June 24, 2007

The Fourth Sunday after Pentecost

Luke 8.26-39

The Reverend Jennifer K. Morrow

 

 

 

A few weeks ago, a church member shared with me a conversation she had recently had with a friend of hers.  This friend—it is important to note for the story—is an active member of another Christian denomination.  In talking with our fellow parishioner the friend inquired: “So just what do you do on an average Sunday morning in the Methodist church?  How is it different from our services?”  Picking up on a hint of fear, our church member replied, “Well, actually, it’s probably mostly like the worship services you are used to: we sing hymns, we pray, sometimes we share in communion, there’s a sermon, and then after that, we bring out the snakes.”  “Really?” her friend replied, as though this isn’t far from the answer she had expected all along.

 

What I don’t know is if the member of our congregation ever dispelled the myth she concocted.  Although today, I’m not sure it would matter.  Did you hear the gospel reading this morning?  It’s not exactly the stuff of armchair Christianity or children’s picture bibles.  In fact, it nearly seems as though the same people who would include this story in their bibles might also include live reptiles in their worship.  In Luke’s gospel, which Carol read for us today, is recorded the dramatic and potentially embarrassing story of a man Jesus cures from demon possession.  Here we have this man, stark naked and stark raving mad, living in tombs and possessed by demons.  Jesus goes out to him, chained among rocks, and sends the legion of demons possessing him into a herd of pigs, who then drop like lemmings off the side of a cliff into the water and drown.

 

Ah, but this story does not come to us from some freaky offshoot of Christianity; it is in the heart of our gospels.  Gospels, as you know, meaning “good news.”  And so just what is the good news for us here?  Well, since I can’t really ask you “Do you remember the last time you were stark naked and stark raving mad running around a graveyard hitting yourself?” the temptation is to turn this character into a metaphor…just as he was held captive by forces beyond his control, how are you held captive?  What “demons” possess you?  What forces control your life, send you into self-destructive patterns?”  Today is the perfect day for a sermon like that. 

 

Except that today, honestly this feels a little like using the cancer survivor as a metaphor for someone getting over a cold.  “Just like she beat breast cancer, you kicked that cold in the butt!  Just like she endured chemotherapy, you took that horrible tasting Nyquil.”  So I don’t want to pretend that the self-destructive forces we face…real and painful and significant as they may be…are well represented by this demon possessed man living among the tombs.  For today, let’s allow his story to be his story; and our stories will remain ours.

 

Of course, part of our story that must be named is our discomfort with his story.  It goes against all that is enlightened and western and educated and protestant within us.  Most all of us would prefer to sweep it under our imported rugs (or better yet, pay someone else to sweep it under there for us and fold the laundry while they’re at it).  But in this reaction, we are not alone.  Our forebears are present at the end of Luke’s story itself.  You remember that once the man had been freed from the torturous demons, and the pigs had taken their fall, the swineherds ran off and told anyone they could find about what they had seen.  Perhaps they couldn’t believe it with their own eyes and needed a few second opinions.  Now by the time those they told arrived, Luke tells us that the formerly possessed man was sitting at the feet of Jesus and “in his right mind.”

 

And what did our forebears do in response to what they saw?  What did these average townsfolk do when they came to the outskirts of their village and found the once ravaged, broken, and scary man whole and well?  They did the same thing many of us would do when confronted undeniably with something beyond our understanding or our worldview:  they did their best to get rid of it.

 

They ordered Jesus from their midst.  Anyone who could, who would do such an inexplicable thing was to be feared, and removed from the picture as quickly as possible.  My sense from their reaction is that these folks were uncomfortable with two things:  Jesus’ power and the once-possessed man’s wholeness.  It seems they preferred a more domesticated God…one who wasn’t actually more powerful than certain forces beyond their control.

 

And this is the thing about them that most reminds me of us.  We hide behind categories like “superstitious” or “unscientific” or just “weird” to avoid encountering the living God.  We like a God who can hear our prayers, and whom perhaps we can’t see or fully understand.  But a God who dwells mostly at the shadowy boundaries of the existences we have carefully laid out for ourselves?  A God who refuses to conform to our categories or our comfort zones?  I don’t know.  It sounds dangerous.

 

And it is.  But what, I ask, are the dangers of worshiping a small, domesticated God?  Sometimes I feel like we enlightened, educated western protestants have got to get over ourselves long enough to give God a little elbow room.  It’s as though we have God on a leash, and as we’re walking past the scary, possessed man among the tombs, yelling and lashing himself, we impetuously tug God away.  God strains to rescue, to confront, and to save.  To be free of our limitations, but we insist that we really need God more over here…where we draw God’s attention to more important matters: what’s your will for MY life God?  Should I take this job or that one?  God?  Over here God.  Stop looking back that way.

 

But God will never stop looking back that way.  The God we proclaim cannot be tamed.  The God we proclaim lives on the margins, insisting to go where most anyone else is too sensible to go.  The God we worship has a need to seek and to save and to salve that cannot be satiated.  God and God’s love cannot be thwarted, redirected, or kept at bay.  This is the God the scriptures and the church and the prophets have at once been proclaiming and fearing for generations.  Martin Luther once notably said that the job of the believer is to “let God be God.”  This is the challenge put to us today. We either let God be God, or we let God go.   We either welcome God’s power to bring the kind of freedom and healing that we literally believe is impossible, or we tell Jesus to get out and leave us alone.  One popular Christian mantra states, “Let go and let God.”  Yes, good.  But today we are pushed beyond that; pushed even further beyond ourselves and our beloved, comfortable God on a leash.  Let go of the leash and let God go, or let God be God and hang on tight.  I say we hang on…