Three days left of CPE, thanks be to God. It was a lot of hard work and not so fun to see people suffering several days a week, but I learned a ton and I understand why it's an ordination requirement.

Some things I learned in no particular order: lots of people are homeless because of untreated mental illness; lots of people develop addictions because they're trying to self medicate mental illness; there are a lot of pastors out there telling people really dumb stuff, like, you'll know your dead baby granddaughter is okay if you see a shooting star at midnight, or, if God had wanted you to have a new liver, God would have given you a liver; gratitude is transformational; our healthcare system is way screwed up; the church universal has let a whole lot of people slip through the cracks; I say I'm sorry a lot and often for no good reason; you can be shot and killed over a fish sandwich; there are a whole bunch of people shooting a whole lot of hard drugs into their veins and they come from all socioeconomic backgrounds; I still pass out if I see images of IV drug use, especially if I haven't eaten; you can be young, attractive, successful, married to a seemingly good guy, an avid churchgoer and still drink yourself to death, literally; men who don't believe in "lady pastors' will nevertheless talk nonstop to a lady chaplain for an entire hour, which is totally okay, since the talk is not happening in a church; I don't really like talking about my feelings; people trying to decide whether to withdraw life support for their mother/father/daughter/son/sister/brother/spouse will ask you what they should do if you happen to tell them you're a chaplain; lots of people are really scared to talk to God; lots of people believe God is punishing them; I'm a little gun-shy about my "pastoral authority"; lots of people don't believe God loves them unconditionally, and so don't believe God loves them; I'm more certain than ever that whatever you did, whatever you didn't do, God loves you anyway.

Also, here's a sermon I delivered for UAB's Episcopal Campus Ministries service earlier in the summer. The campus ministries chaplain asked if I'd talk some about CPE, which is why so much of it is focused on that. Also, I'm very excited to take homiletics this year and to work on sermon writing.

June 23, 2013
Luke 8:26-39

I just finished my first year at Virginia Theological Seminary. Back at VTS in the fall, my New Testament professor made a comment to me and a few other students that I sort of laughed off. She said, “Typically, we have a group of VTS students who go over to the Dominican House"—and the Dominican House is a place of study for young men hoping to become part of the Dominican Order in the Roman Catholic Church—"and take the exorcism class they teach there.” She went on to say that “if you’re really unlucky in your career as a priest, you may have to perform one exorcism. It’s really a much better idea to take a class on a gospel instead.”

And it seems true that Episcopal priests, at least the ones I know, and I think most clergy, just don’t assume that all that many people will be asking them to perform exorcisms. So I was a bit taken aback when someone asked me if I would in fact perform an exorcism a few weeks ago. I very much hope that doesn’t mean I’m unlucky.

  I’ve been here in Birmingham since the end of May working as a hospital chaplain at UAB. I’m completing what is called “clinical pastoral education,” or “CPE,” as part of the ordination requirements for the Episcopal Diocese of Mississippi. CPE, which usually takes the form of hospital chaplaincy, is an ordination requirement among most, if not all, Episcopal dioceses, and is also required of those seeking ordination among several other denominations and traditions.

So I am here working at UAB to meet my CPE requirement. And it was during my very first night on call at the hospital, when I was thankfully shadowing a more experienced chaplain, that I met a young woman who very earnestly and seriously asked me and the other chaplain if we would please perform an exorcism on her.

As you might have imagined, this was on one of the hospital’s psych units. This woman was young and quite beautiful and clearly very intelligent, and unlike a lot of people I’ve seen on the psych units at UAB, she kept saying, “I realize this sounds crazy. I know this makes me sound crazy.” (Most of the people I see on the psych units don’t seem at all worried about sounding “crazy”—her word.) So she would talk about sounding crazy, and then she would recount some very odd incident—such as her boyfriend’s serving her communion, and this boyfriend was someone with split personalities and the communion-serving personality was evil—and all that in her mind proved that she had been, in her words, “marked by the beast.”

“I feel like I’ve been marked by the beast,” she said over and over again. “I know that I’ve been marked by the beast and I’m scared that I can’t get back to God and Jesus and that I will burn in hell.” And that notion clearly terrified her.

And I’m actually not even sure the word terrified does justice to the fear I saw in this woman’s eyes. “I don’t want to burn in hell,” she kept saying. “I believe in God. I want to follow Jesus. But it’s too late. I’ve already been marked.” Terrified. And no wonder. She was completely and utterly convinced that she had moved to a place beyond the reach of any saving help, certainly beyond the reach of society, and even beyond the reach of God.

In that way, she believed herself to be in a place very much like the place where we find the man possessed by demons in tonight’s gospel lesson. This is a man whom the gospel writer tells us lives in “the tombs,” completely removed from the rest of society, except of course for the guard who ensures society is kept safe from the man. This is a man the community has given up on, a man literally living among the dead.

And why not? Clearly, he seems unfit for any other kind of existence. This man, who can’t even manage to clothe himself, is teeming with unclean spirits, and as such, he is continually breaking his chains and being driven off into the wild. He clearly is not in his right mind. He is in fact so totally overcome by his afflictions, his demons, he is unable even to say his name when Jesus asks. Instead, the demons themselves respond. The man is completely and utterly overcome, seemingly, like the young woman on the psych ward, beyond any saving help.

Whether the young woman on the psych ward and the man in the gospel were actually afflicted by demons or by mental illness, each was in a truly dark place, a place they believed to be beyond the reach of God’s saving mercy and love. I would hazard a guess, that while these are no doubt extreme cases, all of us have at some time felt that we, or maybe at least some small part of us, something about us, within us, is beyond God’s reach. If you are like me, you may have a demon or two or three.

Biblical scholar Walter Brueggemann says that “We may imagine, in contemporary context, the demons are any form of addiction—drugs, sex, money, power, control, self-promotion. Such demons preclude much of the life that we want to live.” But,” Brueggemann says, “Jesus has the power to give the man a new life of freedom, beyond the grip of all the demons.”

And Jesus does in fact give the man a new life of freedom. In healing the man and casting his demons into the abyss, Jesus shows the man, the Garasenes, and us that there is no darkness that cannot be overcome. Whatever our demons—and we all have them—Jesus has power over them.

Brueggemann says, “In the extremities of our life, we are powerless for ourselves. Just so the man with Jesus is powerless in the face of his demons. But then freedom, restoration, and new life flow through.” Freedom, restoration and new life flow through despite however dark or bad or sinful we may believe our demons to be. Jesus brings us freedom, restoration and new life, whatever our demons, despite how many our demons, despite a whole legion of demons. There is nothing in us that the love of God through Jesus Christ cannot make new. And we do well to remember—I do well to remember—that there is no one so far gone, even on the psych ward, even on our streets and in our prisons, that the love of God can’t reach, can’t restore, can’t make new. And because we, as Christians, have been made new, we like the man in the gospel must proclaim this.

I don’t know how the girl I met that night is doing. I know that she went home a few days after I saw her, and I assume she got at least some of the help she needed. I know that we didn’t have to do an exorcism, but I don’t know exactly how much improved her mental and emotional state were when she left the hospital. I know that I was scared for her that night, because she was so scared and so convinced she was beyond any help. But I was also hopeful, am hopeful, because I know that what she said was not even close to true. There are no demons that Jesus can’t cast out.