By Reverend Laurie DeMott

"With authority and power he commands the unclean demons and they come out." Weariness, doubt, injustice, fly away far from us for our Savior commands you to begone. There is work to be done.

It was night and the dark settled around the woman like a ghost whispering its fears into her ears. She pulled her blanket up to her chin wishing she could pull it right over her head as she had when she was a child. Then, she could imagine that all of the worries that plagued her would be unable to penetrate the swaddling of cotton and linen, but now she was old enough to know better. She knew that tomorrow, as certainly as the sun would rise, so would her problems be once again clamoring at the door waiting to leap upon her and drag her down. Finances, relationship problems, difficulties at work, and her own feeling of inadequacy in the face of it all: who was she to cope with such things? The worst of it was that she felt so alone in her problems: her family just laughed at her weaknesses, her friends were too wrapped up in their own concerns to be very attentive to hers. She had no one to confess her fears to, no one to hold her hand, to smile encouragement at her and say, "We will get through this together."

She gripped the blanket tightly with worry, and then, in the quiet of the night she heard the whisper of Christ's voice saying, “I am with you. Do not let your heart be troubled, do not be afraid. My peace I give to you." The feverish fear left her and she felt ready to face the night and another day.

"Then Jesus stood at the bedside of Simon Peter's mother-in-law and with a word, the fever left her, and she got up and began to serve."

The young man was trying to decide what to do with his life. He was at an age when people expect you to make decisions about your career, when you are supposed to begin to build a life for yourself. All of his friends had settled into lucrative jobs, or if not lucrative now, jobs that promised a nice future with possibilities for advancement and all of the kinds of things that young people were supposed to desire. But somehow all of that left him feeling empty. It's not that he thought his friends were on the wrong track -- they were good people and good friends – nor was it that he had anything against making money. Money can be a useful thing, he knew, it’s just that he didn’t want salary to be the end goal. He wanted his life to be significant. He wanted to be doing something that mattered. Maybe everyone wants that at first, he thought wryly to himself, but then they put away childish desires and accept the reality of being mundane. So why couldn’t he do the same? Why did he continue to search for something deeper, for a career in which he could feel that he was giving to the world instead of just asking what the world was giving him? Voices all around him nagged at him to grow up, to stop being silly, and to accept the obvious road ahead, but then through the clamor, he heard another voice. It was the voice of Christ saying, "The one who would save his life must give it up." The words rang like a bell in his heart, and he stepped with confidence onto the more narrow path before him.

"And they were astounded at Jesus’ teaching because he spoke with such authority."

There is real power in the word of Christ when we let his word speak to us. His word holds the power to comfort, the power to strengthen, the power to drive out the demons that possess our society -- demons of racism, apathy, injustice, and greed – the power to reshape our mundane lives into lives of extraordinary depth and meaning. Christ’s words are not just pretty sentiments to be embroidered into samplers to hang on our wall; they are words that have the authority to drive out our fear, our uncertainty, our weariness, and our superficiality.

In this short passage in Luke, we see the many faces of the power of Christ's word: he speaks in the synagogue and his teaching strikes the listeners as important and insightful. With a word, he drives out the demons that alienate us from one another, and the sound of his voice has the ability to heal the sick-hearted, the broken, and the lost. 2000 years after he walked the streets of Capernaum, his words still have power and when we allow him to speak to us today, they can instill our lives with meaning, challenge society's demons, and comfort us in our darkest places.

But how does Christ speak to us? This is a question that comes up time and again in church discussion groups, and its clear that there is no one right answer for all people. Some people experience Christ’s voice as a gut feeling that nags at them to make a certain choice or pursue a particular cause. I have heard people describe it as, “I just couldn’t ignore this feeling that God wanted me to do something about this issue,” or “I considered other choices but no matter how hard I tried to make them fit, none of them felt as right as this one.” Some people sense Christ’s word as a sudden unexplainable feeling of comfort that steals over their uneasiness to bring a sense of calm. Some even talk about Christ’s voice as a pestering guilt that drives them to make changes in their lives that they resisted at first but finally recognize as necessary to their wholeness.

Other people experience the voice of Christ speaking to them in more pragmatic but no less compelling ways. They mull over possibilities with friends; they listen to the preaching of the church; they study scripture and finally after careful consideration, they are able to decide on the path that they believe Christ is calling them to. People who trust gut feelings are often frustrated by the careful thinkers feeling that they are too deliberative in their approach to faith while the careful thinkers are often mystified by those who talk about gut feelings, wondering how people can make important decisions based on no more than an abstract tug at one’s gut. I have come to the conclusion, however, that the differences between the thinkers and the feelers, the mystics and the pragmatists, are a mere matter of personality, no different than those who choose a good book because they like the look of a cover versus those who choose their books on the basis of the NY Times Book Review.

But whether we listen for the voice of Christ with our guts or with our brain, we all face the same dilemma; namely that we want to insure that the voice we are hearing is truly the voice of Christ and not simply our own desires dressed up in a holy pretense. And this is the role of the church. Here in the church, we listen to the scriptures, we talk over matters of faith, we learn the traditions of 2000 years of people struggling to grasp the will of God; here we work to plant the teachings of Christ so deeply within ourselves that even if our own voice speaks, it will speak automatically and even unconsciously with the tones of Christ.

I like this automatic response to what I as a musician call “finger memory.” When you first begin to learn a piece of music on an instrument, you have to think through the finger placements and practice over and over again until your fingers are able to move properly through a difficult passage. Anyone who has played an instrument knows that strange feeling of realizing that with enough repetition, the memory of how to play the piece has moved from your brain to your hands. In other words, though your eyes may still need to look at the score for memory cues, it is your fingers that are actually doing the remembering, so much so that if you try to insert your brain back into the process and think about what you are doing, your fingers will inevitably trip all over themselves -- or really, they trip all over your brain which has suddenly gotten in the way. I have had the odd experience of getting out a guitar piece that I haven't played in years and while I am struggling to read the forgotten piece, my fingers will suddenly fly through a couple of measures without any help from my brain. My fingers recover a memory that my brain has long sense lost.

I believe that, in the same way, we can incorporate the authority of Christ's voice over our lives by our commitment to the study of scripture, the preaching of the church, and to discussion with the fellowship of the faithful so that Christ’s words sink so deeply into our hearts, our minds, and our hands that we come to follow his voice without even being conscious of hearing it.

May the power of Christ’s words settle so deeply into your life that they reside in your hands: hands that lift up the helpless, hands that hold the frightened, hands that battle for justice, hands that heal the broken hearts of the world.