Lutheran Church of the Cross, Arlington Heights
10 June 2018 + Lectionary 10B (Pentecost 3)
Mark 3.20-35

Well, that escalated quickly. In one moment, Jesus and his disciples are about to sit down for a quiet meal at home. And then, all of a sudden, Jesus is confronted by an angry mob, made up of the religious scribes and his own family. He’s gone out of his mind! He’s possessed by a demon!

How did we get here? What happened, only three chapters into Jesus’s ministry in Mark, to elicit such a strong reaction against him? When his family heard it… heard what? Maybe it’s helpful to back up a bit…

Last week, we heard the story of Jesus’s disciples plucking grain to eat and Jesus himself healing the man with a withered hand on the Sabbath — actions that lead to a debate about what Sabbath is all about and, ultimately, to the beginning of the conspiracy to have Jesus destroyed. Then, Jesus retreats with his disciples, with a great multitude in tow, and Jesus continues to preach and teach, to cure and heal, to cast out demons and drive out unclean spirits. So overwhelmed by the response and all the people coming to him, Jesus starts recruiting followers, twelve of them to be exact, whom he appoints to proclaim the message of good news and continue the work of casting out demons that he began.

And then he comes home, to sit down and have a little rest and something to eat, which brings us to our passage at hand. When his family heard it… When his family heard about everything Jesus was doing — announcing the dawn of the reign of God, proclaiming the message of good news and liberation, casting out demons and driving out evil forces — they went out to restrain him…

“While confined here in the Birmingham city jail,” the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. begins his letter to his fellow clergy colleagues, “I came across your recent statement calling my present activities ‘unwise and untimely.’” In the hard-fought struggle against segregation, the response among many in the church, and mostly the white church, if we’re being honest, was one of hesitancy: Wait! they said. It was to those who tried to restrain King and other civil rights leaders, who thought it was all too much, too quickly, whose words and actions (or lack thereof) suggested that those fighting injustice had gone out of their minds, it is to these people that King responds: Waiting doesn’t work because waiting almost always means never. Because freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor.

Wait! those who try to restrain Jesus tell him. It’s too much, too quickly. Sure, there are people who are hungry, who are suffering, who are sick, who are possessed by demons, and someone should do something about that, eventually. But not now. It’s causing too much of a scene. Wait…

Speaking of demons: Mark seems to be a bit obsessed with them. Jesus gains popularity by casting out demons; his disciples have the authority to cast out demons themselves; and the scribes are convinced that Jesus himself is possessed by a demon. What are we supposed to make of that? Demons, in the supernatural sense, can seem like a foreign concept to our supposedly sophisticated, 21st-century minds, though it is also true that many of our Christian siblings around the globe even today are convinced of their existence. I honestly don’t know, and that question is for another sermon.

But I am convinced that evil is real: racism, sexism, homophobia, poverty, gun violence, lack of access to health care, immigrants separated from their families at the border,  the stigma of suicide and mental illness, gender-based violence and discrimination, ecological harm and destruction to our planet. Evil is real, and these are our demons.

Evil pervaded Jesus’s world as much as it plagues our own. The demons of injustice haven’t gone away in all these years and it seems they’re not going away anytime soon, and that makes the call to wait, the call to exercise restraint, all the more absurd.

Jesus sees the demons of injustice around him, and he is compelled to do something, to act: to resist oppression, to feed the hungry, to heal the sick, to cast out demons, to proclaim liberation and abundant life for all.

We know this is the call of the church. We don’t always practice it, but we hear it all the time. Yet even at our best, sometimes it can feel like a losing battle. How long, O Lord? we cry, echoing the psalmist, exasperated and weary at seeing so much brokenness, so much evil, so much injustice, around us every day.

In the midst of that, the biblical witness also reminds us of our chosenness by God. In Mark’s gospel, Jesus announces that the reign of God is one where outsiders will become insiders, and he redraws the lines of family and belonging. Who are my mother and my brothers? Jesus isn’t exactly dismissing or forgetting his birth family, as if he needs to be reminded. But looking at those who sit around him, he says, Here are my mother and my brothers! These, all of them, all who are oppressed, cast down, marginalized, are my family!

In God’s reign of justice that Jesus has come to announce, all are included. When Jesus redraws the lines of family and belonging, he paints a picture of what the reign of God looks like: displacing a reign of evil and the demons of injustice with God’s reign of justice and equity, displacing a reign of exclusion with God’s message of inclusion, displacing a reign of hate with the gospel message of love.

In Mark, the beginning of Jesus’s ministry starts with his baptism, a sign of his chosenness by God: “You are my Son, the Beloved.” And in our baptism, we too are chosen and beloved by God.

In Jesus’s family, water is thicker than blood. It is the waters of baptism that that make us siblings with and in Christ; it is these waters which unite us with God; and it is these waters which unite us with each other. In the waters of baptism, God chooses us and binds us together in God’s family.

It is these waters of baptism into which we are immersed and from which we rise daily, drowning evil, committed to resisting the demons of injustice, and striving for God’s reign of love.

Rooted in this baptismal covenant, our identity as God’s own children, named and claimed as God’s own beloved, an identity which no one and nothing can ever take away, we are given the freedom and power to resist evil, injustice, and oppression in whatever forms they present themselves — indeed, the freedom and power to cast out demons.