Scary Movies
I’ve grown up watching scary movies. We watched classics like Frankenstein, Dracula, and the Wolfman, as well as the not-so-classic cheesy horror movies like the screaming skull on Saturday afternoons. When we were teenagers, my brother Greg, my cousin Richard and I would see the more gruesome scary movies of our day: the 80’s slasher movies like Friday the 13th, Nightmare on Elm Street, Halloween, Chucky, and the bride of Chuckie. They were over-the-top in their gruesomeness but did not seem realistic.
The story always had the same characteristics. A superhuman, diabolically evil being would lurk in the shadows, stalking the victims as suspense among the audience was building, and then suddenly swoop out and kill the victims. The victims usually did something wrong to seal their fate. The bullies and the sexually promiscuous characters met their demise first. The heroine (slasher movies of the 1980s often depicted teenage girls as the hero) was brave, resourceful, and usually the most virtuous character in the cast.
She would end up killing the villain… or at least so we would think, until the monster suddenly came back to life and had to be defeated a second time.
Possession Movies
Movies about demonic possession were usually the darkest of the horror movie genre. The Exorcist, released in 1973, was the first of this genre to gain wide popularity. These movies were more nihilistic, and evil is depicted as more powerful.
In the Exorcist, the team of two priests was able to expel the demon, but both priests died in the process. I have noticed that many of our most popular movies now have more nihilistic themes, even our superhero movies. Evil forces seem so overwhelming that even superheroes struggle mightily, sometimes unsuccessfully, to keep them at bay.
The Myth of Redemptive Violence
What makes these stories so popular? Theologian Walter Wink believed that most of our popular movies and certainly the horror and slasher movies use an ancient form of storytelling called “the myth of redemptive violence.” Wink states that power structures since the era of the Babylonian empire “have used this myth to delude people into compliance with a system that is cheating them of their very lives.” “The myth of redemptive violence,” Wink notes, “is the simplest, laziest, most exciting, uncomplicated, irrational, and primitive depiction of evil the world has ever known.” In these stories, order obtains victory over chaos through violence. The myth of redemptive violence is the ideology of conquest, the original religion of the status quo.”
Today’s Demons
Modern stories about demons and demon possession provide relief from tension generated by the chaotic forces in our lives -- impending climate collapse, looming economic recession, the perception of increased violent crime (even if crime statistics might not bear this out), increased homelessness, drug deaths, and suicides, etc. But as movie plots become more cynical, when the heroes fail, our culture may be signaling that our demons are overpowering.
New Understanding
Today, with our increased knowledge about mental illness or epilepsy, modern people rarely attribute these conditions to demonic possession. However, there still seems to be a spiritual dimension to illness: a cycle of self-accusation or anger at family members often accompanies severe illness or death, which is surely spiritual darkness.
The Antithesis
In our gospel story, Jesus deals with evil quite differently. The gospel provides the antithesis to the myth of redemptive violence. In the exorcism accounts in the New Testament, the person “possessed” cannot be blamed. They had been invaded by a stronger, spiritual power, which only Jesus could expel. God does not will suffering, and even Jesus did not escape suffering and death. Suffering is a fact of life, and our faith helps us endure suffering. When we emphasize personal responsibility for keeping ourselves healthy, we often blame the ill for their illness.
The Adversary
1. When he announced the kingdom of heaven, Jesus proclaimed a new regime that counters the darkness of this world: the suffering, the illness, the hatred, war, disease, and most importantly, death would be expelled. According to the New Testament and parts of the Old Testament, this world’s darkness comes from the adversary, the evil force in this world, Satan. The proper name “Satan” comes from the Hebrew word “ha satan,” meaning adversary. In the New Testament, the Greek word used for Satan is “diabolos,” which we translate as Devil, but it also can be an “accuser” or “adversary.” Richard Beck notes in, Reviving Old Scratch that, in the Bible, Satan and the Devil are interchangeable names for the personification of all that is adversarial to the kingdom and people of God. Satan is the personified enemy of God.
Some people may have difficulty believing in an entity that embodies evil, but the New Testament makes the struggle between Jesus and Satan a key theme in the gospels. In modern times, we witnessed the incredible power of evil employed in the Nazi occupation of Europe and the Holocaust, the Rwandan Genocide, the Stalin Regime’s massacres in the Soviet Union, and the Khmer Rouge’s massacres in Cambodia. In the United States, we have our examples of systemic evil: the Wounded Knee massacre at the Lakota Pine Ridge Reservation, the institution of chattel slavery and racism in America, in today’s spike in murders and mass shootings, many spurred on racism, misogyny, or homophobia. Once unrepentant evil is unleashed, it is difficult to stop. I have no problem personifying that evil as Satan and those actions as demonic.
Expelling the Demons
Evil can be overpowering, but Jesus came to free us from the mental slavery of suffering and guide us to communities where we are supposed to care for each other. The New Testament frequently addresses the topic of demons in the four gospels and the Book of Acts. In these stories, demon-possessed people are frightening, cast off from their communities, and live in iniquity until they encounter Jesus or the disciples. Jesus expelled the demons with a command, and the person, released from spiritual bondage, found wholeness and community. Then they can proclaim their salvation, find like-minded followers, and form ecclesia, congregations of believers.
He Who Commands the Winds and Waters
The setting of our gospel story is given in the few verses before our reading. Luke 8:22 informs us, “One day Jesus said to his disciples, Let’s go to the other side of the lake.” So, they set off, and Jesus took a nap in the boat, and the little boat immediately ran into a storm. The boat was getting swamped, and the disciples panicked and woke Jesus. They cried, “Master, Master, we’re going to drown.” Jesus awoke, rebuked the storm, and the waters calmed. Jesus then turned to his disciples and asked, “Where is your faith?” The disciples didn’t answer; they just sat there amazed and asked, “Who is this? He commands the winds and the waters, and they obey him!”
Possession and Addiction
When they reached the other side of the lake and Jesus stepped ashore, he was met by a demon-possessed man from the town. The man was homeless, naked, and ranting. He caused so much trouble around the town that the respectable citizens bound him in chains and tried to keep him under constant guard, but his raving madness gave him superhuman strength. Sort of like those accounts of people today high on drugs who fight off teams of police officers who try to hold them down. The man was probably not unlike the people we see on a street corner, ranting at a trash can or yelling into the air at seemingly no one. These ravings can seem like demon possession; in a sense, it is possession by continuous drug use, alcoholism, or mental illness.
Legion
When Jesus calmly asked the man his name, he replied, “Legion.” A legion of Roman soldiers was 600 men, so the man must have been under the control of countless dark spirits. His actions upset the order of his town, and he was cast out. Jesus, it seems, crossed the lake with his disciples just to heal this man: a man abandoned and cut off from home and meaningful life. Jesus’s own disciples were still working out Jesus’s identity, but this man, driven to insanity by the demons in his head, knew who Jesus was. When he saw Jesus, he fell at his feet and cried out, ‘What have you to do with me, Jesus, Son of the Most High God? I beg you, do not torment me.’ These demons cried out because they knew Jesus had the power to free this man, but the man desperately threw himself at Jesus’s feet.
Demon Pigs
Jesus then cast out the demons that had driven this man to insanity. I don’t know why the demons asked to be placed into the pigs or why Jesus gave them their wish. The text does not explain it, but pigs were considered unclean animals by the Jewish converts who probably first read this story. The pigs also represented the livelihood of the people in the village. Perhaps this was the just impact on their community for casting this man from their care? The story does mention that when the people came out of the village to see what Jesus had done and saw the formerly possessed young man sitting at Jesus’s feet, clothed and in his right mind, they gathered the people from the surrounding area to ask Jesus to leave for they were afraid. Slide 1
Writer Flannery O’Conner, once noted in one of her letters, “all human nature vigorously resists grace because grace changes us, and the change is painful.” The people asked Jesus to leave for the same reason they expelled the possessed man into the wilderness; they were afraid.
Tell How Much God Has Done for You
The formerly possessed man, however, lost all fear when Jesus set him free. He wanted to follow Jesus, but Jesus told him to “Return home and tell how much God has done for you.” So the man went away and told all over town how much Jesus had done for him.”
Chaos and evil are indeed prevalent in the world, but often evil is committed because of fear and sometimes in the name of personal or tribal security. The foreigner and the refugees are barred from the neighborhood. The poor are forgotten. Resources are hoarded, and empires are built as a tribe, caste, or class gains power and enforces that power with violence. Hardship begets hardship until they can seem like legions. To see this dynamic in action, we need look no further than our own Lahaina town.
The Maui News featured a story this week about the recent purchase of the Crossroads Apartments in Lahaina by new investors who plan to force out existing tenants (some of whom have lived in their apartments for decades) to renovate the apartments and charge double the rent. The new investors cannot be reached for comment, but I am sure they would argue that they have a right to make a good profit on their investment. But, given the scarcity of affordable housing in our community, is it responsible to suddenly force out long-term tenants when there is no place for them to go, all to obtain a profit? We seem to have moved from an era when communities organized to establish orderly communities into an era when everyone is out for themselves to get what they can. The myth of redemptive violence has failed to inspire order, but the church has an alternate narrative, the Kingdom of God.
Stanley Hauerwas
Jesus instructed his disciples to make disciples and form the church to counter the chaos with love and truth. Theologian Stanley Hauerwas noted that “the truthfulness of Christian convictions resides in their power to form a people sufficient to acknowledge the divided character of the world and thus necessarily ready to offer hospitality to the stranger.”
We may not change the world, but through our efforts, we can stand for those who were abandoned by their community.
The Church
The church is not the United Methodist Church, the Protestant Church, or the Catholic Church; the church is where people faithfully carry out the task of being witnesses to the reality of God’s Kingdom. God promised to send the Holy Spirit to the church. If we allow that Spirit to help us establish order amid the chaos of this world through the story of grace rather than the myth of redemptive violence, we can exorcise this world’s demons in Jesus’s name. Amen.