June 19, 2022 – Waiting and Working for Real Freedom
Theme: The liberating power of Jesus over demons
Thesis: With faith in Jesus, the grace of God, and the power of the Spirit we can overcome the demons that plague our lives.
Purpose: To inspire hope, courage, and perseverance
Response: We can do this.
I want to talk this morning about demons and the overcoming of demons that plague our lives and our country and about the power of Jesus Christ to overcome those demons. Demons, though not literally true, are surely metaphorically true.
There was once a people who had no desire to come to America. They were captured, enslaved, dehumanized, brutalized, and forced to come. When they arrived in America, if they survived the middle passage across the Atlantic Ocean, they were treated as property, bought and sold, and humiliated for 250 years. When their freedom came after a Civil War, they were given nothing but their freedom—no restitution, no land, no education. Still, they worked their way into a fuller freedom during Reconstruction. As they gained income and increase in civic power, being elected to political office both locally and nationally, their former white masters, and even whites who fought for their freedom, took exception. Belief in White supremacy and White privilege had corrupted their minds and hearts. Reconstruction was shut down allowing one hundred years of Jim Crow laws and culture that continued to restrict African American freedom. Despite these demons African Americans refused to stop fighting for their freedom and continued to educate themselves, build strong institutions, and raise up wise and courageous leaders. For years African leaders, men and women, supported and encouraged by the Black church, cntinued fighting against oppressive laws and unchallenged violence against them.
In the 1960’s, a man arose among the community who was able with wisdom and courage to express and inspire not only the African American community, but also large sections of the American republic. Despite resistance, despite beatings, despite being jailed, and despite killings the people pressed on. They challenged the demons of white power. They did all they could to expel those demons that had turned the promise of America into an ugly caricature of itself. They made progress. People were changed. Laws were changed. But the demons were still able to find homes in the hearts and minds of too many of the American people to prevent full freedom for African Americans.
For a time the demons of white supremacy and white privilege were weakened, but they bided their time. And the demons came alive again, very much alive with the election of Barack Obama as President. The vision of an African American man and his family in the White House was too much. The Tea Party arose, and then came the ugly new incarnation of resistance with the rise of White Evangelical Christian Nationalism, strongly supported by President Donald Trump. Those in power who could not accept that African Americans, non-European immigrants, gay, lesbian, and transgender persons had the right to challenge the demons of White supremacy and White privilege fought back. As Dr. King said, “Freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed.” Demands were made. Progress was made. But the demons did not disappear over a cliff to drown.
The fight for freedom from oppression is a long fight, as Dr. King said, “Human progress is neither automatic nor inevitable… Every step toward the goal of justice requires sacrifice, suffering, and struggle; the tireless exertions and passionate concern of dedicated individuals.” It takes courage to fight and to continue the fight despite years of opposition. But the African American community has both passion and resilience. The community will not give up until they receive their full civil and political rights, until justice is done. I love this poem by Maya Angelou, “And Still I Rise”.
You may write me down in history
With your bitter, twisted lies,
You may trod me in the very dirt
But still, like dust, I’ll rise.
Does my sassiness upset you?
Why are you beset with gloom?
’Cause I walk like I’ve got oil wells
Pumping in my living room.
Just like moons and like suns,
With the certainty of tides,
Just like hopes springing high,
Still I’ll rise.
Did you want to see me broken?
Bowed head and lowered eyes?
Shoulders falling down like teardrops,
Weakened by my soulful cries?
Does my haughtiness offend you?
Don’t you take it awful hard
’Cause I laugh like I’ve got gold mines
Diggin’ in my own backyard.
You may shoot me with your words,
You may cut me with your eyes,
You may kill me with your hatefulness,
But still, like air, I’ll rise.
Out of the huts of history’s shame
I rise
Up from a past that’s rooted in pain
I rise
I’m a black ocean, leaping and wide,
Welling and swelling I bear in the tide.
Leaving behind nights of terror and fear
I rise
Into a daybreak that’s wondrously clear
I rise
Bringing the gifts that my ancestors gave,
I am the dream and the hope of the slave.
I rise. I rise. I rise.
However, overcoming external demons that oppress is not the only fight. There are also internal demons that control us, confine us, and limit our ability to live really free lives. This fight is at least as important, if not more important, as the fight against external demons, and it takes just as much courage. How are we to fight these internal demons? Legion was the name he was given by his community, because he was filled with demons. The community tried to chain him, but he had the strength to break out of those restraints put on by others. But he could not expel the demons that were within him. That is, until he met Jesus. When Jesus came to the country of the Gerasenes, Legion found Jesus. Jesus had compassion on Legion, expelling those demons causing them to race over a cliff to their death. Legion was, at last, at peace. Faith in Jesus, the grace of God, and the power of the Holy Spirit can help us confront our demons, overcome them, or, at least, keep them from taking over our lives. My mother had internal demons that twisted her life from the time she was sexually abused by her father as a young teenager. She never got any help to deal with that. It was simply repressed. Her own pain turned against her as she aged. There were not therapists dealing with the sexual abuse of girls in those days, and you couldn’t even talk about it. The pain festered. It cost her one marriage, to my biological father, and another to my step-father. It was while she was married to my step-father that she became an alcoholic for ten years as I was in my teenage years. Again, there were no Hazeldens or Betty Ford Clinics in those days, and few people even knew about Alcoholic Anonymous. So, my mother never got therapy. While I was in my early twenties, she quit alcohol for good, but she never got therapy to understand what was going on inside her. As a result, her sickness continued to infect me and damaged my step-sister emotionally. It was doubly hard to deal with my mother because she could be wonderful one day, and then become emotionally abusive the next. She was a brilliant and award-winning fashion illustrator and commercial artist celebrated on the west coast. But she never became fully free. Her internal demons were as bad, if not worse, than external demons. Still, in her fifties she returned to Jesus. That gave her consolation and the help she needed never to drink again.
I needed two things to happen to deal with the demons I inherited. First, I needed to experience, in a dramatic way, the love of God. That experience gave me freedom from the external confinement of my parents emotional turmoil. I found a new authority in my life, Jesus Christ. And that commitment and change of life gave me the strength to admit that I needed therapy for my internal demons. Thanks to three years of weekly therapy I have been able to expel most of my demons and to live a much freer life. But I want to say more about the liberating power of faith.
We are children of God. God loves us. Nothing can separate us from the love of God. God is merciful and forgiving. We have the presence of Jesus Christ and the power of the Holy Spirit within us. We can know life in abundance by the grace of God. What is that abundant life? It is a life of love, concern for others, community, and gratitude, and it is lived in the eternal life-giving love of God. Our life is not limited to material life only. Knowing this, trying to live this as best I can, gives me hope, perspective, and a growing sense of inner peace deep within me. Sure, there are times, more than I like, when I allow my ego to get in the way. We’ve been raised in a society that extols the rugged, self-sufficient, hard-working ambitious, individual male. We are taught by the culture around us to seek material success and enough power to keep safe. We are taught to raise individual freedom to be a high value. Empathy, care for others, generosity can get in the way. As Kristen Du Mez writes in her book Jesus and John Wayne: How Evangelical Christians Corrupted a faith and Fractured a Nation, Jesus was the lamb of God, but if you need a leader for the real world, you need someone like the movie actor John Wayne, a rugged, take no prisoners, self-sufficient individual. Jesus is just too nice to lead in our fallen world. I agree with Professor Du Mez that this choice is wrong and dangerous. Societies that nurture libertarian liberty have a hard time being cohesive. It takes love, concern for others, generosity, and willingness to give for the common good for a society to sustain itself. African Americans learned this way of Jesus from the Black Church that gave them the Gospel, the community, and the strength to persevere and fight for their full freedom. As Juan Williams writes in his book This Far by Faith:
“Individual black people took the cloak of faith, an unshakable belief that God would carry them through slavery and lift them up to freedom. Black people used the slave owners’ religion to defeat slavery. They held up the Christian cross as evidence of their humanity….With acts of faith they transformed themselves into Christian soldiers, marching for an end to segregation and for the promise of equality as God’s children….Black people built their own Christian churches. Those churches provided the organizational base that even the Ku Klux Klan and other racists feared to destroy.…” (P. 2)
This faith enabled Dr. King to give his life to make a better world for all Americans. He said, “By opening our lives to God in Christ, we become new creatures. This experience, which Jesus spoke of as the new birth, is essential if we are to be transformed nonconformists … Only through an inner spiritual transformation do we gain the strength to fight vigorously the evils of the world in a humble and loving spirit.”
In Christ, we know that we are fallible, finite human beings who make mistakes, hurt others, and too often hide from the truth about ourselves. We don’t have to live in bondage to our false consciousness and whatever it is that is limiting us. God loves us. God wants to forgive us our sins, strengthen us, and by the power of the Holy Spirit to keep us on the path of eternal life. We can seek God and Jesus in community worship and fellowship, in prayer, in study, and, if needed, a spiritual director or even a therapist. God is with us to give real freedom. Freedom to live whole, not hiding from whatever it may be that keeps us from the abundant life that God and Jesus want for us. We don’t have to let our inner demons pull the strings of our lives or bow before the unjust and oppressive laws and practices that keep us from real freedom. We can respond to the call of the Holy Spirit to new life that is greater than we can imagine. We can become living incarnations of God’s love despite being finite, fallible human beings in this world. We don’t have to be perfect. Purity is not ours to earn; it is God to give, if not in this life, then in the life to come.
Today is Juneteenth when the slaves in Texas finally learned of their freedom two and half years after the pronouncement of Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863. Today, 400 years after the first African slaves were brought to Virginia, African Americans and the United States of America are still striving for external freedom for all. But there is also that deep inner freedom that is the ultimate freedom that neither government nor even death can take away. That deep inner freedom enabled Nelson Mandela to survive 18 years in Robbin Island Prison in South Africa and to be able to resist power’s ability to corrupt him when he was released and then elected as President of South Africa.
That same inner freedom inspired Gandhi, Dr. King, and thousands of others who have learned to live with the freedom that no worldly power can take away. As a result, they have made a world more compassionate, generous, and just. With God’s grace we, too, can live into that same freedom. May it be so for you, for me, and those who we have the opportunity to touch with the eternal life-giving love of God. Demons may be metaphorical, but they are real powers limiting our lives. But we do not have to live controlled by demons, external or internal, we have the love of God, the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, and the power of the Holy Spirit to set us truly free. Amen
– Father Grant Abbott