rebuke and affirm

7 Easter 2010
Acts 16:16-34; Psalm 97; Revelation 22:12-14, 16-17, 20-22; John 17:20-26
A friend of mine who works in mental health told me about a client who came into her office one day. She had been seeing this client for over a year, but on that afternoon, she took one look at him and knew instantly that something was wrong: The look in his eyes was strangely vacant, and his voice didn’t sound like his own. It wasn’t just that this man had schizophrenia (although he did), or that he was addicted to heroin (although he was). Rather, she told me, she was convinced that this man was possessed by a demon.
She told me this entire story in the same tone of voice that I would use to describe a jam in the photocopier. I stared at her for a moment, not sure what to say. Like me, this friend is an Episcopalian, and I am not used to hearing Episcopalians use the language of demonic possession.
I asked her: “So what did you do?”
She shrugged and said: “I did what anyone else would do. I opened up my desk drawer, and I pulled out my Bible, and I rebuked it!”
I waited for more, but there was no more to the story. The evil spirit left her client, he sat down in a chair, and they got back to work on his addiction and schizophrenia.
Listening today to the lesson from the Acts of the Apostles, I was reminded of this story. The message is the same: Demonic beings do exist, no matter how much we try to deny their presence. But God is so much bigger that all it takes to cast them out of our lives is a little rebuke. No candle-lighting, no Latin chant – just a command from a “very much annoyed” servant of Christ. No matter how evil the spirit or how commanding its presence, it’s hard to compete with the one who is the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end.
All this has me wondering about how evil spirits work today – if you’ll consent for a few moments to believe that they may really exist – and whether we can possibly expect them to manifest in the same way that they did in Biblical times. Surely, the slave girl in Philippi drew plenty of attention to herself, not to mention to Paul and Silas, as she stumbled through town shouting about slaves of the Most High God. We know that somebody was taking her seriously; the Scripture tells us that she “brought her owners a great deal of money by fortune-telling.” But you have to wonder: If this same girl was wandering through downtown Portland, crying out about slaves and God and salvation, would anyone care?
Would anyone even notice?
Perhaps, then, the ways of separating people from God that worked two thousand years ago are less effective today. Now that our society has learned how to handle people who cause a scene in public places – we simply ignore them, or we call the police, who come swiftly to drag them away – can it be that these same spirits have gone underground? Much more quietly and privately, as befits a culture that fetishizes privacy, they claim a space in our souls and do everything they can to undermine God’s work in our lives.
Maybe they’ve tried to make their claim on all of us. Instead of spirits of divination, like the one that possessed the slave girl at Philippi, we might call them spirits of isolation – although sometimes they do a very good job of convincing us that they can predict the future, too.
They isolate us from God by saying: You are so unworthy.
They isolate us from our families by saying: Your marriage is never going to work out.
They isolate us from our spiritual selves, saying: Everyone else is beautiful, and you are ugly.
And most of all, they isolate us from hope. Surely, in your darkest moments, you’ve heard them say: Nothing is ever going to get better. Your life will always be this hard.
As Christians, we are blessed to know – at least with our rational minds – that none of these things are true. We know so well that, as today’s psalm tells us, “The Lord loves those who hate evil; he preserves the lives of his saints and delivers them from the hand of the wicked.” We have heard Jesus say to the Father, “The glory that you have given me, I have given my disciples, so that the world may know … that you have loved them even as you have loved me.” And we know that, no matter what our struggles or how pronounced our suffering, glorious things are in store for us: Jesus also speaks of his desire for us, the ones who have loved him, to see his glory and join him in heaven.
We are the followers and the disciples of Jesus. We have been loved by him, redeemed by him, and called to see his glory; we have been transformed through the waters of baptism; we are treasured by God. And we know, from the hope given us of eternal life and Jesus’s return to this world, that things are going to get better.
If we’re trying to understand demons, maybe the question we should be asking is what makes those things so hard for us to remember.
But there is hope here too, for Jesus gives a clear commission to his disciples in the Gospel of Matthew: He says that part of their task will be to drive out demons, in the same breath he uses to tell them to heal the sick, raise the dead, and preach that the kingdom of heaven is near. Is it so crazy to think that as we carry on that work, we are called to drive demons out of each other?
I invite you to give this Gospel reading a little place in your heart as you leave church today and go back to your weekday world tomorrow. Keep an eye open for demons in your life and the lives of others around you, and miss no opportunity to cast them out – which is really to say, miss no opportunity to remind anyone that he or she is a beautiful, beloved, and ultimately treasured creation – a living symbol of our eternal hope in God and God’s enduring hope for us.

Homily by Cat Healy, parish clerk