Mark 3:20-35

1 1 Mark 3:20-35 20 And the crowd came together again, so that they could not even eat. 21 When his family heard it, they went out to restrain him, for people were saying, He has gone out of his mind. 22 And the scribes who came down from Jerusalem said, He has Beelzebul, and by the ruler of demons he casts out demons. 23 And he called them to him, and spoke to them in parables, How can Satan cast out Satan? 24 If a kingdom is divided against itself, that kingdom cannot stand. 25 And if a house is divided against itself, that house will not be able to stand. 26 And if Satan has risen up against himself and is divided, he cannot stand, but his end has come.

2 27 But no one can enter a strong man s house and plunder his property without first tying up the strong man; then indeed the house can be plundered. 28 Truly I tell you, people will be forgiven for their sins and whatever blasphemies they utter; 29 but whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit can never have forgiveness, but is guilty of an eternal sin 30 for they had said, He has an unclean spirit. 31 Then his mother and his brothers came; and standing outside, they sent to him and called him. 32 A crowd was sitting around him; and they said to him, Your mother and your brothers and sisters are outside, asking for you.

3 33 And he replied, Who are my mother and brothers? 34 And looking at those who sat around him, he said, Here are my mother and my brothers! 35 Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother. He s Lost His Mind So, as most of you know, it s not unheard of for me, especially when I decide to preach on the lectionary reading for a given Sunday, to think that I have my sermon all planned out, but then wind up going in a completely different direction than I first thought. Well, that s what s happened this morning, so the title no longer fits (at least in the way I you won t think now it applies to me).

4 As I continued to sit with this passage, I found myself confronted with something that is so prevalent in the gospels but that we usually tend to gloss over. It s something we don t talk about. It s something we usually don t even think about. So this morning, I want us to sit with it for a few minute, not because I have anything profound to say about it, but simply because if we re to take the gospels seriously, we can t ignore it. I remember the first time I saw the movie The Exorcist, based on the 1971 novel by William Peter Blatty. At the time I was either a freshman in high school or possibly even still in middle 2 school actually I m pretty sure I was still in middle school.

5 I say that now, and as I m about to become a father I think, Would I really want our son to watch The Exorcist when he s in middle school? I seriously doubt it, but I m pretty sure that s when I saw it for the first time. There were certain advantages to having a brother a few years older than me who way back in the dinosaur days of the VCR was pretty adept at taping movies that came on too late for us to stay up and watch. I knew The Exorcist was a horror classic with such iconic scenes as the possessed girl Regan s head spinning all the way around and, of course, the wall covered in split-pea soup.

6 (If you ve seen it, you know what I m talking about; if you haven t, that s probably all well and good.) I knew it was a horror classic, so I just had to watch it. Ever since about middle school I ve been a fan of well-crafted horror stories. Not the shock-and-awe slasher flicks that don t take any nuance or craft to make, but well thought out, psychologically complex horror I just can t get enough of. As I think back on it, maybe the reason I love horror stories so much now is because I was absolutely terrified by just about everything when I was little. Maybe I reached a point when something deep inside finally said, Scary or not, I want to know what s there.

7 But that s a whole other conversation. So there I was. I was sitting in our living room all alone in the house. My brother probably would have flipped if he d known I d gone into his room to get one of his tapes. But I remember having that glee that I m sure most of us got when we were young and we were doing something we really wanted to do even though we knew weren t supposed to. I turned on the I put the VHS tape, which had been carefully labeled with masking tape, into the VCR. I sat down on the couch, fast forwarded through the last couple minutes of whatever was on TV right before the movie, and then I hit play.

8 And for the next two and a half hours (give or take) I sat there completely transfixed by what I saw. Not just because of the horror or the gross-out scenes that any thirteen-year-old boy would love, but because the story I saw unfolding on our TV set, with the occasional grainy tracking lines migrating from the bottom to the top of the screen, was a complex story about faith and reason and the dangers that result when either one is taken on its own without being tempered by the other. The character I was fascinated with was Damien Karras, the Jesuit priest Regan s mother turns to for help in a last ditch effort to find out what s wrong with her daughter.

9 He s lost his faith, and yet he s confronted with something his reason tells him is not possible. The story stuck with me. 3 And many years later when I read the original book during my sophomore year of college, I devoured the novel in two sittings as the story I had enjoyed so much in the movie took on new form in my own imagination. And returning to The Exorcist in this way as a young adult, with two years of a theology major under my belt, Father Karras struggle between faith and reason, or faith and science, or more specifically, faith and psychology, echoed for me questions I was asking in my own faith.

10 What is the line between the spiritual and the merely psychological ? And how do we know the difference? Now why do I bring all of this up? I bring it up because, for us, stories of demons and exorcisms are sensationalized Hollywood affairs even the ones that seek to explore genuine and profound questions of faith, as is the case with The Exorcist, they are still highly sensationalized spectacles. But this is the exact opposite of what we usually find in scripture. Take today s passage from Mark for example. Here we have Jesus. He s already started his ministry; he s just appointed the twelve disciples, and already he s running into problems with the religious leaders and not only them, but his own family.