“Facing the Darkness, or Amazing Authority”

     The meeting Jesus had with an unclean spirit in the synagogue is a parable of our salvation. Jesus intrudes, enters the hurt, embraces the "darkness ahead," and rebukes it, commands it depart, stills our troubled souls, our confused spirits calms, and blesses us. He is the Holy One of God that comes among us, entering the pain, confronting the evil, saying, "Peace, be still."
     There's nothing down there to fear, we are told. Darkness is not so terrible. We've all grown up, come of age, can think for ourselves. There is no subterranean abyss at the bottom of the stairs. You're over twenty-one now, educated, liberated, self-sufficient. We celebrate our self-sufficiency, to glory in the glow of our electrically induced enlightenment. There's nothing down there to fear.
     The world that is offered to us by modern secularism is restricted to life upstairs, improvised, and quite incapable of satisfying our real needs. Nietzsche also observed of modern Christians - all nice and polite, and offering nothing of help for the late night, three in the morning, terrors. The depression of uncertainty. Bad prognoses about your physical condition. What a vain, hollow, academic hogwash to tell us we have outgrown need of external intervention, that "self-sufficiency is all you need", that we no longer require a God who intrudes, heals and helps.
     The devil does everything in his power to make his voice heard in this world. At one point he even had the audacity to interrupt Jesus while the Lord was speaking in the synagogue. What is a demon? A demon is a force preventing our lives from being what God wants us to be. A demon is a force not of our own choosing. A demon is not so much a matter of our sin as it is some tragic violation of God's good intention for creation. A   demon is a hostile force at work in us, on us, around us, or above us.
     The evil in this world is committed to convince us to be the self-righteous who think they are without sin because we are unwilling to suffer the discomfort of significant self-examination. Saint Therese of Lisieux put it so nicely in her gentle way: "  If you are willing to serenely bear the trial of being displeasing to yourself, then you will be for Jesus a pleasant place of shelter."
     Therefore, we pray, “Lord, deliver us from evil. Deliver us from our impulse to lie to ourselves and our fear to confess the truth. Lord, deliver us from this evil- the desire to always do things our way and go by our feelings and what we think rather than walking with You. Deliver us from evil, Lord – our proneness to worry, our anxiety to always be in control, our refusal to worship, our excuses for and reasons for keeping our arms folded, lips tight, when we should help others.”

Pastor Sam