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Grace, mercy and peace be to you …
“Die … her … let! Die her let!”
True story. I’d been called to the emergency room of the small regional hospital in the town where I was serving a congregation prior to coming here to Louisville. On the gurney in the emergency room sat one of our teen-age members.
This girl had been adopted as a small child, and she was now living with her adoptive mother who was going through a divorce. No one except the dad who left was handling it well.
Her mother knew that there were drugs in her daughter’s life. And on this particular evening, the daughter had displayed a knife and had threatened to hurt either herself or her mother … but thankfully, with no one hurt … here she was in emergency.
And those were the words she greeted me with. “Die her let.” Turn those words around and we hear instead … “Let her die.” If it sounds like she and I had company in that room. We did.
We say this as an introduction to what we heard read in our Gospel for this morning … Jesus going and teaching in the synagogue and having a confrontation with a man who had an unclean or evil spirit …
We read these stories about unclean spirits in the Bible today in our 21st century and we’re tempted to write them off as quaint, don’t we?
Those poorly educated, unscientific people of Jesus’ day saw what we might understand today as the symptoms of epilepsy or some other nervous disorder. And because they didn’t understand what they saw … they labeled it as demon possession.
And, as we know, Jesus is the Great Physician of body, mind and spirit … and so, we understand that He had the power to heal the disease, or whatever it was, that would make a man shriek under Jesus’ touch.
We tell ourselves that we don’t see demons today, unless they’re part of a fantasy in some Hollywood movie. If they were around, they’d be all over TMZ and YouTube.
Well, the spirit who was making my young charge in the ER say: “Die her let!” was not from Hollywood. “It” even had a name: its name was Sam. And this young girl knew Sam was there. When I asked to speak with Sam she refused; she told me that Sam didn’t want to talk to me.
You may remember when Jesus sent his disciples out, two by two … they came back rejoicing that even the spirits submitted to them … The key word there is … two-by-two. Jesus easily can order the spirits around. For us of mortal skin, dealing with the spiritual realm is not to be practiced one-on. I didn’t have any back-up that night…
All I could do was put her in God’s hands. And so what happened? She was put into full-time residential care, in a facility hours away from her home. There she received life-coaching, drug rehab, and psychological support.
I saw her as I made monthly visits to her facility. But, when she was released I saw her no more as she and her mother moved on. I pray that God has relieved her of her burden.
Moral of the story? … What we see in our reading today and elsewhere in Scripture is still out there. Sam’s are real… and Sam’s are legion.
And perhaps what’s really disturbing in our reading for today is that this encounter we see between Jesus and an unclean spirit is not off on some remote island somewhere … but where? In the Synagogue read that… in church.
Makes sense, though. As we do come into this world in need of a Savior … without one, we are in the devil’s camp … and we are unable to free ourselves from the curse we have inherited with our race. The curse of sin … and the judgment sin brings.
So who do the Sam’s of this world go after? Not those already in trapped by the Devil, but those whom we might expect to see in church … those, who by faith, by water and the word, have been ushered through those waters … out of the land of slavery to sin … and into an inheritance in heaven, our promised land.
“But not so fast,” says the Devil. “It’s true, those who have yet to come to faith are mine … But oh, what it a joy it is to steal from the Lord’s flock … to reclaim those who have tasted the fruits of His sacrifice … to destroy His Kingdom, one soul at a time.”
And so … like the serpent in the garden, the Devil craftily goes about like a lion looking for those He can devour. And those he is looking for are the ones who have come into the Lord’s kingdom by faith… those, again, whom we might expect to find … in church.
And so, the Author of Lies goes about trying to destroy that which makes us the Lord’s… namely our faith. And there are two ways we see him going about doing that.
The first is bringing us under the deception of divination … or occupation with the occult. The lie is … God really doesn’t care about you. And so, if you knew more about your future … you could do a lot better job of taking care of your wants and needs than waiting for God to come through. Besides, who do you really end up depending on most of the time, anyway? Yourself, right?
So … Tarot Cards, palm readers, séances … are just a few ways the Devil presents his lies. Now, they may not be bold-faced lies … but, just half truths … like we see him misapplying Ps. 91 to tempt Jesus to jump off the pinnacle of the temple to prove His divinity.
Well… you’ve never been to a Tarot reader or fortune teller? Well then, how about playing with a Ouija Board? Or looking for answers under the proverbial 8-ball with those little blue, floating triangles?
Harmless? Think again. About 10 times, think again. That “yes” or “no” to a sensitive question has led many down a slippery slope that has caused much pain and a shipwreck of their faith.
But that’s only one path. And that may be the path less taken. The other path the Devil uses is the one of temptation to rebellion. The one that starts with the thought, “I know this is wrong, but I’m going to do it anyway.”
The sacramental system of the Old Testament was specifically identified as God’s means to deal with unintentional sins. Out and out rebellion by knowingly and intentionally sinning … doing something we’re not sorry for … doing something we’re not repentant about … something we would do again if given the opportunity … leaves us where? In the Old Testament … it put us outside the camp.
Why? Because we’re doing it, we’re sinning on purpose, in God’s face … we don’t want His forgiveness, and so there is none. So … where does that leave us? With shipwreck of our faith. And the Devil laughs all the way home.
Now … the good thing about God is He can fix shipwrecks. As we also hear in Scripture, He works all things to the good of those who love Him and are called according to His purpose.
And so, what about our times of rebellion … our open sinfulness? Like the Prodigal son … God sometimes let’s us do those things in order for us to see what life is like without Him … and when we do, we find that our wreck is a call to repentance, and finally, to a revitalization of our faith.
But sometimes our indiscretions don’t immediately lead to a crash … We keep getting away with sinning against Him and our conscience … And if that’s our path … then look out for Sam or one of His cronies.
People who have studied this have found that when there are Sam’s in a person’s life … there is also something called “grounds” for those spirits to be there. Grounds … A reason. A reason usually connected to the pattern of intentional sin.
We might see then, that the spirit being there is sort of like a temporal punishment … which even though it is brought about by evil … it is still a call to repentance.
Martin Luther and the pastors of his age dealt with this phenomenon. And in their writings they tell of the cure, which was repentance … the confession of the sin … and the assurance of God’s forgiveness in the Gospel. And in that … personal faith was restored.
So. The verses we have from Mark for today are not really about demons. They are about Jesus. They are about His authority as the Son of God appearing in Human flesh.
The ironic part of the story is that the demon knows who Jesus is, on sight… while we of human flesh do not. Yet, we see Jesus not only having authority over that spirit … but we also have a witness on the part of that spirit, a part of creation that we cannot see...
A witness that a lawyer might call an “admission against interest” … The Spirit identifying Jesus as “the Holy One of God.”
So… need we fear the devil and his minions? No, not as we remain in Christ by faith. God is the Creator … and the Devil and all those of his ilk are mere creations. And as we see in our text … they are bound by Jesus’ authority.
And we are protected from them by His grace…. As we pray, “Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.”
But, dare we intentionally step out of faith? Dare we take to heart the lies of Satan … that the world and the life he can offer us is richer and more fulfilling than the one God intends?
Many have fallen for that lie… and have taken that path. And as a result … shipwrecks of faith abound. But as the faithful father never turned His back on his prodigal son … waiting anxiously for Him to come to His senses and return … so God uses every means at His disposal to bring us to our senses as well.
Dear friends … it’s a bigger world … a bigger creation than we can see or perceive with our senses. But it all has one purpose … that you and all mankind might come to faith and salvation through Jesus Christ.
And so … For that blessing that is in your life today … that you and I can live each day “all for Jesus,” … we give Him highest praise!
In Him,
Amen.
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