Somewhere to Cast Our Demons

Brad Sullivan

St. Mark’s, Bay City

June 19, 2016

Proper 7, Year C

Luke 8:26-39

“Somewhere to Cast Our Demons”

Earlier this week, while beginning my preparation for today’s sermon, I posted the following on Facebook.  “We need to stop hunting wild hogs.  Without them, we’ll have nowhere to cast our demons.  Amen.”  There were several comments, some people taking the post very seriously, some rather disgruntled by the theological or huntingological implications.  My favorite comments, however, came from my cousin Nicki, who reposted what I had written.  In response to one rather disgruntled response, she wrote, “I thought it was funny. Father Bradley Sullivan is my cousin. I know his sense of humor...I used to change his diapers.”   

Saying we need to stop hunting wild hogs so we’d have a place to put our demons was all I had at the time for a sermon starter, and it gave me a chuckle so I figured I’d share.  Then I started thinking that metaphorically speaking, it’s not that bad of an idea…not the wild hogs part, but the idea that we really do need somewhere to cast our demons. 

When the legion of demons begged Jesus not to cast them into the abyss, it seems that they were speaking of the abyss mentioned in Revelation (bottomless pit from which the demons came).  Imagery of the abyss from which the monsters and later demons come goes all the way back to the great deep of Genesis from which fountains of water came forth to drown the earth.  Therefore, they abyss is often associated with water, the seas where the great monsters and the Leviathan dwell.

So, the demons begged Jesus not to cast them back into the abyss, and it seems that Jesus granted the demons’ request by sending them into the pigs, and then they ended up going into the abyss anyway as the pigs rushed headlong into the lake and were drowned.  In the spiritual realm, the demons went back to the abyss. 

For us, in our world today, our society and our world are like the man amongst the tombs.  We are rife with legions of demons:  demons of anger, demons of fear, demons of hatred, just to name a few, and we desperately need somewhere to cast our demons.  I should say we need somewhere other than each other to cast our demons.  In our country, we tend to take our anger, fear, and hatred, and cast it all over each other.   Sometimes we cast our demons onto each other through our fearful words and angry rhetoric.  Sometimes we cast our demons onto each other through hurtful actions that separate and divide us.  Sometimes we cast our demons onto each other with sprays of bullets into unsuspecting nightclub patrons, moviegoers, prayer groups, or elementary school students. 

As much as the exceedingly vast majority of Americans would never cast their demons onto others by shooting them, there is a connection between our speech, our words and actions, and the bullets that fly.  Fear, anger, and hatred lead only to greater fear, anger, and hatred, and eventually to division and killing.  As Bishop Doyle wrote in his response to the mass shooting at Pulse nightclub last Sunday in Orlando:

The Internet is already full of unchristian, disrespectful, and horrific responses supporting the shooting and demonizing Islam.

The reality is that we in this country are responsible for creating a place where hate speech is glorified, unnecessary weapons of mass destruction are freely accessible, and violence is cheered.

 Yes America, we are reaping what we sow.

I too believe we are reaping what we have sown, and I’m not talking about guns.  I’m talking about the ways we talk to and about each other and especially how we talk to and about the other.  There is so much fear, anger, and hatred constantly being spewed out in conversations on the internet, in coffee shops, on the radio, the TV, even in churches and in our homes.  We have been setting an enormous blaze with our talk.  As James wrote in James 3:5-10:

How great a forest is set ablaze by a small fire! ⁶And the tongue is a fire. The tongue is placed among our members as a world of iniquity; it stains the whole body, sets on fire the cycle of nature, and is itself set on fire by Gehenna. ⁷For every species of beast and bird, of reptile and sea creature, can be tamed and has been tamed by the human species, ⁸but no one can tame the tongue—a restless evil, full of deadly poison. ⁹With it we bless the Lord and Father, and with it we curse those who are made in the likeness of God. ¹⁰From the same mouth come blessing and cursing. My brothers and sisters, this ought not to be so.

The blaze we have set with our tongues, with our words both written and spoken, is a blaze of fear, anger, and hatred, and fear, anger, and hatred are our demons.  These demons have divided us, made us weak, and turned us against one another.  These legions of demons have done to us what Jesus did to the legion of demons that we dwelling in the man.  While the demons were together, acting in the man as one, they were strong.  No chain could hold him.  No people could restrain him.  Once Jesus cast the demons into the herd of pigs, they were divided, and they were weak.  They rushed headlong into the abyss, the very place where they feared going.

As a country, as a church, as the Body of Christ, we have been divided by the legions of demons of fear, anger, and hatred.  We have been weakened by our divisions and have been rushing headlong into the abyss.  We need to stop casting our fear, anger, and hatred on one another, and we need to find another place to cast them.  We need to find a safe place to cast our demons so that they won’t continue to cause greater harm, and the only place we can cast our demons without them harming others is God.

One way of casting our demons upon God is prayer, particularly prayers of lament, as I wrote earlier this week.  We read in the Psalms prayers of lament, prayers of people who are so fed up, that they are crying out to God, even blaming God for the problems that beset them, asking God to seek vengeance upon their enemies.  Some of these prayers make a turn and offer blessings and praise to God; some of them do not and simply end with these prayers of anguished cries, calling for God’s vengeance and questioning God’s justice. 

We need to bring back the prayer of lament so that we can cast our demons upon God rather than upon each other.      

It sounds easy, especially for the preacher man to say that we should cast our fear, anger, and hatred upon God rather than each other.  I realize that with some of my preaching about loving our enemies, not seeking retaliation, it may seem that I’m rather detached from the violence and hatred in our world.  I am not.  I fear for my children’s lives.  I remember riding my bike a half a mile or more away from home, spending whole days down by the creak behind our neighborhood, totally unsupervised.  I can’t imagine my kids doing that nowadays.  I’ve come into adulthood in a world in which being shot by a sniper while stopping for gas along a highway is a viable reality for me and my children.  I am afraid for my children and the world they are inheriting.  I want to protect them.  I want to stop anyone who would harm them, and in the moment, if someone was trying to kill them, I have little doubt that I would do everything in my power to stop them, even if it meant killing the killer.  I don’t know if that goes against what Jesus taught or not...depending on the day, I'll tell you one thing or another; I simply know that in the moment, it is what I might do. 

At the same time, I believe that praying for our enemies, for their welfare, praying love for them, seeking not to retaliate against evil is the only way that we are going to make a dent in containing the blaze of demons that we have set.  I know that the more I dwell on those thoughts and fears, those plans for horrific eventualities, the more the demons of fear, anger, and hatred fill my heart and guide my actions.  I know that I can’t with any efficacy or success rail against the things in this world that I don’t like.  All my fearful and angry writing and speech will do is add fuel to the fire, increase the blaze, and cast even more demons upon others already plagued with demons of their own.  I’ve done more than enough of that already, as have many of us, or all of us.

We need to stop all of the blame and simple solutions for the problems in our world, given as ways to alleviate our fear, anger, and hatred.  One easy target has been the government, folks saying the problems started because we took prayer out of schools or removed the 10 Commandments from government building.  Before we start blaming governments or states or school districts for removing prayer or Christian symbols and practices, we need to look at the potential of logs in our own eyes, remove them, and then lead by example.  Saying, “the problem is that they took prayer out of our schools,” is simply casting a demon of blame upon the world.  Such a statement makes someone else to blame, and makes the problem someone else’s to solve.

The problems of casting our demons upon others is a problem that is all of ours to solve.  Render to God what is God’s.  Give the demons of blame to God.  Pray to him your blame of someone else.  Or even blame God and pray that to him.  God can take it.  God would probably appreciate the honesty.  God is the appropriate place to cast our demons, because unlike everything in all creation, our demons can’t hurt God. 

Render unto God what is God’s to deal with.  Render unto God our demons of fear, anger, and hatred, so that he can cast them out.  Like the woman last week who came to Jesus full of sin, weeping upon his feet, we need to come to Jesus full of demons and then weep them out at his feet. 

When we weep our demons out at Jesus’ feet, we will likely feel powerless.  With that, we find yet one more demon with which we struggle:  our powerlessness.  We want solutions to the problems in our world and we are mostly powerless to make those solutions happen.  So we rant, we criticize, demonize, we divide. 

Divided, we rush headlong into the abyss.  We weren’t made for division.  We were made to be unified in Jesus.  Unity does not mean unanimity.  With all of our difference, we were all baptized into the one body of Jesus Christ.  “All baptized people are called to make Christ known as Savior and Lord, and to share in the renewing of his world.” (BCP p. 531 - Ordination: Priest)

We were not made to share our anger for the destruction of this world.  We were made to share our faith for the renewing of this world

   

We certainly need to share our fears, our anger, and even our hate with others, but for the purpose of seeking help in bringing those demons to God.  We are meant to help each other cast our demons out upon God.  As baptized disciples of Jesus, we are meant to do for each other what Jesus did for the man suffering from a legion of demons.  We are meant to help each other find a herd of wild hogs and help each other cast our demons there.  I realized just likened God to a herd of wild hogs, and I probably just secured 10 more years in purgatory for it, but the analogy holds true.  We need a place to cast our demons, and that place is God, and we need to act as Jesus for each other, helping each other to cast our demons upon God, rather than upon each other.  Rather than remaining divided, rushing into the abyss ourselves, we cast our demons upon God so that they will run into the abyss, and we will remain united in Jesus.  Amen.