Sermon of 24 June 2007, Fourth Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 7)****************************************************************
Readings: 1 Kings 19:1-15a, Psalm 42, Galatians 3:23-29, Luke 8:26-39

There is something very different about today’s gospel reading – In fact, Jesus does several things in today’s gospel reading that he does not do a single other time throughout the rest of Luke’s telling of the Gospel, and yet it is subtle enough that we frequently read right over it without recognizing the significance of what has just happened.

A few verses before today’s reading, we hear the beginning of today’s adventure… One day, Jesus got into a boat with his disciples, and he said to them, ‘let’s go across to the other side of the Lake.’

This is the one and only visit that Jesus makes to Gentile territory in Luke’s gospel, and it is the setting of a very unique encounter.

As Jesus and the disciples step out of the boat onto foreign Gerasene land, they are approached by a local man who is possessed with a Legion of demons. Some time ago, Jesus had healed another gentile – the daughter of a centurion – while in Capernaum, but this was a different time and a different place. In these strange surroundings with only the disciples as his companions, Jesus allowed the demons to speak, to recognize him, and to plead with him. Agreeing to let them go into a heard of swine, this foreign holy man in a strange land ends up drowning a whole heard of the local’s pigs. The swinherds bolt for the city and bring back a crowd of Gerasenes and other locals who are no doubt stunned at the tale the swineherds told them. Gripped with fear at seeing their local madman sitting at Jesus’ feet, clothed and conversant, they ask Jesus to leave – his apparent power is too much for them. As has happened in so many other gospel stories about non-Jews being healed, the Gerasene demoniac pursues Jesus to thank him.

In this exchange there are two additional differences from any other encounter we read in the gospels. The man who begged to follow Jesus was not given a condition which he must meet in order to follow, but was simply told to go home. He is also not told to keep silent about what has happened that day, but, on the contrary, he is told to declare how much God had done for him, which he is only too happy to do.

The Gerasenes had no warning, no prophecies, no preparation for the awesome and healing power that Jesus commanded and they were understandably terrified. Who was this powerful foreigner? Were all of his people like him? Had he come to destroy them? The unknown prospects were endless and too frightening to be anything other than grim. So they plead with Jesus to leave them and he departs… BUT he leaves a proselyte behind to proclaim the wonders of God’s grace to the local population – one of their own, who had been so miraculously touched by Christ’s healing power that his change could not possibly go unnoticed.

How different this experience is from the other side of the shore where throngs of people from cities and village across Galilee and Judea flock to Christ’s presence to be healed and to hear his teachings – and yet these are demonstrably without the same thanks that Jesus receives from the select few gentiles that receive healing at his hand.

For those under the law who have long awaited the coming of messiah, there are myriad responsibilities that must be fulfilled upon being healed – reporting to the temple priests in order to be declared clean and be reintegrated into normal society, sacrifices of thanksgiving, purification rituals, prayers and incense, not to mention the awesome bragging rights of being touched and healed by messiah! There is no such obligation on the part of the Gentiles, who, free from the binding weight of thousands of years of tradition, are free to fully experience the deep and profound thankfulness that convicts them of God’s awesome power in their lives.

Jesus uses just such a converted heart in today’s Gospel to prepare the way amongst the Gerasenes for the abundance of God’s kingdom to be brought near, the benefits of which Paul and other missionaries to the Gentiles reap within a generation of Jesus’ healing of this one man – finding the soil tilled and ready to sow the fruits of God’s kingdom amongst them.

Paul relates to the church at Galatia today by describing the law as both guardian and warden until the time would come that he describes as the faith in Christ that frees us. But it isn’t in any way that Christ threw out the Law or the years of beloved tradition of the Jewish people, Jesus was very specific about that. What Christ does is something far more radical. In what Paul describes as clothing ourselves with Christ, Christ frees each of us from ourselves – from our own self-imposed blindness and limitations, from our own history of tradition that keeps us bound to our past and locked into our familiar patterns of living, frees us from our paralyzing fear of a God that is so close, so personal, and so powerfully working in us that we each literally have the power to change the world... starting with our own.

Today Christ uses the Gerasene demoniac to do just that – to change the hopes and expectations of a foreign population to prepare them to come face to face with God.

If then, through Christ, we are no longer bound to the categories that we’ve spent millennia developing to compartmentalize and divide ourselves from one another, slave and free, male and female, Jew and Greek, black and white, American and Iraqi, Gay and straight, Us and them... what does it mean for us today?

In many ways I feel that our society and our church are in a less healthy stasis than that which Paul describes as waiting under the Law for faith to come. Somewhere between the shores of Galilee and the land of the Gerasenes, we are neither ready to let go of the Law nor ready to embrace the divisionless freedoms of the opposite shore.

Just before today’s gospel reading where Jesus arrives on the Gerasene shore, we read that while still on the sea Jesus fell asleep and a storm rose up. The boat was filling up with water and the disciples were terrified. They woke Jesus, shouting ‘Master, Master, we are perishing!’ And he woke up and rebuked the wind and the raging waves; they ceased, and there was a calm...

From our own place in the boat, we frequently find that we are still in the midst of the storm of confusion and chaos that precedes the calm place of silence and understanding... that precedes arriving on foreign shores where the freedom of new understanding gives us a frightening glimpse of the true power that we possess as children of God.

Elijah’s story today gives us another remarkable example of the place of chaos that can so easily overrun our hearts and minds amidst the demands of our lives.

Running from Jezebel, who has sworn an oath to kill him, Elijah takes to the hills in retreat. His own chaos is mirrored in the mountain-splitting wind, the foundation rocking earthquake, and the all consuming fire that precede God. Again it is only after the ravages of the storm pass that the sound of sheer silence, the calm after the storm, the inner peace after ceasing to struggle, bring Elijah into God’s presence.

What are we – right here, right now, today – running from, and who are we running to? Of course, the answer for each of us is different at different times and places in our own lives and journey, but the journey itself is one that is all too familiar for most, if not all of us.

Today’s readings are particularly poignant for me as I discovered in preparing for my sermon this morning that I too have been running. I have been in the boat on the sea in the midst of the storm. I have been struggling between law and freedom as I have struggled to hold an extended family together amidst hardships of addiction, infidelity, denial, and codependence – such that lately it has become a burden even to speak with some members of my family. The trouble is that in the midst of the storm I have been in such a state of chaos and struggle, as I have striven to give emotional support and spiritual counseling to each of my troubled loved ones, that I haven’t had the presence to recognize the strain it has been putting on me and the relationships at the root of these problems. I find that I can no longer seek to put a band aid over the cancer that is eating away at some of the most precious relationships in my life.

In the sheer silences of today’s readings, I find a keen understanding of the moments of clarity that follow the chaos of a heart in turmoil. I find that I am finally ready to let go of the long history of tradition that has tied me to the Galilee shore and embrace the frightening freedom of God’s healing in a strange new land.

The master is awake... the sea has been calmed… the choice before me now is whether to return to the familiar shores of my own tradition of ignoring and waiting out the storm in hopes that it will resolve itself, or to head to the opposite shore where the terrifying unknown path of faith lies with the promise of freedom.

With Jesus and Elijah, we are each called today to examine the histories we have built for ourselves, to examine the new shores of change, and to listen for God’s voice in the stillness of our hearts to guide us out of chaos into freedom, faith, and new life.

With Paul we are called to clothe ourselves with Christ, to break down the artificial divisions that we’ve been taught to put between ourselves and others, that we perpetuate and multiply through our own willfulness to hide from the radical freedom to which Christ calls us, and to experience, first hand, the powerful healing work of Christ in calming the storm around us and giving us a new vision of peace and hope.

With our Psalmist, we thirst for God as with heavy souls we trust and strive for the promise of God’s peace.

As I set sail for the Gerasene shore away from my own family tradition of silence and acceptance, I realize and accept that I may be met with fearful natives that wish me to go back to the old way of doing things, but through Christ, I also know that I must follow the frightening path of the unknown to reach out in faith and hope for a future of freedom that knows no boundaries or divisions and fears no consequence for the furthering of God’s kingdom.

Let us join with Christ in striving for the far shore.

Amen.