Scripture: Mark 9:14-29
The scripture reading for today helped me to become a Christian, and over the years I have thought of it often and preached on it often. It’s because of what the father of the child who is possessed by a demon says when Jesus tells him that all things are possible for the one who believes. The father says: “I believe; help my unbelief.”
That statement helped me, once upon a time, because it described me. It described me when I was a person struggling with whether I believed enough of what I thought Christians were supposed to believe to call myself a Christian. Here was someone in the gospels who, like me, seemed to have within himself both belief and unbelief, faith and little faith and faithlessness, hope and no hope, both the desire to believe and the difficulty of believing.
Coming at a time when I was struggling with such things, finding such a friend in the gospels helped me to be more comfortable with who I was in relation to the gospels, more comfortable with Jesus, and more comfortable with the Christian faith. “I believe; help my unbelief.” It not only helped me at the time. It came to represent for me a kind of basic description of what the life of faith really is and ought to be, something anyone could hope to grow into, not grow out of. So because of that statement, this has been an important passage to me for quite a long time.
But today I’m thinking about this passage from a different angle. This is a good example of how any given reading can take on a very different meaning depending on the context of the reader and the questions we bring to it.
Tuesday is the birthday of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Not long ago, I picked up a book of sermons by Dr. King called Strength to Love. I was looking over the table of contents to see what I might want to read, and my eyes fell on one entitled: “The Answer to a Perplexing Question”. That aroused my curiosity as to what the perplexing question was that he was referring to.
It turned out to be the question the disciples ask Jesus at the end of the passage we have for today. Jesus has already cast out the demon from the boy, but the disciples maybe are just a touch jealous. They want to know, “Why could we not cast it out?” It was not for lack of desire. It was not for lack of effort. But no matter how much they had wanted to cast the demon out of the boy and no matter how hard they had tried, they had failed, until Jesus arrived. And they wanted to know why they had failed.
That’s the perplexing question Dr. King was referring to, and it’s the question I want to focus on as well. In his printed sermon, Dr. King interpreted the demon to be “evil” in a very broad, sweeping sense. Why have human beings been so unsuccessful in rooting out evil from society or from the soul? That was how he was asking the question. I want to be more specific and focus the question on the specific evil that Dr. King devoted, not a sermon but his life, to casting out: the demon of racism.
Why have we not been able to cast this demon out?
Why have the combined efforts of the abolitionist and civil rights movements not been able to cast out the demon of racism from our society?
Why have all the books and studies and commissions and resolutions and recommendations we have produced not been able to cast out the demon?
Why have the combined courageous voices of John Woolman and Frederick Douglas and Sojourner Truth and Angelina Grimke and Lillian Hellman and James Baldwin and Malcom X and Martin King and countless others both black and white—why have not all those strong, eloquent, prophetic voices been enough to rid us of racism?
Why have not the combined efforts of the American Anti-slavery Society, the American Missionary Association, the NAACP, the Urban League, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee, the Congress of Racial Equality, Operation Breadbasket and Operation PUSH—why haven’t the combined efforts of all these organizations and countless others brought us racial justice?
Why have neither the violent efforts of Nat Turner and John Brown nor the non-violent efforts of Dr. King been the last word in the journey toward freedom?
Why haven’t the breakthroughs of Satchel Paige and Jackie Robinson and Paul Robeson and Marian Anderson made all the walls of prejudice come tumbling down?
Why haven’t the combined effects of constitutional amendments and Supreme Court decisions and civil rights laws been enough to enable us to move on to something else?
Why haven’t the troubled consciences of all the people of good will in this country, past and present, been enough?
Why have we not been able to cast it out—this demon of racism?
I’ve had occasion over the last week to describe to several people what I intended to preach about this Sunday. I said on those occasions that I didn’t know yet what my answers were going to be, I just knew what the question was. I said that maybe with the implication that by the end of the week I would come up with some answers. And of course I do have more to say than just posing the question. But I also realized how arrogant it would be of me to really think I could answer that question in the second half of a sermon. And then I realized that part of the answer lies in the very difficulty and arrogance of giving answers at all.
In some measure we have not been able to cast out the demon of racism because we have too often assumed, consciously or unconsciously, or acted as though it was something that could be cast out, just like that. If we would all just do this or that. Lay your hands on the place where the demon is and command it with authority to come out. That’s what we’re supposed to do. Pass a law. Pass a lot of laws. Establish programs. Educate. Recruit. Employ. Provide health care and child care. Train police not to practice profiling or use excessive force. Examine ourselves to try to see if there are any remnants of bigotry or prejudice within us, and if there are, get rid of them. Step by step, purify our attitudes. Piece by piece, undo the unfair social policies of the past that have harmed people of color in our society.
Now I would never suggest that such things don’t need to be done. And it would be unfair to suggest that anyone thinks they can be done just like that. We all know that there are social problems connected with racial injustice in our society, that those problems need to be addressed, that those problems are not easily solved, and that they will require serious and sustained attention. Nobody thinks these things are easy. But I do suggest that one reason we have not been able to cast out the demon of racism is that we have defined it too narrowly as a problem, or a bunch of problems, that we need to solve, and that we can solve.
But what if racism is more than a problem, more than a whole bunch of problems, more than a whole bunch of very serious and deep-rooted problems. What if one reason we have not been able to cast out the demon is because we have thought of it in terms of problems to be solved rather than as a demon?
A problem is something objective and identifiable that you can look at and think about and try to solve. A problem is something that is isolated and under our control. If you think you have solved it, you can put it aside and go on to something else. If it proves to be too difficult to solve right away, we can put it aside and come back to it some other time, when we get a good idea in the middle of the night. Or we can blame someone else for not thinking or acting the way we would like them to act. We come up with solutions to problems, but people get in the way. Education is a perfect solution to many problems, if only people would be as determined to educate themselves as we think they ought to be, and if they aren’t, if they don’t value education or trust the educational process the way they should, then the people themselves become the problem, and we can blame them for messing up this really good solution we have dreamed up in our head. There are problems connected with racism and they deserve our continued attention and best efforts, but we will not cast out racism if we think that’s all there is to it.
I have to admit that in the scripture Jesus does solve a problem. The kid has a demon. Jesus gets rid of it, with a few words and maybe a wave of the hand. But Jesus is not a good role model here. We’re in big trouble if we start having savior complexes. We’re in big trouble, especially on this issue, if we think we are going to perform miracles. We’re the disciples. We’re the ones who want to know why we couldn’t cast it out. And in the story Jesus does say something instructive to the disciples and to us. “This kind,” he says, “can’t be driven out by anything but prayer.”
I have to confess that I am not necessarily thrilled with this statement by Jesus in the context that I’m talking about this morning. Do I really think, that this demon of racism cannot be driven out by anything but prayer? That statement could be interpreted in ways that would be troubling to me, to say the least. If the implication is that there is nothing any human being can do to confront racism but pray, then I have trouble. If the implication is that prayer is a sufficient social strategy, then I have trouble. If the implication is that God will do for us what we are unwilling to do for ourselves, then I have trouble. If the implication is that the church should mind its own business and stick to prayer rather than meddling in social issues, then I have trouble. If the implication is that good heart, good thoughts, good intentions, and a belief in the power of prayer are all we need to confront racism, then I have trouble. But of course Jesus didn’t say any of this, and there is no reason why we need to interpret what he said this way. After I got past some of my own baggage on this, I came to feel that what Jesus said about prayer is actually very suggestive to me as to why we have not been able to cast out the demon of racism that is in us and in our midst.
It’s easy to fall into thinking of prayer as one method of dealing with problems. There is some problem in our lives, some trouble, some need, and we bring it to God looking for help, maybe for a fix, but if not that then some resources to make the situation better or to help us to deal with it or to see our way through it. We may want help for ourselves or for others to deal with some situation. We may be brave enough to ask God to intervene directly not instead of but in addition to whatever we can do. It’s easy to think of prayer in this kind of problem solving way. And it’s not wrong. It’s just such a small part of what prayer is, at least for me.
As I was thinking about what Jesus said in the scripture, I realized that for me prayer is a lot more than pleading with God to help me out, or help others out, in this or that situation. For me, prayer is a process of continually shaping and re-shaping who I am as a human being. Prayer is where I am constantly deciding what is important to me, what I care about, what I hope for. Prayer is where I negotiate with God over what I expect of myself and what I expect of God and what God expects of me. Prayer is where I deal with whether my prayers commit me to anything beyond prayer, and what that might be. Prayer is how I become who I am. Prayer is my soul work.
When I think in this way about prayer, when I remind myself that this is what prayer is for me, then what Jesus says in the scripture speaks directly to me about why we have not been able to cast out the demon of racism. As long as racism is a problem that can be picked up or put down for whatever reason, we will not cast it out. As long as racial injustice is a problem that people of privilege in our society think they have or can find the answer to, we will not be able to cast it out. As long as racism is a bunch of problems out there that can be studied, analyzed, and trivialized, we will not be able to cast it out.
On the other hand, if combating racial injustice is not something we do—maybe—when we feel like it—but becomes embedded in who we are, then we have a chance. When racial injustice is no longer an optional item on the agenda for white people in this country but at least begins to appear on everyone’s screen all the time, then we have a chance. When white folks begin to look within themselves not only for the purpose of trying to see if there are any vestiges of outright bigotry but to become aware both of how we have benefited from racism and how we ourselves, not only people of color but we ourselves, have been hurt by racism, and when we begin to find the words for those things and tell that story out loud, then maybe we have a chance to cast the demon out. When racial injustice becomes everyone’s reality, we have a chance to cast the demon out.
We have a lot of praying to do, if Jesus is right, and I think he is. As I said, I wasn’t sure I wanted to let Jesus’ words apply to this topic at first. Racism can’t be driven out by anything but prayer didn’t sound quite right to me at first. But if prayer is more than asking God for things, if prayer is working out our identity, if it is our way of becoming who we are and who God wants us to be, if it’s the secret battles we fight with ourselves, if prayer is our soul work, then I do believe it’s true: this demon will not be driven out by anything but prayer. We have a lot of praying to do. We have a lot of soul work to do. May we be faithful in it. Amen.
Jim Bundy
January 13, 2002