He was the secret everyone knew. He was the talk of the town, but not in a good way. The man with the unclean spirit.

I remember him well. He was bitter, but he had a generous heart. He didn’t want to keep this bitterness to himself, he shared it with everyone he knew. He didn’t listen. He would often speak over you. One time he was in the doctor’s waiting room and had a loud argument over the phone with his cable company. He’d text during movies and while driving. He never used his turn signal.

He had an unclean spirit. And he shared it. On committees, he always voted no. He spoke ill of everyone but never to their faces. He used obscure points of Roberts’ Rules to stall annual meetings. He never did anything completely awful though. He wasn’t evil. He didn’t take from the offering plate, physically harm or verbally assault anyone. He dressed well and didn’t drink as far as we knew. He just wasn’t helpful. He was mean. Like a deep-in-the-spirit mean.

Then one day our pastor said a traveling preacher from Nazareth was going to preach at our gathering. We all inwardly groaned. Outside preachers are hit-or-miss, and usually miss. But this guy stands up and… wow. He taught as one having authority. Not like the scribes and their endless droning about minute doctrinal details from a thousand years ago that no longer applied. This guy had a fire! He had passion! I mean, we haven’t heard anything like it in the service before.

He put the scriptures in context. He didn’t begin with what we all thought we knew. He came at it from a different point of view and showed how our sacred stories are still relevant and not at all what we had learned in Sunday School. That’s not to say what we learned was all bad, he just went deeper with it. Really unlocked the meaning and spoke like he truly believed and lived what he was saying. And that’s when HE spoke up.

“What have you to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth? Have you come to destroy us? I know who you are, the Holy One of God,” said the man with the unclean spirit.

And the preacher just gave him a look… it’s hard to describe… it was one of pity. One of love. One of anger and yet understanding. I think he smiled a little, too. Then he said, “Be silent and come out of him!”

The man shook and began crying. He just collapsed back into his pew. We were amazed! What a scandal to take place on a Sunday morning. I muttered to my neighbor, “What is this? A new teaching and with authority? He commands even the unclean spirits and they obey him!”

I looked up and couldn’t find the preacher. Then I saw him… he was over by the man, kneeling beside him. They went to coffee hour together and stayed a really long time. The deacons were cleaning the tables in the hopes that they would take the hint. They didn’t. They were deep in conversation. It was only when they were sweeping the floors around them did they hug and go their separate ways.

Did you know that man with the unclean spirit? He’s different now. He listens. He doesn’t rely on pre-packaged phrases. He’s really cool to hang out with. He came up and apologized to me for taking such a long time after service that week. He told me about his struggles. He told me about his pain. He was so real. I was so moved that I shared about my struggles, too. It is something I don’t think I’ve ever really truly done before.

As I think about the sermon that the preacher gave, you know; the new teaching with authority. I don’t think it was new at all. I think it was the same message we have always heard, but the difference was that the preacher lived it. It’s as if he believes that you should be about your faith more than just on Sunday.

As I reflect on all of this… It turns out, I had an unclean spirit too. I said I believed something, but I wasn’t really living it fully; sometimes not at all. I said I cared for other people, but I never really gave all that much to charity. I said I cared for the poor, but I couldn’t give you a name. I kept my problems from my friends, and we just skated around on the surface of our conversations. But I feel like I’m slowly thawing. Slowly sharing more and more of my life. Beliefs aren’t much if you haven’t taken them for a test drive.

And you know… others are starting to do the same. We’re remembering what we’re supposed to be about, we’re rediscovering what we believe, and we’re finding a deeper community. Before, we were around each other, but we really didn’t know one another. But now… Now we’re risking a little more with one another. Allowing each other into our lives more.

I used to listen only to speakers who agreed with me. I don’t any more. I used to listen to these motivational speakers who spewed litanies of trite, neatly packaged self-empowerment messages about being my best self. They had these 5-point plans. Now I see that this work is bigger and messier and more communal than I had been told or sold.

My unclean spirit said that people can’t change. That once I have them categorized and labeled, then they stayed there. Yet that preacher reminded me of how much change I come from. How we used to be slaves in Egypt until God lead us out and gave us a new law through Moses. How we used to be a small tribe, until we had King David and his son Solomon. Then we changed again going into exile in Babylon. We became different, we learned new ways, we had to adapt. We had to listen hard to God through all of this and God kept saying through the prophets, “I am with you. You need to shape up and live fully into what I’ve been telling you all along.”

And now this preacher from Nazareth… He sounds a lot like those prophets of old. He sounds like someone worthy of following. He sounds like someone who will build a community where you can’t hide, where you can’t help but share what you’re going through. Where you will want to listen to what others are going through and not play games and deal in petty drama. He wants us to deal in compassion and understanding.

There are some that couldn’t handle this change in our community however. They saw the transformation happening in our community and they couldn’t face it. They didn’t like being seen and compelled to be transformed. They started behaving like the man used to. They even tried to keep that man in his box, saying that he still had an unclean spirit. The man would listen and smile and say, “If you say so.” They said the preacher from Nazareth destroyed us. But the large part of this group left a few weeks back. I guess it’s hard to cast out unclean spirits you’ve been calling angels for quite a while.

That preacher from Nazareth did destroy us. He destroyed our petty culture of “going along to get along” in which some toxic behavior really fostered. He destroyed us so much, we had to change the name of our community. He destroyed that man’s unclean spirit, and now he’s a pillar of our community. And our unclean spirits are being cast out, ones we didn’t realize each of us had. These unclean spirits and bad behavior can still come back. When that happens, we just say the words from our Holy Scripture to remind one another and ourselves what we should be about…

We are about the transformation of the world. We should have been, but we weren’t. We’re in this great new community that I just can’t stop talking about, and we really love it. We’ve changed so much, we gave ourselves a new name. Would you like to know what we call our community now? Would you like to hear the name?

We call it, “church.”