Bless This Mess

[This message was shared during worship with the people of Saint Matthew Lutheran Church in Logan, Ohio, this morning.]

Mark 1:21-28
There are three main things to which I think today’s Gospel lesson point us.

The first is the power of Jesus’ teaching. The telephone call came, as happens so often in crisis situations, in the middle of the night. This was in my first parish. “Pastor,” the person on the other end of the line said, “We had to bring Mike to the hospital. Could you come up?”

I wasn’t surprised. Mike’s life was a mess. Apparently, all of his issues--emotional, psychological, spiritual, and medical--had come to a crisis. When Mike revealed during his intake interview at the hospital that he’d recently had thoughts of suicide, state law mandated that he remain hospitalized, even against his will.

I was there when the doctor revealed this to Mike. Folks, if I live to be a hundred-and-twenty, I will never forget the venom that spewed from Mike’s mouth at that. He acted like a cornered animal. It wasn’t just what he said, it was how he said it. There was menace in his posture, as though at any moment, he might pounce on any one of us.

Mike was admitted to the hospital for treatment and I know that all the counseling that he received in subsequent weeks helped him. But what helped most was a little devotional booklet that a friend gave to him. Every day, Mike read the booklet and the Biblical passage on which it was based. The book became dog-eared and worn during his weeks in the hospital. I remember during many a visit glancing over at him and seeing him gently move his finder over the binding of the book, so important had its contents become to him. Like many people through the centuries, Mike had moved to a place of sufficient desperation to actually pay attention to God’s Word.

This relates to our Gospel lesson: The people in the synagogue in Capernaum, where Jesus was visiting and may have even lived for a time, were “astounded" by Jesus. The original New Testament Greek says literally that they “were blown out of their minds.” The reason for their reaction, our lesson says, is that Jesus taught with “authority.” That word in Greek is exousia, which can also be translated as power. There was power and authority in Jesus’ teaching.

New Testament scholars believe that the teaching that the synagogue crowd heard from Jesus was the same teaching Jesus shared with people at the very beginning of His ministry, teaching that was summarized in words appearing in last week’s Gospel lesson: “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.”

That’s so simple. Where’s the Wow factor? What would cause the crowd to be “blown out of their minds”?

You know the answer. As we said last week, Jesus’ Word--the Word of God--has power. When Mike heard that Word and read it and thought about it, a transformation began to happen in his life. And I believe that every time that you and I encounter God’s Word--when we truly allow ourselves to pay attention to that Word--transformations can happen.

This brings up the second thing that I want to mention regarding today’s Gospel lesson: Jesus’ teaching can call out of our lives whatever prevents us from experiencing God’s wholeness, whatever keeps us from living life with God.

That’s what happened in the synagogue in Capernaum. In the middle of Jesus’ teaching there, a man filled with a demon, a spiritual agent of the devil, showed up, disrupting everything. Apparently referring to his demon buddies, the demon, speaking through the man he possessed, asked Jesus if He had come to get all of them. “I know who you, Jesus: the Holy One of God.”

Jesus was not about to let a demon teach people at worship in a synagogue about His identity as God in the flesh. That’s something all of us must come to by faith in the crucified and risen Jesus.

Besides, whenever the devil, the sin in the world, or our sinful selves talk about Jesus, the talk always has a spin designed to undermine our faith.

That’s why Jesus called out to the demon: “Be silent! Come out of him!” Jesus called the thing that was enslaving that man out, so that the man could be free.

And whatever it is that’s enslaving you—it may be a seemingly minor thing like a habit that prevents you from being the person God made you to be, Christ can do the same thing for you.

Young people, the Savior Who went to a cross and rose from the dead for you can give you a healthy self-esteem.

Middle age folks, caught in a rut, He can help you live with contentment and joy.

Older folks, dogged by a sense of your limitations, He can overcome your self-doubts and help you use your wisdom and experience for good.

Jesus and His Word have authority. Jesus and His Word can call the worst from out of us and set us free to be with Him now and forever. Here’s the third thing I want to point out from our Gospel lesson and it may be the most important thing: When Jesus works in our lives, our lives won’t always be easy. Martin Luther said that the believer in Jesus Christ is the Holy Spirit's workshop.

No matter how neat the carpenter, I’ve never seen a woodworking shop that didn’t get messy while the carpenter was making something. Wood shavings from the lathe and dust from the table saw are on the floor. As Jesus works on us, removing what separates us from God's goodness and forging and shaping our characters, things will get messy.

There are times when we don’t understand what God is doing in our lives. We resist and our faith falters.

There are moments when it’s easier to adopt the world’s ways, rather than God’s ways. We cave into selfishness.

When the chaos and confusion of our imperfect lives are submitted to the perfect love and order of Jesus Christ, the encounter can be messy. When Jesus called the demon out of the man at the Capernaum synagogue, it convulsed and cried and yelped. The evil in that man wouldn't give up without a fight!

Sinful habits and compulsions, just like all habits and compulsions, are hard to break. That’s because, as somebody has said, we form our habits and after a while, our habits form us. They get a grip on us. They wear ruts in our brains and lives.

The confrontation between Jesus’ word, which brings new life and freedom from old ways, and our sinful habits is not just explosive, but thoroughly, disturbingly unsettling and messy.

A man came to see me once. “I’m stealing from my company,” he told me, “and I know it’s wrong. But I can’t stop.” So far as I know, he never did stop. He had heard Jesus call out the evil into which he’d sunk, but he was unwilling to let it go. It would have been too messy to try.

A church member was visibly upset after worship one Sunday in my former parish. I thought that some tragedy had come his way. We went to a room where we could talk. “What’s wrong?” I asked. “I’m so angry with myself,” he explained. “God is so good to me. And yet I keep sinning.” He went on to explain that every week he hoped and prayed that when it came time for Confession and Absolution in the worship service, he wouldn’t be able to think of any ways in which he’d failed to love God and failed to love his neighbor as he loved himself. “I no more than receive forgiveness from one sin and seem to have it licked than I see the power of another one over me,” he said. I smiled and put my hand on this man’s shoulder. “In this life, the only time you’ll stop feeling the need to confess sin is when you’ve grown so far from God that you sin without regret. May you never get to that point!”

I was really expressing the hope that that man’s life would remain messy from God working in his life.

Pastor Rodney Stark tells a true story from his ministry: She had drifted along spiritually for a while, but came to a point where she felt a need for God. She began to attend church, not getting much out of it at first, when one Sunday, the pastor showed how Jesus and His Word could impact her life. It was as though he was speaking directly to her. Jesus always speaks to us through His Word, if we give Him the chance to do so.

Jesus' Word has authority. Jesus’ Word can call out of us everything that isn’t from God. And when we let it, Jesus’ Word can bring the messiness of positive change to our lives.

There is a disturbing untidiness that comes to our lives when Jesus confronts all that would otherwise separate us from God. May that messiness be a central element of your life every single day!

[The three take-away ideas for this text from Mark's Gospel, which dovetail with my own thinking, were identified in a wonderful sermon by Pastor Rodney Stark which I first read several years ago.]