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SERMONS

Fourth Sunday after the Epiphany
February 1, 2009

By The Rev. Alston Johnson

There is something that you should know about me, something that I should tell you, I hope it will not compromise our friendship - I am a great fan of Harry Potter. I have thought of joining a group or something; I just don’t know.

In the book, The Prisoner of Azcaban, the students at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry receive a lesson in how to combat a particular kind of spook. The foe is a “boggart.” It is a shape-shifting kind of ghost. When someone encounters a boggart in the world of Harry Potter, it will suddenly transform itself into a vision of your greatest fear.

The first boggart the students encounter is locked in a classroom cupboard . It becomes a demon-box rattling and shaking before the class. When the demon-box is opened out pops the boggart, transformed into that one thing that renders its victim powerless, helpless, frozen. The boggart’s power is to render a person petrified in their own fear.

For the students in Harry Potter’s class the boggart assumes all sorts of forms before the startled students - for one it becomes a giant spider, for another a giant snake, for another the image of frightening professor Snape.

If any one of us were standing before the demon box and the boggart, I wonder what form our fears would assume?

The charm with which to combat a boggart is ingenious - “Riddikulus!”

Out pops your greatest of fears - the one thing that petrifies you - and you say to it “Riddikulus!” - and just as suddenly the boggart transforms from something terrifying into something funny; darkness is overcome with laughter.

{Pause} { a children’s story not just for children}

I am always struck by what Jesus finds sitting right there in the pews of the local synagogue. Perhaps Mark is sending a number of messages by placing this demon possessed man right under the noses of good synagogue folk. Not at the courts, not at the bank, not at the houses of ill repute, but at the synagogue, where God’s word is spoken, that is where we find evil finding its shelter. An observation that I am always borrowing from other biblical scholars, is that anywhere Jesus is present in the Gospels - everything is in motion - things are either moving toward Jesus, or away from Him; nothing remains stationary.

Jesus has already been identified by the heavens as the Beloved Son; and now Jesus is identified from below, by the forces that would like to avoid him. Jesus is smoking them out - like fire burning through the brush - the snakes are on the move when Jesus is present. Mark is telling us about the kind of power that Jesus brings into this world; it is a power to flush evil out of all the corners where it hides, where it waits.

In contemporary writing about Satan, the Devil, demons, more often than not, they are catalogued beneath the heading “The Problem of Evil.” This seems to be a way to get our minds and our imaginations around the forces in this world that destroy the Creatures of God; that destroy the presence of God.

We may have need for demons to be categorized as a “problem of evil,” so that there is some outside chance of their presence being “solved.” To speak of evil in any other terms, we might risk opening a pandoras box of speculations about what is actually going on in this first chapter of Mark.

It does not seem to me that Jesus is addressing this demon as a problem to be solved, as much as an enemy to be faced and overcome. This encounter is immediate, not hypothetical, not academic.

The lines are also blurred by our modernity. It is fairly obvious that many in the ancient world who were considered demon possessed were in some sense mentally ill and unwell. Psychology and modern medicine certainly clear up much of the ancient demon problem. That may be, but the writer of Mark’s Gospel never uses the word “therapeuo” - to heal - in reference to those possessed with demons - only with those having identifiable diseases. And does identifying evil as a “problem” really eradicate its presence in the world?

I really wish that I had an easy answer - that “the problem of evil” had some sort of textbook remedy - either out of psychiatry, physics, biology - but I have a hand full of experiences of what I would call the “mystery of evil.

In the midst of all the empirical knowledge that we have of ourselves, our world, its mechanism, its substance, for me, a modern Western person, there remains, at times, a presence for which we cannot account with modern categories; a something that ever so gently steps off the “Enlightenment” map, steps out of the categories with which we order other areas of our contemporary lives.
Just as there are moments of God’s grace, presence, and light, that remain unexplainable in purely rational, or scientific categories. The “mystery of evil” is like other things in the spiritual life - those who have experienced it, know it, and probably don’t need too many other rationalizations; while those who have not experienced it, either don’t worry about it, or go in for explanations and rationalizations.

One thing I can say with confidence, is that there is only one human life that has overcome the mysterious evil, that has power over the demon-box; and that is Jesus Christ.

And I think that J. K. Rowling, the author of the Harry Potter series, is onto something by shouting “Riddikulus!” at the boggarts, the boogie men, the devils, and the demons who haunt us - who live in our own little demon-boxes. She has latched onto one of the most ancient and greatest Christian truths - the devil and his demons cannot bear laughter.

In some measure, that is what Jesus comes into this world to tell the powers and the principalities that would enslave us - “Ridikkulus!”

“The devil, that prowde spirit, cannot endure to be mocked,” said Thomas More. And from one of the great court jesters of evil, Martin Luther, “the best way to drive out the devil is to jeer and flout him, for he cannot bear scorn.”

It is the power and the real presence of a living Lord who gives us the courage and certainty of laughter in the face of a mysterious evil that would haunt us. And, as every true friend of Hogwarts knows, Harry Potter finally defeats the dark one on that one day of the year when children and adults cast mock and scorn upon evil by dressing it up as a cartoon - Halloween.

“Riddikulus! Be Silent, and Come out of him.”