Demons, Deliverance and Declaration*

This is a story about demons, about deliverance and about declaration.  Call them the Three Ds, if you like.

The first D is a demon.  Jesus meets a man who has been possessed by a demon.  This man is barely human; he runs around naked, living among the tombs on the edge of town.  From time to time, he is captured and chained up, but each time he breaks free.  This is an important point:  the demon is strong -- stronger than any human restraints.

And yet, already, I know that I have lost some of you.  Some of us here today, and I am one,  come from societies which do not take demons seriously anymore.  For us, they are cartoon characters, suitable for comic books and movies, where they are played for humorous effect by some guy in a latex suit.  Or we tell ourselves that the demons in the Bible represent mental illness -- that Jesus meets a crazy man, a man with a psychological disease, and heals him.  Jesus is a sort of model for modern psychiatry.  That's okay; that makes a lot of sense.  If we know nothing else about the Lord's earthly ministry, it is that it was a ministry of healing; and indeed, the story ends up with the man "in his right mind."

But to be honest, I'm not sure that does justice to the story.  Because, when the Bible talks about demons, it is talking about something more than disease.  Because disease, as we think about it today, is neutral; germs aren't good or bad, any more than dogs or cats.  They simply are.  But demons are bad.  They are servants of the Devil; they are the weapons with which which an alien power has invaded God's Creation, and with which it makes war against us.  In the beginning, God made the world, and declared it good; but the power of sin has corrupted the world -- from Adam and Eve, down to your heart and mine.  We are in bondage to sin -- we said so together, just a few minutes ago -- we are in bondage to sin, and cannot free ourselves.

But Jesus can set us free.  There in the land of the dead, outside the boundaries of civilization, he meets the man who -- just like you and me -- is controlled by demons.  And Jesus breaks their power.  That is the second D -- deliverance.

How does he do it?  First, with a question:  What is your name?  Identify yourself, he says, like a traffic cop who has pulled you over on the highway, standing by your open window, demanding license and registration.  Identify yourself. If you want to cast out a demon, that's not a bad place to begin.  If you want to be free from sin, it helps to name the sin.  This is why we have confession; so that we can say, out loud, "I am controlled by lust," or "I am controlled by ambition," or "I am controlled by fear."  Or shame, or doubt, or whatever else.  Name the the demon, and you are half-way home.

But this demon is tricky.  It answers Jesus -- no choice, because he is in charge for every moment of this exchange.  But it gives a tricky answer, saying, "Our name is Legion, for we are many."  Well, there's the human condition in a nutshell, beloved.  It is never just one demon for us.  It is never lust alone, but lust and ambition and fear.  Or pride and greed and rage.  There are so many demons!  They are Legion, in your heart and in mine.  But this does not stop Jesus; he does not care how many of them there are.  He has come into the world to do battle with all of them, and with their master.  He has come to drive the demons out, to save us all, one soul at a time. And so he does.  He delivers that poor man, as he delivers you and me.

The demons know they are beaten.  They always did, from the moment they first begged Jesus to leave them alone.  Now they beg for a chance even to  possess a herd of pigs --  pigs, which to a Jew like Jesus are unclean animals.  I have always suspected a little joke here, on the part of St. Luke the Evangelist, or even of God.  Pigs are un-kosher, unfit for human consumption; and yet they are the best the demons can hope for. So Jesus reduces these fearsome demons to the level of dirty, disgusting animals, and even then they run over a cliff into the sea so that nobody can ever turn them into sausage.

The pigs may be a little joke, but the exorcism -- the deliverance -- is not.  This is an illustration of God's plan for you and me, my friends.  This is God's promise:  to set us free from our bondage; to lead us toward Heaven; to deliver us from evil. The demons are cast out; we are delivered by the mighty hand of God.

All that remains is the third D -- declaration.  Because it is one thing to be free, and another thing to live like you are free.  There is an expression, that "the slave grows to love his chains," not because they are good, but because they are all he knows.  Psychologists talk about something like this, when they treat "the Stockholm Syndrome."  In the 1970s, Swedish bank robbers took hostages, and held them by force for almost a week.  Locked them in a vault, threatened to shoot them, even strangled one.  Yet when it was over, the hostages talked about how much they loved their captors, what decent people they were.  They had been set free, but they still thought and acted like captives.

And what about us?  Do we live like people who have been set free from sin?  Do we defend what is right and condemn what is wrong, or do we stand by quietly and with our silence give comfort to the devil?  Even more than that:  Do we talk, in public, about the One who has set us free?  Or do we keep our faith a secret, something to be shared only with other believers?  Because, after all, we don't want to seem like religious fanatics, do we?

Well, actually, I do.  And I hope you do as well.  Some people may call it fanaticism, but I say it is plain honesty; through Jesus, God has saved my soul, and I will tell the world so long as I can speak.  And if I cannot speak, then I pray my deeds will speak for me, that whatever I do may give glory to God.  I pray that I will, and that you will also, beloved -- declare your own deliverance from demons; declare it every day, with joy; declare with your tongue and with your hands the glory of the God who sets us free.  Amen.

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*Note:  The title of this sermon, and its central conceit, are borrowed from another sermon on the same text, by Pastor Steve Saxe.  It is an excellent sermon, and I encourage you to read it here.