“What’s Past is Prologue” Mark 1: 21-28
by Rev. Dr. Christine Johnson
There are some days when I wish I had the power of Jesus.
When you see someone tortured with an unclean spirit,
you just want to say “Be silent, and come out of him.”
In Mark, we’re given the impression that this unclean spirit
is possessing this person.
This unclean spirit, it seems, has come from outside of this person,
and is inhabiting their body.
This is the premise of a hundred horror movies.
There are many different kinds of possession.
Today I want to focus on persons, who seem to be possessed by an idea,
or a mission, or something that has happened in the past.
An unclean spirit, for me, is when someone is so possessed by something,
it destroys their sense of self, and dooms them to a diminished life.
I believe that God calls us to a life which flourishes,
in which happiness and joy exist alongside the usual setbacks and challenges.
A life which flourishes experiences pain and sorrow
but knows how to put it into perceptive, so that pain and sorrow don’t take over their body.
I was at a Presbytery meeting on Wednesday
at which a brand new pastoral relations policy was being introduced.
In the middle of the presentation, one woman cried out about how she didn’t understand.
She couldn’t understand
how this policy would reduce the incredibly high workload for her committee.
She couldn’t hear what the person was saying,
because she kept coming back to the pain, despair, fatigue, worry of her own committee.
During the whole meeting, I could hear her making snide comments.
She was possessed with her concept of reality,
and couldn’t free herself of the old model in order to understand the new model.
I wish I could have said, “Be silent, and come out of her.”
Her unclean spirit, though not evil or demonic, blocked her from truly flourishing,
from seeing a way out of model that’s just not working.
An unclean spirit always speaks up against authority,
because they’re stuck.
I’ve seen this over and over again when it comes to past experiences.
In a small town everybody knows everybody’s business.
Facebook has nothing on a small town.
So, when I went to visit a certain woman I’d already heard about
the fact that her husband had embarrassed her
by carrying on an affair with another woman.
He then divorced her and married this other woman.
She sat in her large, beautiful house
and told me that she would never forgive him for what he did.
Somehow we think that holding on to our inability to forgive
has a cosmic effect.
That is, we think that by holding on to our hurt, our resentment, our pain
we’re somehow getting our revenge on that other person.
But where was her ex-husband?
He wasn’t in the room with her.
He was off living another life with a person he loved.
Who was being affected by the hurt, resentment and pain?
...only the person who holds on to the past, and won’t let it go.
Another woman in that small town
had experienced incest .
She had also been sexually abused by another adult.
In her 30s, the pain of these memories was so bad,
she could hardly function because of back problems.
She decided to lash out at her family,
and at the man who sexually abused her.,
When she tried to have her revenge,
her father was so upset he hung himself.
Her “unclean” spirit couldn’t cope with those memories.
They tore her apart.
Her “unclean” spirit couldn’t find a healthy way to resolve the issues,
which certainly needed to be dealt with.
I spoke with her until I was blue in the face,
but she couldn’t hear the authority in my voice.
I wish that I’d been able to say,
“Be silent, and come out of her.”
For both of these women,
their souls were crushed.
It was like their souls were cemented in the past.
How do you move on,
how do you let go, when you’re immobilized?
I turn again to Joan Chittister,
who is a member of a religious order, a theologian and writer.
She wrote a wonderful book called, “Welcome to the Wisdom of the World.”
She asks,
“How do we recover from the losses life brings along the way?”
And there will be losses.
We all lose things – great things—along the way.
Parents die, houses burn down, companies close, relationships end,
friends move away.
Chittister writes,
“Death happens. Sickness happens. Change happens. Then, it is not a matter of being able to control life that we need; it is a matter of being able to accept what can be made out of what’s left of it.”
As I read Chittister’s words,
the phrase “What’s past is prologue” popped into my head.
This Shakespearean phrase comes from the play, The Tempest.
The two characters in the play, Antonio and Sebastian,
are discussing the first act in their heroic drama.
Antonio tells Sebastian that whatever has happened in the past
is the prologue to the script which is in their hands to write.
In other words, in the Shakespearean context,
this phrase means:
"What's already happened merely sets the scene for the really important stuff,
which is the stuff our greatness will be made on."
For us, it could mean this:
“What’s already happened shapes who we will become.”
The spirit of the past, in a healthy way, teaches us how to live in the present.
The spirit of the past should not possess us in such a way
that we are like the bent-over woman, crippled by the burdens we carry.
I learned the hard way that what’s past can only hurt you if you choose to allow it.
Chittister says this so eloquently:
“When we refuse to let go of the past, when we refuse to build a new life in the place of the old, we doom ourselves to the kind of emotional death from which there is no exit. We entomb ourselves. We make new life, new spirit, new spiritual insights impossible. We fail to see the God of the present as the new gift of the past.”
Jesus spoke with authority of a new way, a way that overcomes all the unclean spirits,
a faith in God that gives us a solid foundation on which to live healthy balanced lives,
lives that flourish even in the face of challenges.
What’s past is prologue.
Chittister says, “All I need to do is to embrace the future with the knowledge faith gives us of the rightness of the past.”
Jesus always worked with the past in order to offer a vision of what the world could be.
He stood in the synagogue, surrounded by ancient scripture and the history of his people,
so that a new word could be spoken in order to heal the world.
What’s past is prologue.
Your past is a prologue to the beauty and love that comes from God
and is newly available to you every day.
No comments:
Post a Comment