Silence! Come Out!

Mark 1:21-28  

Rev. Monte Marshall

Cecil Williams was born in 1929 in San Angelo, TX.  He was born black in a segregated city.  From the moment Cecil was born, his mother nicknamed him “Rev.”  “Someone’s going to be the reverend in this family, and you’re it,” his mother said.

Cecil grew up in a black congregation, Wesley Methodist Church.  He was raised in “an environment of love and peace,” but “like many African Americans,” he writes, “I grew up in a sea of contradictions.  Whites ran everything, so I wanted to be white, but I hated white people and everything they did to keep us down.  As I got older, I felt that being black was bad.”

When Cecil turned twelve, something inside of him went awry.  He writes:  “I was struck by what felt like a bolt of lightning.  It was as though all the pressures in the world punched a hole in my mind, and I was left with nothing but terror.  It happened one moonlit night when I sat on the porch with my family.  Suddenly everything seemed to turn pitch-black except for the moon, which appeared to melt into itself with fat drops of hot lava falling on my skin.  Then I heard a roaring engine and looked up to see a giant train barreling right at us.  The smell of hot metal and the sensation of scalding wax from the moon made me scream.  Snarling voices came out of the darkness, which overcame light.  I felt this darkness sucking out my life.  Nobody saw or heard any of this but me.  My screaming caused the family to leap up and try to help, but my body jerked and bucked as if some kind of monster were pulling me away.  Nobody could do anything but hold me tight.  My mother was sure I was having a seizure.

“Word spread quickly of my attack, if that’s what it was.  Within minutes, neighbors arrived, the doctor visited…our minister came, and relatives raced over to the house offering help.  I couldn’t hear or see them, but I did hear alien voices screaming at me.  We will kill you, they yelled.  There is no escape.”

Every night for many months, the terror returned and “the voices only got scarier.”   Cecil “missed school, stayed in the bed, feared the darkness, exhausted [his] parents, and drove everyone to distraction.” 

The family doctor called it a “nervous breakdown.’”  But Cecil’s diagnosis was different:  “The contrast between my family telling me I was the Rev—the future minister who was going to ‘make it for this family’ and pave the way for desegregation—had clashed in my mind with incident after incident in the white world that confirmed I was powerless.  All I had to do was look in the mirror when the madness and the voices overtook me:  that face, the blackness that the white power structure dismissed as nothing, looked back at me as a nobody who deserved to die.”[1]

Cecil’s story came to mind as I pondered this morning’s text from Mark’s gospel.  It’s Mark’s story of Jesus’ first direct, public act.  According to the story, Jesus confidently “strides” into the synagogue in Capernaum on the Sabbath.  He’s in “holy space on a holy day.”[2]

And Jesus teaches.  Mark doesn’t say what he teaches, but Mark does say that the people are spellbound by what they hear because Jesus teaches with an authority—or a power—that is missing in their own religious scholars.

Mark then says that all of a sudden a person appears in the synagogue with “an unclean spirit.”  This image of “an unclean spirit” emerges from an ancient worldview.  And quite frankly, when some of us hear this kind of language, we picture forked-tailed demons flying around in the air and swooping down to “possess” unwary individuals. 

Frankly, I don’t share this worldview.  Nevertheless, the image of “an unclean spirit” does speak to me.  It speaks to me of what one commentator calls “the destructive forces in the human spirit that seem to prefer bondage and oppression to liberation and freedom.”[3]  It’s an image that expresses chaos, turmoil, brokenness, disorder and dis-ease in human life—conditions that stand in sharp contrast to the health, wholeness and peace that God intends for human life.

Do you see why I thought of Cecil and the terrifying turmoil he experienced in his childhood?  Well, I also connected Cecil’s story to Mark’s story in another way.  Cecil heard threatening voices that no one else could hear.  And sure enough, in Mark’s story, the unclean spirit also has a voice—and it speaks.  In fact, the unclean spirit speaks and not the person afflicted by the spirit.  That person’s voice is silenced as if that person has been rendered powerless to speak by the unclean spirit. 

And this disruptive spirit doesn’t just speak, it shrieks, and its voice expresses anxiety:  “What do you want from us, Jesus of Nazareth?  Have you come to destroy us?”  It’s then that the unclean spirit tries to seize control of the situation by “naming” Jesus:   “I know who you are—the Holy One of God!”

Now here’s an interesting question:  When the unclean spirit asks, “What do you want from us, Jesus of Nazareth?” who is the US?  Could it be that the US “is all the people we are on the inside”—all those parts of us from the past that still live in us—that are hidden under the very skin that we’re in?[4]

It seems to me that the person with the unclean spirit in Mark’s story pushes us to confront those parts of ourselves that we consider “unclean”—the parts of ourselves that cry out from the deep, dark places within us.  These are the places where we lock away memories, hopes and experiences that we no longer want to examine like the fear and the pain that we’ve repressed for years—the hurts caused by the people we loved and trusted the most.[5] 

The unclean spirit in Mark’s story asks another question of Jesus:  “Have you come to destroy us?”  Fear does indeed reside in the dark places within us.  We are terrified that if all of the “unclean” parts of ourselves are destroyed, we will no longer know who we are.  Better the chaos we know, than the risky wholeness we don’t know.  In the grip of this fear, the “unclean spirit” stays in control of our lives to disrupt and to destroy!

But then, in Mark’s story, Jesus speaks.  He doesn’t call security to have this disruptive person removed from the premises.  He doesn’t turn and run away from this crazy person.  And he isn’t left speechless before the chaos.  No!  Jesus stays put, he engages, he speaks.  He “rebukes the spirit sharply:  ‘Be quiet!  Come out of that person!”  Jesus speaks to silence the voice that speaks chaos into human life!  And Jesus commands:  “Come out!”   

And what happens next?  The unclean spirit convulses the possessed person violently, and with a loud shriek, it comes out.  Again, a commentator asks:  “Is it any wonder the man was coughing and convulsing when Jesus was healing him?  We don’t want to give up our stuff!  We don’t want to give up our self-sufficiency.  We don’t want to give up our defenses.”[6]  So when deliverance comes, it doesn’t come easily.

Mark says that “All who looked on were amazed.”  They begin to ask one another, “‘What is this?  A new teaching, and with such authority!  This person even gives orders to unclean spirits and they obey!’”  Immediately news of Jesus spreads throughout the surrounding region of Galilee.

So that’s Mark’s story.  In Cecil’s story, deliverance also came, but it wasn’t because of some divine intervention from the outside.  Cecil writes:  “Everyone in the community prayed for God to help me.  Folks were certain that our pastor with his direct line to heaven would surely get the channels open.  But there would be no divine intervention for me.” 

It was when Cecil sought power from within, that deliverance came:  “Instead of trying to run from the aliens, I turned toward them.  If there was no escape, then I wanted to face them.  ‘I know you,’ I said when they visited me that night, astounded that this was true.  ‘I can hear you.’  I was more curious than afraid.  ‘I ain’t goin’ with you tonight,’ I said, actually sounding steady and firm.  Soon it hit me; these voices were not the enemy.  Whatever their threats, they could not really bring me harm.  In fact, they had something to give me.  It was a message:  You’re more powerful than you’ve ever imagined.

“The release of fear came over me gradually, but I began to fall into the soundest sleep I had experienced in a year.  Eventually I woke up to a sunlight so sweet and the sound of birds so loving that I felt my life had started again.  My mother was sitting on the edge of the bed.

“‘Is it over?’ she asked with a smile.

“I nodded.  ‘It’s over.’

“’Well, you look like a new person.’

“That’s the way I felt.  My terror was over.  My hell was over.  I was ready for whatever life would bring.”[7]

By the way, in later years, Cecil became an official “Rev,” eventually becoming the pastor of Glide Memorial United Methodist Church in San Francisco—a congregation that has deeply influenced the ministry of Travis Park United Methodist Church.

Now I don’t know how you feel about it, but Cecil’s story amazes me.  It affirms for me that God’s power—the power at work in Jesus—the power that sets us free from every “unclean spirit” that torments us—is still at work among us.  The voice still speaks:  “Silence!  Come out!”  But this power comes not from a divine intervention as if God is “out there” somewhere.  This power is within us already!  Indeed, we are more powerful than we’ve ever imagined!

My brothers and sisters, we can teach and preach until our faces are blue, but it’s power like this, evidenced in the transformed lives of people, that lends authority to all that we do. So come, Holy Spirit, come!  More power to us all!  Thanks be to God.  Amen.