Maybe you remember how comedian Flip Wilson loved to do some outrageous trick on someone and then quip, "The devil made me do it." When you can laugh at yourself and get others to laugh with you, it helps us cope. When you can make fun of yourself, not take yourself too seriously; maybe God is helping us face the fact that we do not always know why we act as we do.

Groucho Marx says, "Show me a private club that would have me, and I wouldn’t want to join such a club." Charlie Chaplan made himself into a tramp, a bum, in the silent movies. Red Skelton made himself into "a mean wittle kid." Rodney Dangerfield loved to complain, "I don’t get no respect!" Whoppi Goldberg brags how she is "a big looser."

The psalmist says, when the Lord God sees the powers on earth who conspire against the Lord and his anointed, "He who sits in the heavens laughs, the Lord has them in derision."(Psalm 2:4) What if God looks down at all of our human stresses and strains, our frowns, our tears, even our pains, and what if God smiles and God laughs at us, his human creatures, because of how seriously we take ourselves, running and hiding from the devil and evil, when God knows the truth about the devil and his demons is their power has already been snuffed out, while we act as if those demons are still so worth getting all upset over?

Bit how can God laugh at us when we so often feel we have to agonize over our human mess? When innocent, hard-working miners die in our coal mines? When the terrorist Hamas Party wins the big election in Palestine? When AIDS is sweeping across Africa? When Osama Bin Laden makes a new video promising to attack us again, soon? The official answer of our faith is this: God shows us all the cards God holds, and God invites us to preview how the game of life, indeed all of human history is going to turn out. The cat is out of the bag. The destiny of the demons has been decided once and for all.

Mark’s Gospel puts it this way: Jesus comes to Galilee proclaiming the good news, "God’s kingdom is breaking in upon you, wake up and believe this good news." Mark puts together a series of short stories, like pearls on a string, to reveal in this one human life, the career of Jesus of Nazareth, what God is doing to save us from evil. When we get this message and see ourselves as God sees us, then maybe we too can laugh with God at how seriously we take ourselves, when God has already kicked out evil and makes fun of the residue, still strutting about with pride that goes before its own great fall.

Jesus takes his own people seriously. Jesus goes to his new disciples’ hometown, Capernaum and sets up his shop, teaching every Sabbath, week after week, in the synagogue, becoming a regular fixture in town life. Before long, his fellow Jews begin to notice he teaches in a wholly new way, not what they are used to. They are startled and provoked at how personal and directly he shows them God’s love and judgment. They are used to the laid-back, dry, analytical examinations of legal precedents and hair-splitting arguments on fine points of scrolls containing hundreds of laws. Their scribes put them to sleep, droning on about divine issues. Jesus speaks with divine fire in his heart and soul. The scribes talked about God. Jesus is Emmanuel, God right here with us. Unthinkable, shocking, fascinating, unnerving. Bound to provoke both positive and negative feedback.

A student of English Literature took seminars on the poetry of T. S. Eliot and the writings of C. S. Lewis. Like most undergraduate seminars, these students argued endlessly about what these authors really meant to say. This same student became a Rhodes Scholar and went to Oxford University. There these two authors, T. S. Eliot and C. S. Lewis came to his classes. Now at last, the student reported, I now know what the poem The Wasteland and The Chronicles of Narnia really do mean, sitting with the two authors themselves.

Jesus’ hearers in the synagogue are very impressed. But do they recognize Jesus as the holy one of God, as God’s anointed Son, in whom the Spirit of the author of all creation and abundant life sits with them? Do they see Jesus as the one who is the way, the truth, and the life, the one in and through whom sinners may come unto the Father?

Among Jesus’ hearers day after day is a disturbed, weird-looking man, carrying within himself an unclean spirit, as Mark puts it. Suddenly one day this man shrieks, "What do we have in common, Jesus of Nazareth? I know you and you have come to destroy us, for you are the Holy One of God." Jesus snaps out, "Be quiet. Leave this man alone and depart from us." The unclean spirits throw their host into convulsions. He thrashes about on the ground, foaming at the mouth, gasping, groaning, shrieking with wails and moans, for demons do not give up without a last stand fight to the death. Then they are gone, exorcized, cast out of their host, and the man lies limp and weary, weak and numb after the unclean spirits leave him alone to himself.

Scholars say this man probably had a seizure, such as we associate with epilepsy or another disease or condition that attacks the nervous system. And so that culture labeled much human suffering as the work of demon possession, whereas today we do not automatically blame disease on evil forces, but we seek natural causes and medical cures for human suffering. Yet with our many cultural differences, then and now, Mark’s message is the good news that Jesus comes to promote life abundant and when Jesus’ presence and teaching are influential his authority and his spiritual energy render the demons impotent. Their destiny is determined by the Spirit of God in Christ Jesus.

We do not know that happens to the unclean spirit that Jesus casts out. In another incident in Mark, you remember, the demons leave their host, enter a herd of pigs and rush into the sea to be drowned. In this story, Mark’s emphasis is upon the response of the onlookers. They are overwhelmed with emotion and excitement. The Greek language says they are shaken up deep within their bowels. "What is this? A new teaching? This teacher, this rabbi, has the right, the authority, and the power, the energy, the control so that he commands not only us, his fellow human beings, but even the unclean, superhuman, demonic spirits and they obey him." And this new reputation, this astounding report begins to spread out among the nearby towns and villages.

And so in this incident Mark shows that the demons are the first creatures to recognize, to know, to struggle against Jesus and to feel his power as "the Holy One of God." No humans do this, recognize and honor Jesus as God’s anointed one, not even Jesus’ disciples, until the very end of the Gospel, and then it is not a person of Jewish faith, but a gentile, the Roman Centurion, who confesses "Truly this man was God’s Son." (Mark 16:39) But this gentile does this when he witnesses the crucifixion of Jesus when, Mark is saying, Jesus brings to fulfillment the final struggle against all evil, a struggle already taking shape when Jesus cleanses this poor man in the Capernaum synagogue.

Evil does not go quietly away. The demons shriek and thrash, convulsing the poor possessed man, before leaving him. Evil believes in itself, fights for itself, holds on as long as it can, to the bitter end. But evil does meet its end. The reformer Martin Luther was fond of saying, "In Christ God has chained up the devil tight once and for all. However, on every Saturday night, Christ lets out the chain, link by link, so that the devil can roam around over the countryside, wrecking mischief and havoc, and so even though it is true that Christ says "All authority on heaven and earth has been given to me," Christ also gives to us his ministry of reconciliation and sends us into all the world to make disciples, baptizing and teaching. We know in Christ all evil is already doomed, we have read the script of world history and we know when the curtain comes down how the play ends. But the curtain is still raised and we are all actors on stage, and each of us is playing a role, as Shakespeare puts it, hopefully our role as disciple of our Lord, learning how to say our lines truthfully so that we never break character.

In his great hymn, A Mighty Fortress is our God, Martin Luther writes, "Did we in our own strength confide, our striving would be losing. Were not the right Man on our side, the man of God’s own choosing. Dost ask who that may be? Christ Jesus, it is He, Lord Sabaoth his name, from age to age the same, and he must win the battle."

Martin Luther goes on, "And though this world, with devils filled, should threaten to undo us, we will not fear, for God hath willed His truth to triumph through us." When you name Christ as your Lord and Savior, you will surely have your own list of evils to combat, for only the standard of Christ gives us the necessary criteria to identify evil. I recall the conversation between two Christians of the Quaker persuasion. John said to Mary his wife, "Ah Mary my darling, I look around me and all the world is going to hell in a hand basket, except me and thee, and dear Mary, sometimes I wonder about thee."

In staff meeting the other day, we took a vote on who and where are the demons living in our world. In the twentieth century alone, we agreed great systems of evil have threatened to undo us: Racism, Sexism, Communism, Facism, Greed, Egoism. But we dare not exclude our own preferences for Individualism, Capitalism, Democracy, Socialism, Libertarianism, and as scholars remind us, Religion itself, including our own, may become distorted and disruptive or demonic when we seek to control symbols of faith and behavior for our own advantage.

A week ago I went to see George Cloony’s new movie Good Night, Good Luck about newsman Edward R. Murrow’s struggle against Senator Joseph McCarthy and his own CBS power system. In this movie mosaic actors and artists bring us inside our smoky, murky, messy human condition and you see how intricately entangled are sincere and talented agents in governments and media when caught up in the power struggles of the cold war era as we faced the challenge of world Communism.

Which brings us to this basic biblical truth. All creation is intrinsically good, but all good elements of the creation are subject to being twisted demonically into evil. Good examples are the element gold, the compound alcohol, nuclear energy, human sexuality, government, economics and the pleasures of art, literature, and music. God’s good creation is also, in God’s patient providence, also this fallen creation. And so if God was in Christ reconciling this fallen world unto himself, God is also in Christ giving unto us the ministry of reconciliation. The job has been done, once for all, yet this job waits upon us to take up our cross as well. The destiny of the demons is already determined, yet we ourselves are surely also involved in this destiny, when we profess our faith in Christ Jesus as our Lord and Savior.

And how tempting to conclude that when all else fails, yet surely I know that within me, deep down within me, in the depths of my soul, evil has not penetrated my good heart. But if I meet Christ in my heart and know I must confess my sins, I shall recognize that to imagine myself free from evil is surely the kind of pride that goes before the great fall.

Lest we should so imagine, let us listen to the words of the Apostle Paul, surely a saint if ever there is one. In our epistle lesson the great saintly Apostle meditates upon his own struggle with evil. "I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate….For I know that nothing good dwells within me, that is, in my flesh. I can will what is right; but I cannot do it. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do….So I find it to be a law that when I want to do what is good, evil lies close at hand." Now this Apostle can be this honest with himself, not on his own steam, but because like the man possessed in the Capernaum synagogue, Paul struggles mightily with his own demons, because Christ Jesus has come to live also within him, and Christ Jesus is daily exorcizing Paul’s demons. Can you or I ever expect to become such a saint that we should outgrow this same struggle? Better to welcome this struggle, Christ within us; so that our demons are giving up, but not without a struggle.

Paul continues, "For I delight in the law of God in my inmost self, but I see in my members another law at war with the law of my mind, making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members. Wretched man that I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death? And Paul answers his own question with the same good news Mark shows us in the Capernaum, synagogue. "Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!" May you and I always say this same prayer of thanksgiving, through Jesus Christ, our Lord.

Martin Luther wraps up his hymn this way, "The prince of darkness grim, we tremble not for him; his rage we can endure, for lo! his doom is sure, one little world shall fell him. That word above all earthly powers, no thanks to them, abideth. The Spirit and the gifts are ours through him who with us sideth; Let goods and kindred go, this mortal life also; the body they may kill, God’s truth abideth still, His kingdom is forever."

Alleluia! and Amen.