Disability, Demons, and Gays (Oh, My!): Sermon Preached on 8th September 2024 (Fifteenth Sunday After Trinity)

Preached at Holy Cross, Seend; St Peter’s, Poulshot; and Christ Church, Bulkington

James 2. 1-17; Mark 7. 24-37

“…he sighed and said to him, ‘Ephphatha’, that is, ‘Be opened.’”

A few weeks ago, an acquaintance messaged me out of the blue to tell me he was thinking about his relationship with God, and asked my advice on the best way to start reading the Bible. I gave him my usual advice: start with Mark’s Gospel – as it happens, the source of most of our Sunday Gospel readings in 2024 – then Genesis, then Revelation, then John’s Gospel, then Acts… and if you’re still keen at that point, it’s time to subscribe to some Bible Reading Fellowship notes.

This acquaintance is a journalist, and it was obvious from some messages he sent me as he started his journey through Mark that he was comfortable with the rich multi-layered symbolism of the story, and indeed enjoying it greatly.

Then, a few days ago, he asked if I knew any disabled biblical scholars or theologians who were worth reading. As it happens, my acquaintance is disabled, and one consequence of his disability is a very severe speech impediment.

So, knowing that he had just read the section of Mark that I am preaching on this morning, I asked for his thoughts on a story of a deaf man with a speech impediment being healed when Jesus says: “Be opened.”

My friend, alert to the multiple layers of symbolism in the text, said this struck him as relating to being “open to and opened by the love of God”. As for healing, his disability is, to him, simply part of who he is—it must therefore also, he said, be part of his Christian Faith. “I don’t think Jesus would want me not to be disabled or spend every day hoping for a cure”, he wrote to me.

He has faith that God has made him as he is. Therefore, he needs no healing. Not from his disability, anyway—although, like all of us, there is doubtless much from which he does need to be healed.

Interestingly, this is one of relatively few of Jesus’ healing miracles in which the faith of the person being healed is not specifically credited. Indeed, Jesus rarely claimed any credit for the healing miracles that surrounded Him during His earthly mission. Contrast this with the sort of religious charlatans, then and now, who use their charisma and capacity to inspire faith to make a good living for themselves. Christ came not to manipulate us, still less to profit from us, but to liberate us from all that keeps us from living in accordance with our human nature, which is in the image and likeness of God’s own nature. Our disabilities are therefore also things which reflect God’s nature.

In the other miracle story, the Syrophonecian woman is told by Jesus that her clever retort to a rather sharp comment by Him has cast a demon from her daughter, even though Jesus has not even seen the girl. Not faith, as such, as the agent of healing, but an unflinching, insightful, and rather cheeky honesty. That exchange is worth a sermon in itself, and I have preached on it in the past, but this morning, let me instead turn to the question of demons.

The subject of demons in the Bible, and how Christians today relate to them, can leave us feeling uncomfortable, even embarrassed. Indeed, there is much in how some Christians talk about demons that should leave us embarrassed. The other day, I saw a video of a talk by an American Catholic priest who is something of a celebrity exorcist. The idea of a publicity-seeking exorcist makes me suspicious. Surely someone engaged in real spiritual warfare wouldn’t draw attention to themselves? As one wag said to me, it’s like jumping up and down in the trenches shouting, after Captain Blackadder, “Over here, Fritz! What about me?”

Anyway, this American clergyman was expounding with great confidence about what he called the Five Demon Generals who sit at “The Table” and apparently report directly to Satan. Let me stress that this does not come from Scripture, nor from any established Christian tradition of teaching, but it does remind me a lot of the Dungeons and Dragons-type games I loved playing when I was a teenager.

These supposed élite demons want to promote sin in the world, although strangely the only sins the top demon generals seem to be interested in are related to sex. It seems that envy, anger, gluttony, pride, avarice, and sloth can make do with lesser diabolical entities to promote them. This priest said that the sin this demonic élite was particularly keen on promoting was homosexuality.

Now, I have many sins that I need to be redeemed from, and I have, like all of us, demons that torment me. But my homosexuality is not among them.

I don’t dismiss all talk of actual demons. I’ve known priests who were asked by a bishop to work in deliverance ministry because they had wide-ranging pastoral experience, some background in psychology, and very level heads. These people were generally sceptical of the idea of demons or indeed anything supernatural when they started. Yet while performing exorcisms over the years they sometimes saw and heard disturbing things that they could not explain in rational terms – not frequently, but very definitely. But this chancer on the Internet was misusing sensitiveand difficult concepts to tickle the ears of his fan club and, um, demonise a whole class of people.

Well, I have faith that God made me who I am and that this is good enough for Him. As St Paul wrote to the Corinthians, “By the grace of God, I am what I am.”

Having talked about disability, demons, and homosexuality – it’s quite a pair of readings today – let’s turn to the rich. The Letter of James was obviously written for Jewish Christians, it has traditionally been attributed to James the Brother of Jesus, the leader of the Church in Jerusalem in the decade or so after the Resurrection. My view is that the traditional view of its authorship is correct, and in it we are touching the world of the very earliest Christians. Not everybody likes this letter—but I do! Martin Luther certainly didn’t like it—but I do! Luther called it a “right strawy epistle” and wanted to relegate it to second-class status in the Bible.

At the heart of Luther’s problem was that James hammers home the idea that faith without works is empty—if our faith is real, it will change how we live. Luther, on the other hand, responding to the abuses of the pre-Reformation period wants to stress that we are saved through faith alone. Actually, there isn’t a contradiction here: it is God’s grace alone that saves us; faith is the means through which we grasp that; and good works should flow from our faith in God’s grace.

While being rich may be in advantage in the world, it is not with God. In the Kingdom of God many things are turned upside down, and that includes our advantages and our impediments. God has chosen the poor to be rich in Faith, while the rich risk seeing their fine chains choke them off from the source of eternal life.

Yet despair not, if you are unfortunate enough to be rich—because Luther was right: none of us is saved by our works or our state in life. Just as James deplores acts of favouritism, there is no partiality with God. Whether we’re rich or poor, disabled or an Olympic athlete, gay or a crusty old reactionary who isn’t sure what they think about that sort of thing: God loves us all as His children and it is He who saves all who put their trust in Christ, as I will say in the Prayer of Consecration in a moment, “not weighing our merits but pardoning our offences”.

Be open to God’s love, as you read and hear the Bible and in every aspect of your life, and you might be opened by it in some way that you don’t expect, and healed in a way that you never even knew you needed.

Now glory and honour be to the Holy and Undivided Trinity, the Father who made us, the Son who redeemed us, the Spirit who sustains us, this day and forevermore. Amen.

Banner image—Martin Schöngauer, Saint Anthony Tormented by Demons (1470-4). Hangs in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City.