Have You Come to Destroy Us?

(or, everything is okay)

Mark 1:14-28

                 Would you dare entertain the idea that everything is okay?

            “Have you come to destroy us?”  That’s what the man with the unclean spirit shouted at Jesus in the synagogue where he taught.  “Hush,” said Jesus to the man.  Many say the man was possessed--like demon possessed.  Others say there’s no such thing as demons.

     I think there’re demons in my television. I didn’t realize my television was possessed with the unclean spirits of legion demons until I started studying the Benedictine Rule of Life.  A man called John from Memphis has written a contemporary language version of the sixth century rule of life of Benedict of Nursia. 

            At the end of his little book, Always We Begin Again, John writes about how to end a day: “Skip the evening news, and discover that your life is not full of tragedy and violence.”  The evening news is the portal through which the awful demon brothers, anxiety and fear, journey nightly into our homes.  We let them.

            And they hang from the ceiling and lie spread out on the floor; they drape over the furniture like teenagers and wayward husbands who take up so much space you can’t ignore them.  They saturate the atmosphere in our sitting rooms and dens with violent images and tragic stories.  Some of it is true.  Some of it is not true.  And none of it is the reality of my living room.

            I know this, because I hushed the television and sat in the silence.  I looked up and down and all around.  I sat still and listened.  Everything was quiet--no demons on the floor, no demons hanging from the ceiling.  Sure enough, the violence and the tragedy had disappeared; they are not my reality.

            Now, that does not mean that sad, violent things don’t happen.  They do.  But why would I intentionally pipe them into my room, which is not a sad, violent place until I turn on the demon machine and kick open my mind to let them in to run wild and ransack my soul?

            Let’s think about this present moment.  Everything seems okay right now to me.  Does it seem okay to you?  Now, no doubt, many of us have sad thoughts in our heads right now.  Some of us have anger in our hearts right now.  Some of us are delighted.  Some of us are grieving.  But right this second as we sit here in this church, the sky is not falling.  No one is getting beat up and abused.  If you’re dying, you’re not dead yet.  Right?  Are there any dead people in here right now?

            Right here, right now, no one is being told they are not good enough….  In fact, let me say this: you are all beautiful, perfect children of God--loved beyond measure forever and ever, amen.  So, not only are you not being abused right now, you have just been told the beautiful truth which is that you are loved!  Good?

            So right now everything is okay.  Right now.  We’re not thinking about earlier this morning; we’re not thinking about later this afternoon.  We’re talking about right now.  Right now is peace--hushed, comfortable peace. 

            However, if I rolled a big t.v. in here and put it up front--moved the font and put it up in front of the altar so that you could all see it-- and turned it on to let the demons out, turned it on to some news program, I bet the anxiety level in here would shoot through the roof and the illusion that we are not okay would completely overcome the reality that we are okay.

            Someone would pull the plug on the television, the demons would be silenced, and we would settle down again into the comfortable reality of our “okayness.”

             I know what you’re thinking, “but everything is not okay.”  You’re right.  There is hunger and homelessness and disease and wreckage threaded all throughout life.  And we work to repair the damage.  Operating out of our okayness, we work to repair the damage.  Bit by bit--one day at a time--out of our okayness we work to repair the damage.

            We stock the shelves of the food pantry.  We keep the Grace House open.  We feed the hungry at the free lunch.  We support the Hope Center, which is a local shelter for battered women.  We are raising money to rebuild the earthquake-destroyed Episcopal Cathedral in Port au Prince, Haiti, along with so many other crushed buildings in our hemisphere’s poorest country.

            You know, if we went to the site of the crashed cathedral right this second, transported through space at light speed so that in the very next moment we were standing in the middle of the rubble, we would see that the building is smashed, but everything’s okay.”  No one is being crushed right this second by falling walls.  The violence of the crushing quake is hushed.  Everything is okay right now. 

            We think about the people who died in the earthquake and we think, “Well, that’s not okay.”  And it’s not; it’s sad and tragic and it hurts.  And, even still, Christians believe that our dead are okay.  Because life is no end and life goes on, as our dead enter into the heavenly embrace of our Creator God.

            We call it resurrection.  Resurrection is the purest form of okay.  Resurrection is like liquid concentrate okay.  I believe Jesus came into the world to say, “Hush.  Everything’s okay.  I came to heal you.”   And then he traveled all around pointing out the things that are not okay:

               Poverty: not okay.  Help the poor.          

               War: not okay.  Love your enemies.

               Hunger: not okay.  Feed the hungry.

               Injustice: not okay.  Love and visit the imprisoned.

               Racism and prejudice: not okay.  Everyone is your neighbor.

               Greed and selfishness: not okay.  Give your stuff away.

               You are judgmental: not okay.  Get a mirror.  There’s something in your eye.

“Hush,” says Jesus, can you see when you focus on me how everything begins to change and you become okay?”

            Have you ever been in a car wreck, a bad fall, or been beat up?  And gotten up and brushed yourself off and looked yourself over and caught your breath and you verify that you’re still alive, and then what do most people say?  “I’m okay.  Okay.  I’m okay.”  Sometimes we have to fall down and nearly die before we can begin the ascent into healing. 

            When Jesus first came on the scene, teaching about the tremendous power of God’s love, a man with an unclean spirit--maybe he was demon-possessed--shouted out in the middle of church, “I know who you are!  Have you come to destroy us!?”  The man was trembling and overcome with fear and terror.  He was not okay, and his question sprang up out of his deep, fear-soaked doubt.  He was wild-eyed, angry, and hurt.

            “Hush,” said the Christ.

            I can see the scene in my mind.  Jesus raised his hand in the air, as if he were about to give a blessing.  He looked at the man and he loved him and he said, “Hush.”    The man asked his question again, only a bit softer this time:  “Have you come to destroy us?

            “Hush.”

            Again the question, softer still, “Have you come to destroy us?”

            “Hush.”

            Now, Jesus turns his held-up hand and flicks his wrist as if giving a direction in traffic and he says, “Hush, and come out of him.”

            The man shook as if an earthquake had hold of his soul, and he cried out in a piercing scream, and he slumped to the floor in a sweaty mess, and he whispered, “Have you come to destroy us?”

            And Jesus, the Christ, said, “Hush, little one, I have come to heal you.  Everything is okay.”

              The man breathed the words again, Have you come to destroy us?

              “No, I have come to heal you.”

               The man said softly, Have you …come to heal…me?

               “Yes.”

               The man’s eyes grew full of light and he said ever so quietly,  Is everything okay?

               “Yes.  said Jesus, Now, hush…, hush…, hush.”

            Jesus Christ has come into the world to heal us.  Everything is okay.  Now, hush and soak in his healing love.  Fall down to begin the ascent into the saving, healing love of God.

            Hush.    Hush.    Hush.

Amen.