"Perverse Generation"

Faithless. We use this word to express treachery or disloyalty as in a wife or husband who has not been faithful. In a more general sense, we think of someone going through life without religious faith. Who can conceive of such a thing? Do we not see God's imposing Presence all around us, certainly in the beauty of the Creation shimmering in the most humble leaf and blade of grass? And who standing beside a deathbed does behold the sudden and dramatic difference between life to death? This is a day-to-night difference. I feel sorry for actors who face the challenge of portraying death, say, in a murder mystery, because life is bountiful and unavoidably shines out of anyone who is still living, even the frail. He must be dead in order to act dead. The force of life is great.

Nonetheless, we encounter people who neglect, even discard, their religious faith. Indeed, there are some who are obsessed with ridiculing belief in God and have made this their unholy obsession. They explain all things in material terms. In particular, medical science has been a tonic for atheists.

As a whole, the practice of medicine has relieved suffering in many patients. But it will always be out of its depth. I am reminded of Lewis Thomas' excellent book, The Youngest Science (1983). This dean of the Yale Medical School, himself an M.D., had written this book as a tribute to his parents — a general practitioner and a registered nurse. In the book he wrote something I shall never forget: that modern medicine before the mid-twentieth-century (the advent of penicillin) had more in common with Hippocrates in ancient Greece than with the medicine he practiced in the 1980s.

At a dinner party many years ago, I asked physicians sitting round the table (I was the only one present who was not a physician), "Of all the diseases and syndromes possible for the human body, what percentage would you say we have detected, much less given a name to?" That number, they agreed, must be below ten percent. It may be below one percent.

Some time after this, following a severe head injury, a stint in the Neurological ICU, and a long period of rehab .... actually, of waiting, for there was nothing they could do, I asked that same question of neurologists assigned to my case at the Harvard Medical School. Several of them told me this: that if medicine is the youngest science, then neurology is the surely the newborn in the family. One man said that neurologists were venturing into a vast darkness, visibility several inches, feeling their way ahead, feeling but failing to recognize most of what they were touching. Recently, a doctor told me there are two orders of neurological disease: the unintelligible and the incurable.

This is a particular example of George F. Will's general statement: "we are a people who know next to nothing about virtually everything." Our knowledge if broad but paper thin. May I humbly offer a corollary? The less first-hand scientific knowledge one possesses the more likely one is to believe that the sciences have mastered practically everything. The less one knows about science, the most one lionizes science. And a principle I learned at Bell Labs was that while the developers were rather pompous, those in research, who were doing the real scientific work, were more likely to be tentative, knowing that whatever breakthroughs might he been made .... these did not point to timeless verities but to "what is temporarily believed."

Given this perspective, we must go slow in reading our brief Gospel lesson this morning. A man kneels before the Lord Jesus begging Him to heal his son of epilepsy. Jesus exorcises a formidable demon delivering the young man of his tormentor. The modern mind is provoked: "Isn't belief in demon possession an artifact of a superstitious culture now long vanished? Hasn't medical science explained all this?"

Our religious faith, however, teaches that the material and spiritual domains are distinct. They also are woven into each other in their discrete separateness as the soul is seamlessly woven into the body.

Angels do not have material bodies. They are spirit as God is Spirit (Jn 4:24). So are fallen angels, whom we call demons. In order to participate in the world of flesh and blood, demons, like viruses, must invade human cells and bodies to make them their own. Angels and demons compete for dominance over the most royal real estate, the human person. Humans are the only thing created to be permanent and surely the only creature made to be holy. Angels and demons fight fiercely over this particular territory.

How does possession actually work? When we choose for evil, giving a demon entree, we introduce a noxious vapor into our interior life which drives angels and ultimately the Holy Spirit away (Ps 51:11). But all is not lost. As St. Basil the Great has written (On the Holy Spirit), a man may cover himself with mud and seek out dark places where he might hide and sin. But sooner or later, he must step out into the sunlight. When this happens, a little piece of mud breaks off of his skin, (perhaps through some good thought). And the Holy Spirit's rays penetrate that little chink is his dark armor flooding the body with light.

As demons require matter in order to function in the world, so spiritual phenomena in general require material components to find expression. We do not say that a miracle ceases to be a miracle because it occurred by material means. Let's say, for example, that the Hermitage should fail financially. All monks and nuns live constantly on the edge. They receive no funds from the Church as a matter of course. Then suddenly — Glory to God! — one of our members receives a windfall through a distant relative's legacy. We have been delivered! Shall we now say that this deliverance was no miracle because it came to us through material means. A Quaker minister I knew told me, "Everything is a miracle. It's the timing you want to pay attention to."

Yes, we live in the material world, irretrievably. God, therefore, requires material means to express His love to us. Indeed, to do anything in the way of ministry, God needs us. The great example of this was His need for the consent of a twelve-year-old girl to order to effect the salvation of mankind. She was asked to give away her whole future: a beloved husband her own age, children, a place of honor in the village. One wonders how many twelve-year-old girls God asked before obtaining this consent.

Conversely, diseases in and of themselves do not accuse us of sinful living .... of course not! There are many cases when we suffer disease through no fault of our own. Nonetheless, all disease derives from the alienation of mankind from God brought on by human rebellion in Eden.

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This morning we meet with an epileptic. He is said to be possessed. His case produces disgust in the Lord Jesus.

The idea that epilepsy should be connected to possession provokes incredulity to the modern man, for he is sure we understand epilepsy. In point of fact, for all our neural imaging technologies and for all our advances in the medical sciences, we do not have the slightest idea what epilepsy is, nor its causes. It is an effect, a disorder, something is wrong. But we have no theory; we cannot propose an ultimate etiology. And of course it is incurable.

The word epilepsy derives from an ancient Greek word, επιλα'μβανειν, (epilambanein) meaning "to seize, to afflict, to possess." And today that is all we know. What was known two thousand years ago is all we can say this afternoon.

Epilepsy presents an apt image of possession: the human is taken over by an unseen agency. We have no material explanation. The body is convulsed doing things it otherwise would not. The young man's father says,

In Haiti we heard these very words. People would come into our clinic and say,

"He falls into the fire and into the water." These patients would present covered in third-degree burns.

But why? Why does he fall into the fire? We understand what is meant at the level of empirical description. We know empirically that gazing into fire or at the shimmer of light on water can produce a certain effect on the brain, triggering a seizure. The body loses control. But we cannot say why.

In the first-century Levant, the emphasis on fire and water points to the four elements, which were said to constitute all things: earth, wind, water, and fire, corresponding to the four basic humors of the human person. We see an oblique suggestion (speaking in first-century terms) that the young man is too much preoccupied with elemental spirits, "falling into fire" in the sense of "falling into sin." And we notice that Jesus does not simply rebuke the spirit. He rebukes the young man, and then He exorcises the spirit. As St. Paul has written,

I suppose that most adolescents in the U.S. have become slaves, too. But whatever the case may be with this young man, it disgusts Jesus prompting Him to say,

Now, epilepsy does not deterministically point to moral defect, much less to demonic possession. It is a material event that in this case seems to have a spiritual or moral meaning. Conversely, a medical diagnosis of epilepsy does not rule out demonic influence, not then, not now. In fact, no set of material data ever rule out the presence of spiritual phenomena any more than the presence of our bodies rules out the existence of our souls. Both things are always true.

If the Scriptures, which describe historical events, have both a spiritual meaning and a literal meaning, then it follows that our history and, in particular, our lives have both a literal meaning and a spiritual meaning. That's the nature of the world that God made.

Does not venereal disease have a spiritual meaning? Is not venereal disease an organic pathology which also is an expression of moral illness? These diseases, many of them incurable, are epidemic in our time, and all of them have the power to infect, but only as a consequence of sin. If everyone were faithful, saving the precious treasure of sexual intimacy for marriage, we wouldn't even know what an STD is. STDs would not exist.

And what of gluttony? Heart disease, diabetes, stroke, senility are its outcomes. Most of the world is malnourished even as obesity has become epidemic worldwide. I propose this as a major moral problem. Can we really isolate these phenomena as being morally indifferent? Substance abuse is life-destroying on a colossal scale, yet comes about only through moral choice. What is the cure to drug addiction? Restraint. And God, the only Physician Who matters in the end, endures an ongoing exile from public life in the United States. I'm finding these days that I cannot even mention God in general conversation.

God, rather than being longed for, the desire of the everlasting hills .... is wanted only in the sense of a "Most Wanted" poster hanging among other public enemies. People go to prison for their devotion to God. At this point of the absurd, the greatest absurdity of human history is revisited: people seeking to murder their God hanging Him on a Cross among criminals.

I remember the RC Cardinal Archbishop of Chicago saying ten years that he would die in his bed (and he has), that his successor would die in prison, and that his successor would die a red martyr.

This helps us to understand why this Gospel lesson should conclude with the following words:

First comes disregard of God's moral laws, which fills Jesus with disgust. Then comes dismissal of God altogether. Then the final solution: "Let us murder our God."

Not merely the man Jesus .... but also God. For Jesus sees an adulterous and perverse generation around Him who has failed to recognize God Who stands right before them! The tragic end of this tale is inevitable. For as we know, this disjointed and diseased world will never square with the perfect lineaments of Heaven. The twisted world will never align with Heaven's goodness. There are two, discontinuous realms.

Look at the world around us. Can we honestly say that it is not adulterous and perverse? Can we not see how many people are possessed? We use the word addiction to describe obsessions with drugs and sex. That is to say, these obsessed people are not in control. Do we not see how this will end? .... this "American culture of death," as Mother Theresa put it gathers dark strength with each day.

The Christian pastor Dietrich Bonhoffer martyred by the Nazis wrote that

This idea is no novelty. Roughly 2,700 years before Bonhoffer, we find this in the Holy Scriptures:

Beware the spirit of our age which has replaced moral responsibility with facile medical diagnoses. Jesus says that resistance to evil begins with fasting and prayer, which is to say mastery of the passions. But this is not enough. For an entire lifeworld languishes as if in a trance.

We must come to our feet. We must be resolute. And we must speak clearly .... even as the rulers of this age seek to silence us through intimidation and even by legal means. We must speak plainly. For the Lord our Savior Jesus Christ taught,

Who has ears to hear let him hear!

In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost.