What have you to do with THIS?

Scripture: Mark 1:21-28

Article: "Self Immolation is on the Rise in the Arab World"

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/21/world/africa/self-immolation-on-the-rise-in-the-arab-world.html

I’ve been struggling with this story in the Gospel according to Mark. There is, of course, the obvious problem: The man that the storyteller Mark describes as “one with an unclean spirit” would probably be described as someone with mental illness by many of us today, not necessarily possessed by an unclean spirit, or demon. Beyond this tension between the world and cultural understanding of ancient Palestine and that of ours, however, I think there remains an even larger problem: It’s stories like these, stories about dramatic healings of the most unlikely people, that make the Christian faith sound too romantic and naïve at best and harmful at worst. They are stories whose endings elicit responses such as: “REALLY?! Please tell me you are joking. Seriously. How ridiculous. You truly BELIEVE this nonsense?”

The above response is, ironically, quite similar to the question the man with the unclean spirit poses to Jesus in this story: “What have you TO DO WITH US, Jesus of Nazareth?” His question is the question of a world captured by demons of many stripes….Demons in the form of greed, demons in the form of anxiety and depression, demons in the form of mean spiritedness and ill will, demons in the form of apathy and hopelessness. These unclean spirits say: What have YOU to do with US? Do you actually have anything to say to us? Please, show us how you are going to change anything.

While reading this passage I found myself envisioning the various people I’ve worked with (mostly through my internship at a Poverty Rights center in Atlanta) who live with schizophrenia. They are arguably some of most tortured people on earth. Have you ever seen someone running down the street, hands clasping the ears, screaming for no apparent reason? This is probably a person suffering from schizophrenia. Schizophrenics live their lives in a kind of altered reality, haunted by very real voices that command them to do things as simple as brushing their teeth to violent acts against themselves and others. Many of the people we encounter in scripture (and especially in the Gospel stories) that are possessed by unclean spirits or demons would probably be diagnosed as Paranoid Schizophrenics today. I find it of no coincidence that the first recorded “healing” or “miracle” proclaimed in Mark’s Gospel describes Jesus casting out a spirit responsible for making one man’s life a kind of living hell. In casting out the unclean spirit, Jesus not only delivers the man from the prison that exists in his own mind and body, but he also delivers those around the man—those in his family and community—from the constant fear that he may lash out uncontrollably and perhaps violently. In casting out the unclean spirit, Jesus is delivering both an individual and a community from fear and pain. And like I hinted at above, he is also beginning his ministry by healing a man whose pain and feeling of enslavement is arguably much more acute than those around him. The gospel writer’s choice to place this story at the beginning of Jesus’ ministry not only testifies to Jesus’ special “preference” for those who suffer most and are shunned by others, but it also serves as a magnifying glass for humanity: If Jesus, and the way of Jesus, can deliver people suffering from the most visible and seemingly endless torture, surely he can deliver the rest of us from the “milder” forces that keep us from living abundant lives: anxiety, depression, pride, low self-esteem, anger.

Last Sunday, Nada Bakri reported on a disturbing trend in the Arab World: Well over a year has passed since Mohamad Bouazizi set himself on fire and sparked the revolutions in Tunisia and across the region, but despite the relative success of the movements, self-immolation is on the rise.

It’s hard for most of us to even imagine feeling so trapped and hopeless that we set ourselves on fire as an act of painful self-destruction and/or protest. It may be just as hard for a theologian to insist that God is truly at work delivering people from the spiritual and mental torture that causes something as awful as self-immolation, especially when the statistics point to the contrary. And yet this is the truth that Christians believe has been revealed. When Jesus stood up in the synagogue to teach, the people were “astonished” because he was not only teaching something new but he was also an unlikely teacher; His teaching and his action on behalf of the suffering man flew in the face of the man’s question: “What have you to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth?”

The same teaching and action continues to confront that agonized question today: “What have you do with us, Jesus of Nazareth?” And although most of us who try to follow Jesus don’t consider “casting out unclean spirits” part of our skill set (at least in the literal sense!), we are called to proclaim hope in even the most desperate places and situations, because that’s where Jesus started and that’s where he ended and continues to work. Resting in that knowledge, we should be emboldened to compassionately follow Jesus, casting out the unclean spirits that live in all of us, and casting out the “societal” unclean spirits that lead to tragedies like Self-Immolation. This is what Jesus has to do with us.

Instruments

Scripture: Mark 1:14-20

Article: "Where are the Liberals?" http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/10/opinion/brooks-where-are-the-liberals.html?scp=5&sq=david%20brooks&st=cse

Last week, the New York Times published an OP-ED by columnist David Brooks entitled “Where Are the Liberals?” Brooks claims that “given the circumstances, this should be a golden age of liberalism,” arguing that the reason it’s not lies in the fact that Americans ultimately don’t trust the government. He calls this the “Instrument Problem,” explaining that while “Americans may agree with liberal diagnoses, they don’t trust the instrument Democrats use to solve problems.” Fair enough.

However, this prognosis begs other questions: Doesn’t commitment to a larger cause or ideology demand a certain amount of patience? And is the Democratic leadership entirely to blame for this ailment? (Brooks says yes, claiming that liberals have more or less shot themselves in the foot by criticizing government as much as conservatives do.) However, it seems to me that folks espousing the liberal diagnosis but refusing to “carry the card” carry just as much blame for the trouble Liberalism is in as does the Democratic leadership; Often, these leaders are simply stating facts: Yes, the government has problems. Yes, there are corrupting forces in the government. Yes, we need to continually analyze what is working and what is not and negotiate how to be more effective. What’s sad is how folks take these statements and use them as evidence that “the government” really is Lucifer. Are we that naïve? Is it so hard for us to take a step back and seriously contemplate how many millions of schoolchildren would be starving or elderly people living on the streets (especially in the current economic climate) if the government didn’t provide school lunches and social security? Yes, the government certainly has its fair share of problems, but I’m not so comfortable with the alternative.

In Sunday’s gospel reading, Jesus is just beginning his ministry in Galilee. The Gospel according to Mark, chapter 1, verses 14-15 reads: “Now after John was arrested, Jesus came to Galilee, proclaiming the good news of God, and saying ‘The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.’”

The time is fulfilled. The Kingdom of God has come near.

In an age where eschatology has almost unequivocally come to be understood as something (terrifying, perhaps) that happens in the future or at the ‘end of time’ in the popular psyche (thanks in large part to literature like The Left Behind Series), the gospel writer records Jesus saying that “The Time” is both now (it is fulfilled) and it is near: It is both present and future, but not distant. God has done something that both fulfills the here-and-now and sets in motion an unstoppable coming and indwelling of the divine Kingdom. This “something” is God’s movement from utter transcendence and invisibility to physical, earthy, ordinary presence. Jesus’ very existence marks the presence of God with us, and his invitation to turn away (repent!) from brokenness to harmony with God and one another marks the nearness of God’s reign on earth. Jesus is, in effect, an instrument. He brings what feels so distant and wholly untouchable and unattainable into our realm, blessing our world in all its messiness and imperfection.

In many ways, it’s a lot easier to focus on the “big picture” than on the various colors and utensils used to create that picture, whether the big picture is ideology or the Kingdom of God. (And I’m not suggesting they are the same! Relax.) Both allow us to lay back a little, confident that our vision of perfection (or almost-perfection) is the right one, while not getting too tied-up in the details or having to defend the processes or behaviors we’ve adopted to realize those visions.  We do this because we know that our instruments suck. They have to be tuned and practiced until we scream, dusted and tuned again. Some even require us to dump the spit out during rehearsal. This may explain why many Americans ultimately trust the liberal diagnosis and vision of a more equitable society but find themselves ashamed or unwilling to defend the instrument that’s been doing the heaviest lifting in this department for over 70 years.

But the Gospel tells us that God blesses our instruments. This was revealed when God came to us as an instrument in Jesus Christ and beckoned us to use our instruments—our bodies, our tools, our minds, and our hearts—to not only name the hurt in our world but to work towards its demise, building and healing, feeding and transforming. God knows our instruments are imperfect. In the Presbyterian, Reformed tradition we even assert that Jesus himself was conditioned (and limited) by the socio-cultural presumptions of his time—Limited by his humanness! But God chose to be fully present in and through him anyway, revealing that wherever individuals and entire societies seriously seek to provide for the most vulnerable people and accept their lives as intricately woven in others, God is in the midst of them. Even in our dusty, out-of-tune instruments.