Those Demons

Monday of Week 7 in Ordinary Time

Mark 9:14-29

What do we have?

A Father: Eager in his budding faith

A Son:  Possessed and in need of healing…liberation…

Jesus:  Getting a little impatient?

The Disciples: Just off the the transfiguration and appearing in need of a little fine-tuning

A Particular Demon:  Who responds only to prayer

Matthew names it epilepsy

Mark isn’t interested particularly

For Mark it is a case of demonic possession and the terrible affliction and suffering that goes with that

Getting beyond the theological problems, which can be worked out here, I can see in my own life, a kind of slipping into ‘possession’ and having it afflict me…in fact.

It isn’t that hard for me to imagine myself somewhere in this story of healing, hope, and faith.

But faith in what???

Maybe it is faith in change as a possibility?

Faith in the companionship of the Holy Spirit?

Faith in the possibility of living an accompanied life?

Faith in receiving healing and wholeness and participating in an-other’s reception of the same?

That’s a good start

It has happened

It continues to happen

It will happen again

Love Who?

You have heard it said…

But I say…

Part II

Matthew 5:38-48

The sermon on the mount continues…

When the whole “an eye for an eye” system of justice came about

You can bet it was an improvement

“An eye for an eye” meant no more overkill

No more wiping out whole clans because someone stole a loaf of bread

…an improvement

But we human beings can do better

Enter Jesus

It’s time for another improvement

The cycle of violence

Fed by revenge and vengeance

Escalates in the absence of the courage to speak a word of mercy

There is not a conflict between Justice and Mercy

The refusal to return evil for evil opens up a new arena for a deeper realization of justice

The call to love is a call to step outside the feeding frenzy of sacred violence*

But the frenzy is lightening fast

And getting swept up can happen in an instant of spiritual sloth!

Love your enemies

Just do it

And see what happens

*which disguises as gossip, shunning, oooh...and a lot of stuff I do on a regular basis

Need a Spit Shine?

Mark 8:22-26

His sight was restored

And he could see everything distinctly

When I was young

My Dad had a careful routine surrounding

Polishing his shoes

There was the old shoebox

The cloth

The tins of polish in brown and black

And all shades in between

Finally, was the brush

He would wrap the cloth around a fingertip

Dab it in the polish

Put his left hand in the shoe to mold it firm

And buff with intense pressure

In circles

Dab again

Rub again

Dab again

Rub again

And then he would hold the shoe

at arms length

and observe his work

Tilting it from side to side

A few more dabs and rubs

Another observation

Then my favorite part

The buffing

He would take the brush

And as if the brush were a fighter jet

He rhythmically swooped that brush down and across the shoe

Swooping up and down

With swiftness

And at differing angles

…as his left hand

moved the target strategically

Oh yeah…and he periodically spit on the shoe as he did so

Jesus heals the blind man in today’s gospel with spittle.  And the healing happens in stages (the scholars make much of that)

As I read the text

I thought of my Dad’s shoe shining ritual

In the Gospels, healings happen

And they are once and done

That is what narratives capture

But as for me

The ritual needs repeating

Like shoe-shining

Dulling happens

I don’t usually notice

The gradual blurry-ing

But when thanksgiving wells up inside

I know that I have been healed once again

The sacramental life

With its rhythm

And predictability

Works on me like the

contents of that shoe box

in my Dad’s careful hands

GO DEEPER!*

6^th Sunday After Epiphany

Matthew 5: 21-37

GO DEEPER

The Sermon on the Mount continues

The Beatitudes set the vision for a life of blessing

Last week we were challenged to be salt and light

And today…not so happy-happy

There is a refrain in our Gospel today

You have heard it said…

But I say

You have heard it said…

But I say

Jesus, after telling us that not one jot or tittle of the law will be erased

After telling us that he has not come to replace but rather to fulfill the law

He then says

In not so many words

But you my friends

If you want to follow me

You’ll have to go deeper

…DEEPER

I think sometimes

when we hear the law

Thou shalt not…

It can be a little too easy

to place ourselves outside all the evil in the world

I haven’t murdered anybody lately

I’m not a terrorist

And my adulterous behavior is under control

But digging deeper

Digging into the seeds of anger and the seeds of lust

That hits home for everyone

The Law

It sets us up for a kind of moral minimalism

That’s what our legal system promotes in a way

Our laws are set up as ‘minimum requirements’

Just don’t do these things and you won’t go to jail

I had a professor who talked about the difference between

Our law---English law

And Church Law---which is from Roman law

(I don’t know if I have the terms right)

But the point was that one was a set of minimum standards

Meant to keep culture orderly

And sane and chaos free

And the other

Sets the top bar

And asks us to reach

Jesus is calling the disciples and

The curious crowd to

Engage, and stretch and reach

To dig deeper

He’s not interested in minimums

But there is more

there is something else at work in this passage

Remember that bit about leaving your gift at the altar?

I think that’s the clue to the ‘how’

Because we like short cuts

I’ll just make a nice gift

And then it will all be good with God

I’ll make it up to God indirectly

Then I don’t really have to do

the work

of making peace

Or of reconciling with my neighbor

I’d rather pay;)

There is something nice and clean cut

…a religious life based on transactions

It is so clean and tidy

And mathematical

I’ll always know where I stand

But I hear Jesus saying in this part of his sermon

‘That’s just not good enough’

I don’t want your gift as a payment

I want it in Thanksgiving

Murder, adultery, and every grave sin

They all begin as a seed…

A seed of anger

A seed of lust

A seed of resentment or jealousy

There is a continuum…

Between the seed….and the eruption

Left alone

Left un-reflected-on

The seeds grow

Our own inattention acts as fertilizer

Reflecting on this text

Called to mind an incident that happened

25 years ago

Rob and I had 3 children under 5

It was a particularly tough time for us

On Christmas Eve…or the Eve of the Eve

After he had been gone for a week

I took my building resentment

out to do the last minute

Santa Shopping

I was tired

Stressed

And it was late

I took my 80 bucks

And filled my cart at Toys R Us

I emptied my cart at the cashier

I hadn’t pushed the cart in ahead of me

Through the check out line

I Absent-mindedly left it behind me

…there was nobody coming up

The checkout lady was giving me my change

When…WHAM!

The cart hit me with great force in my side

The wind was knocked out of me

I turned and saw a woman

She had pushed the cart with all her might

Pushed that cart into my side

And she said “you think I want to deal with your stupid cart?”

I was too tired

Too stressed

To do anything

To react in any way

I just left

I went to my car and cried

Not for that lady

Not really for me

Maybe just because it was Christmas and that was ugly!

I hadn’t thought about this incident in a long long time

I am recalling it now with different questions

Did the other lady go to her car and cry too?

Did she say to herself

‘where the hell did that come from?’

And what about me?

So many things could have happened if I hadn’t been saved by my exhaustion

I could have found some choice, juicy words for that lady

I could have winked at the clerk and said something snide under my breath

I could have shoved the cart right back at her

What I do know is that

Christmas can be so stressful

It was for me that year

But I still could afford to run and spend $80 on Santa Gifts

Jesus doesn’t seem to make any distinction

About which side we are on.

When anger erupts it spurts its seed everywhere

Maybe going deeper means

Catching as much as we can

and dealing with it

Maybe it doesn’t matter who started what

The honor is in being the one to make the first move

The honor is in leaving the gift there

before the altar and going

Going deeper

Going toward reconciliation

And the scripture also answers the ‘why’ question

If we don’t

We’ll never get out of jail

I have a friend who asked me to pray for her

And for the healing of a relationship

the prayer she asked for was a NOVENA

which is a nine day dedicated ritualized prayer

These are scripted prayers

that ask for the intercession of Mary by one of her many titles.

This was a prayer asking for the intercession of

Mary, the Undoer of knots

I loved the image as soon as I saw it

There was this statue of Mary

With beautiful flowing, unknotted,

untangled ribbons

All around her

Isn’t that what unreconciled anger, resentment…sin

Does to us

Doesn’t it just tie us up in knots?

I imagine that being tangled and knotted up

is what it feels like to never get out of jail

All of us have untied knots

Knots in necklaces

Knots in shoelaces

I can’t even count the number Christmas lights I have unknotted

And to do it right

You have to go deep

To the beginning

To where the knot began

To the seed

I hear Jesus saying

Go Deeper

I’ll be there

Let’s meet in that place

That place where the law is inscribed in your heart

That secret place,

Where it is a bit more quiet

where your conscience

Can hear my voice

And there we’ll start untying

And you will know the grace

…the profound joy

…and the deep, deep delight

of leaving your gift at the altar

and doing the work

of living a heroically generous life