With Authority

Mark 1:21-28

February 14, 2021

Emmanuel Baptist Church; Rev. Kathy Donley

Image: Christ Preaching at Capernaum

Maurycy Gottlieb, circa 1878-79

Note: A recording of the worship service in which this sermon was preached may be found here: https://youtu.be/GRarupM44lM

Perhaps you’ve been to a stand-up comedy show when a heckler interrupted or a politician’s stump speech when a protester demanded attention. Maybe you haven’t been there in person but you may have seen clips of times when it was a big enough deal to make the news. When that happens, there is a different kind of energy in the crowd. People get nervous and excited. Some will internally side with the heckler, some with the comedian. For some it is just part of the entertainment, but others will be uncomfortable until the tension is resolved. Imagine that kind of disruption in church. Maybe you don’t have to imagine. Maybe you were there. It has happened in some minor ways during worship at Emmanuel. Usually when I was at the lectern. It was unexpected and perhaps distressing to some of us. We all kind of held our collective breath waiting for the interruption to end and worship to continue.

We can imagine Jesus at the lectern in Capernaum. Perhaps he has been speaking for 30 minutes or just for 5, but then the unnamed man yells out, disrupting everything. That feel of discomfort, of nervous energy, of waiting to see who will get the upper hand sets up the tension in this scene.

As people with a scientific worldview, we don’t quite know what to do with this story. We often apply contemporary categories to the man with the unclean spirit, suggesting that he might have schizophrenia or some other illness. Unlike first-century Palestinians, we don’t generally think in the category of demon possession, and so we want to reduce this story to categories that we understand.

Fred Craddock was a pastor and seminary professor of the last century who said, “we have not, by the announcement that we do not believe in demons, reduced one whit the amount of personal and corporate evil in the world. The names of the enemies have been changed, but the battles still rage.”[1]

Whether or not we believe in individual demons, we can faithfully enter into this story if we understand it as a struggle between good and evil. The demonic is that which distorts God’s good purposes. Perhaps it is not such much a personal being as patterns of behavior and ways of thinking that distort our sense of reality. I appreciate the ways that Thomas Troeger describes it in the hymn we sang earlier – doubts that stir the heart to panic, fears distorting reason’s sight, guilt that makes our loving frantic, dreams that cloud the soul with fright.[2]

The man in Capernaum is in the grip of something -- doubts or fears or guilt -- and Jesus delivers him from that. On one level, this is a story of individual healing. But it is more than that. This is an exorcism, a confrontation between competing authorities.

Scholar Ched Myers describes it as a symbolic action which carries weight and meaning beyond the individual level. Symbolic actions are significant because of the context in which they occur. A monk nails a list up on a church door. A woman sits down on a bus. Those actions matter on an individual level, but also on a much larger scale.

Jesus is in the middle of teaching. Mark has already said that the people are amazed at how Jesus teaches – with authority. Interestingly, not a word of what he was teaching is reported here. But something stirs up the man, so that he yells out “What do you have to do with us?” which is more literally translated “what do we have in common?”

“Why are you meddling, Jesus? What business is it of yours?”

“Stay in your lane, Jesus.”

The content of Jesus’ teaching is pushing someone’s buttons. It is challenging someone or something in that church. I’m using the word “church” on purpose, because if I say synagogue, then we might be tempted to think this phenomena happens only in other traditions, not in our own. And that would be to keep Jesus’ authority at a safe distance. So in the church, Jesus is teaching and what he says is a challenge to the religious leaders. We know that they are the target of the symbolic action because they are the only other named authority in the story.

Ched Myers says that Jesus’ symbolic acts were powerful not because they challenged the laws of nature [with miraculous healing] but because they challenged the very structures of social existence.[3] If you were near the top of the social order, you perceived Jesus as destructive and deviant. If you were near the bottom, you perceived him as liberating.

And lest we still think that this happens only in other traditions, I remember some conversations from my seminary days. With some regularity, the question of pastoral authority would be raised. The question might be framed “do pastors have special authority because we are called by God or because we are ordained?” Or it might be a conversation about how careful pastors should be about what they say and do because they wear their authority like a cape and any missteps might sully it. What I remember is that the male students were always very invested in the details of these conversations while the women tended to resist the very idea of a hierarchy in which pastors were a step above everyone else. I always appreciated the position of Fred Craddock who wrote a very influential book about preaching. It was entitled As One without Authority. As One Without Authority. Part of the premise of that book is that effective preaching enables people to hear the voice of Jesus as authoritative in their own hearts and minds, that pastors’ only claim to authority is in the same Jesus available to all. Jesus is the true authority.

A few years ago, the current president of my seminary delivered a graduation speech in which he challenged those future pastors to go and preach as ones with authority. That current president was a student when I was. Decades later, we still approach the question from very different points of view.

The demons attempt to name Jesus as a way to control him. Jesus silences them. Silencing our demons may be necessary so that we can hear the true authority in our lives.

Sometimes the demons are the voices in our heads. I don’t mean the kind of voices that might accompany mental illness. I mean the messages that we have absorbed over our lifetimes. They might be mantras from parents or grandparents. You might hear the voice of a favorite teacher or an honest critic who told you the truth. Many of your voices are in my head, along with those from other congregations. I know some of your favorite theological soap boxes, the things you think someone else really needs to hear, and something I said in a sermon once that you objected to. I have a lot of voices in my head. I expect you do too. Silencing those voices allows us to hear the true authority in our lives.

In her book Pastrix, Nadia Bolz-Weber explains it this way, “Before we do anything wrong and before we do anything right, God has named and claimed us as God's own. But almost immediately, other things try to tell us who we are and to whom we belong: capitalism, the weight-loss industrial complex, our parents, kids at school—they all have a go at telling us who we are. But only God can do that. Everything else is temptation. Maybe demons are defined as anything other than God that tries to tell us who we are.”[4]

I am fascinated that Mark tells us more about how Jesus taught than what he said. I suspect that Little Man’s Grandma is right when she said that Jesus just taught some simple truths about life and love. But the way that he taught enabled people to hear them in transformative ways, ways that challenged them and challenged the status quo. That was what amazed and astounded the people who heard him.

The African-American teacher and preacher Howard Thurman said it this way “There is something in every one of you that waits and listens for the sound of the genuine in yourself. It is the only true guide you will ever have. And if you cannot hear it, you will all of your life spend your days on the ends of strings that somebody else pulls.”[5] . . . If you cannot hear it, you will spend your days on the ends of strings that somebody else pulls. Knowing how committed Thurman was to following Jesus, it is not a stretch to understand that the sound of the genuine for him was the voice of Jesus resonating with authority in his life.

There are so many claims to authority these days; so many potential voices to attend to, so many alternate realities which prey on doubts and fears, which disturb our peace with distortions and subversions of God’s good purposes. With all of that swirling around us, it is imperative that we listen for the only true authority in our lives, that we silence all other voices except that of Jesus.

Listen, listen to the truest guide we will ever have. Know that before all else, God has claimed us and loved us. Trust that voice to comfort and challenge, to heal, to transform. Amen.

[1] Fred B. Craddock, Luke, Interpretation series (Louisville: John Knox Press, 1990), p. 66

[3] Ched Myers, Binding the Strong Man (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1988, 2008), pp 147-148

[4] Nadia Bolz-Weber, Pastrix: The Cranky, Beautiful, Faith of a Sinner and Saint (New York: Jericho Books, 2013), pp 138-139

[5] From Howard Thurman's 1980 commencement address at Spelman College.