are all sorts of situations where you might look at someone and say, “What has gotten into you?”  Maybe you’re looking into the mirror when you say that.  I could suggest a list of unwelcome visitors that we nevertheless invite: pride, envy, wrath, sloth, greed, gluttony, and lust.  The seven deadly sins open the door to a world of chaos, and they’re always lurking there just beneath the surface like a virus in the system that stay dormant until some moment of weakness lets it latch onto a vital organ and endanger someone’s life.

But there are also questions we ask at baptism which, if you ask yourself at those moments, will be of great help:

“Do you accept the freedom and power that God gives you to resist evil, injustice, and oppression in whatever forms they may present themselves?”

and, with that,

“Do you confess Jesus Christ as your Savior [meaning, among other things, that you are not able or expected to save yourself] and put your whole trust in his grace [again, meaning that he is both capable and willing to do the job]?”

As somebody pointed out long ago and far away,

“He commands even the unclean spirits, and they obey.” [Mark 1:28]