What Demons Possess Us Today?

Sunday, January 28, 2024 – Mark 1:21-28

A Problem of Language

Today, I want to talk about healing. In our gospel text, we hear of a man healed by Jesus of an “unclean spirit.” Jesus clearly performs an exorcism of that demon. Now, I’ve heard tell of present-day exorcisms, and I’ve seen the movie, “The Exorcist,” which was super scary. But for most of us, talk of demon possession may seem completely unrelated to our present day world.

I read a book by Episcopal bishop John Shelby Spong a few years back called Unbelievable. In it, he writes of a time when his adult daughter said to him, “Dad, the church is answering questions that we don’t even ask anymore.” I’ve often said that the problem in the Church today is a language problem. We don’t speak in a language that most people today can hear. We’re using terms that originated in the middle ages or earlier and expecting them to still have power. But those words just don’t land anymore. Yet I believe deeply that the core truths at the heart of the Christian story connect exactly with the deep spiritual needs of today. Let me try to connect our story of the man healed from a demon possession with our current world.

Trauma and Loneliness

In the late 1990s, two researchers – Dr. Vincent Felitti, a doctor with Kaiser Permanente in San Diego, CA, and Dr. Robert Anda, a scientist with the Atlanta-based CDC – conducted a huge study called the Adverse Childhood Experience or ACE study. When I was in my doctoral program at the Claremont School of Theology, I worked part time at Western University of Health Sciences, and it was there that I had the opportunity to hear a lecture from Dr. Felitti.

In that talk, he shared what had led to this research. In his medical practice, he ran a clinic that helped people with weight loss, and there had worked with a woman who he helped to lose something like 100 lbs. This success led her to begin to feel really good about herself. But then all of a sudden, the weight began piling back on for no apparent reason. Dr. Felitti and his staff then discovered that the triggering event for her sudden weight gain was that her thinner body and newfound confidence was beginning to get attention from men. Upon further digging, they learned that this woman had been sexually abused as a child, and that her weight seemed to have been a way to protect herself from being vulnerable to trauma ever again.

So Felitti and Anda decided to study the relationship between early life trauma – what they called adverse childhood experience – and health problems and risky behavior in adulthood. They identified 10 categories of adverse childhood experiences like physical, emotional, and sexual abuse, neglect, having a parent incarcerated, domestic violence, divorce, alcoholism or drug abuse in the house, etc. They questioned 17,000 people in the Kaiser Permanente health system as to whether they’d experienced any of these 10 categories, and then gave them what they called an ACE score between 1 and 10.

The results were astonishing. They determined that only one third had an ACE score of 0, “[o]ne in six individuals had an ACE score of 4 or more, and one in nine had an ACE score of 5 or more.” They also found that “Women were 50% more likely than men to have experienced five or more categories of adverse childhood experiences.”

What was even more stunning was the unmistakable correlation between a higher ACE score and higher incidences of a wide range of risky behaviors and public health ills including: alcoholism, alcohol abuse, smoking, and illicit drug use; depression and suicide attempts; chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, ischemic heart disease, and liver disease; financial stress and impaired worker performance; and higher risk for intimate partner violence and sexual violence overall. We are traumatized people. And that trauma is crushing us.

We are also being crushed by loneliness. A 2014 a study interviewed 1500 people about intimate relationships. More than one quarter of them “said that they have no one with whom they can talk about their personal troubles or triumphs.” Even worse, when family members were excluded, more than half said the same. Things have only gotten much worse since then in American society.

Trauma, loneliness, depression, anxiety and similar ills are today’s demons. Does the Christian story have a message of good news for healing and exorcising these demons? I believe it does.

Healing in the Judeo-Christian Tradition

I recently re-read a chapter from a wonderful book called The Uncommon Touch by Tom Harpur. He was a Canadian biblical scholar, professor, and Anglican priest and the book is about spiritual healing. In it he talks about the overarching theme of healing in the Bible, both the Hebrew and Christian Testaments. In relation to the concepts of sin, salvation, and human destiny, he writes, “What is at issue is the problem of human brokenness and how we can be restored to health.”

Our Genesis story of the Fall, he writes, “is that of a broken relationship with God, with one’s inner self, with one’s neighbours and, ultimately, with nature and the universe.” This is, at its core, a symbolic story of how “humanity is in need of renewed wholeness.” This theme of healing continues with the prophets, who spoke of the “Day of the Lord,” a time when’s God would make all things whole and renew cosmic harmony. These themes are present in the Psalms, too, where, Harpur writes, “All the emotions, conflicts, hopes, doubts, fears, and longings of our common humanity are laid bare in the presence of God or of what some theologians call the Ground of all Being, or the Depth Within.”

The prophets point to the healing of God, and our first reading today speaks of the prophet who will speak with divine authority. And that is exactly what we see in today’s gospel. I mentioned last week the number of times that the word “immediately” appears in Mark. In fact, we see the lightening speed with which Jesus moves from his baptism to his wrestling in the wilderness with the adversary, to his calling of disciples, and now to his presence in the synagogue where it’s said he preaches with authority, unlike the scribes. But what initiated those fast-moving events was Jesus’ mystical encounter with the Holy Spirit at his baptism. That is what fueled everything that happened next. The scribes spent their lives learning about God, but Jesus experienced God.

Jesus clearly shows that he is filled with the power of the Holy Spirit, and that power can heal, make whole, and radically transform people’s lives. Healing is at the center of Jesus’ ministry in Mark. There is very little in Mark about Jesus’ teachings, very few parables, and the Sermon on the Mount or Plain isn’t included at all.

There are skeptics who claim Jesus’ healings are just symbolic, but Tom Harpur writes that “if the core testimony to Jesus’ ability to heal is untrustworthy then the entire credibility of the Gospel record is undermined. Further, as I have again pointed out elsewhere, the whole phenomenon of Jesus’ effect on his contemporaries and the vigour of the movement which sprang up from it become utterly inexplicable.” Healing was at the core of the early Church and it’s what drew people to the movement.

Healing for Today

What’s even more important to the story that the church could tell today is that healing didn’t stop with Jesus. Healing continues to happen throughout Paul’s letters and the Book of Acts. Jesus’ disciples and Paul were given the gift of the Spirit for healing and continued to heal throughout their own ministries. Harpur reminds us that “It is clear throughout Mark’s narrative that Jesus intended his disciples and all those who accepted his message that ‘the Kingdom is at hand’ to carry out a ministry of healing.”

We live in a time of epidemic levels of depression and anxiety – two demons I’ve struggled with my entire life. We live in a time of epidemic levels of loneliness, another struggle of mine. (In fact, I’ve often said that my four horsemen of the apocalypse are gluten, dairy, sugar, and loneliness) And if the ACE study holds any truth, the traumas we experienced in early life are making us terribly sick as adults.

Isn’t the healing power of the Spirit of God for these demons good news for people today? Is the Redeemer community being called to be a community of healing and wholeness?