A Sermon preached on June 23, 2019, Proper 7
at St. Augustine’s, Wiesbaden
I always feel sorry for the pigs. I wish I could explain why they all
have to die following that mad dash into the lake once they have been possessed
by the demons that Jesus released the man from. I suppose one thing it shows is
just how much that poor man was going through and that he was actually quite
strong to have survived that long. And when people heard this story, and
remember it will have been passed on verbally long before “Luke” wrote it down,
I expect they smiled and laughed and imagined it was a real Roman Legion rushing
into the lake – or better the sea and leaving Israel. It is not a coincidence
that the symbol of the X Legion, a key component of the occupying forces, was a
wild boar, a pig, and Roman occupation will often have seemed like a demonic
possession of Israel.
But that’s a side story and putting the fate of the pigs aside, let’s
focus on what is I think the theme of both the Gospel passage and the extract from
Paul’s Letter to the Galatians: Salvation!
Our Presiding Bishop Michael Curry refers to the Gospel message and the
Movement that grew out of it as being loving, liberating, and life-giving. And
that is what we see described or acted out in these two passages. Paul likes to
write things down and explain them. Jesus prefers to tell stories or just act
as he wants us to act. We learn best when we put the two together.
The first thing we hear and read about is liberation. Paul literally
refers to humanity as being “imprisoned and guarded under the law until faith
would be revealed …. Until Christ came.” (Galatians 3:23-24) This was not just negative
as Paul goes on to explain. Like immature children we needed a guardian or
custodian to keep us on the straight and narrow, and to help us learn. But we were
still not free. Now the way forward is not marked by walls of rules and fences
of regulations, but by a person we can choose to follow, Jesus who describes himself
as “the way, the truth and the life.” (John 14:6) To have faith in Jesus is to
trust in his promise and to follow in his path.
The prison the man from Gerasene needs to be liberated from is horrific.
He has been a captive to the demons that torment him. And not just to them, his
own people, afraid of him, have driven him out of town to the place of the dead
where he wanders among the tombs, naked, alone, neglected, forgotten and afraid.
They keep tying him up, putting him in chains, but while he manages to break
free of the physical chains, he remains tied down both by the demons within and
by the neglect and rejection of the society he was once part of. When Jesus
turns up, healing, release, and liberation follow. Jesus may have commanded the
demons to leave the man, but the behavior of the people of Gerasene was what also
kept the man down. And I think it is their shame and fear of what this stranger
with great power might do to them that causes them to “ask Jesus to leave them;
for they were seized with great fear.” (Luke 8:37)
Why and how does Jesus release the man? Out of compassion and with love.
Love is his motivation and love is the cure. We may not have Jesus’ miraculous powers
but treating even those who seem and act “crazy” with the same love and respect
that we owe every human being at least ensures that they are not further
removed from society. And love, active love, loving others as Jesus loved, is
also the cure for those demons that haunt us and our own society: racism,
sexism, homophobia, xenophobia …. The list is legion. They are all based on
hate, fear, and exclusion. Love is the reason Christ came, to point to God’s love,
to remind us that we are all children of God, to show us a way to free ourselves
and others from the sins that really matter, those that separate.
Jesus gives the man his life back. He was as good as dead. Cut off from
family and friends, with no name, he had lost his identity, his community and
his home. Jesus restores all this. When the “people came out to see what had
happened, … they found the man from whom the demons had gone sitting at the
feet of Jesus, clothed and in his right mind.” (Luke 8:35) Although the man wants
to go away with Jesus, he asks him to return to his home, “and declare how much
God has done for you.” (8:39) He is to be a living parable for the life-giving power
of the Good News in Christ. The Gospel should
be both life-receiving and life-giving. The man is overjoyed and grateful for
the new life he has received, and cannot avoid going out with an invitation to
others to receive the same gift.
In Galatians, Paul too describes a new life in Christ in community, not
in isolation. To be given new life is to have relationships restored: the relationship
with God as God’s children of faith and the relationship with one another no
longer separated by any human divisions. “There is no longer Jew or Greek,
there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all
of you are one in Christ Jesus.” (Galatians 3:28) This is both our new and our
old identity. God sent God’s Son to restore what was always ours. Paul writes
that if we belong to Christ, we are “Abraham’s offspring, heirs according to
the promise.” (2:29) But this promise goes back even further, long before the first
Patriarch. Jesus came to restore the promise of the creation story: that were all
created equal and in God’s image. (Genesis 1:27)
To be saved is to know love, liberation, and life and to want to share it.
In Michael Curry’s words: “In all things, we seek to be loving, liberating and
life-giving—just like the God who formed all things in love; liberates us all
from prisons of mind, body and spirit; and gives life so we can participate in
the resurrection and healing of God’s world.”[1]
Amen.
Amen.
