Preacher: Julia Baker

Date: January 28, 2024

Scripture: Mark 1:21-28

I have had a keen interest in healing for a long time.

This has not merely been an intellectual pursuit,

but has risen from a place of raw survival.

Maybe some you can relate also, maybe you have cried out to God,

a convulsion from the very depths of yourself in your hour of need.

Or maybe your cries have been less from inner cobwebs and swirl, but

when you feel the agony of others, hear the cries of our groaning earth.

Both are a desperate call for healing. We ask, “how long, Lord?” and “how?!”

We just heard a powerful healing story.

What can we glean from it towards our yearnings to be transformed…

First, as we should do with any passage — let’s place this story in its larger context.

We are still in chapter one of Mark.

Mark is the speedy Gospel.

I picture the first chapter as a montage in a movie.

We move from scene to scene to scene. 

The camera starts with John proclaiming Jesus’ coming,

then Jesus is baptized by John, spends time in the wilderness and is tested

and in the verses rights before today’s story he calls

Simon and Andrew, James and John to be his disciples —

and they immediately drop their nets and follow.

Not only is this zippy. But in the ESV translation

within 10 verses we have the word “immediately” four times.

Twice when calling the disciples and twice within the story of the unclean spirit

“And they went into Capernaum, and immediately on the Sabbath he entered the synagogue and was teaching. And they were astonished at his teaching, for he taught them as one who had authority, and not as the scribes. And immediately there was in their synagogue a man with an unclean spirit.”

Immediately is not a word I think of when it comes to healing.

More so the slow scabbing over of a wound,

the subtle gentle light of love that transforms the weight of shame,

the tedious, committed work of exposing and rewriting toxic narratives,

the daily, moment-ly

picking oneself up and turning towards the bigger, truer

expansive story of Love and Grace.

But Jesus’s response to the man with the unclean spirit is so well

clear, direct and immediate.

Be silent and come out of him.

I have been thinking a lot about what Jesus models here

and why I am so drawn to it.

In my early twenties I learned and later studied the therapeutic modality Internal Family Systems.

IFS, also known as “Parts Work” is based on the idea that we all have an internal “family of parts within us.” Like any family, parts that have different roles and agendas. If you listen to our language we speak this way — “a part of me wants to go to the game night Saturday, while another part of me really just wants to stay home with a novel on the couch.”

All parts are motivated to keep the system safe and in stasis.

For survival, parts take on extreme roles to keep us safe through their perceived narratives of what is needed for stasis in the system and in our lives. They are sooo loyal, they are working for us, what they interpret (even if from a place of wound) that we need.

For example, when triggered my people pleasing parts work overtime clucking and fussing, shapeshifting  to make sure that others in my orbit are happy. The many too quick “yes’s” I have given and not enough “no’s.” This dear people pleasing part who works from flawed stories that it absorbed about what was required in order to be loved.

The beautiful news is that within all these committed parts there is our Self.

The place within us untouched by wound and agenda.

The place of calm, compassion, curiosity, clarity, and courage…

Healing and transformation in IFS happens through introducing

our parts to our capital “S” Self.

The place within us that says to ourselves, “be silent and come out of him.”

—

I have been a student of IFS for years now,

but it hasn’t been until the last year or two

that the profundity of healing has occurred for me.

I realized that I had been confusing compassion with permission.

For years I had been giving inner authority to Parts,

letting them have the microphone and run wild.

I was listening to the pained places,

I was hearing the stories that parts carried and compassionately saying,

“I hear you, I understand why you are doing what you do.”

And I stopped there, because that felt like what love was.

Empathy for the parts, but actually not rebuking the action,

and calling them into new life.

I am learning more and more that Self holds a powerful Mama Bear energy.

That with compassion says, “I know that you want to do that _________,

but I know the bigger picture story here, you see only in part, I see the whole.

Be silent and come out of her.”

Be silent and unclench your fists, breathe easy.

Be silent and drop the weight of your burdens.

Be silent and lay down that storyline, let’s write a new one.

Be silent and release to sink deeper into the life abundant.

Be silent and recognize The Holy One of God.

Be silent and allow the voice of Love and Grace to be the compass of inner authority.

—

I will leave us with a few wonderings…

I wonder what are the places within ourselves and within our lives with others we might be confusing allowing for compassion when really true healing might come with compassionate, clear exhortation a calling from and towards.

What maybe is most inviting for me in this story is to be with the parts of me that read these healing miracles and maybe don’t believe they are really true anymore.

That makes me sad.

I wonder if you do the same?

I wonder then, what does it look like to invoke Jesus’s healing command of be silent and come out of him. What places within your being, what places within your relationships might need that invitation, command spoken?

I wonder, what it would be like to step into the story

and hear Jesus speaking those words to places you feel “unclean”?

I wonder what it would be to really trust Jesus,

the one with the authority of the Author God, to heal us.

To recognize him as the Holy One and take in his healing word.

A final thought,

I appreciate, maybe more than anything,

that after Jesus’s words of rebuke, we read:

 “And the unclean spirit, convulsing him and crying with a loud voice, came out of him.”

Convulsing and crying with a loud voice.

There is nothing sanitized and pretty and neat about that, and it is refreshing. Jesus didn’t wave a magic wand, sprinkle fairy dust and a puff of blue smoke whisked the unclean spirit away.

The work of transformation, personally and collectively, is work that comes with convulsions, tears, and roaring. That is okay, necessary even.

This is messy hard work to claw our way to truth.

So courage friends as we seek the Holy One, the healing path, taking and speaking the words of Love and Truth.

Amen.