Fifth Sunday after the Epiphany

Sunday, February 8, 2009

St. David’s Episcopal Church, DeWitt NY

The Rev. James C. Bresnahan, Interim Rector

“Others as Not Other”

Mark 1:29-39

1:29 As soon as they left the synagogue, they entered the house of Simon and Andrew, with James and John. Now Simon's mother-in-law was in bed with a fever, and they told him about her at once. He came and took her by the hand and lifted her up. Then the fever left her, and she began to serve them.

That evening, at sundown, they brought to him all who were sick or possessed with demons. And the whole city was gathered around the door. And he cured many who were sick with various diseases, and cast out many demons; and he would not permit the demons to speak, because they knew him.

In the morning, while it was still very dark, he got up and went out to a deserted place, and there he prayed. And Simon and his companions hunted for him. When they found him, they said to him, "Everyone is searching for you."He answered, "Let us go on to the neighboring towns, so that I may proclaim the message there also; for that is what I came out to do."

And he went throughout Galilee, proclaiming the message in their synagogues and casting out demons.

I was 17 years old, and it was the first time I came face-to-face with mental illness. A member of a Christian college organization I belonged to stopped showing up at our gatherings. Weeks later, we found out why: she was in a mental hospital. A group of us went to visit her. I was more than freaked out by the jail-like cells, the solemn guards, the eeriness of blank faces or peering eyes, and incoherent speech. When we finally met up with her in a large hall, she had no idea who we were. She had no idea about anything.  Her mind had snapped. She stared at us as if we were in outer space.

Knowing next to nothing about mental illness, I had not the slightest idea what to say, or what to do. I was anxious, spoke platitudes, and left confused.

Here was a person who believed in God, loved Jesus, and she was this way.  I couldn’t explain it.  In my naivite, I wondered: What had she done wrong that God would let her become that way?  So different from me! So ‘other’ than me, I thought.

It’s a decade later – the sixties - I’m now a pastor, in my twenties, with book knowledge in my head but little experience behind me. It’s September. my turn among area clergy to lead worship at a local nursing home - my first time ever at one. There, before my eyes, are old people, real-old people, sick people, demented people.  Who were these people, so unlike me, I thought - most in wheel chairs, most with eyes closed, most barely able to speak? I was unnerved.

My next time to month to worship came in January. Winter. I hoped for snow, enough snow so I could call in to say, I can’t be make it in today. Roads are too bad. Sorry. I’ll be there next month.

No, I was never going to be old myself.  I was never going to be like those in a mental hospital. I was never going to be in a wheelchair.  I was never going to be like those others, who were nothing like me.  How could I be? I was I, and they were they.

I don‘t remember when or how my mind changed, and my heart, or how many years it took.  But over time I stopped defining people by their condition, or age, or circumstance, or whatever. I learned to define people only one way – as a child of God, like me.

That is one of our basic Christian affirmations: People are not the diseases that afflict them.  People are not their compulsive actions. People are not their age. People are not their incapacities. People are not the emotions they display.  People, simply, are people, whom God loves and who are God’s children. We differ from each other not in who we are but simply in how life has treated us and in what, consequently, shows up in us.

Which leads me to today’s Gospel reading, and particularly to what it says about exorcisms, how Jesus “drove out many demons.”

Some, in reading this text, have little more to say than to object “How primitive! How superstitious!  There are no such beings as demons. There are chemical imbalances, there are illnesses, there are genetic abnormalities, but there are no demons.”

And, of course, they are right.  We have identified in most cases what people 2,000 years ago could describe only metaphorically and mythically. We do understand the causes of mental illness in ways nobody millennia ago did or could.

But if that is all one can say with regard to our text, we miss its real substance. 

It’s deep message is this. People are not demons. People are not crazy.  People are not their illnesses.  People are not their dementia.  But something terrible can and does take possession of people’s minds, which is not them. Something terrible shows up in people’s lives, which is not them.  And it was Jesus’ will and work not to judge, condemn, and write people off because of their behavior or condition, but to befriend, to show compassion, and to bring healing and deliverance to people, so that what troubles them might trouble them less.

I think of another story in our Scripture that has similar meaning.  It is the story that appears in John’s Gospel, of a woman who had committed adultery.  Gathered around her is a crowd of men, all holding stones in their hand, ready to throw at her, to stone her to death.  For, in their mind, she is an adulteress; she is what she had done.  She is what they are not. They prepare to stone her to death.

But Jesus steps between her and them. First he says to the men, Who of you is without sin?  Who of you can say, I don’t sin. You throw the first stone.  Each, in turn, lays down his stone and walks away.  Then Jesus turns to the woman and says, Where are any to condemn you?  She answers, There are none.  And then he says to her, Neither do I condemn you. Go, don’t sin again!

What strikes me about this story is what struck me about today’s reading.  For Jesus, people are not defined by their behavior nor are people indistinguishable from their deeds. The woman is not an adulteress.  She may have committed adultery, but who she is has not changed.  She is no more and no less than anyone else is, a child of God, forgiven and set free by God’s mercy to live a more faithful life.

Do you remember the story Jesus told of two men who were praying in the temple?  The one prayed, “God, have mercy on me.”  The other said, “Lord, I thank you I am not like others.”  Which one, Jesus asked, went home right in the sight of God?

So we pray that God would help us all to be less judgmental and more understanding and to see others not as other than who we are – but as who we are, children of God, wanting and needing like us to be treated kindly and well.