Sermons

Lent 3

23 March 2025

Vineville Baptist Church

Macon, Georgia

1. Gregory Pope

DEMONS

Mark 5.1-20

Following Jesus Through The Gospel of Mark

 

After stilling the storm, Jesus docks on the other side of Lake Galilee to visit the area of the Gerasenes, Gentile territory. He goes to the village graveyard. Out of the tombs comes a man who is a terrifying sight. He is possessed by an unclean spirit, a demon, and he lives in the cemetery. Burial caves and corpses were considered unclean. So this was a place where he has been banished. It was the ancient world’s worst mental institution. For a while people had tried to keep him tied with chains. But no more. He’d break them. Night and day he wanders among the burial caves naked, howling, slashing himself with stones. A true horror.

This horror is, sometimes, more a picture of ourselves than we would ever want to admit. Is there a part of you that feels like this man? Karl Menninger called it years back “man against himself.”¹ He said our worst hatred is often reserved for the self. Richard Rohr calls it “stinking thinking.”²

So many people, perhaps most of us to some degree, live with self-hatred. And our self-hatred at times takes the form of self-punishment, self-abuse, self-destructive behavior. Sometimes we reach the point where we no longer care what happens to us. And we, like this man, feel isolated and unclean.

There are people with scars all over their bodies from where they have tried to hurt themselves. Some have scars, not on their bodies, but on their hearts and minds, for they have lacerated themselves emotionally, spiritually, psychologically. There are those who go on one self-destructive binge after another, whether it is through professional suicide, drugs or alcohol, flunking out of school, disordered eating – whatever way they can find to hurt themselves.

Mark says this man has an “unclean spirit.” In other places it’s called a “demon” or “demonic spirits.”  In the ancient world of Mark’s first readers, if you were sick, it was believed to be caused by a malicious demon. They had very little understanding of infections or viruses or diseases or mental illness. Instead, they looked for causes in the external world of spirits and demons.

I’m not sure what you expected when you saw the sermon title today – perhaps you were hoping we were going to perform exorcisms on your spouse or your children. Not today. When I speak of demons, I’m not talking about literal Hollywood gremlins roaming about. I’m speaking of demons in the spiritual and emotional sense. Where our emotions and spirits are terrorized. You ever felt that way?

To speak of demon possession may sound strange to us. But to the people in Mark’s day it seemed very real. And while I would not discount demonic possession, modern psychology has given some of the old demons new names like paranoia and schizophrenia, that enable us to better understand and treat mental illness.

But the old names correspond more closely to what people often experience. Deeply conflicted people filled with self-hatred do not just feel like they have a chemical imbalance. They feel possessed by a power that has taken control.

Some mental illnesses can be effectively treated with therapy and medication; some cannot. For some people life gives them more than they can handle and finally the family has to place them in an institution to protect them from self-harm.

The Gerasenes sent their mentally ill to the cemetery. So Jesus goes to the cemetery because he’s always looking for those who have been sent away. He actively seeks out the sick, the possessed, the wounded. Especially the sick, possessed, and wounded parts of ourselves.

 

Call it what you like, we all have our demons. We all know the feeling of being pushed and pulled, driven and drawn, twisted and torn by forces within us and beyond us. Parker Palmer speaks of the “divided self” and our yearning to live “divided no more.”³

Some of us know what it’s like to feel powerless in the grip of addiction or helpless in the face of temptation. We know what it’s like to be lured and led into ways of living which distort and destroy life as God meant it to be. To be fragmented, tormented, disturbed by emotions and voices that are destructive.

Our demons often emerge in an unhealthy view of ourselves. Some of us hate ourselves and constantly accuse ourselves of wrongdoing. Usually something from our past has left us in a state of self-accusation and self-hatred. We differ from one another only in degree.

That is one reason I send you out of these doors every week with the baptismal benediction: “You are God’s beloved.” Because Richard Rohr says, “The only cure for possession is repossession – by our original Source,”⁴ by the Love that brought us into this world and carries us through the days and nights of our lives.

We need this reminder because some of us find ourselves at times dwelling in dark burial caves, slashing ourselves, most likely due to guilt over something we’ve done or a devastating lack of self-worth. We hate ourselves for it and we feel unclean, unworthy of love. Or it may be that we’ve been deeply hurt or injured and we feel we deserve it.

The man in our story is overwhelmed by the spirit of uncleanness, of self-hatred. He’s out of control. He’s scary. His skin is slashed and bleeding. And he’s alone. As you might expect, no one will come near the man.

Jesus comes near. The man falls at his feet and says, “What have you to do with me, Son of the Most High; please don’t punish me.” The spirit of self-hatred has so permeated this man that he can only think of one thing Jesus would do to him, and that’s to punish him. He does not fall down before Jesus hoping for healing. But rather, punishment is what this man expects from God – which is sometimes what we expect from God.

Do you ever come to church like that? Not hoping for healing, but expecting punishment. You’ve done something wrong and you’re here for God to punish you. You’re hoping that the preacher will yell at you and that the sermon will crush your toes. Do you live like that before God down deep in your secret heart – always expecting God to punish you, never expecting God to pick you up out of your guilt and shower you with grace? How can you possibly love a God you fear only wants to punish you or a God you believe inflicts you with disease? It’s a religion some of us learned, then we turned it inward and have become our own judges and tormentors.

I don’t know in what condition you came here this morning or what the reason. It doesn’t matter. Jesus is here for deliverance, for the healing of his love.

The man asked Jesus: “What have you to do with me?”

Jesus wants the man’s deliverance from the dehumanizing forces that have possessed him. He orders the unclean spirit to come out of the man, “Come out! Leave him alone!” Jesus was not put off by the strangeness of the man’s appearance or behavior. He met him as a unique individual and a person of value. “What is your name?” Jesus asked.

The man said, “My name is Legion, for we are many. There are so many of us.” A legion of soldiers was numbered in the thousands. This man feels like an army of violent spirits. He is so pulled apart that he feels like a mob. It’s sometimes translated like that: “My name is Mob.”

Ever felt like there was a mob inside of you? A crowd of selves vying for control? An evil twin inside and you just knew the evil twin was going to win? Ever felt like there was a menagerie of evil forces inside having a field day in your soul – hundred yard dashes, sack races and everything?

When the intellectual giant C. S. Lewis was on the road to conversion to Christ, he said the Spirit of God revealed to him in a moment of sober reckoning all his false selves. He said: “For the first time, I examined myself with a seriously practical purpose, and there I found what appalled me: A zoo of lusts. A bedlam of ambition. A nursery of fears. A harem of fondled hatreds. My name was Legion.”⁵ Then there came into his life the healing mercy of God, the Christ who desires to save.

 

This dark story from Mark now takes a comic turn, and I don’t want you to miss it. The legion inside this man begs Jesus not to send them out of the territory. You see, this is unclean Gentile territory. And the unclean spirits know they have a better chance here than anyplace else. It’s like the demons are saying, “Jesus, cast us out of this man. But please don’t cast us out of Las Vegas. This is our kind of town.” The unclean spirits then hear some pigs nearby. They get a great idea. Unclean pigs are great temporary holding places for unclean spirits. So they beg Jesus, “Please Jesus, let us go into those pigs over there.”

And now the story becomes a reverse of Brer Rabbit and the Briar Patch. Remember how Brer Rabbit tricked Brer Fox and Brare Bear? They caught him and he said, “Please, do anything. But don’t throw me in that briar patch.” When that’s really exactly what he wanted. So they toss him in. And he goes hopping happily away, grinning as he goes, saying, “I was born and bred in a briar patch.”

In this story, Jesus tricks the unclean spirits or lets them outsmart themselves. He gives them their wish and lets them go into the pigs. And what do the pigs do? They run like a herd over the cliff into the sea and drown. And the townspeople are livid. 2000 pigs. That’s a significant economic loss to the community. So they ask Jesus to leave.

Personally, I think they could have been more inventive. They could have hauled the pigs out of the sea, slaughtered them, cooked them, chopped them up, added pickles and spices and had deviled ham! It was Gentile territory. Gentiles can eat pork!

The people are mad at Jesus and they beg him to leave town. He’s caused economic havoc. He’s bad for business. He’s just concerned about getting sick people well. He doesn’t care about the economic cost of healing. It’s an interesting scene, isn’t it. The formerly possessed man now sits by Jesus, fully clothed in his right mind. But the town, they don’t care that the man has been healed. They only care about the 2000 pigs who have taken a flying leap into the sea. It’s a lot of bacon. The crowd is more concerned with their economics than rejoicing over a man who was sick and is now healed. The people want Jesus out of town because he’s disturbed their economics.

So Jesus, who was often willing to shake off the dust when unwanted, gets back into the boat without a word and prepares to set sail. The man, now healed and whole, begs Jesus, “Please let me go with you!” He’s ready to follow. He’s ready to leave behind the people who had bound him in chains. But Jesus says, “No. Remain here, go home, and tell your friends and family about God’s love.”

People need signs that healing is possible and that a community of compassion is available. Because none of us gets healed all by ourselves. There was a man whose alcoholism had created public embarrassment as well as private harm. One day he stood in morning worship and told the church about his problem and how he was trying to walk the road to sobriety. And he said to the congregation: “Thank you for being a place where I can be sick and a place where I can get well.”

Can you think of a better description of Christian community than that? It’s the beauty of 12 step groups. The church has much to learn from their honesty and accountability.

The man goes and tells everyone how Jesus put his life back together, and all who hear it are amazed.

What a beautiful picture of transformation in this man. Cleaned up. Healed. Delivered. Happy and sane. He doesn’t hate himself anymore. He knows himself to be loved. He’s no longer naked. He’s clothed. He’s no longer bruised and bleeding. He has learned self-care. He’s no longer Legion. The mob inside his head has been silenced. And now he is one. Now he is whole.

And that’s what Jesus wants us to be: Whole. Fragmented no longer. No longer overwhelmed by confusion and self-hatred. No longer pulled apart. No longer like the fabled Civil War veteran who hopped on his horse and rode off in several different directions. But whole. One who has found what Thomas Merton called “a hidden wholeness”⁶ within each of us.

What about you? Have you learned to forgive yourself for your sins, your mistakes, and walk on in the grace of God? Have you realized your infinite worth in the eyes of the One Who Made You?

 

I don’t know who you imagine God to be. But I would ask you this morning to visualize a God who loves you – all of you, not just part of you – a God who loves you completely with an always-ready-to-forgive kind of love. He is here this morning to walk with you into tomorrow, to help you feel clean again, to free you from your chains of addiction and compulsion, to remove from within you the demon of self-hatred, and to cover you with love and grace so that in time you can learn to love yourself and be whole again. And then you can go tell your friends what God has done for you, that Christ is the “center that holds.”

 

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1. Karl Menninger, Man Against Himself, Mariner Books, 1956.
2. Richard Rohr, Breathing Under Water: Spirituality and the Twelve Steps. Franciscan Media, 2011, 108.
3. Parker Palmer, A Hidden Wholeness: The Journey Toward an Undivided Life, Jossey Bass, 2004
4. Rohr, 109
5. C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life, Fontana, 1959
6. Thomas Merton, “Hagia Sophia,” Emblems of a Season of Fury, New Directions, 1963