Preached · January 30, 2022
Series · Mark Confronting the Powers
Text · Mark 5; Mark 5.1-20
Mark 5
Let's turn our Bibles to Mark chapter 5. I'll be honest with you: I knew back in the fall, when we started our Mark gospel series, that we were going to have to talk about demons and angels and possessions and the powers and the spirits and the invisible world — and I was sort of nervous about all of that. Because we are a bunch of rational, educated people here in the Western world, and we don't possibly believe in angels and demons; we're far more sophisticated, right? And the Table Church in particular has a reputation for quite a few of you to be in a phase of deconstruction. Maybe you grew up in a Pentecostal or charismatic background, or a background that held all of these things — angels and demons and possessions and exorcisms and gifts — in really high esteem, and since then you've begun to rethink your faith, and now the idea of hearing preaching on that sort of thing again might send shivers down your spine. I get it. I'll talk about a little bit of my own testimony when it comes to this as well. But it's important stuff, so we're going to spend some time in it tonight.
As Mark Twain said — I said this earlier this morning to our Bible class — "I would not have preached so long if I had had more time to prepare." So if this sermon goes long, close your tab and download the podcast and catch up later.
Mark chapter 5 says:
They went across the lake to the region of the Gerasenes.
They, being Jesus and the disciples. "Across the lake" is key language, meaning they're leaving Palestine, leaving Jewish territory, going into Gentile, non-Jewish territory.
When Jesus got out of the boat, a man with an impure spirit came from the tombs to meet him.
The region of the dead. This man lived in the tombs, the local cemetery.
No one could bind him anymore, not even with a chain. For he had often been chained hand and foot, but he tore the chains apart and broke the irons on his feet. No one was strong enough to subdue him. Night and day among the tombs and in the hills he would cry out and cut himself with stones.
And you know there were teenagers back then who were doing dares, seeing how close they could get to him, listening to the spooky sounds of this demented man.
When he saw Jesus from a distance, he ran and fell on his knees in front of him, and he shouted at the top of his voice, "What do you want with me, Jesus, Son of the Most High God? In God's name, don't torture me!" For Jesus had said to him, "Come out of this man, you impure spirit." Then Jesus asked him, "What is your name?" "My name is Legion," he replied, "for we are many." And he begged Jesus again and again not to send them out of the area. A large herd of pigs was feeding on the nearby hillside, and the demons begged Jesus, "Send us among the pigs; allow us to go into them." So Jesus gave them permission, and the impure spirits came out and went into the pigs, and the herd, about two thousand in number, rushed down the steep bank into the lake and drowned.
Those tending the pigs ran off — like you do when you see all your pigs run off a cliff — and reported this in town and countryside.
And the people went out to see what had happened. They came to Jesus, and they saw the man who had been possessed by the legion of demons sitting there, dressed and in his right mind.
And they were happy? Excited? No — afraid.
Those who had seen it told the people what had happened to the demon-possessed man, and told about the pigs as well.
And then the people began to plead, beg, and demand that Jesus leave their region.
As Jesus was getting into the boat, the man who had been demon-possessed begged to go with him. But Jesus did not let him. He said, "Go home to your own people and tell them how much the Lord has done for you, and how he has had mercy on you."
So the man went away and began to tell in the Decapolis — a region of ten cities — how much Jesus had done for him. And notice Mark's little bit of subversive writing: Jesus says, "Go and tell how much the Lord has done for you," and Mark says the man went and reported how much Jesus had done for him. A little bit of Jesus being divine here.
And all the people were amazed.
This is the word of the Lord.
Testimony
In my life, I've told some of my testimony here at The Table Church. I had a biological mom who was unable to take care of me. I was in the foster system, lived with some relatives for a spell, and then when I was ten I moved in with the Parrott family, who eventually adopted me when I was 14. The Parrott family was part of a small denomination called the Missionary Church, a pretty typical evangelical church at the time. We had a youth group, all of those sorts of experiences.
But when I was a little older, before college, my brother had gotten involved in a Pentecostal, charismatic gathering a little outside of town. I looked up to my older brother, who was a spiritual giant in my mind, so I started going to this gathering as well. And this place was wild. It was there that I experienced things like speaking in tongues and casting out of demons. We would gather around certain possessions of people and dance in circles around them to cast out evil spirits. I would give ecstatic prophecies. I would rebuke my old church. I would rebuke the spirits of my high school. There was a time we were at an acreage where there was a barn, and we were seeing spirits and demons floating over this barn, so we made a circle around it and cast it out.
This experience started out as something deeply life-giving. When I first started, I was experiencing nightmares that I'd had since I was a kid. My biological mother suffered from paranoia and schizophrenia, so she had a hard time getting a grip on reality. When her mother, my maternal grandmother, died, she refused to believe it, and so before the funeral she snuck into the funeral parlor and tried to sneak food and water and supplies into my grandmother's casket. She opened up the eyelids — and I, as a six-year-old, saw all of this. Those images of the whites of my grandmother's eyes haunted me for years; I had recurring nightmares about it. But when I first encountered these charismatic Pentecostal folks, they laid hands on me, prayed for me, and the nightmares were gone. I've never had a single nightmare since.
But as I got deeper into this world, I became a nastier and nastier person, because I believed I had knowledge and power that those little peon Christians didn't have. I believed I could see into a world and a realm that was really in charge of things while the rest of you all were blind — and I wasn't afraid to tell anybody about it. I was a really nasty kid to my parents, telling them about all their spiritual blindness and darkness.
I got to college, and, as I've said before, I had the gift of many patient mentors and professors who shook the hubris and pride out of me and brought me into a more humble expression of my faith. And as I left that expression behind — of certainty and demons and angels — I eventually looked back on it with shame and embarrassment, a sense of how could anybody possibly think this is a good idea. But as the years went on, I began to see healthier examples of what it is to believe in not only this physical world but the spiritual world as well.
That's what I want to talk about tonight. My basic main idea is that there are, in fact, powers — invisible realities that must be named. Scripture calls these the powers, and Jesus heals us and our society, our culture, our nations, our organizations from them. He sets us free. He undoes the corruption and sets us on a mission to do the same.
The Existence of the Powers
So let's talk about these powers. Do they exist? If you're anything like me, you probably have some cartoony images in your mind of angels and demons — little flying creatures that somehow grab hold of us and influence us. So do me a favor: get out your second screen that you're probably already playing Wordle on, and do a Google image search for "biblically accurate angels." If you're one who suffers nightmares, maybe do this in the morning and not close to bedtime.
They're a little wild. There's the angel figure that my grandma gave me — the little Precious Moments one. And then there's the angel figure that I really wanted. If you look at the images described in Scripture — multi-winged, some with one eye, some with eyes all over, crazy things. Here's an image where the angel says, "Be not afraid," and the man says, "Sir, this is the scariest moment of my life." Because if an angel as described in Scripture shows up, you would bleep your pants. These things are wild-looking. We've been influenced by culture, cartoons, movies, going back to medieval times and drawings — particularly from Dante's writings — of what angels and demons look like: a little more human in figure and form.
The Hebrew Bible
Let's talk about how the Hebrew Bible, the Old Testament, talks about these invisible powers. There's a whole bunch of vocabulary. It uses the idea of little-g gods — all of these gods of the nations that Yahweh, the one true God of Israel, is going to conquer, showing that he is almighty, the Lord of hosts, the Lord of the angel armies. There is one true God, and all of these other gods of the nations. We hear language about angels, messengers of the divine God, and lots of images in Isaiah and Ezekiel of what they do and look like. There's language about a creature or being called ha-satan, "the Satan" — and the Satan figure in the Hebrew Bible is not necessarily the same as the devil we think of today, but rather like a prosecuting attorney who shows up to make a case against God's people. There are the chaos monsters you'll read about in Job and the Psalms — Rahab, whom God slaughters and chops into pieces; and this Rahab is a chaos monster, and once God does that, then God can bring order to the chaos as Genesis chapter 1 begins. There's Leviathan and Behemoth, creatures that were signs of rebellion against order, and then God comes and defeats them and puts order into place.
These are all the different ways the Hebrew Bible talks about this invisible reality. If you're an ancient person, you did not have a clear split in your mind between the physical (the real) and the invisible (the not-so-real). In your imagination, these two realities were deeply linked; one influenced the other constantly.
The other thing we find surprising about the Israelites is that they were rarely strict monotheists. They did not have a strict notion of there being one God. We see this even in the first commandment of the Ten Commandments: God says, "You shall have no other gods before me." The first commandment is not, "There are no other gods." Rather, God, when he speaks to his people Israel, assumes they think there are lots of gods, and their first priority is not to think there are no other gods, but to not have any other gods besides Yahweh.
This comes up all the time in the Old Testament. There's a fascinating passage in Daniel chapter 10 where Daniel is praying to God, but his prayer gets delayed by weeks because the prince of Persia — one of the gods of Persia — has blocked the prayers, so the archangel Michael has to come duke it out with the god of Persia before Daniel's prayer can get to God. Look at Psalm 82:
God has taken his place in the divine council; in the midst of the gods he holds judgment.
Again, Hebrew imagination says there is not just one God; there is a variety of gods and one God above all. And Yahweh says, in essence, "How long will you be unjust and show partiality?" God says, "You are gods, children of the Most High, all of you. Nevertheless, you will die like mortals and fall like any prince." This whole idea — if you want to Google it later — is henotheism. Not monotheism, a belief in one God only, but henotheism: the Israelites believed there were a variety of gods, but one God above all.
Between the Two Testaments
Eventually, after Israel was exiled to Babylon and returned, this viewpoint changed, and they became more strict monotheists. Between our two testaments — between the book of Malachi and Matthew — there are about 400 years of theological development, where the language Jews and Israelites use about this invisible world changes: not so much gods and chaos monsters, but rather angels and demons.
The New Testament
The New Testament uses different language about this invisible world, but it's getting at the same Jewish notion that there is this world of invisible powers influencing the world. Some examples. Romans chapter 8 — this is Paul expressing that there is nothing that can separate us from God's love, but the things that might try are angels and rulers. In Paul's imagination, it's not "angels" as invisible beings and "rulers" as the people you vote for; these are both influential invisible powers that can affect the world. Ephesians chapter 3:
God's purpose is now, through the church, to show the rulers and powers in the heavens the rich variety of God's wisdom.
The heavens being the realm where the invisible world is. Ephesians 6:
We aren't fighting against human enemies, but against rulers and authorities and forces of cosmic darkness and the spiritual powers of evil in the heavens.
Colossians 1 is this gorgeous poem or hymn about the Son of God:
The Son is the image of the invisible God, the one who is first over all creation, because all things were created by him, both in the heavens and on the earth, the things that are visible and the things that are invisible — whether they are thrones or powers or rulers or authorities. All things were created through him and for him.
Last example, 1 Peter chapter 3:
Your salvation comes through the resurrection of Jesus, who is at God's right side. Now that he has gone into heaven, he rules over all angels and authorities and powers.
So by the time of Jesus and the first-century church, this Jewish notion of a whole world within the world, which shapes and affects physical reality, continues. And whenever we see language of power, authority, ruler — that's what's being talked about.
What Are the Powers?
Now, get out of your mind images of flying creatures latching onto you and riding you around like a horse. Let me give you a definition. This comes from a great, incredible book called Engaging the Powers by Walter Wink. Bear with me:
The Powers, unfortunately, have long since been identified as an order of angelic beings in heaven, or as demons flapping about in the sky. Most people have simply consigned them to the dustbin of superstition. Others, sensing the tremendous potential in the concept of the Powers for interpreting social reality, have identified them merely as institutions or structures or systems. The Powers certainly are the latter, but they are more, and it's that "more" that holds the clue to their profundity. In the biblical view, the Powers are both visible and invisible, earthly and heavenly, spiritual and institutional. The Powers possess an outer, physical manifestation — like buildings and portfolios and personnel and trucks and fax machines —
This was written in the '90s.
— and an inner spirituality, or corporate culture, or collective personality. The Powers are simultaneously an outer, visible structure and an inner, spiritual reality. The Powers, properly speaking, are not just the spirituality of institutions, but their outer manifestations as well.
That was some heady stuff. Let me give you some examples. You may have a job somewhere, and within a week — a month at most — you begin to get a grasp of the corporate culture. There are certain expectations, unwritten rules, about how you're going to behave, and what happens when you buck up against the system or culture of the corporation. No one wrote this stuff down, necessarily, but when people enter into a corporation, all of a sudden, out of that group of people emerges an identity that they didn't necessarily intend to have. We talk about it in terms of corporate culture. And it's really hard to change corporate culture. There's no instrument or measuring tape or scale you could stretch out to measure it. It just is. It just exists.
We talk about the spirit of a nation, or a New York state of mind. New York just has a certain way of being. Americans — when they go into a different country, everyone knows you're the American, because you stick out like a sore thumb. There's just something that emanates American-ness, or New York-ness, or Boston-ness — Midwestern is what applies to me.
Think about a riot happening after a sporting event. Very rarely does a group of people get together and say, "Hey, if our team wins, let's go flip some cars and light them on fire." But rather, a spirit affects the crowd and sends them out, and that spirit makes them do things that individually they would never do. And then as soon as the crowd dissipates, that spirit does as well. This is what we're getting at: there are these spirits, these powers, that influence groups of people, and out of the groups of people emerge concrete actions in the world.
Axioms
I'm going to keep going with some axioms to help us get our minds around this. An axiom is a simple statement that gives limits to and handles around a complex idea. Some of my favorite axioms come from a guy named Mike McHargue — "Science Mike" — who, when he was an atheist trying to understand what faith and spirituality and religion were all about, had some axioms that helped him get a better handle on why it was worth practicing the faith.
Here's his axiom on sin:
Sin is at least action or inaction that violates human consent and produces human suffering. Sin comes from the divergent impulses between our lower and higher brain functions — our lizard brain and our monkey brain — and our evolution-driven tendency to do things that serve ourselves and our tribe. Even if this is all sin is, it is destructive and threatens human flourishing.
As a bare-minimum definition of sin — no Bible verses quoted — Mike McHargue is arguing, even if this is all sin is, it's still worth talking about. He has an axiom for the Bible:
The Bible is at least a collection of books and writings, assembled by the church, that chronicles a people's experiences with and understanding of God over more than a thousand years. Even if that's a comprehensive definition of the Bible, study of Scripture is warranted to understand our culture and the way in which many people come to know God.
So I gave a crack at writing an axiom for the powers — gods, angels, demons, et cetera:
The powers are at least the systemic social and cultural forces that both emerge from and animate organizations, corporations, nations, and other groups of people. Even if that's a comprehensive definition of the powers, it's essential to identify these powers so that they may be critiqued, reformed, or exorcised.
Why Does It Matter? Language Creates Perception
Why does any of this matter? Because it's heady, philosophical, theological stuff. Why does it matter that we get this right? It matters because language creates perception. The words we use to talk about the world can actually create perception.
When I was a kid, I grew up poor for the first seven years of my life, so all I had was a black-and-white TV. And a black-and-white TV was enough to get me interested in Superman, the adventures of Lois and Lane, things like that. But when I got a little older and got into a different house and realized there was color TV, I realized black-and-white TV was a relic of the past. And in my childlike mind, I thought that anybody born before 1980 or so only saw the world in black and white — that black and white was all there was; it wasn't just how they recorded things, it was actually how the world was. Now, this was a silly idea, and I was wrong — but there's something kind of true about it.
The color blue, to blow your minds tonight, was not perceived by people until relatively recently. There's a whole story about how we figured this out. If you go back to ancient Greek poetry — Homer — he describes the sea not as blue but as "wine-dark." He describes the sky not as blue but as a dark monstrosity. Some sociologists and folks who study language got together and analyzed the ancient languages of Greek and Hebrew and Chinese and Japanese and Indian languages and Icelandic languages, all in ancient times, and realized that none of these languages had a word for the color blue. And it seems like ancient folks couldn't even see it, because they didn't have a word for it.
Now, they tested this. There's a tribe in Namibia, the Himba tribe, and they also do not have a word for the color blue, but they've got dozens of words for the color green and all its different shades. So they put these folks in front of a computer and showed them eight or nine blocks of green and one blue, and they couldn't pick out which one was blue. Then they put a different image in front of them — all of them, to our eye, looked like the same green — but the Himba folks were able to identify which one was slightly different every time. Their language granted them an ability to perceive the world differently than the rest of us, who don't have dozens of words for the color green. If you want to wiki-hole yourself later, this is called the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, or linguistic relativity: the idea that the structure of a language affects its speaker's way of thinking, and therefore people's way of seeing the world is relative to their spoken language.
All right — what on earth does this have to do with demons? Back to Walter Wink:
The relevance of the Powers for an understanding of structural evil should now begin to be clear. Any attempt to transform a social system without addressing both its spirituality and its outer forms is doomed to failure. Only by confronting an institution and its solid way of being concrete in the world can the total entity be transformed.
It's not a coincidence that our society — Western, American society — is incapable of having language for, or being conscious of, angels, demons, and invisible powers, and also seems to be equally incapable of confronting racism and cis-hetero-patriarchal normativity and economic greed and toxic capitalism and consumerism and individualistic freedom at all costs and militarism and the myth of redemptive violence. I want to argue that our inability to talk about the powers influences our inability to talk about systemic evil. Our culture has the fewest words, the least amount of language, for the spiritual realm — and our culture is the one most affected by depression and addiction and anxiety and suicide and mental illness. When we throw away all of that language of how to speak about the powers, we are shaming our ancestors and the majority world, who still confront this every day and have language for it.
Back to Jesus
So, Jesus confronts someone possessed by a demon. Again, we do not need to read this as a little invisible monster who is getting a free horse ride off of this person, which Jesus has to kick off somehow. Rather, Jesus is confronting the corrupted powers of this man's world and the hold they have — not only on individuals, but also on communities and villages and nations.
Now, I, for one, do not hold that demon-possessed people are basically an ancient way of speaking of mental illness — because the ancient world had ways of speaking about mental illness; it was not only demon possession. It's an insult to mentally ill people to say, "Well, basically, it's a version of being demon-possessed." It's more accurate to see it as first-century people's way of understanding when someone had become either corrupted or deeply influenced by a culture's illness imposed by others. Demon possession was often the language of scapegoating. So this man has been taken by his community, sent out to the graveyard, and told: do not come back.
Now, there's an irony here, because Jesus is not confronting just one possessed person, but rather Rome itself. There's a man, and he's possessed by a demon named Legion, "for we are many." If you are a first-century person, this has all the literary subtlety of us saying, "Hey, someone came into our church and they were obviously possessed — they were possessed by a demon named Red Hat, and they said, 'We are MAGA.'" That's all the same subtlety that Mark is using here. Seriously. Black scholar Obery Hendricks says:
This demonic presence called Legion, the occupying presence which wrought the bitter pathology of oppression — how could it be anything but the Roman military?
This man has been scapegoated by his community to be an outsider, because the entire village has been possessed by Rome, by legions of armies which occupy them. So this way of seeing the world opens up the possibility that we are all implicated in the corruptive ways the powers affect us. Because remember, the powers aren't just invisible; they also show up in real, physical ways. So we have to start asking ourselves tough questions: How have we been implicated or possessed or corrupted or oppressed by the demonic lie of white supremacism? Of hustle culture and toxic capitalism? Of ableism and insipid forms of eugenics? Of sexism and patriarchy? Of white Christian nationalism?
When I say these things are demonic or satanic, what I don't mean is that there are little monsters poking at our brains to make us into bad people. What I do mean is that out of our organizations and corporations and even churches and religions and countries and states and cities emerge the powers — the spirits, the demons, the false gods. And then these demons in turn perpetuate and give energy to the concrete corporations and groups and political parties and churches and people that go on corrupting creation. It's a cycle that, without God in the flesh intervening, becomes vicious and destructive.
The other thing I want you to see in this story is that when Jesus frees someone, it angers the community. They send Jesus, the liberator, away. This man's freedom comes at economic cost — goodbye, piggies — and that cost is considered too high by the community. And that is precisely what we can expect to happen when those who are animated by the divine spirit of liberation and freedom confront those who are possessed by the corruptive powers.
We see this cycle over and over again when America deals with race. Otis Moss Sr. said in a sermon in 1976:
I see a black and white parallel here. As long as we were struggling in the cotton fields of Tennessee and Georgia and Alabama and Mississippi, with our cotton sacks across our shoulders and to our sides, picking cotton and having our fingers burning from stinging cotton worms that were hiding under the cotton leaves; as long as we were barefoot, actually and symbolically, laughing when we were not tickled — America was satisfied. But one day America saw us marching to the voting booth, sitting down at lunch counters, and all of America became afraid.
When Jesus dares to set us and our cultures free, cultures bite back. In fact, our freedom will anger those who benefit from our oppression. Your freedom will anger those who benefit from your oppression. And so you may be the man who had been possessed by Legion, and Jesus has set you free, and the crowd wants your liberator to go.
Tying It All Together
So let's tie this together. Every aspect of our society has both concrete and invisible realities that need to be named, and Scripture calls this the powers. Jesus heals us from the powers that corrupt us and our world, and sets us on a mission to do the same.
Here's the good news: the powers do not have the last word, and they will not succeed in the end. They will be — and this is crucial — redeemed and restored. Remember what we read in Colossians 1: that he sits above all the powers and rulers and authorities, for they were created by him; and the Colossians hymn goes on to say that in him all will be reconciled. God will not only liberate us from the powers, but will liberate the powers as well. Those things that are currently corruptive, God will make into a healing force in the world.
So the invitation and the challenge for us is to be recipients of that healing power of Jesus — to be able to name and recognize that there are oppressive powers and systems and angels and demons and gods all pulling and tugging at us, and Jesus wants us to be healed, to be set free, to be in our right minds again. And the challenge is that our healing may make us deeply unpopular. But what does Jesus do with this man? He sends him back into his community to preach all the good things that the Lord has done. Now this man's eyes are opened; he sees the truth of what God is really like, of what the world is really like, and now he, the previously possessed man, is going to go perform exorcisms of his own in his own hometown.
Our mission is much the same: to have our eyes opened to the corrosive powers of this world, to become detached from them, attached to the divine spirit, and empowered to go perform exorcisms of our own. This is what I mean when I say Jesus confronts the powers — and Jesus is asking us to do so as well.
This is a transcript of the sermon as preached, lightly edited for readability.
