Sitting and listening to sermons is something I love to do. Most of the time it is a very positive experience, sometimes it really is not. The latter is when one of two things is taking place. Either the preacher cannot preach and lost me or he is distorting the gospel or scriptures. So, I am left either bored and end up reading from my Bible during the sermon, or I am taking notes and processing what is wrong with the sermon. Fortunately, the majority of sermons I hear are good or even great and that needs to be kept in mind if you are going to read any further.
So, I hear this sermon on Mark 1:21-28. I love the Gospel according to Mark and have spent more time teaching from it than any other. What was odd about this sermon was that the preacher took an event, namely the encounter with a demon in the synagogue, and made it mythical. How? With one question. After talking briefly about the authority with which Jesus taught, and then the casting of the demon, he asked us all “What are your demons?” He then spoke of various sins as demons and suggested that we can be free of them. My beef at this point was that this text describes a supernatural event and the preacher diminished that with one question. No longer were we to be thinking about an incredible thing that Jesus did there but we were to think about the so called demons in our lives. My next concern was that the meaning or point of the passage was removed or ignored entirely. What Mark’s gospel does so brilliantly is reveal who Jesus is. He does that in part by telling us about the reactions that people have to him. This demon possessed person identified Jesus as the Holy One of God. The people’s reaction was to ask “who is this man?”. There was the meaning of the text to preach on. Instead we were told to think about our demons. However, the comparison is simply not reasonable. This was an evil spirit that dwelled within someone. It was not a sin of the person or a sinful issue in the persons life that Jesus cast out. So the preachers question really would naturally lead a person to think that to get rid of sin in their life, one must have it cast out. The text would suggest that this casting out would be a dramatic and possibly violent action. Wow! How cool would it be if I could just go see a priest and have all my sins cast out one by one? It would not be pretty but in the end I would be healed and sinless. Sadly this is so far from gospel truth.
If the sermon had stuck to the plain meaning of the text, he could have preached on the question of who Jesus is and got us all thinking about how well we know the son of God. Throughout Mark’s gospel, this is a huge point. People just did not understand who Jesus was. The same is true today when we stop and realize how few people understand who Jesus is. He could have focused on the authority of Jesus demonstrated not only by his teaching but by the act of casting out a demon. That can draw our attention to the God that is holy and righteous and capable of saving us. Instead we could easily have gotten the impression that we can at least in part save ourselves if we would only identify our demons. That is not the gospel.
“The gospel of submission, commitment, decision, and victorious living is not good news about what God has achieved but a demand to save ourselves with God’s help.” — Michael Horton
So, our handling of scripture must get it right – at least to the best of our ability. This is why Paul emphasizes “rightly dividing the word of God” when instructing leaders. There really is no excuse for preaching like I heard in this sermon. I know that sounds harsh. Maybe I am comfortable saying that because of other bad sermons I have heard. However, we don’t have the freedom to be sloppy with preaching or teaching God’s word. It is vital that we proclaim the gospel and that gospel is that God has done all that needs to be done to save us. When we are focused on Him, our hearts and consequently our lives change as well.
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