a sermon on mark 5:1-20, for mental health awareness week in our series, “Unraveled”
We are on the 4th Sunday of our 11-week fall worship series Unraveled: Seeking God When Our Plans Fall Apart. Just like our own lives, the Bible is full of stories in which life seems to just be coming apart at the seams. We’ve heard about Moses’ mother, Jochebed, and the unraveling plans for her son’s life. We’ve heard about how Peter was undone by fear as he sank in the water he was trying to walk on, and about Rizpah’s life unraveling into grief at the murder of her two sons. And today – at the beginning of Mental Health Awareness Week – we hear about a man who lived with the daily unraveling of his mind thanks to the legion of demons that possessed him.
Did you catch that? He lived with the daily unraveling of his mind…thanks to the demons that possessed him.
Sometimes I hear myself saying things in sermons or in worship that I would just never say in real life. But somehow when I say them in church they seem, like, totally normal instead of totally strange or totally out-of-touch. “This man is possessed by demons” falls squarely into that category.
Like a lot of things in the Bible, I’m not quite sure what to make of this notion of demon possession. On the one hand, everything I know about the world tells me that demon possession is either the stuff of old-school psychological thrillers like The Exorcist, or a remnant of equally old-school theologies that we’re too sophisticated to believe anymore. On the other hand, I’ve witnessed demon possession. Or at least, I think I have?
Most of you know that I served in the global church for nearly 15 years before coming to Grace. Many of our Christian siblings in other parts of the world believe strongly that demon possession is real. In Madagascar, for example, there’s a whole revival movement in the Malagasy Lutheran Church called fifohazana. The fifohazana movement trains lay people – mostly women – to serve as what are known as “shepherds.” Many of the trained shepherds serve in tobys, which are shelters of a sort that are a haven for people who suffer from what have been identified as spiritual illnesses. Daily worship is part of life in a toby and at each service the shepherds perform public exorcisms, loudly casting demons out of people in the name of Jesus. I was invited to attend one of these worship services on a work visit to Madagascar some years ago. Witnessing these exorcisms and the very dramatic physical responses of those who were being healed was so far outside my own understanding of how the world works that I can still feel the sense of deep unsettledness that experience created in my spirit.
I remain grateful to those Malagasy neighbors for allowing an outsider like me to share in such a profound and intimate experience. And frankly, I remain unresolved in my thoughts about things like demon possession. I see the world through White, Western lenses that have been educated in a particular kind of schooling system, and so though I’ve ostensibly witnessed demon possession and exorcism I still don’t know that I “believe in it” in the way that our Malagasy siblings do, or in the way that the first reader’s of Mark’s gospel probably did. Like, maybe our Malagasy neighbors, like the ancient Palestinians, just don’t know about things like mental illness, or epilepsy, or other similar kinds of diseases. Or, maybe it’s just easier or safer for people like us to explain this stuff away in medical or scientific terms because it makes it seem a little easier to control or understand or something. I don’t know for sure. But I do know this: no matter what we call it, a whole lot of us know what it’s like to have something destructive grab hold of us – or of people that we love – and refuse to let go.
The National Alliance on Mental Illness estimates that 1 in 5 adults and 1 in 6 children in this country will experience a mental health disorder in any given year, which means that virtually all of us have been touched in some way by the realities of mental illness – whether it’s a mild case of COVID depression, or a chronic and debilitating dance with schizophrenia or bipolar disorder or anorexia or substance abuse. A great many of us know what it’s like to struggle with a mind that feels like it’s fraying a bit at the edges, or is coming completely unraveled. A great many others know what it’s like to walk with someone whose mental health struggles are so crippling that they make our loved one feel as outcast and terrified as the man in Mark’s story, howling in pain as he wanders alone among the tombs.
Before I go on, I want you to hear something very clearly. By means of this sermon I am in no way trying to conflate demon possession with issues of mental health. I may not know what to make of demon possession, but I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that science is real and so is mental illness. I thank God for the gifts of research and medicine that help people balance the delicate chemistries of our brains. I thank God for the gift of good mental health therapists who help people unravel the destructive messages that can get knotted up in our minds. If you or someone close to you is struggling right now, please reach out to a doctor, or a counselor, or to one of us here at church. God desires wholeness for you, and we want to help you access the resources you or your loved one needs to be well.
And how do I know that God desires this kind of wholeness for you and for all of us? Well, because the Bible says so.
As soon as Jesus and his disciples pull their boat onto the shores Gerasene country, the man with the unclean spirit comes running toward them. He bows down before Jesus and the demon inside him screams at the top of its lungs, “‘What have you to do with me, Jesus, Son of the Most High God? Do not torment me!” Jesus answers the demon with a question: “What is your name?” The demon replies, “My name is Legion, for we are many.” And in an instant, Jesus sends the demons into a nearby herd of pigs as the man’s unraveled mind is knit back together, right there in front of him.
Two things strike me here. First is that, in the gospels, demons are the ones to most reliably recognize Jesus and his authority. The religious rulers argue over who Jesus really is, and even his own disciples struggle over it. The demons? Never. They know who Jesus is, and they’re afraid of him because they know that Jesus simply will not abide the lies that those demons whisper into our hearts; lies that tell us we are not worthy of love or of wholeness.
And the second thing that strikes me is this: Jesus makes a point to ask the demon’s name. Now, this demon’s name is Legion, which what a regiment of Roman soldiers was called. This little detail suggests that the man’s demonic suffering was also connected to what it meant to live under an oppressive Roman Empire, but as I read the gospel this week a more intimate connotation jumped out at me. Jesus asks the demon’s name, which invites us to consider the question of identity.
The late writer Rachel Held Evans says this in her book Searching for Sunday, and forgive the slightly coarse language here “…[there is a chorus of] voices locked in an ongoing battle with God to lay claim over our identity, to convince us we belong to them, that they have the right to name us. Where God calls the baptized beloved, demons call her addict, slut, sinner, failure, fat, worthless, faker, screwup. Where God calls her child, the demons beckon with rich, powerful, pretty, important, religious, esteemed, accomplished, right. It is no coincidence that when Satan tempted Jesus after his baptism, he began his entreaties with, “If you are the Son of God . . .” We all long for someone to tell us who we are. The great struggle of the Christian life is to take God’s name for us, to believe we are beloved and to believe that is enough.”
Friends, I want to be really careful here because though I don’t think this is what Rachel Held Evans is saying, there are a lot of well-meaning Christians out there who will tell you that overcoming struggle of any kind just requires you to believe a little harder in Jesus. And forgive this slightly coarse language, but that’s just BS. An inability to overcome mental health difficulties has nothing to do with a lack of faith. But I do think there’s something to Rachel’s reflection. In an unraveling world filled with all kinds of lying voices that would try and lay claim to us, Jesus shows up. He commands all that would shackle us to step aside, restoring us to beloved community and reminding us over and over and over again, as many times as we need it, that we belong to God. That we are beloved and that that is enough.
Jesus asks, “What is your name?” and the demon says,
“My name is Legion.
My name is Mental Illness.
My name is Fear.
My name is Isolation.
My name is Self-Harm.
My name is Shame.
What have you to do with me, Jesus, Son of the Most High God?”
And with gentle compassion, and freedom on his voice, Jesus answers:
“Everything.”
Heidi Torgerson 