Testing the Spirits

One of the great advantages of being a priest with a science background is that it frees me to take the spiritual world seriously. I know the value and limits of science, and I also know that there are forces within and without that can lead us toward or tempt us away from God. Those forces that take us further from God can conveniently be labeled demons; giving them a name makes them easier to confront. And not all are internal. There is evil greater than any one human could accomplish (the Holocaust and Gulag come to mind), and so one can talk of Satan as well, not as a figure with a long tail and horns, but rather as an evil power greater than ours (though not equal to God’s power).

Discerning whether a particular “voice” or spirit is or is not from God can be tricky – so much so that the desert fathers and mothers of Egypt never trusted the appearance of an angel. One could never be sure of its source. Elijah did not have that problem, it appears, perhaps because the evil he faced was so transparent in Ahab and Jezebel. By contrast, the angel that appeared to Elijah fed him and led him to Mount Horeb, where he had a chance to encounter God directly. A rock-shattering wind, earthquake and fire nearly overwhelmed him before there was “a sound of sheer silence” (a more elegant translation than “a still, small, voice”). Out of this great silence God spoke the Word to Elijah.

It’s just as clear that the spirit residing in the Gerasene man is an evil one. And not just one, either, but an entire Roman legion’s worth! Whether we take that at face value or not, it certainly expresses how he felt, as though inhabited by many evil spirits. No wonder the man couldn’t be controlled. And no wonder that the people of the region were petrified when they found this uncontrollable man in his right mind, clothed and sitting at Jesus’ feet. Besides, they couldn’t afford to lose any more pork chops. So they rejected the One who is greater than any evil spirits.

How do we test the spirits in our own time? How do we know which lead us toward God and which lead us away? Here we come to a real problem, not only because the spirits are difficult to determine, but also because it’s hard to see our own complicity in what the spirits are doing. Take the Gulf oil spill, for instance. I don’t own BP stock and I don’t usually buy BP gas. Yet I drive fifty miles back and forth to work every day. I use plastic bags all the time, the more so because I have a dog. I eat food that isn’t grown locally, but must be trucked in from large farms that use fossil fuels for machinery and fertilizer. We fly out to Connecticut to visit our son. All of that is possible because there are oil wells, including offshore ones that can fail catastrophically. Surely it is an evil spirit that entices humans to put profits before safety – but when we allow that to happen, are we not also subject to that same evil spirit?

And that reveals one of the limits of science. Scientific knowledge is not value-neutral, as some think. Out of our values we decide what will be researched and how that knowledge will be used, and in doing so we follow the spirit of good or evil. We study how to drill deep wells, but not what will happen if and when they fail. We devise ever more uses for fossil fuels, but only after decades of use do we consider what the global consequences of such use may be. The spirits of our time are not as obvious as a Jezebel or Gerasene demoniac. Fortunately, one part of the picture still hasn’t changed: Jesus can still command the unclean spirits. It is for us to ask that they be cast from us.

Pentecost 4: 1 Kings 19:1-15a; Psalms 42, 43; Galatians 3:23-29; Luke 8:26-39.