Luke 8: 26-39
Relief!
June 24, 2007
Rev. Elizabeth Macaulay
In the two week since I last stood in this pulpit:
100 persons received a warm welcome and groceries at our
second Rich Harvest held yesterday.
50 persons from across the
Anne Savage and Doug Morey were married in this sanctuary,
as were Carrie Christiansen and Peter Binnie.
Ryan Olson preached his first sermon.
My daughter graduated with honors from the U of Chicago
after being piped in by twenty pipers and drums and I didn’t sob too audibly so
as to unduly embarrass my clan during the ceremony.
Veterans from this church loaded a bus and toured memorials
built to honor their service and sacrifice.
The Vietnamese ministry growing through this church
worshipped for the first time in this, their new home.
Groups gathered for Bible Study and for twelve-step support.
Children were dropped off and picked up for day care and
their parents wondered at the unfolding of so much activity in this once sedate
and predictable establishment.
Persons in the hospital were visited and prayed with,
countless cups of coffee were consumed, much laughter was shared and all of
this, all of this summertime living and loving and learning and being was done
in the name of Jesus.
Especially in the name of Jesus. Jesus, who never let his followers get the sense
that the ministry field was defined for them by their comfort level or their
location or their own sense of distinctions used for sorting purposes.
Jesus, who teaches us yet in today’s gospel lesson about the
glory and stretch and challenge of what it is to do the work of discipleship.
Today’s lesson has Jesus entering Gentile territory. For the Jews in his company and for the Jews
telling and listening to this account some seventy years after the fact,
location matters.
The country of the Geresense was Gentile country. And it would be understandable and expected
that Jesus would avoid that part of his homeland. As a Jew, Jesus would have been taught that
Gentiles were misguided and almost dangerous in their status as not-Jews. So
what would he have to do with them, anyway?
There was enough work and teaching and healing to be done with his “own”
people. Why would he wade into the
troubles of totally “other” others?
Wade in he does. And
as soon as he finds solid ground. As
soon as he lands on this alien shore, he is met with a man three-ways to be
feared:
He is possessed of a demon.
Forces held this man in bondage.
And he was so wracked by that bondage that he lived without
clothing. An act in his culture well
beyond socially acceptable. And worse
yet, he lived in proximity to the tombs.
Tombs at the time of Jesus were considered so unclean that they were
whitewashed in order to warn people against casual contact.
So we are to know that this man lives a life of utter
misery. He has lost his ability to speak
for himself or live in such a way that there is any sort of community around
him.
But something within him - the demon itself - recognizes the
healing power of Jesus when it encounters it.
What about this business of demons, so many of them in this
poor man that they call themselves “legion”?
At the men’s Bible study on Wednesday the question was
asked. Are there forces of evil in the
world that take possession of people?
Are there demon-like things that come into our lives and shred them so
thoroughly that we might feel like we are staggering around half-naked and
dazed?
We decided that there are powers and principalities. Energies in this world that can take us to
themselves and woo us to death.
Things like addictions - addictions to food or to alcohol or
to chemicals or to sex or to things or to, as the paper reported Friday, video
games.
Addictions to a vision of who we have to be to be somebody
in this world: addictions to power and
to possessions and to work and to the perfection of our children and marriages
and addictions to the just plain ridiculous notion that we are supposed to be
perfect.
We can become addicted to our own sense of our own badness,
and that is one of the most toxic demons seeking to lodge in our souls.
Do you believe me when I say that this man stumbling amongst
the dead is a not-too distant kin of us each?
And so we too, like the one possessed, encounter Jesus and
we too, if we are honest with ourselves sometimes want to cloak our badness and
our need and send Jesus on his way because the healing that this Jesus offers
us is going to mean we’re going to have to get real with our lives. Peal back the demon voices and vices and live
wholly present and aware and real with our God and our world.
And that, that can be terrifying.
“Lord Jesus, Son of the Most High
God, what do you want with ME?”
Anyone who has ever surrendered themselves the healing
honesty of asking that question - through a twelve step program or through any
sort of decision to turn their lives over to wholeness. Anyone who has awakened to a life desolate
and pain filled and no longer bearable and anyone who has decided to make
needed changes for living authentic lives.
They know the terror of the question: “Lord Jesus, Son of the Most High God, what
do you want with ME?
The know the terror of the question because they must live
into the unfolding of the answer. And
their lives will never be the same.
Preacher Barbara Brown Taylor in one of her books speaks the
terror and challenge of asking that question and living into the answers.
“Reynolds Price is a writer who suffered from a rare form of
spinal cancer through which he lost the use of his legs. His crisis was not only physical but also
spiritual, since his illness required him to change his entire way of
life. What surprised him most, he said,
was the resistance of his friends.
‘When we undergo huge traumas in middle life,’ he said, ‘everybody
is in league with us to deny that the old life is ended. Everybody is trying to patch us up and get us
back to who we were, when in fact what we need to be told is, “You’re
dead. Who are you going to be tomorrow?’” (Speaking of Sin, pg. 60)
My husband Cooper is a UM pastor at a sister church
nearby. Yesterday they held a new member
class, and as happens during such time, there is some heart deep sharing that
happens around why church, why now, what is it that draws you to join this
church?
One of the women present shared this story to illustrate why
the church has come to mean so much to her and to her family.
She and her family had been attending the church for about a
year. She is the mother of a four year
old. Her four year old was discovered to
have a heart defect. A hole in her heart
that was going to need medical intervention.
And so the testing before the procedure began. Before one particular X-Ray, as the process
was being explained to her, she asked her mom
“When they take the picture, will
they be able to see God in there?”
Her mom was a bit taken aback and a lot warmed and intrigued
by the question. She told her daughter
that no, the picture wouldn’t be able to show God in her daughter’s heart.
Why, she asked her wee one, was she
so sure that the picture might show God in her heart?
“Because”, said her daughter, “They teach us at church that
God lives in each of our hearts. So I
thought that when they took a picture of my heart, they would see God there.”
Her mom was so moved by that testimony, and so grateful that
the church they had begun to visit had such a powerful impact upon her
daughter.
A week later, the mother got a phone call from the
surgeon. He told the mother that he was
not going to be doing the procedure.
At first the mother was devastated. She had come to trust this physician and had
felt such comfort in his being involved in the healing of her daughter.
She shared her disappointment with
the doctor, and he laughed.
“No”, he said. “I’m
not doing the procedure not because I don’t want to do it or can’t do it. I’m not doing the procedure because an
amazing work of healing has happened. I
can’t say why it is, but your daughter doesn’t need the surgery. It seems she is healing without it.”
The girl’s parents were amazed and so grateful. They were so excited to share the news with
their daughter.
She listened to what they said. And then she said with the kind of
matter-of-fact wisdom of a wise four year old:
“I TOLD you God lived in my
heart. Because God lives there, my heart
got better.”
At the beginning of this sermon I listed all of the events
of the past two weeks because they are real and they are holy and they are the
work of our church and of our lives and we undertake this work because if we
have not physically been the ones staggering about the tombs in utter
desolation, we have none-the-less been witness to the ways the powers and
principalities of this world are sore in need of exorcism.
And so we stand on the ground of this world we inhabit here
on
And we say to the legion of forces we seek to vanquish:
Fear and poverty and loneliness and addiction and
despair. To those demons we say:
God lives in our hearts. And we believe in the healing power of
God. And we will not be bound.
We will serve, and we will witness, and we are the people
who dare to ask the question and those who stand ready to hold and bless all
others courageous enough to ask:
Lord Jesus, Son of the most high
God, what do you want of us?
And we look to each other and our
God to learn the answer.
Amen