The peril of the empty mind!

Luke 11:15-26

Once, when Jesus cast out a demon from a man who couldn’t speak, his voice returned to him. The crowd was excited and enthusiastic, but some said, “No wonder he can cast them out. He gets his power from Satan, the king of demons!” Others asked for something to happen in the sky to prove his claim of being the Messiah. He knew the thoughts of each of them, so he said, “Any kingdom filled with civil war is doomed; so is a home filled with argument and strife. Therefore, if what you say is true, that Satan is fighting against himself by empowering me to cast out his demons, how can his kingdom survive? And if I am empowered by Satan, what about your own followers? For they cast out demons! Do you think this proves they are possessed by Satan? Ask them if you are right! But if I am casting out demons because of power from God, it proves that the Kingdom of God has arrived. “For when Satan, strong and fully armed, guards his palace, it is safe— until someone stronger and better armed attacks and overcomes him and strips him of his weapons and carries off his belongings. “Anyone who is not for me is against me; if he isn’t helping me, he is hurting my cause. “When a demon is cast out of a man, it goes to the deserts, searching there for rest; but finding none, it returns to the person it left, and finds that its former home is all swept and clean. Then it goes and gets seven other demons more evil than itself, and they all enter the man. And so the poor fellow is seven times worse off than he was before.”

Food for thought!

Have you ever felt that there seems to always be a grouch (a person who is always critical of others) in every crowd? This is the person who never seems to appreciate good and goodness in life and in others. He recounts his tales of woe to anyone who listens, telling about what’s currently wrong in his own life, or life of others. In today's gospel, while the crowd was excited and enthusiastic about Jesus, the grouch said, “No wonder he can cast them out. He gets his power from Satan, the king of demons!” The grouch know how to twist the good we do to something evil!

It is sad to consider good as evil; to call Jesus an agent of the devil. And this is not uncommon. Normally when we don't like someone, everything that person does will look evil to us; it is then that we resort to slander. Do you possibly have anyone you slander because you dislike him or her? Are you a grouch to someone?

THE PERIL OF THE EMPTY SOUL

Today's gospel reading has another grim and terrible story. There was a man from whom an unclean spirit was expelled. It wandered seeking rest and found none. It determined to return to the man. It found his soul swept and garnished--but empty. So the spirit went and collected seven spirits worse than itself and came back and entered in; and the man's last state was worse than his first.

(i) Here is the fundamental truth that you cannot leave the mind empty. It is not enough to banish the evil thoughts and the evil habits and the old ways and leave the mind empty. An empty mind is a mind in peril. We've got to fill our mind with something. It is not enough to not think of evil; it is good to think of good and goodness.

(ii) The best way to avoid evil is to do good. Often we may be troubled with wrong thoughts. If we go no further than to say to ourselves, "I will not think about that," all we do is fix our thoughts upon it more and more. The cure is to think of something else, to banish the evil thought by thinking a good thought. We never become good by not doing bad things, but by doing lovely things.

Phillipians 4:8

Summing it all up, friends, I'd say you'll do best by filling your minds and meditating on things true, noble, reputable, authentic, compelling, gracious-- the best, not the worst; the beautiful, not the ugly; things to praise, not things to curse.

“You gotta accentuate the positive; eliminate the negative; latch on to the affirmative; don’t mess with Mr. In-Between!” so sang Johnny Mercer in the mid-1940s. This message is still a good one for us today.