Isaiah 65:1-9
I was ready to be sought out by those who did not ask, to be found by those who did not seek me. I said, “Here I am, here I am,” to a nation that did not call on my name. I held out my hands all day long to a rebellious people, who walk in a way that is not good, following their own devices; a people who provoke me to my face continually, sacrificing in gardens and offering incense on bricks; who sit inside tombs, and spend the night in secret place; who eat swine’s flesh, with broth of abominable things in their vessels; who say, “Keep to yourself, do not come near me, for I am too holy for you.” These are a smoke in my nostrils, a fire that burns all day long. See, it is written before me: I will not keep silent, but I will repay; I will indeed repay into their laps their iniquities and their ancestors’ iniquities together, says the LORD; because they offered incense on the mountains and reviled me on the hills, I will measure into their laps full payment for their actions. Thus says the LORD: As the wine is found in the cluster, and they say, “Do not destroy it, for there is a blessing in it,” so I will do for my servants’ sake, and not destroy them all. I will bring forth descendants from Jacob, and from Judah inheritors of my mountains; my chosen shall inherit it, and my servants shall settle there.
Psalm 22:19-28
But you, O LORD, be not far away; O my help, hasten to my aid. Deliver me from the sword, my life from the power of the dog. Save me from the lion’s mouth! From the horns of wild bulls you have rescued me. I will declare your name to my people; in the midst of the assembly I will praise you. You who fear the LORD, give praise! All you of Jacob’s line, give glory. Stand in awe of the LORD, all you offspring of Israel. For the LORD does not despise nor abhor the poor in their poverty; neither is the LORD’s face hidden from them; but when they cry out, the LORD hears them. From you comes my praise in the great assembly; I will perform my vows in the sight of those who fear the LORD. The poor shall eat and be satisfied, Let those who seek the LORD give praise! May your hearts live forever! All the ends of the earth shall remember and turn to the LORD; all the families of nations shall bow before God. For dominion belongs to the LORD, who rules over the nations.
Galatians 3:23-29
Now before faith came, we were imprisoned and guarded under the law until faith would be revealed. Therefore the law was our disciplinarian until Christ came, so that we might be justified by faith. But now that faith has come, we are no longer subject to a disciplinarian, for in Christ Jesus you are all children of God through faith. As many of you as were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. 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. And if you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s offspring, heirs according to the promise.
Luke 8:26-39
Then Jesus and his disciples arrived at the country of the Gerasenes, which is opposite Galilee. As he stepped out on land, a man of the city who had demons met him. For a long time he had worn no clothes, and he did not live in a house but in the tombs. When he saw Jesus, he fell down before him and shouted at the top of his voice, “What have you to do with me, Jesus, Son of the Most High God? I beg you, do not torment me” - for Jesus had commanded the unclean spirit to come out of the man. (For many times it had seized him; he was kept under guard and bound with chains and shackles, but he would break the bonds and be driven by the demon into the wilds.) Jesus then asked him, “What is your name?” He said, “Legion”; for many demons had entered him. They begged him not to order them to go back into the abyss. Now on the hillside a large herd of swine was feeding; and the demons begged Jesus to let them enter these. So he gave them permission. Then the demons came out of the man and entered the swine, and the herd rushed down the steep bank into the lake and was drowned. When the swineherds saw what had happened, they ran off and told it in the city and in the country. Then people came out to see what had happened, and when they came to Jesus, they found the man from whom the demons had gone sitting at the feet of Jesus, clothed and in his right mind. And they were afraid. Those who had seen it told them how the one who had been possessed by demons had been healed. Then all the people of the surrounding country of the Gerasenes asked Jesus to leave them; for they were seized with great fear. So he got into the boat and returned. The man from whom the demons had gone begged that he might be with him; but Jesus sent him away, saying, “Return to your home, and declare how much God has done for you.” So he went away, proclaiming throughout the city how much Jesus had done for him.
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Wow. How much has Jesus done for this man? That takes some serious courage to tell the communities of people who hated and feared him what having his sanity back was worth. When Jesus tells this man to return to his home, what does the man think that even means? For years his home has been the graveyard, where he was chained up like a wild animal, I wonder if he ever considered even returning to where his life began before the demons swept in, snuck in, crawled, slithered, shouted in his brain and tore at his sleep. Had his community even kept a space for him to live in anymore, or was he now also homeless?
I consider this man’s story in my mind to be something like prison inmates released back into society after a long sentence, or soldiers returning from war with enough PTSD to make the people around them nervous and jumpy. For all of the violence he has inflicted, all of the violence that has been inflicted upon him, his mental clarity may have been restored quickly enough, but the community that had learned how to set him apart as dangerous now has their own discomfort to wrestle with. And Jesus throws him right back into that chaos, to be his own advocate in front of a people who may or may not have expected him to ever recover, but who definitely were fearful - it says so twice in the text. No wonder the man begged to get into that boat with Jesus, who wants to live in a place where everyone is afraid of you?
But that’s the world we live in now, isn’t it? I know we have a community here divided on the issues of gun control and human sexuality. I’m not here to argue whether hunters and law enforcement officers should be able to keep their guns, which isn’t even the question we’re asking. I’m here to ask about what we do when we are so afraid of each other, so afraid of our selves, that violence outright becomes the only solution we can see. It has been a year since a white supremacist - raised in our faith tradition - walked into a Bible study in Charleston and opened fire on a group of our peacefully gathered brothers and sisters in Christ, simply because he had been taught to hate and fear. Nobody had bothered to show him otherwise. It has been only a week since the sanctuary of our LGBTQ Latinx siblings was violated, when a man struggling with his own sexuality and the outright homophobia of his father came into our safe space and killed us.
Why do we meet violence and fear with more violence and fear?
So many of my friends this past week have been pouring their hearts into articles, letters, liturgies, trying to make sense of how a country which has for so long been legally and politically violent toward us can now claim to have compassion for our deaths. Thrivent Financial, of all groups, will support Focus on the Family, who work actively against recognizing my full humanity, and yet refuse to support those organizations which offer life-giving support networks for the LGBTQ community, because those issues are divisive. But they still sent out an email this week offering fundraising support for the families affected by last Sunday’s shooting. Our rhetoric has fed the fear that leads to this kind of violence, even when it seems words are only words. But words aren’t just words, are they? We begin by making another group of people ‘other,’ so we can justify killing them later. We tie each other up in chains, even tighter every time those chains get broken, just like the demon possessed man in the Scripture text today.
It’s no wonder that the man’s first reaction to Jesus was to beg him ‘do not torment me!’ His whole life was torment, that was all he could expect to come from anyone. Even inside his own head he was not safe, nor cared for. Picture the way we have been talking about addiction since the 1980s, with this whole ‘war on drugs.’ It’s no wonder we are having a hard time breaking the stigma and clearing out the shame, we don’t like dealing with suffering, so we find excuses to distance ourselves from it. The ‘war on drugs’ was started during a time when crime was going down, and it was started to target communities of color, portraying them in the news as dangerous drug addicts who needed to be put away, even though drug use is the same across the races. We set up a whole community to be the target of our fear, again, and now we have to face that fear in ourselves as addictions take deeper root among people who look more like us. Because once this man was set free of his demons, clothed and in his right mind, the rest of his community had to see him again as one of them, see the possibility that they might be more like him than they first wanted to admit. We don’t tend to like that feeling, putting ourselves in the same category as those we have ostracized, seeing our own humanity reflected in the lives of people who don’t seem like us at all.
This is the way the demons work. This is what I mean when I use the language of ‘sin.’ We are so set against one another that we have lost even the desire to find in each other those fragments of God’s image, that Image in which we are all created. All of us, each and every one. As Paul says in his letter to the Galatians this morning: Jew and Greek, Male and Female, Slave and Free, each and every one belonging to the whole. That destructive power breeds racism, classism, Islamaphobia, homophobia, sexism, addiction, but the work of Christ breaks down those barriers, destroys the dividing wall. The love of Christ stands on the outside with everyone who has been cast aside.
We need intervention, my friends. Our whole culture is growing more and more fearful, and reacting in violence is the opposite of building God’s beloved community. But Jesus comes to those barren, wilderness places, on purpose. Jesus crosses the borders and meets the ones who have been thrown away, and will not let the community’s fear have the last word. Jesus cuts through the voices of destruction to speak a word of wholeness, cuts through the voices of despair to build a new reality, cuts through the voices of fear with a perfect love that is unafraid of the ‘other,’ because God sets us free from the demons we have gotten comfortable with. God unsettles us with a new way of living just when we have figured out how to live in unbearable circumstances, or just when we have put our blinders on again so we can stay safe from the ‘other,’ so that the larger beloved community can become a lived, a holy, reality among us.
See how much Jesus has done for us, even before we could think to ask. Isaiah the prophet speaks to this beautifully: I was ready to be sought out by those who did not ask, to be found by those who did not seek me. I said, “Here I am, here I am,” to a nation that did not call on my name. I held out my hands all day long to a rebellious people, who walk in a way that is not good, following their own devices; a people who provoke me to my face continually, sacrificing in gardens and offering incense on bricks; who sit inside tombs, and spend the night in secret place; who eat swine’s flesh, with broth of abominable things in their vessels; who say, “Keep to yourself, do not come near me, for I am too holy for you.”
The Kin(g)dom of God levels the playing field. God comes to us while we are in the middle of the mess, while we are actively working against life and love, while we are chained up by our fears and chaining one another up by our fears. Jesus steps in and clears away the lies we tell to justify killing each other, however slowly or quickly we are doing that.
Jesus kind of left that man on his own to defend himself to the frightened crowds, and I’m not sure how well that worked out for the man, but maybe he was seen as a marvel, a miracle, someone touched by God, set apart in another way that made it easier for the community to distance themselves from him again. I would like to think the community wrestled with him one on one, the way old friends at a reunion get to know each other again after decades apart and a multitude of life changes. But honestly, I don’t know what his restoration to community, what that community’s own restoration with him, looked like. We don't have that part of the story. Maybe it's up to us to live it out. I do know that Jesus does not leave us unchanged, that the truth will set us free, even if it makes us weird and uncomfortable and miserable first. That the truth of the full humanity of all of humanity, regardless of religious background or class or race or sexuality or gender, is the root of our being from the outset of creation.
When Jesus walks with us, Jesus walks with all of us. When we say we are created in the Image of God, we are all created reflections of the Divine Image. I know that today is Father’s Day, but did you know that today is also Juneteenth? It’s the celebration of the day, two and a half years after the Emancipation Proclamation, that finally all slaveholders and slaves got the word of freedom. That we would have to pass a law recognizing all people as people might seem ridiculous now, as though such a thing were common sense, but we are still healing from that wound, trying to recover in ourselves the full humanity to recognize the full humanity of others. It is a day of celebration in many ways, a day to tell the demons of hate and fear and violence that they ultimately have no say over who we are and what we are worth. The legion will ultimately lose, because the Lord of Life, who had the first word on life, also has the last word on life, and every word in between is Life. So we continue to gather in our holy spaces, defiantly refusing to fear each other, refusing to let death have the final say, because it cannot, and it never will, save us. Life wins out, love wins out, hope and joy and peace and justice will win out as we are restored to one another in truth and in wholeness in the Kin(g)dom and the love of our God.
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