On Demons

The Rev. Paddy Cavanaugh, Fourth Sunday after Epiphany, Year B, 1/28/24

Readings: Deuteronomy 18:15-20, 1 Corinthians 8:1-13, Mark 1:21-28

In the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, amen.

St. George’s let’s talk about demons. There comes a time in every liturgical year, when the lectionary turns to Jesus’s extraordinary public ministry, that the awkward topic of Jesus casting out demons arises. We all know and love the stories about Jesus the healer, Jesus the teacher, and Jesus the miracle worker, but when it comes to Jesus the exorcist… we’re often left feeling a little itchy and scratchy. The reality is we just don’t have a cultural and theological hook on which to hang this talk about demons anymore. Demons are just not something most of us really think about or know how to deal with when they come up in scripture.

Yet contrary to our modern-day experience, forces of spiritual darkness appear to be a topic of great importance in scripture. The story we hear today of Jesus casting out an unclean spirit from a possessed man is not a quirky, isolated incident. In fact, there are at least seven major accounts of Jesus casting out an untold number of demons in the New Testament, and many more instances of his disciples doing the same.

What in the world are we to make of this in the 21st century, when our primary frame of reference for exorcism comes from Hollywood movies and fantasy novels?

The most common response we have is to rationalize and contextualize these stories. Since the time of the Enlightenment in the 18th century, prevailing wisdom has told us that science and reason can explain any experience inconsistent with our modern understanding of the natural world. Thus, if you were to go to a library and look up books written about the accounts of Jesus’s numerous exorcisms, you’d find many of them making an anthropological argument that demonic possession was simply a primitive misunderstanding of mental illness, or that we can read these stories as ancient allegories about the darkness that exists in the world, but is ultimately human, and not spiritual, in origin.

I think that these attempts to explain these stories in terms of our known experience are admirable and represent a very human desire to make sense of an incredibly confusing world.

I also think that if we truly believe in the spiritual reality of a relational God who makes himself known to us in the material world of creation, as God did in Jesus, then it’s not an unreasonable step to take seriously the possibility that there are spiritual forces that may try to distract us and draw us away from the all-embracing love of God.

C.S. Lewis wrote emphatically on this topic in a hilarious and poignant novel called The Screwtape Letters. In it, a comically inexperienced demon tries to trick a human subject, identified in the book only as “the patient,” into the range of vices, temptations, and missteps that human beings commonly fall victim to, in order to distract him from the reality of God’s power and love. In one humorous instance, the demon tries to coax the patient into attending a church that is more like a nice social club where, quote “the vicar is a man who has been so long engaged in watering down the faith to make it easier for his supposedly incredulous and hard-headed congregation that it is now he who shocks his parishioners with his unbelief, not vice versa.”

To make a personal confession, this line was the impetus for this sermon today. Earlier this week, I too found myself tempted, perhaps by this same little demon, to preach on one of the easier lessons, and leave all this tricky demon business for Rev. Shearon to deal with next week when it comes around again. However, I was compelled by Lewis and a famous line attributed to the French poet Baudelaire, that “the greatest trick the devil ever pulled was to make humans believe he does not exist.”

So wherever you fall on the spectrum of belief about its origins, I think we can agree that evil is unfortunately a real presence in the world that cannot go ignored. Certainly in recent years there has been a cloud over our civic and political life that has extended into many of our personal lives, pitting us against our friends, family, and neighbors. Certainly in the broader world, geopolitically, right now there is ample evidence of the evil that enslaves us and the evil done on our behalf.

As people of faith who believe in the power of an infinitely loving God who is interested in making right what is wrong in the world. I think it benefits us in our understanding of this evil, and more importantly our faith in God’s power to overcome it, to try to perceive evil from spiritual lens, in addition to our scientific lens.

As Christians, our spiritual understanding of evil in the world begins with its end, at the foot of the cross. The gospel tells us that through the work of salvation accomplished on the cross, our Lord Jesus Christ took on all the works of darkness of every origin, human and otherwise, and not only neutralized them, but transformed them into the glory of God. The residual evil, sin, and death that continues to burden us is only a shell of its former self and in the final tally, it is ultimately powerless over us on account of the redemptive love which God has poured out on us.

Therefore, let me tell you first and finally that we have no need to fear any evil in this world so long as we have the love of God within us. St. Paul reminds us that “neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities… nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Rom. 8:38-39). However, we do still have to deal with it.

And how? Last Sunday evening we held a prayer vigil right here in this nave, in which we prayed for an end to the conflict in Palestine and Israel and called upon God to help us put an end to all the works of violence and evil in the world. It was a beautiful lofty prayer which from a purely scientific perspective might have seemed overly ambitious and empirically dubious as an effective strategy. However, as Katie Wenger, one of the co-organizers of the vigil wisely reminded us in an early planning meeting, “prayer is a form of action.” We believe in the effectiveness of prayer to change circumstances in our lives and in the world for the better.

First, prayer transforms individuals. Not just spiritually, but also clinically. Studies have indicated that intercessory prayer can have a positive effect on recovery outcomes in persons suffering from chronic and acute health problems.

Second, prayer transforms the social order. As the witness of countless heroic saints like Dorothy Day, Desmond Tutu, and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King attest, engaging in corporate and personal prayer strengthens our capacity to take communal action against the forces of darkness in our world. These saints would be the first to tell us that the success of their movements was directly tied to their faith in the power of a crucified God whose love liberates us from the bonds of evil. 

And third, and I need y’all to stick with me on this one, prayer transforms the cosmic order. If we did not believe this, there would be no need for us to be here at all. We could join Greenpeace, or the Rotary Club, or any benevolent social organization of our choosing and get the same thing out of belonging to those admirable institutions.

But no, the thing that keeps us coming back, again and again, to experience the love of God made real for us in our prayer and in this Holy Eucharist, is the faith that something actual is happening here. Even if we can’t always put our finger on it, and even if we don’t feel it strongly in our hearts every single time, our direct, physical encounter with God in the Holy Eucharist is a cosmological event. In it, the boundary between space and time, between the material and spiritual world collapses, and we are drawn into a mysterious transformation of reality as we know it as we are made one with God, in body, mind, and spirit.

And if God has the power to draw us into a world-shaking love of this magnitude, then God surely has the power cast out a few trifling demons. They are merely distractions from the reality of this love. You see, in the cosmic scheme of things, we really have no need to fear any of the evil that afflicts us, but we do need to take it seriously. And the way we do that is by taking seriously the far greater power of Jesus who delivers us from evil and empowers us to cast out the demons afflicting us in our own time. 

Christ Jesus is our advocate and mediator in this struggle, and by the work of salvation wrought on the cross, recalled in the Mass, and continued in the work of human hands, God’s love is victorious. God’s love transforms evil into glory. Amen.