Seminarian Steve Bragaw's Sermon

4th Sunday After Epiphany 1 Mark 1:21-28 Jan 31, 2021
I love Christmas—-don’t get me wrong.
Easter, Thanksgiving, the Fourth of July. I love the big holidays—the getting ready, the spectacle, but I’ve also always been fond of the smaller, quieter, quirky ones. This week marks an important one in the life and rhythm of the spiritual journey through the year: I am talking of course of Groundhog day—February 2nd—which falls this year on Tuesday.
I’ve always loved Groundhog Day—as a kid, growing up in New England, Groundhog Day was always if not the beginning of the end of winter, it was the end of the beginning, of that long season of slipping our feet into plastic bread loaf bags before sliding them into our rubber boots, in a futile effort to keep our feet dry wading through the slush on our way to the bus stop in the endless gray mornings. Groundhog Day was always the first of the triduum marking the journey out of Winter—soon followed by the arrival of Girl Scout Cookies and baseball spring training.
So you can imagine my joy and surprise when my little holiday became a movie: 1993’s Groundhog Day. Bill Murray played TV weatherman Phil Connors—-a deeply flawed, narcissistic, egotistic, horrible, self- loathing human being—who is sent to Punxsutawney PA to report on the Groundhog Day festival. Phil, ever the narcissist, looks down on the town and its people as beneath him, and when a sudden blizzard— which he predicted would pass them by—arrives and snows the town in, he has to spend the night. When he awakes the next morning at 6AM—-spoiler alert on a 25 year old movie—he finds it’s February 2nd, Groundhog Day, and he’s forced to repeat the day. Again. And again. And again. And again. Part of how the movie works is there’s no explanation—he’s not visited by ghosts or assisted by angel looking for his wings, there’s no Doctor or Tardis, no extraterrestrial orb—it’s just Phil, and the eternal repeating of one mundane gray day.
Harold Ramis, the writer and director, speculated while writing the script that Phil Connors spends 3000 years in Punxsutawney, repeating the same day. 3000 years. Phil goes through all the stages of existential despair—including trying to kill the Groundhog—before finally learning to embrace profoundly the strange grace of the day. He find joys in the small things, learns to play the piano, and finds ways to help the townspeople he once loathed—and in the process, learning how to love himself.
Theologians love this movie. It’s perhaps the best artistic treatment of the concept of purgatory since Dante Alighieri wrote Purgatorio as part of his Divine Comedy in the 14th century. Dante’s description was no less mystical than Ramis’: Dante envisioned a seemingly endless, repeating cycle of existential despair, with the souls of the not damned but not worthy circling a seemingly endless cycle of rooms. The last room featured two doors—an easy one, which led back into the labyrinth—and a hard one—a door surrounded by fire. If the soul that had followed the seemingly endless meandering walk could come to the fiery door and walk through—unscathed—it was free to ascend to paradiso.
Growing up Roman Catholic, I always disliked the idea of purgatory: I’d argue with the Catholic priests about it (before I realized I was a Protestant), not finding purgatory anywhere in the Bible or at all consistent with the idea of a loving and redeeming God. I remember my response to Dante: maybe not the “Bah! Humbug!” of Ebeneezer Scrooge, more of a “Really?”
Now? In 2021? I’ll be honest, I’m not so sure anymore.
We’ve been through what seems like our own version of purgatory this past year. A year ago this week, we marked in the United States our first cases and first death from the Coronavirus, Covid 19: now, a year later, we have exceeded the total of US combat deaths in WW2. Every day this month we’ve averaged more deaths than on 9/11—Every. Day. We’ve grown numb to it. While the arrival of vaccines give us hope, our numbness to it all—-All. Of. It—-grows. And soon we return to Lent—our Second Lent of the Rona—and we remain distanced, apart, afar, disconnected, and uncertain. We need to prepare ourselves and be mindful for the emotions of grief and alienation that the Second Lent of Covid may create.
Bragaw 4th Sunday After Epiphany 2 Mark 1:21-28 Jan 31, 2021
Dante’s purgatory was marked in part by the absence of a sense of time; our own sense of time has been challenged this year, and this is a real thing. The Dutch-American psychologist Bessel van der Kolk describes in The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma how traumatic stress forms memory differently, in how the chemicals driven by stress change our perception of time in the creation of medium term memory. There’s a reason why Christmas seems like five years rather than five weeks ago—the mind is literally recording time differently.
Our minds are seeing things and remembering things and processing things differently. And maybe there’s a strange grace in that? Maybe the strange grace of this--all of this—is that we are seeing and processing and remembering differently?
The strange grace of disorientation and grief lets us approach and enter into today’s Gospel differently than we would’ve the last time we heard this text in late January 2019. Which is good: make no mistake, this is a deeply strange passage but incredibly powerful story in the Gospel of Mark. It’s a gift to look at it anew.
It’s the beginning of Jesus’ ministry, in the first chapter of Mark, and he’s returning with his newly-called band of followers to his hometown. Not where he was born—Bethlehem—not where he grew up— Nazareth—but to the hometown he chose to live in as an adult: Capernaum, on the far north coast of the Sea of Galilee.
This is a pivotal story in Mark’s Gospel. Mark is the oldest of the Gospels—we believe it was first, for a host of good reasons—and it’s different in many ways: shorter, more concise, with an accelerated narrative, and it’s kind of the gritty, kinetic action movie version of the Gospels, compared to the measured Rabbinic teaching of Matthew, the stately journey to Jerusalem of Luke, or the ethereal otherworldliness of John.
Two vitally important things happen in this story: we find out a lot about who Jesus is by what he does; but we also find out a lot about the the people of Galilee.
What do we learn about Jesus? One of the main ways Mark is different is who Jesus is, and what he does, and what are the signs we should be looking for: Mark’s Jesus is a healer—and he’s an exorcist. The two actions go together—Jesus heals, and he casts out demons. In Mark’s narrative they are paired tasks— they’re related. Again and again through Mark, Jesus and the disciples move from town to town—Jewish and Gentile—around the Sea of Galilee, healing the sick, exorcising demons, and fleeing the town in their boat, one step ahead of the law.
The exorcism in the synagogue in Capernaum stands out—not because it was the most dramatic—but because it’s the first sign of Jesus’ public ministry. THIS is how he begins his ministry.
What do we learn about the people? This is what defines Mark’s Gospel: Jesus remains a mystery to the people.
This is vital to understand Mark, and it starts with today’s passage and two stories that follow. Jesus returns to his adopted hometown and proclaims the Gospel, and the people who knew him as an adult— the good people of the synagogue of Capernaum—are amazed, but are deeply skeptical. In the next chapter, his hometown—Nazareth? He’s rejected and driven out—not just by the people—but his family — by his brothers and sisters, and his Mom.
Again and again in Mark, the disciples, his family, his hometown—reject him. They don’t see who he is.
But the key to Mark’s mystery is the one group of characters in Mark who ALWAYS recognize him, who call him by his name, his real name?
Bragaw 4th Sunday After Epiphany 3 Mark 1:21-28 Jan 31, 2021
The Demons.
"What have you to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth? Have you come to destroy us? I know who you are, the Holy One of God."
They always call him by his real name. They always recognize who he is and what he represents. And they always resist. And Jesus always casts them out.
Now, if you had asked me when we heard this last? Demons? Exorcisms? I would’ve waived it away. How about it we preach on the psalm appointed for the week?
Now? I’ll be honest, I’m not so sure anymore.
So what do we do with this?
Dante offers two doors out—an easy one and a hard, fiery one.
One response I think is to look for the easy grace, find the comfort in the vaccines and the coming of Spring and say something like, “let us resolve to go forth and fight the demons we see, to do the work of the Gospel”, and to, maybe channel some Lincoln: “We are not enemies, but friends....Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory... will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”
But that’s the easy door, and I think it leads back to the maze.
The hard way out—the fiery door—is to sit with the questions:
——-Why are the townspeople of Capernaum—who knew Jesus—unable to see who he is?
——-Why are the Demons able to see who Jesus is while those who knew him best—his friends and his family—unable to? Why did the townspeople not see who Jesus was even when the Demons called him out?
These questions are the essence of Mark’s mystery, that Mark is inviting us to sit with and make us uncomfortable.
I’d add a third question:
Why were the townspeople, the citizens of the synagogue in Capernaum, unable to see the Demon in their midst? Was it just fear? Were they afraid to see the world differently? Was confronting the demon just too much? Did they choose not to see—Jesus, or the Demon—or could they just not see? Did the demon represent something that was socially unacceptable to talk about in synagogue? Was it more polite, comfortable, and pleasant to just ignore the Demon in their midst? Which leads to the frightening question: by ignoring the demon, was it more also polite, comfortable, pleasant and socially acceptable to ignore the presence of the very Son of Man in their own midst?
And here’s the strange grace Mark offers us—are we like the good people of Capernaum—refusing to see either God or the devil? What demons lurk within our midst, protected by our silence? Addiction? Systematic racism? A justice system still stepped in the toxic poison of white supremacy? What saving grace stands in our presence, unacknowledged by our fear of the disruption it would create to dismantle these demons?
And may we use the strange grace offered by this time of plague, disruption, and disunity, to be willing to see the world around us with new eyes and open hearts. Amen.