unraveled – Heidi Torgerson

Unraveling of the Mind

November 17, 2020November 17, 2020 Heidi Torgerson

a sermon on mark 5:1-20, for mental health awareness week in our series, “Unraveled”

We are on the 4^th 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.”

A Story of Conversions

October 21, 2020 Heidi Torgerson

a sermon on acts 9:1-20, as part of our fall worship series, “Unraveled”

A handful of years ago now I heard a phenomenal TED talk by the young Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie called “The Danger of a Single Story.” In the 20-minute video Adichie describes the powerful impression that the multitude of British and American children’s stories she read as a girl had left on her. She began writing her own stories at about the age of 7, and although at that point she had never been outside of her West African home country, all of the characters in her stories were just like the ones in the books that she had read and loved. They had white skin and blue eyes. They ate apples. They played in the snow. The audience chuckles with her as she reminds them that, in the home she knew and loved, almost everyone had Black skin and dark eyes. They ate mangoes. And she had never even seen snow. She talks about how much she loved those British and American books, and how deeply they stirred her imagination. But she also remarks at how they taught her that people like her didn’t exist in literature, which is why her first encounters with African writers were life-changing. “They saved me from having a single story about what books are,” she says.

Adichie’s talk continues with a mix of poignant and often hilarious anecdotes meant the help the listener recognize that stories are incredibly powerful, and that with their power comes a danger. Specifically, she describes the danger in coming to know just one single story about a group of people. “The single story creates stereotypes,” Adichie remarks, “and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete.”

Because of her Nigerian roots much of Adichie’s talk reflects on the single story of poverty, disease, and conflict that many people learn about the continent of Africa, and how much richness that single story leaves out. To illustrate, Adichie recounts a conversation with an American student at a university where she had recently been a keynote speaker. In that conversation the student tells her it’s such a shame that Nigerian men were physically abusive, like the father character in her novel. Adichie good-naturedly returns his pity. “I told him that I had just read a novel called American Psycho,” she says, “and that it was such a shame that young Americans were serial murderers.”

Adichie’s full talk is totally worth your 20 minutes if you have a chance to check it out, but you get the picture. Single Stories keep us from seeing the Whole Story – whether it’s a single story we’ve learned about a group of people, a single story we’ve assigned to an individual, or even a deep investment in a single story about ourselves. Today’s reading from the book of Acts is about exactly that. It’s about two people who held tightly to single stories about themselves and about each other; about how their tight grasp on those single stories begins to unravel; and about how the unraveling creates space for three different experiences of conversion along the way.

The story begins with Saul, who is also called Paul – as in, the person who eventually wrote nearly 30 percent of the New Testament. The writer of Acts tells us that Saul was on the road to Damascus, breathing threats and murder against the disciples of Jesus. Obviously threats and murder are not good, and so the single story I’d always learned about Saul is that he’s the bad guy in this particular narrative. But church history professor Amy Oden reminds us that this was not, in fact, Saul’s story about himself.

Saul was a deeply religious person whose dad was a Pharisee. Remember that the Pharisees were a group of highly devout Jewish teachers, distinguished by their strict observance of tradition and religious law. The earliest followers of the Jesus movement were also Jewish, and their proclamation of Jesus as the Messiah was not in line with orthodox Jewish teaching. It was tantamount to heresy for people like Saul. And so, Saul had appointed himself as sort of a defender of the faith. He goes after those who belonged to the Way – fellow Jewish people who were followers of Jesus. But in Saul’s mind he’s not going after people in order to persecute them. He’s going after them in order to save them from their error and to protect the sanctity of the Jewish faith. Saul’s story about himself is that he is a committed son of the covenant, someone who is trying to do the right thing in order to strengthen and preserve the people of God.

Saul was super invested in this story about himself. He was convinced of his right-ness; certain that his way of understanding God and expressing his commitment to his faith was the Most Correct Way. He was so passionate about it that he went to the high priest and got official authority to basically put any followers of the Way under arrest, to tie them up, and to bring them back to the religious authorities Jerusalem. But as he packs up his zeal for religious purity and carries it out with him on the road to Damascus like a suitcase, he has this completely wild experience. A light from heaven flashes around him and a voice booms out of nowhere, “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?” Saul has no idea who’s talking to him and so he says, “Who are you Lord?” And the voice says, “It’s me, Jesus. Get up and go into the city and await further instruction.” And then he is thrust into darkness, struck blind on the road while the men traveling with him stood by, speechless.

Unable to see a thing, his men have to lead him by the hand all the way into Damascus. A man named Judas puts him up and Saul sits in darkness for three days, not eating or drinking anything during that time. The first part of the story is so dramatic with its flashing lights and voices that we sometimes miss this piece – this part where Saul is sitting in the dark, suddenly stripped of power and self-sufficiency, completely vulnerable to the people around him. We can’t know for sure, but I imagine that his soul is also reckoning with the shadows of darkness as the story he had always believed to be true about himself comes unraveled. I have a hunch that this is where Saul’s conversion to faith in Jesus actually takes place – not in the flashing lights and booming voices, but in the quiet uncertainty of coming to terms with the reality that his entrenched views had narrowed rather than expanded his vision for what God was up to in the world through Jesus.

As Saul tries to find his way through the literal and metaphorical dark, our story pivots to another person who is on the brink of a different kind of conversion. Ananias was a disciple of Jesus and when the Lord came to him in a vision, telling him to go to Judas’ house to look for Saul, he was like, “Umm, no thanks. You know that everyone’s been talking about this dude, right? You know that he’s been arresting people who follow the Way, right? You know I’d really rather not risk going to hang out with him, right?” And Jesus is like, “Yep, I know. Except that I’ve chosen this man to bring my name before the whole world so I’m going to need you to get over yourself and go find him.” (Okay, so those weren’t his EXACT words, but you get the point…)

Ananias had a single story about Saul, and the story is that Saul was dangerous – a persecutor of anyone who followed Jesus and thus someone against whom he’d need to defend himself and his community. Frankly, it’s a completely understandable story. But just like Saul’s story about himself, Ananias’ story narrowed rather than expanded his vision for what God was up to in the world through Jesus. It made him afraid and defensive, and it made him skeptical of the notion that someone like Saul could have a central role to play in the liberating story of Jesus.

I don’t know how long it took Ananias to get to Judas’ house, but apparently it was long enough for him to experience a conversion. By the time he enters the house where Saul has taken refuge, Ananias’s single story about Saul has unraveled enough that he greets Saul not as “Persecutor,” but as “Brother.” My own humanity makes me wonder if Ananias really meant “Brother” when it came out of his mouth or if he had to kind of cross his fingers behind his back until his heart could catch up with the words his mouth was forming, but maybe that doesn’t actually even matter. Maybe what matters is that Jesus could see beyond the single stories that Saul and Ananias believed about themselves and about each other. Maybe what matters is that Jesus aided in the unraveling of these single stories, so that their lives could be woven together in witness to God’s vision for a reconciled world.

There’s one more conversion in this story, except this one isn’t an individual conversion. It’s a communal one. The writer of Acts tells us that Saul, after being baptized, remained with the disciples in Damascus for several days as he began to proclaim Jesus in the synagogues. Now you know those other disciples had learned the same story about Saul that Ananias had learned – the story that would have led them to be fearful and on the defensive when presented with someone like Saul. But the saving power of the gospel is too important to be held in the hearts of a few individuals. In order for it to spill out into the world most effectively, it needs a community. Which is why Jesus has been calling us into unlikely relationships with each other for literally thousands of years now.

Friends, you know that this call to community isn’t easy. The church can be a messy place because, well, it’s filled with messy people. Like Saul, we can get so entrenched in our own ways of thinking that we become closed off to the ways that Jesus might be made known through another person’s perspective. Like Ananias, we can get so caught up in the single stories we’ve heard about other people that we put ourselves constantly on the defensive, not believing that Jesus could be revealed in anyone who thinks or acts or behaves or believes or votes “like that.” Whether it’s our politics or our approach to this pandemic, our ideologies or the way we live out our faith, a too-tight grip on the stories we tell about ourselves and each other can narrow rather than expand our vision for what God is up to in the world.

And so, I want to leave you with a question this week. Or rather, with a couple of questions. What stories about yourself or about other people are you holding on to a little too tightly? And how might those entrenched stories be hindering your ability to see the fullness of God’s activity in this broken and beautiful world? Maybe this is a week to let our grip on those stories unravel a bit. Because the truth is that we need each other. And we need to be converted again and again – not necessarily to one another’s viewpoints, but to lives that reflect the story of Jesus’ loving, healing, freeing purpose for this world. And that story is just too big to tell on our own. Thanks be to God.