Beyond the Patio

Casting Out Demons in Our Lives
Luke 8:26-39

What do you think of demons? It is not that strange to talk about demons in a world where movies and TV programs display extraterrestrial beings taking up residents in human bodies and taking over the human minds and wills. When people act out of character we jokingly ask, “is that really you or has some strange creature taken over your body?” When our sons or daughters ask what they can do to help around the house, we look at them strangely because they look like our sons or our daughters but we suspect that they are really someone else. We want to shout, “Will my real son or daughter please step forward?”

We think that they are possessed, but not necessarily by demons. In New Testament times the world was seen to be filled with demons and when people seemed to be controlled by outward forces, or from some irresistible inner powers which rendered them harmful to them selves or others, they were thought to be possessed by demons. They were cut off from the rest of the community.

So we have this story in the Gospel today of this man said to be possessed with demons coming to Jesus. He was kept at distance from the rest of the people so he lived in a what was considered to be a desecrated a place “among the tombs” . His nakedness was also a sign of his separation from the rest of the community. At the end of the story after Jesus had released him from the demons, we see him clothed, in his right mind, listening to Jesus, and going home. He was no longer separated from the rest of humanity. It was quite a transformation don’t you think?

*

What do we make of this story today? Do we reject it as an ancient folk tale bordering on magic and the occult? Or are we willing to study the pre-scientific images of demons and evil spirits to discover what kind of reality lies behind them. I believe that they can be interpreted as anything that seems to take control of a person in such a way that the person loses the ability to think reasonably or act rationally. Often through their actions they are harmful to themselves and others. I don’t think that they are little creatures that enter into you and cause havoc but they are ,what should I say, “influences” that completely take over your life.

Alcohol and Drugs can take control of a life in such a way that the person seems to be possessed and people around them seem helpless in trying to deal with the consequences. Anorexia can creep into a persons life and take charge. Depression can be one of those things that renders a person helpless. There are all kinds of “rages” that take hold of people today: road rage, air rage, queue rage, and a host of others. People are taken over by anger, by hate, by prejudice, by greed, by fear, and hundreds of forms of obsessive compulsive behaviour.

Gossip can take control of people’s lives. There was story of a young women who took her own life , driven to it by vicious talk of several old crones in the quiet English village where they all lived. Their gossip ruined her good name, and she tragically chose to commit suicide. The coroner’s jury, after examining the circumstances of her death, brought in the verdict “killed by idle gossip”. Who was it who said, “The way of the world is to praise dead saints and to persecute living ones.”

Negativity can take mastery of a person’s life. I have met people who, when you meet them, have such an air of negativity that you feel uncomfortable in their presence. Not only are they negative, but they seem to be carry a number of people with them so that it completely leads others to despair. I have run into the odd parish like that in my travels. The whole parish has been taken over by pessimistic spirit so that absolutely nothing can be done.

The Internet can be addictive and can take control of all of our time and energy. There have also been cases when some young people’s lives have taken over by bullies on the Internet with disasterous results, sometimes even suicide. Smart phones can take over a persons life so they cant go anywhere or do anything without having their smart phone with them.  It can take away face to face contact with others where there are people texting each other when they are actually in the same room together.

All these things, once they take control, drive people to outrageous behaviour and isolates them from others. They might as well live among the tombs like the man in today’s story. Friendships are destroyed. Other members of the family are alienated. Our obsessions can even take over our identity.

*

What helps when a person realizes that these so called “demons” have taken over their life and they feel a lack of control and sick unto death? Counseling can help by giving us a mirror to see what is happening in our lives and giving us the possibility to move us toward a new way of acting. Even really good friends can help us in this way. Physicians can help in dealing medically with a number of the conditions that develop from our compulsive lifestyles. Groups can help in giving us the kind of insight and support that we need to make changes in our lives. But I’m sure that each counselor, friend, physician, group therapist or leader can attest to situations where they have done everything in their power to help the person to be free from forces that bind them with the person that you are trying to help remaining unchanged. In all respects these people should be on the road to recovery but they are not.

Why is that? Often it is because down deep within we do not want to change. We do not want to get better. We have made friends with our old compulsions. The changes required for the future are more devastating to us than the misery of the present. We have not given ourselves completely to the healing power that is available in the universe.

Jesus stands before us like he did before the Garasene demoniac of our story. He is able to cut through the resistance of the forces that have a hold on us, and he is also able to pervade our own resistance.

Jesus calls us the faith that can make healing possible.  As Paul Tillich points out:

But faith means being grasped by a power that is greater than we are, a power that shakes us and turns us, and transforms us and heals us. Surrender to this power is faith. The people whom Jesus could heal and can heal are those who did and do this self-surrender to the healing power in him. They have surrendered their persons, split, contradicting themselves, hateful of themselves and therefore hostile to everyone else; afraid of life, burdened with guilt feelings, accusing and excusing themselves, fleeing from others into loneliness, fleeing from themselves to others, trying to escape from threats of existence into the painful and deceptive safety of mental and bodily disease. As such beings they surrendered to Jesus and this surrender is what we call faith. But he did not keep them, as good helpers should never do. He gave them back to themselves , as new creatures, healed and whole (1)

It is by this faith that we as followers of the Way can continue the works of Christ  and be the healers.  Through faith we have it in us in some unimaginable way to be Christs to each other. As Frederick Buechner points out in Listening to Your Life that in some way our stories intersect with Christ’s story and his story becomes our story:

 We have it in us to work miracles of love and healing as well as to have them worked upon us. We have it in us to bless with him and forgive with him and heal with him and once in a while maybe even to grieve with some measure of his grief at another’s pain and to rejoice with some measure of his rejoicing at another’s joy almost as if it were our own. And who knows but that in the end, by God’s mercy, the two stories will converge for good and all, and though we would never have had the courage or the faith or the wit to die for him any more than we have ever  managed to live for very him very well either, his story will come true in us at last. And in the meantime, this side of Paradise, it is our business (not like so many peddlers of God’s word but as men and women of sincerity) to speak with our hearts (which is what sincerity means) and to bear witness to, and live out of, and live toward, and live by, the true word of his holy story as it seeks to stammer itself forth through the holy stories of us all. (2)

Such faith also releases us to be more receptive to all the other forms of healing administered through the counsellor, physician, group or therapist.

We have His healing power among us now. Are we able to surrender to it?

---

(1) Tillich The New Being, Charles Scribner’s Sons, NY , 1955 On Healing p. 38-39

(2) Frederick Buechner Listening to Your Life, Harper Collins, New York, N.Y.1992, p. 161

_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________