"The Exorcist"

Pastor Laura Guy

March 11, 2007

Here's an instant replay of what happened in worship:

We heard the story of Jesus casting the demons from Legion (Luke 8:26-39) from a site that uses Legos to tell Bible stories.
We thought about the usual way many Americans interpret the story - that the man was mentally ill, and Luke was just using the "demonic" language because that's the way ancient cultures understood mental illness. But if we choose to interpret the story that way, we are also choosing to ignore a big part of the story, or should I say a "pig" part of the story. If Jesus simply healed a man of mental illness, then what's the purpose of including the scene where the demons go into the pigs and they all drown?
We wondered if the story was true as Luke reports it, that the man really did have demons. Even if we've never seen someone possessed by a demon, many of us have experienced times when we felt some kind of evil force at work in our own lives. It's not a "the-Devil-made-me-do-it" kind of experience, but more of a supernatural tempting, taunting. Perhaps we can take this as evidence that demons do exist.
We saw that Luke wants us to know two things about Jesus in this story. First, he has compassion on this man who is truly the least, the last and the lost - one who is cast out from community and has no life or identity of his own. And secondly, that Jesus has the power to cast out the demons from this man. In fact, the demons tremble and grovel and beg for mercy in front of Jesus. It is only his compassion and his power combined that make him able to save us from whatever demons - real or metaphorical - we wrestle with.
We prayed for the power of Jesus to help us conquer whatever was holding us back from being the people God created us to be.
We shared communion, a symbol of Christ's power available to us.