Foundry UMC DC: Sunday Sermons
Religion & Spirituality:Christianity
How Will We Be Known?
A sermon preached by Rev. Ginger E. Gaines-Cirelli with Foundry UMC, February 7, 2020, fifth Sunday after the Epiphany. “Tired Feet, Rested Souls” series.
Texts: Isaiah 40:27-31, Mark 1:32-39
Let’s talk about demons. What comes up in you when you hear the word? Perhaps it’s an image from a story or movie. Perhaps it’s a feeling of fear or anxiety. Maybe it’s a particular person or group. Perhaps the word “demon” raises curiosity or maybe a description or explanation of what a demon is from previous study. I imagine that many will understand that things we now explain through medical science may very well have been called the work of demons in the 1st century.
In verse 32 of our Gospel text, people bring to Jesus “those possessed with demons.” To be possessed is to be influenced or controlled by something. Demons—or fallen angels—are generally understood as spiritual beings who are against God, literally “anti-Christ.” The Greek word in verse 32 is daimonizomenous, meaning to fall under the power of a demon. So one way to think of demon possession is a person who willingly or unwillingly has a malevolent spirit in their lives in a way that controls or influences them. As a result, these persons do harm to themselves and others. I wonder what comes to mind as potential current examples or experiences of this…
The same word daimonizomenous, can be translated “demonized.” Consider: to “fall under the power of a demon or fallen angel” may also be understood as a life owned, curtailed, damaged by anti-God beings outside the self (beings acting upon you, not within you). Hear the story with this way of translating the word: “That evening, at sundown, they brought to Jesus all who were sick or demonized…” Those who are “demonized” may have been named as evil, or worthy of contempt or blame. Why? Well, why are people demonized today? Because of who they are, what they look like, what they have, what they’ve done, what they’ve said. Scapegoating, blaming, tribal hatreds, prejudice, all of this is both ancient and ever new. Right now there’s a lot of demonization going on. I wager many if not most of us will have a person we could slap the word “demon” on right now.
In any and all the ways we think about demon possession, make no mistake that it affects the whole of a person’s life. In the culture of Jesus’ time, both illness and daimonizomenous meant separation from community, exclusion, isolation, and often harsh treatment.
For those who find the whole idea of “demons” hocus-pocusy or simply distasteful, let me suggest that you don’t have to buy in to the notion that there are angelic beings who serve Sauron or Voldemort or Satan in order to acknowledge that evil is real and a powerful force that affects human lives and relationships. Wherever it comes from, there are powers that take hold of humans and lead us to do terrible things. This is not to say that we have no culpability for the harms we commit—in “a devil made me do it,” get-out-of-jail-free-card kind of way. But it is to simply be honest about the forces that tempt us and that bind us.
Here’s a personal example. Over the years, I have grown increasingly aware of and angry about the way that as a white person I’ve been soaked in ways of perceiving, thinking, assuming, acting from the moment I was born—ways informed by white supremacy.
And let’s pause a minute for some definition of what I’m talking about when I speak of “white supremacy.” (with thanks to Dr. Izetta Mobley for sharing her expertise and resources) “While most people associate white supremacy with extremist groups like the Ku Klux Klan and the neo-Nazis, white supremacy is ever-present in our institutional and cultural assumptions that assign value, morality, goodness, and humanity to the white group while casting people and communities of color as worthless, immoral, bad, inhuman and ‘undeserving.’” Legendary scholar Barbara Smith writes, “Toxic as such beliefs are, white supremacy is not merely the individual delusion of being superior to Black people. Institutionalized white supremacy does not need individual bigotry in order to function, because it is a universal operating system that relies on entrenched patterns and practices to consistently disadvantage people of color and privilege whites.” White supremacy is “baked in” to our political, economic, and cultural systems and fuels widespread ideas of white superiority and entitlement—both consciously or unconsciously.
Being completely unaware or intentionally denying this state of things leaves a person like me like a bull in a china shop, bound to break and destroy and do harm. But here’s the thing: awareness of the reality and power of white supremacy doesn’t mean that I automatically can stop the behaviors or the assumptions or micro- or macro-aggressions against my siblings of color, no matter how much I desire to. The last thing I want to do is harm. And even when I’m trying to be a good ally, I hurt people I love, honor, and admire. And it makes me angry that I didn’t get any choice about being formed in a white supremacist culture, it is simply the water in which we all swim. I am bound by it, scarred, and stained by it. It is a power that is not of God, that is directly opposed to the love of God and of neighbor, that is directly in conflict with the Kin-dom of God that is the heart of Jesus’ proclamation.
You see I am at some level possessed by—under the influence of—the demon of white supremacy. Unchecked, this leads to daimonizomenous, demonizing, blaming, belittling, silencing, excluding people of color. It can also, frankly, lead me to demonize those I blame for fueling and continuing to sustain the white supremacy I was born in to. It makes me sad and angry that there’s so much daimonic power at work in and around me! //
Thanks be to God that Jesus is more powerful than the demons and that Jesus loves me and loves you. Thanks be to God that Jesus shuts down the demonic voices. Thanks be to God that Jesus proclaims in word and deed the good news of the Kin-dom—setting captives free, removing blinders that keep us from perceiving, and giving us freedom and power to resist evil, injustice, and oppression in any form they present themselves.
You see, we do have free will. You can choose, I can choose, whose influence and control we will surrender to. If we choose Jesus, our priorities will begin to reflect the love, compassion, and justice of God. And when we inevitably fall or push someone else down, Jesus will be there to forgive and help us all get back up and stay on the journey. Under the influence of Jesus, you will find yourselves being honest about the state of your own life and willing to call out that which is doing harm in yourself and the harm being done to siblings’ bodies and spirits. When we are possessed by the love of God through Jesus, we will be willing to risk much in our resistance of evil in the world. We will be willing to try and to keep trying.
I’m painfully aware that truly moving toward both awareness of white supremacy and the concrete changes such awareness inspires may be easier for individuals than groups. Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote in his Letter from the Birmingham City Jail, “Individuals may see the moral light and voluntarily give up their unjust posture; but as Reinhold Niebuhr has reminded us, groups are more immoral than individuals.” He asks, “Is organized religion too inextricably bound to the status quo to save our nation and the world?” That remains a very “live” question. From where I sit, King’s assessment of the American church has shifted little. He wrote, “So here we are moving toward the exit of the twentieth century with a religious community largely adjusted to the status quo, standing as a taillight behind other community agencies rather than a headlight leading men to higher levels of justice.” He goes on, “So often the contemporary church is a weak, ineffectual voice with an uncertain sound. So often it is an archdefender of the status quo. Far from being disturbed by the presence of the church, the power structure of the average community is consoled by the church’s silent—and often even vocal—sanction of things as they are.”
Foundry has been known over the years to at least try to be headlights that lead to “higher levels of justice.” We take pride in this piece of our identity and call. We take every piece of our call to love God, love each other, and change the world seriously and seek to put it into action concretely. We do speak up and speak out. We do show up and stand in solidarity. We try and keep trying.
And at the same time, we (as a whole) are possessed by—under the influence of—the white supremacy daimonion that took up residence in the body of our nation from the beginning, the demon that afflicts the United Methodist Church and every faith community. As a group, our comfort, privilege, loyalties, and familiar ways of being create their own obstacles to really breaking from the status quo. And we are not immune from the temptation to demonize those we believe are doing harm. “Wokeness” doesn’t get rid of white supremacy. Sometimes it even creates a playground for new little demons to gather.
So what do we do? Dr. King writes, “I have consistently preached that nonviolence demands that the means we use must be as pure as the ends we seek. I have tried to make clear that it is wrong to use immoral means to attain moral ends. But now I must affirm that it is just as wrong, or perhaps even more so, to use moral means to preserve immoral ends.” In other words, in our desire to create change, to bring justice, to clearly name and rebuke the powers of racism and white supremacy, we must not allow ourselves to be possessed by hatred or violence. Our “means” must be aligned with the way of Jesus, a way that is always the way of love and compassion. AND we must also be acutely aware of how easy it is to fall back on rationalizations, existing (immoral) laws, loopholes, and perceived obstacles that keep us bound in the white supremacy-soaked status quo that fails to do justice. In short, we are called to try to do what’s right for the right reasons in the right way. I honestly believe that’s what most folks are yearning for—not a community that’s perfect, but one that is honest and trying in every way to have integrity as followers of Jesus.
And, make no mistake, this is exhausting. It takes a lot of energy, resources, and time. Dr. King lifts up inspiring examples of those who were, as he called them, “the real heroes” in the South, those who faced “jeering and hostile mobs…with the agonizing loneliness that characterizes the life of the pioneer”; the “old, oppressed, battered Negro women, symbolized in a seventy two year old woman in Montgomery, Alabama, [Mother Pollard] who rose up with a sense of dignity and with her people decided not to ride segregated buses, and who responded with ungrammatical profundity to one who inquired about her weariness: ‘My feets is tired, but my soul is at rest.’… the young high school and college students, the young ministers of the gospel and a host of their elders, courageously and nonviolently sitting in at lunch counters and willingly going to jail for conscience’ sake.” These heroes are remembered because they did what they could, they acted with integrity, they faced the daimonion of white supremacy without returning hate for hate, blow for blow, and they kept going…
How will we be known? How will we be remembered, as individuals and as a congregation? Will we go down in history as a people who did all in our power to do whatever it takes for as long as it takes to lovingly, peacefully, and courageously resist and dismantle the powers of white supremacy in our lives and congregation and nation? I pray we won’t let the privilege of wealth or whiteness lull us to sleep or convince us this has nothing to do with our lives. I pray that all of us in the Foundry family will remember that we, like Jesus, can wait on the Lord in prayer and let God renew our strength, so that even when our proverbial feet grow tired from the long journey, our souls will be rested in the knowledge that we are marching upward to Zion, to the Kin-dom, to the beautiful city of beloved community that is promised by the God whose power is second to none.
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