Grace to you and peace from God our Father, and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

Let me begin this morning at an unusual place—a fairy tale.

No one can argue that Snow White's stepmother, the evil queen, didn't have a healthy ego. Day after day she boldly stepped before her magic mirror to ask, "Mirror, mirror on the wall, who's the fairest of them all?" Or, in a more modern version, "Mirror, mirror on the settee, who's more beautiful than me?" And every morning that mirror concurred with the fair and foul queen that the image reflected upon it was in fact the most beautiful in the kingdom.

Then one fateful morning the queen got the shock of her life. Instead of answering her question with the usual "You are, my queen," the mirror replied, "Snow White." The wicked queen's own image had not changed, but the mirror's reflected perception of her had. That truthful, if tactless, mirror found someone more beautiful to reflect, and so it now called the queen "second best."

Very few of us ever feel like rushing to the mirror first thing in the morning. There is something about a night's rest that instead of making our faces look like a million bucks, makes them take on the "face value" of about $1.29.

Even though mirrors usually show us a version of ourselves that we'd rather not see, it's almost impossible to walk past a mirror or a reflective pane of glass without at least giving it a glance. Like the wicked queen in Snow White, we are drawn to our mirrors. We become mesmerized by what they say to us and about us.

We all have talking mirrors, Ken Hemphill reminds us in his book "Mirror, Mirror on the Wall (Nashville: Broadman, 1992). Unfortunately for most of us, what we think we hear our mirrors telling us is far from being "fairest of them all." Instead, we hear a thousand judging voices from our early childhood through adolescence and adulthood telling us every negative thing we ever heard or imagined may be true. Many of us are still looking in childhood mirrors or adolescent mirrors or adult mirrors.

- The child still in each of us looks in a mirror and hears it saying accusingly, "You! Look at you! You can't do that! You're scrawny, your ears stick out and you're too shy to speak up in class. You can't lead."

- The teenager in us, that part that always feels 16, looks in a mirror and hears it saying vindictively, "You! Forget you! Look at those zits; look at those braces. You're not perfect. No one is going to love you."

- The adult in us, the part that at least thinks it is "grown up," looks in a mirror and hears it saying judgmentally, "You! What a joke. Wait until they catch on to you. You aren't worthy of respect."

As Mark carefully records, much of what Jesus did during his ministry was heal. While some of the healings Jesus effected were for truly physical maladies--fevers, blindness, crippled limbs, deafness, bleeding; a great many of Jesus' healings were "exorcisms." Regardless of the way we choose to understand that kind of sickness today, it is clear that the maladies were of a spiritual nature-the kinds that develop from negative images of the self.

And he cured many who were sick with various diseases, and cast out many demons; and he would not permit the demons to speak, because they knew him.

One of the most telling symptoms of spiritual disease in scripture is the cruel things the interior "demons" forced their human hosts to say and do to themselves. As Mark mentions in this week's text, the cure Jesus effected was not just "exorcising" these spirits—it was shutting them up!

Mark uses this story to communicate the unique power and authority Jesus wields in his travels and teachings. Whether it is to rid the man and the synagogue of this unclean spirit, or simply to get the demon to be silent, Jesus' command is irresistible. The demons depart and are silent.

To continue the theme from last Sunday, it might do us well to be healed of the damage our personal demons can inflict on us-in this case the old mirror-image demons. We need to break the mesmerizing, paralyzing eye-contact we keep making with the old lies in our lives. We need to polish our mirrors until we see ourselves as God sees us.

Indeed, the mirror, without trying to make a pun, might become a powerful image for us. Mirrors, as in the story of Snow White, are common metaphors for separate realities. I think of "In Through the Looking Glass" by Lewis Carroll, featuring Alice from "Alice in Wonderland". Mirrors reveal things that would otherwise remain hidden, a world apart, a truth we might not otherwise know, sometimes thankfully much more profound than who is fairest of all.

I remember thoroughly enjoying another story featuring a mirror. I didn't like the sequels much, but the original "Matrix" was fun for the theologian in me. The film is set in the year 2199. The world has been taken over by the Matrix, and is being run by an artificial intelligence. Humans are harvested like plants to be part of the Matrix, living their lives in an artificial reality never realizing that they are slaves of an evil system that has a false claim on the world. A few rebel humans discover the horror of the Matrix. They believe that computer programmer Thomas Anderson (Keanu Reeves), who by night is a computer hacker named Neo, is "the one." This "one" will, according to prophesy, save the world from cyber-slavery.

The story begins as the rebel humans start recruiting Neo to defeat the evil Matrix. Neo, after some convincing, signs on with the rebel forces, and begins the process of discovering the truth. When he swallows a pill, Neo looks into a mirror, and he begins perceiving that the world he thought was real is a computer-generated illusion.

The movie is filled with biblical references and images, and Neo is obviously a messiah figure. And the idea of two worlds, one visible and the other not, is a running theme throughout the Bible. In both Matrix and the Bible, people are encouraged to see beyond what seems to be real. In both, the demonic forces are those that work to prevent people from grasping the truth.

For Christians, baptism is our mirror. Through its waters, we die to the world of sin and rise inheritors of a new reality-the kingdom of God, visible to all who have eyes to see, audible for those who have ears to hear.

What Mark might call exorcism or healing happens when we can see what God intended in us. It forges a way of viewing the world that sees Christ in all people and discovers hope for God's kingdom where many find only despair.

When we believe the warped images our distorted mirrors show us, we risk making that vision of ourselves real. What we unconsciously repel in visions of evil may actually be our future. As the Vedic sages described it, "We become what we hate.' The abused child who hates its beater grows up to become a child-abuser; the Jews, the battered children of Europe, take on the militarism of the Germans..." (William Irwin Thompson, "Imaginary Landscape: Making Words of Myth and Science," New York: St. Martin's Press, 1989, 143-144).

Instead of believing in the lies of the talking mirrors of this world, perhaps we can hear the boast of the apostle Paul that in Christ we are a "new creation"; the "old has passed away"; behold, "everything has become new" (2 Cor. 5:17). The demonic mirrors of our lives can be silenced.

The greatest damage such mirrors do is to convince us that we have nothing to offer the world, that we have no gifts, that we aren't worth anything. In the waters of baptism, the true reflection we see bears the image of our Lord. Nothing less.

We need not see ourselves as second best. We need not let worldly perceptions rule our hearts. With a Lord who speaks with authority to the demons, we may expect even our personal demons to keep their peace. Through Christ, we may see beyond what appears to be real in order to perceive the truth that we are exactly as God intended and that not demons but God's spirit rests within us.  —  Amen.