I have a thought about being possessed by demons. The thought I want to pursue isn’t all that scary, but it wouldn’t hurt to start with the only joke I know about demon possession.

Question: What happens when you fall behind in your payments to the exorcist?
Answer: You get repossessed.

The scripture that came up in church last Sunday was Mark 1;21—28. We are a lectionary church so the pastor who is preaching that day has the obligation to preach on one of the texts or to give some reason why she is not. The preacher last Sunday took it on and treated in seriously. That’s two separate achievements in my mind.

Here is the passage as it appears in the New Jerusalem Bible.

21They went as far as Capernaum, and at once on the Sabbath he went into the synagogue and began to teach. 22And his teaching made a deep impression on them because, unlike the scribes, he taught them with authority. 23And at once in their synagogue there was a man with an unclean spirit, and he shouted, 24’What do you want with us, Jesus of Nazareth? Have you come to destroy us? I know who you are: the Holy One of God.’ 25 But Jesus rebuked it saying, ‘Be quiet! Come out of him!’ 26And the unclean spirit threw the man into convulsions and with a loud cry went out of him. 27The people were so astonished that they started asking one another what it all meant, saying, ‘Here is a teaching that is new, and with authority behind it: he gives orders even to unclean spirits and they obey him.’ 28And his reputation at once spread everywhere, through all the surrounding Galilean countryside.

I don’t have any trouble seeing how Mark fits this into the early ministry of Jesus, but the notion of demon possession—even when an episode is as dramatically portrayed as it is in v. 26, really doesn’t move me. I remember having the same familiar “I don’t really care” reaction to the story Jesus told about the man who sold everything he had to buy a field because he knew there was a treasure in the field. “Treasure in the field” is not something I knew how to care about. But in the movie The Butcher’s Wife, one of the principal characters is a psychiatrist (a very bad psychiatrist) and is required to choose between the love of his life and continuing to cherish his status as a psychiatrist. That makes sense to me. It was so very hard for him to give it up.

So what would make me care about the phenomenon Mark calls “demon possession? In the same service, we sang a hymn called “Silence! Frenzied, Unclean Spirit.” Here are the first two stanzas.

“Silence! Frenzied unclean spirit,”
Cried God’s healing Holy One
“Cease your ranting, flesh can’t bear it”
Flee as night before the sun.”

Lord, the demons still are thriving
In the grey cells of the mind
Tyrant voices, shrill and driving
Thoughts that grip and bind.

That sounded pretty contemporary to me. Probably “the grey cells of the mind” [1] got me started down that path but once you start there are a lot of other reasons to keep going. “Tyrant voices, shrill and driving” sounds like any number of twisted experiences, with or without the benefit of street drugs.

It sounds, in other words, like the world I live in, just as the status-loving psychiatrist sounds like the world I live in more than the treasure hunter does.

And that would have been a very good thing to have happen to me in a worship service, but the choir also sang an anthem, “Lord, Grant Thou Me a Quiet Mind,” which was as close to the other end of the continuum as can be imagined from “tyrant voices, shrill and driving.” We sang:

Lord, grant Thou me a quiet mind
in depths of Three and thought inclined
O gaze upon this wounded heart
and with Thy sweet and piercing Dart
Prick this soul with Love’s embrace
and heal these wounds with saving grace.

We had sung that in practice, of course, and I didn’t react to it much one way or the other in practice. In the context of the service, with the sermon prying up the power in Mark’s account and with the hymn delivering the “tyrant voices, shrill and driving,” I had trouble singing to the end of the anthem.

Each of those elements of the service, the sermon, the scripture text, the hymn, and the anthem fit like hand in glove and I am very glad I was there.

[1] It’s hard not to be sympathetic. “Mind” rhymes so nicely with “bind.” But it’s way too physical. The mind doesn’t have any “grey cells,” which are notably important in the brain.