A night of discussing 'demons' 
On Monday evenings I host what I call a Faith and Fellowship at my home. It is an open group of folks who gather and let me share a text from the lectionary (structured Bible readings for the church) and together we push on it to see just where it might help us develop our spiritual formations.

Last night the reading was from Mark’s Gospel in the first chapter and it talked about Jesus’ healing folks that were broken and, as the scripture put it, possessed by demons.

You can just imagine the direction the discussion went when I asked the folks, “What would you talk about if you were leading tonight’s session?” You guessed it, demons! What are they? Are they real? Does everybody have them? How do they work? And on and on the conversation went.

It was an honest conversation that admitted to our cultural differences and our cultural reservations regarding the topic and understanding of scriptural demons. It led us into a closer look at all kinds of brokenness and sin, especially the little subtle sins that are ultimately the most dangerous and damning because they are so well camouflaged within our cultural norms.

After a while, I asked the group, “Do you want to know where I would have taken this text?”

Getting an affirmative answer from the folks mingled with a quizzical look like nothing could be more interesting than demons, I answered by reading one verse. It reads. “In the morning, while it was still very dark, he got up and went out to a deserted place and prayed.”

Kind of dumb-founded, they looked at me and waited.

“Jesus,” I explained, “went to the wilderness to be with his Father/God in order to recover from the work he had done, be prepared for the work he was to do and be wise enough to discern when to stay and heal and when to walk on. Jesus went to the wilderness to be strengthened to be who he was, all of who he was and what he was to do.

"He was not going to find that in the midst of a broken culture filled with broken people who had broken expectations for him and themselves, but in the purity of the company of God where God and God alone is present with him, in the deserted place we call wilderness.”

Greg Johnson, a writer and hiker of the Great Smoky Mountains once said, “If you’ll go where others won’t, you’ll see what others don’t.”

How true, and modeled by Jesus as he slipped away to that deserted wilderness time and time again. Jesus went to a place with God that most of us won’t, so he saw the world in a way that most of us don’t.

 Maybe how we view and deal with our own and other’s brokenness … demons … has more to do with where we’ve been and what we’ve seen, than anything else.

Just another thought from the shallows…..

Dr. Jeff Wilson grew up in Nashville, has ties to both UT and Vandy, and has served as senior pastor at numerous churches throughout the South and in Texas. He now serves on the Brentwood United Methodist Church staff. Click here to read his recent columns.