Binding the strong man
“But no one can enter a strong man’s house and plunder his property without first tying up the strong man; then indeed the house can be plundered.”
June 7, Proper 5
1 Samuel 8:4-11(12-15)16-20(11:14-15) & Psalm 138,
2 Corinthians 4:13—5:1 Mark 3:20-35
Other texts: Taming Your Gremlin
“Listen to the Mustn’ts“, Shel Silverstein, from Where the Sidewalk Ends.
Draft text of the homily. Please do not cite without permission.
There’s someone who doesn’t want you to succeed.
Who doesn’t want you to change.
This someone revels in you feeling bad about yourself.
Wants you constantly reliving past hurts and disappointments…
Wants you forever worrying about future calamities…
Wants you to incessantly dwelling on all the things that are wrong with you…and wrong with the world…
Insists that if you were just smarter, more capable…if this weren’t arranged against you…you’d be able to figure things out…and get them right.
They always say they want what’s best for you…
But what they really want is what’s best for them…
They want you miserable, and afraid.
You know who I’m talking about…
That voice in your head that you’ve lived with all your life…
the critical voice…
the negative voice…
Or maybe it’s a whole committee of voices…
Stop wasting so much time! Get busy!
O don’t get so excited, you know this is never going to work out…
Idiot! what did you do that for!?
You know these voices…
The shoulds. The oughts.
You know that Shel Silverstein poem:
“Listen to the MUSTN’TS, child,
Listen to the DON’TS
Listen to the SHOULDN’TS
The IMPOSSIBLES, the WONT’S“
You know those voices.
The ones that promises that everything will be just perfect…if only
If only he’d come back…
If only they’d be nicer…
If only I could drop 10 pounds…get myself organizized.
The one that tell you to never show any vulnerability…
The one who scoffs at your dreams…
The one who insinuates, “you don’t have enough…
you’ll never be enough…”
The one that tells you to get over it, because everyone suffers and you’ve got it easier than most…and besides, suffering is noble…
you’ll be rewarded..someday….(trust me)”
The ones that say, “you’re not playing by the rules,
you can’t heal on the Sabbath,
you can’t eat with tax-collectors and sinners…
you must be out of your mind…
maybe there’s a devil in of you.”
Jesus hears the same chorus of voices today…
that you & I know all too well…
the ones that want us constantly distracted…
confused…
obsessed with anything and everything outside of our selves…
the ones that want us stuck in our heads…
dwelling on the past…
fantasizing about the future…
“paralysis by analysis” one of my sage friends called it…
the ones that don’t want any of us living in the here and now…
because they know that here and now—the present—is where we meet God.
Jesus has just started his ministry around the north shore of the sea of Galilee.
He’s been declaring the unclean, clean…
forgiving people of their sins
eating with the wrong people…
violating the establishment’s sense of order and decorum;
He’s even recently deputized 12 of his closest followers to go out and do the same.
And like anyone who is trying to change things…to move people and institutions toward greater compassion, and health.
He gets pushback…
detractors…
people who say, “he doesn’t know what he’s doing.”
“He must be out of his mind.”
And his family, gets worried and tries to stop him.
The religious authorities trek all the way out to this distant outpost to smear him with accusations of doing the devil’s work.
Who do you think you are?
You can’t do that!
You shouldn’t
You mustn’t.
Those voices that we all know…that we all hear…they echo loudly in this house in Nazareth.
And Jesus names them for exactly what they are: demonic.
The voices that hurt,
that belittle,
that bully,
that unjustly criticize,
that insist on maintaining order, and efficiency, and profitability no matter the human cost…
that oppose life…
and health…
and wholeness…
and reconciliation…
that oppose the work and will of God…
those voices are demonic.
All voices of the strongman.
And you know what’s even more insidious?
We keep inviting them in…
inviting them in to take charge of our small, fear-filled lives.
“No! but we are determined to have a king over us,
so that we also may be like others,
and that our king may govern us and go out before us and fight our battles [for us].”
Trouble is the strongman doesn’t fight battles for us, he fights battles with us.
The Israelites were told what a king…
what a strongman would do to them…
and yet out of fear they welcomed Saul.
Out of fear we tolerate, and are often ruled by the voices we know.
The many voices of the strongman.
Some are more noticeable than others…
because they’re more familiar…
they whisper in our ears…
and play tapes in our heads every day…
over and over again…
You can’t do that…
You must do this…
You need this…
You don’t deserve that…
If only “they” would change, you’d be just fine.
The voices of our personal strongman…
Some are more difficult to discern because they are diffused into so many people…
The strongman of racism still holds sway over many…
There is a strongman of patriarchy and privilege.
There is the strongman of materialism who roars that consuming and possessing more and more is the only thing that will make us happy…
There is the strongman of empire that insists that only might makes right.
All these voices feed one another…
from the most intimate and personal to the most global and political
forming a web that we are all caught in…enmeshed in…
in biblical language these voices are referred to as the “principalities and powers.”
“And no one can enter a strong man’s house and plunder his property without first tying up the strong man.”
How do we rid ourselves of them?
How do we bind them?
How do we follow Jesus and tie up the strong man?
Believe it or not, it is ridiculously simple to bind the strong man…
—simple, but not easy—
All you have to do is center yourself in the here and now…
The full reality of the present…where we live and move and have our being in God.
That eternal house not made with hands, that Paul talks about, is here and now—the Trinitarian reality of the present.
And to center yourself the first and best thing is to simply breathe
center yourself in the here and now…
allow yourself to become aware of what you’re really seeing and hearing, and smelling and feeling…
And when the voice kicks in and starts trying to get you to think about what has happened, or what will happen…to pull you out of the present…
simply notice it’s there, and return to the present.
Acknowledge the strongman, the gremlin, the demon, your inner critic, whatever you want to call it…acknowledge it’s there, but don’t engage it.
As you practice becoming aware of your own strongman—but not engaging it
you learn to recognize that you are not that voice.
Or, the person God created you to be is not that voice—
and as you recognize that you are not that voice… they will gradually lose power.
They will get louder and more devious at first…
but if you patiently continue to center yourself simply notice them…
they will gradually become less powerful…
Practice becoming aware of your own strongman and you will be much better at recognizing other, bigger ones…
becoming aware of white privilege helps bind the strongman of racism…
being aware of our wealth and the size of our carbon footprint, and committing to living more lightly, and more simply
helps diminish the strongman of empire, and materialism.
acknowledging how binary gender expressions keeps people locked in unhelpful dichotomies
weakens the strongman of patriarchy…
Start with your own strongman…
breathe…
simply notice the voices that try, in all kinds of devious ways, to distract you…
to keep you fixated on the past…
worried about the future…
not able to fully experience the here and now…
that distract you from seeing God…
Shout to prevent you from hearing God…
Stand in your way to keep you from following God…
Do you know the end of that Shel Silverstein poem?
Listen to the MUSTN’TS, child,
Listen to the DON’TS
Listen to the SHOULDN’TS
The IMPOSSIBLES, the WONT’S
Listen to the NEVER HAVES
Then listen close to me-
Anything can happen, child,
ANYTHING can be.
God’s voice…God’s will is always about possibilities; always about love and life, and health, and wholeness, and reconciliation, and living into God’s dream of shalom.
You know that voice too…
It’s the still small voice that whispers: you are a child of God.
The voice that asks, “who are my brothers and my sisters?”
And then proclaims: here are my brothers and my sisters.
You are my brothers and my sisters.
Amen.