The "evil" Captain Kirk from "The Enemy Within"
On Sunday, January 28th, we considered the story of Jesus healing a man with
an unclean spirit. In this story, the unclean spirit immediately recognizes that Jesus is the
Holy One of God—but the text doesn’t tell us if the unclean spirit responded in
anger or in fear. I decided to read it both ways, to give a sense of
how each response can color our understanding of this story.
The Enemy Within (1/28/18)
Sermon
I borrowed the title of my sermon from a very famous
episode of Star Trek. In “The Enemy
Within,” Captain Kirk beams back to the Enterprise
from the planet Alpha 177, but there’s a problem with the transporter. A few
minutes later, after everyone has left the room, another version of Kirk beams
back to the Enterprise. Nobody
witnesses the return of the other captain, so nobody realizes that there are
two captains.
Somehow, the transporter split the elements of Kirk’s
personality and placed it into a separate copy of his body. The first version
contained all of Kirk’s compassion and nobility, the second version had all of
Kirk’s aggressive traits. This version is sometimes referred to as the “evil”
Captain Kirk, but that’s an oversimplification. The kinder, gentler version of
Kirk who came through the transporter first is indecisive; he’s unable to make
decisions. The point of the episode is that we are the sum total of all our
traits, even those that seem to be negative—and we need some of those less-desirable
attributes sometimes. The question is, how do we balance those different
characteristics of our personalities?
This morning’s Gospel lesson offers another story of “the
enemy within.” There’s a man in the synagogue who was afflicted with or
possessed by an unclean spirit. The unclean spirit is the enemy inside of that
man, but it goes even deeper than that. In Jesus’ time, people believed that
any illness, any ailment, any deformity was a punishment from God. These
afflictions were seen as punishment for sins. The afflicted were isolated
because of their conditions—other people were afraid to reach out because the
sins of the afflicted persons would contaminate the healthy people. Sin was
thought to be contagious.
What’s more, the man with the unclean spirit would have
been ritually impure. That is, he wasn’t allowed to participate in Jewish
religious life until he was cleansed of his sins. But because he was seen as
impure, nobody would want to minister to him. In a sense, this man was the
enemy within the synagogue.
This story is Jesus’ first public act of ministry in the
Gospel of Mark. This tells us a lot about who Mark thinks Jesus is. Mark doesn’t
offer some sort of vague philosophical statement about the character or
personality of Jesus. That is, Jesus isn’t just the Word of God, made flesh;
Jesus is the Word of God, acting the world. And in Mark’s gospel, Jesus’ first
act is to reach out and minister to the man with an unclean spirit.
Jesus breaks boundaries!
Jesus ministers to a man who was cut off from the
community, without fear of contamination.
Jesus heals this man on the Sabbath. Jesus does this without
fear of the religious authorities.
Jesus breaks the boundaries that cut this man off from the
community because Jesus has the authority to transcend the religious rules that
prevent others from reaching out to the man.
The unclean spirit is the only character in this story that
recognizes the true source of Jesus’ authority. Others recognize that Jesus has
a kind of authority that the scribes don’t possess, but it’s the unclean spirit
that truly knows that Jesus is the Holy One of God.
In his first letter to the Corinthians, which was one of
the alternate readings for today, the Apostle Paul writes:
We know that "all
of us possess knowledge." Knowledge puffs up, but love builds up. Anyone
who claims to know something does not yet have the necessary knowledge; but
anyone who loves God is known by him. (8:1-3)
It occurs to me that the
unclean spirit has knowledge, but it doesn’t have love. But to be honest, I don’t
know if it’s afraid of Jesus’ authority or if it’s angry that Jesus is going to
cast it out. That’s why I read the story both ways.
As I look at the Church today, not just here at Rehoboth,
but all mainline Protestant churches, I get a sense of hesitation. I sense that
we’re not completely willing to follow Christ’s call; that we’re not willing to
seek out the unclean spirits and heal those who are afflicted. I mean, we’re
willing to do some of that, but not the stuff that makes us feel uncomfortable;
the stuff that calls for us to change; the stuff that calls us to be in
relationship with people who don’t look like us or act like us.
For a long time, now, we’ve thought of the Church as a
refuge from the outside world, a place where we come to retreat. We come to
hear a gospel that comforts us, rather than a Gospel that challenges us. We seek
the soft reassurance that we’re doing it right and eventually we’ll get our eternal
reward. And in this, we’ve created a Church that simply mirrors all of the
divisions within our society, rather than a church that breaks down the walls
of hostility that separate us from one another.
One of my dearest colleagues in ministry told me a story about
a church that mirrored the divisions in society. It was also a story about her
father, who began to feel the call to ministry in the 1950s. He had a young
family and money was tight. He sold insurance and went to seminary part time,
all while raising a family in rural North Carolina.
At some point in the 1960s, he finished seminary and he was
ordained in the Southern Baptist tradition. He was called to serve a church in
Richmond, Virginia. He took the words of the Apostle Paul to heart: “There is
no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer
male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:28). No
doubt, he also heard Martin Luther King, Jr. say that Sunday morning at 11:00
AM is the most segregated hour of the week. So, this man decided he would
invite some African Americans to worship at this white Baptist church in
Richmond. He thought his congregation would grow in spirit and in numbers.
It didn’t go well.
In a few months, the members of the congregation in
Richmond asked their new pastor to leave. They wanted their church to remain
the way it had always been. They didn’t want that sort of change. The man was
heartbroken. He returned to selling insurance and he never went back to
ministry.
That was Richmond, Virginia in the 1960s, and I think our
situation in Rostraver Township in 2018 is somewhat different, but the pattern
is familiar. “Throughout Mark’s Gospel, the religious leaders are so dead set
on maintaining the ‘religious stats quo’ that they lose sight of the One for
whom life is maintained.”[1] That is, in the Gospel of
Mark, the religious authorities lose sight of the commandment to love their
neighbors as they love themselves. Instead, they focus on the laws and the
traditions; they attack Jesus for healing people on the Sabbath, among other
offenses. For the religious authorities, Jesus becomes the enemy within.
Now I don’t think that you folks are angry at Jesus or that
you’re refusing to follow Christ’s call, but I do think that we’re all a little
afraid of change. We’re all a little afraid to do things that are outside of
our comfort zone, like healing the sick or casting out unclean spirits.
In this story, Jesus is the only person who could heal the
man with the unclean spirit: He’s the only one who is willing to cross the
boundary between clean and unclean to reach out to the man with the unclean
spirit. Jesus has the authority to cast out unclean spirits because he is the
Holy One of God and because of this, Jesus breaks the barriers that prevented
other people from reaching out to the man with the unclean spirit.
In Mark’s Gospel, Jesus is what Jesus does. Jesus breaks
boundaries. In Mark’s Gospel, Jesus is
the breaking of boundaries—God broke the boundary between heaven and earth when
God entered the world in the person of Jesus. In this, Jesus also breaks down
the barriers between God and humanity. When Jesus is baptized, God breaks open
the heavens to announce that Jesus is God’s beloved, with whom God is well
pleased.
In Jesus, God gets to be in a direct relationship with God’s
people, and we get to be in a direct relationship with God. We think that
healing bodies and spirits is the work of Jesus, and surely it is, but that
work belongs to us, too—Jesus broke the boundary that separated us from that
work. The Gospels tell us that the disciples did the same work; Acts tells us
that the Apostles did the same work.
I’ll be honest, I get uncomfortable with the idea of
casting out unclean spirits—that’s scary stuff—but I do believe we can be part
of the process of healing broken spirits. I don’t have an easy, off-the-shelf
plan of action for you. But I do believe that comfort and complacency and our
desire to remain the same are barriers to the work that Jesus calls us to do.
So, let’s work together to find those broken places where we fear to tread, and
then let us work to mend those breaches and heal those broken spirits. Thanks
be to God. Amen!
Benediction
Now, beloved, as you depart from this place, remember that
we are called to be the Church, the body of Christ in the world today. We are
called to go forth and be instruments of God’s love and peace and love and reconciliation.
We are called to do the difficult work of mending broken spirits. Do not return
evil for evil to any person, but know that we are all loved by God, and that we
are called to reflect that love to everyone we meet. Go forth and be the salt
of the earth and the light of the world. In the name of Jesus Christ, our Lord,
let all God’s children say, Amen!
[1]
Brian K. Blount and Gary W. Charles. Preaching
Mark in Two Voices. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press (2002), p.
39.
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