Sermon text: Mark 1:21-28
There was a recent study concerning substance abuse that made some rather remarkable and unexpected findings. It was a two-step process. The first step involved animals, rats I believe. They first put a rat in a tiny cage, with little light, no activity. Attached to a cage were two dispensers, one for food and one distributing some manner of stimulating drug. Unsurprisingly the rat hitting the dope and got high.
They put another rat in another cage, only this time there was one of these wheels that they could play and exercise on. They gave it good lighting and better food and again the two dispensers, one that good food and the other with the drug. This time, the rat played on his wheel, basked in the light, ate the food, and hardly ever touched the drugs. Again, perhaps not surprising.
But the shock came when they took the rat from the first cage and put it in the second’s cage. The scientists figured it would hit the drugs like mad, now that the poor animal was addicted. But what happened was the first rat played on the wheel, basked in the light, ate the good food, and hardly ever touched the drugs. The addicted rat chose the alternatives when those alternatives became available.
The scientists asked themselves, “Does this apply to humans?” Well, they looked at several social studies of human behavior and substance abuse and saw a lot of parallels. They found happy well-adjusted human beings typical do not have issues with substance abuse, even when such substances are readily and easily available. They also found that people having difficulty with jobs, relationships, mental illness, depression, poverty, and other social ills were far more prone to abuse drugs, alcohol, pornography, etc. Again, no real surprises here.
But then they decided to do with people what they did with the rats. They took a group of folks that were struggling with addiction and gave them better opportunities: improved jobs, better health care, more income, marital counseling, etc. They expected these addicts to maintain their drug habits, but like the first rat in the second cage, they stopped doping up almost completely, even enduring the pains of withdrawal to do so.
It wasn’t the drugs that caused addiction, the study concluded. It’s not the people involved and their moral fortitude or lack thereof. It’s “their cage,” the circumstances of life in which they live.
We often use the phrase “demonic” to describe the devastation addiction causes in addicts and the people who care for them. It’s fitting. There is something viciously evil about it. But what if we’ve misidentified the source of the evil? What if we’ve gotten it wrong all this time?
Jesus has his own encounter with the demonic in our Gospel lesson today, one of many throughout the Gospel accounts. He goes to the synagogue as is his custom on the day of worship and there he encounters a “man with an unclean spirit.” Mark is his usual hurried self in telling the tale. Jesus commands the spirit to leave, it goes, the crowd is astonished, the end.
Time and time again throughout the Gospels we see this sort of story. Jesus encounters a demon-possessed person and he (and we use this phrase somewhat flippantly) sets them free. He commands the demonic to go and it goes. He destroys the cage that has imprisoned these poor people. He sets them free.
We live, in this day and age, in a demonic society. We are imprisoned by greed, poverty, lust, hatred, disease, sorrow, and a whole host of other evils. And those prisons, those cages, demand and define our addictions.
- The stockbroker convinced his happiness is tied to his bank account with continue to accumulate more and more money until he has more than he could ever spend in a lifetime and yet he still craves more.
- A homeless man who has nothing will seek out anything that gives him a moment’s respite from his misery. The oblivion found at the bottom of a bottle is sweet release.
- A lonely boy convinced no one will love him and a young woman damaged by sexual abuse will do whatever they can to feel loved, even if it means obsessive viewing of the lurid images of magazines or the Internet or throwing themselves into the arms of whoever’s willing.
- A person convinced the difficulties of their life is the fault of some other will relentlessly pursue a personal agenda of hate and anger against any and all who remind them of their imagined enemy.
I could go on, but we see this all around us. We see people addicted to drugs, to sex, to obsession, to rage, to food, to money, and they will do anything they can to feed their addictions: lie, cheat, steal, even in some extreme cases kill. And sometimes, we are those people and they are us. We too can be the rat in his tiny cage, doing anything we can to escape the nightmares, real or imagined, of our lives.
All too often, we think of sin as a moral failing. It is that, but it is also more than that. It is also the circumstances of our lives that drive us to make those choices. It is also our cage. Sins are the things that life does to us as much as the choices we make. That’s the reason we use the language of captivity quite often here in church when speaking of sin. We are “in bondage” to sin, for instance, in our confessional prayer.
Every morning, we wake up to discover life is finding new and innovative ways to kick the crap out of us. And each night, we return to our beds with new scars from the battles we’ve fought. Sometimes, those scars impact our thoughts, our feelings, and our behaviors. It twists us into becoming the things we resent. Sin begats sin and find ourselves deeper and deeper in that dungeon.
Jesus offers an alternative: freedom. His kingdom, his reign, is the ultimate expression of the deepest desires of the human soul. A place of acceptance, compassion, peace, and liberation. Time and again, he reveals this kingdom to us in his ministry, saying in so many variations to people caged by demonic forces “Let them go.”
“Let my people go.” The clarion call of Moses is echoed in the work of Jesus. Perhaps that is what the people sense in their astonishment at his teaching. A new liberator has come, one here to set us free from all that enslaves and imprisons us. One that will break the bondage of sin, death, and evil. One that has the power and authority to do what we cannot do: Make us free.
This freedom comes with a price, but it is not one that we are called upon to pay. Christ himself goes to the cross for our liberation. Christ offers up himself to break the bonds of sin and death, to loosen our chains. This is why he came. The cross is not merely a crude instrument of torture and death, but the avenue that shatters all that holds us captive. Only he could do it. Only Jesus could endure its cost for our sakes. But endure it he did. He gave all so that we could have our heart’s greatest desire: freedom. Amen.
No comments:
Post a Comment