To Tell What God Has Done for You

Isaiah 65:1-9; Psalm 22:19-28; Galatians 3:23-29; Luke 8:26-39

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 Jesus’ feet, clothed and in his right mind. And they were afraid.

That is a wild story, isn’t it? A possessed man living naked in the cemetery, pigs flying off the cliff – what a strange and bizarre story.

Starting with the idea of a man possessed by a lot of demons. Modern people, if we take the idea of demons seriously at all, tend to think of them as something exotic, like in The Exorcist. And that probably is how we might imagine the possessed man in the cemetery today – head spinning around and all that. But that’s not how people thought in biblical times. They thought of any force or power that is opposed to God as somehow demonic. If God is – as we saw last week – a Trinity of persons, a communion of persons united in love who made human beings to be a communion of persons united in love – then any power or force that drives us apart, anything that makes us mistrust one another, that makes people live in fear, that excludes some people from our love, this is a power that somehow comes from the enemy of God. And that’s not exotic – that’s everyday life. If the Devil wants us to mistrust each other and fear each other and be too defensive around each other to be willing to take the risk of love, then the Devil has quite a legion of powers doing the Devil’s work these days.

There’s an interesting clue about how people in the time of Jesus would have understood this story in the name that the possessed man gives to his demons – Legion. Legion is a Latin word, a military term, meaning a unit of the Roman army of about 6000 soldiers. Imagine if Jesus had arrived in today’s Ukraine and found someone possessed by demons, and asked What is your name?, and the person answered with the Russian word for “brigade.” What is it that makes human community impossible for you, what is this force that everyone is trying to contain but can’t, what is it that’s making everyone afraid and defensive and violent? “Brigada.” Yes, I’ll bet.

And then the brigada ends up marching into the lake and drowning in the water. Do you remember another story in the Bible when the soldiers of the enemy march into the water and drown? (Ask for ideas.) Yes, the crossing of the Red Sea, Pharoah’s armies are chasing the newly escaped Hebrew slaves, trying to bring them back from freedom into slavery. The people of God pass safely through the sea, the brigada of Pharoah is overcome and defeated.

I imagine the early disciples of Jesus, telling and retelling this story to each other in the years after Easter, living as they were under Roman occupation, when the demon is named as Legion, Brigada, they nod knowingly, maybe chuckle a little. Yeah, those guys are from the pit of hell all right. And when the brigada enters into the pigs and they charge right off the cliff into the sea like Pharoah’s soldiers, those first disciples probably thought of this story as comedy. Jesus sets the man free from Legion and Legion winds up defeated the way armies who try to take away the freedom of God’s people always get defeated. Way to go, Jesus!

Of course, the story doesn’t sound much like a comedy to our modern ears. I mean, the poor pigs! Not to mention the suffering this man must have gone through, cut off from his community, living among the dead, living without clothes – like an animal rather than a human being. And then when Jesus restores him to his humanity, when his own people, his own community come to see what happened to the pigs, they see the man sitting at the feet of Jesus – the place of a disciple – clothed and in his right mind, their reaction is not relief, or thanksgiving, or amazement. Their reaction is fear. They are so afraid that they beg Jesus to leave their town. The healing and the restored community that Jesus has brought them are not received with delight but rejected with fear. And there’s nothing funny about that.

In some ways today’s Juneteenth commemoration is a good modern illustration of what is happening in this gospel story. On Juneteenth, people who had been enslaved and mistreated and excluded from full participation in society learn that their captivity has ended. That the armies who didn’t want them to be free have been defeated. That they were now free people, free to be themselves, to live as free people in society. I don’t think we can imagine the joy, the relief, the peace, the pride, the hope that they must have felt in knowing the nightmare was over.

And what was the reaction of the rest of their community? Were they equally filled with joy and relief for the wonderful thing that had happened for their neighbors? Maybe some were, but we know from history that most were not. The people who had paid a lot of money to buy slaves probably lost a lot of their wealth that day. Like the owners of the pigs in today’s gospel story, freedom for a neighbor cost them a lot of money. People who didn’t have much money but who could say, well, it could be worse, at least I’m not a slave – many of them were fearful of what the future would mean for them. Just as the townspeople in the gospel story used to say, well, my life may be hard, but at least I have clothes on my back and a roof over my head, not like poor possessed George out in the cemetery.  George getting well was frightening to them.

George may have had a legion of demons, but Jesus was able to set him free. But when Jesus healed this man, the people of his town were full of fear, they didn’t want any more connection or healing. Seems to me there were plenty of demons in this town all along, but because George’s demons were so obvious, nobody had noticed before that there were a lot of other demons loose in this community. And the thing is, Jesus could have set them free from their demons too. But the thought of that freedom made them afraid.

But isn’t that the way it always is. Jesus offers freedom from the demons – freedom from all the forces and powers at work in the world that isolate us from one another, that keep us suspicious and afraid, the demons that tell us: Hold on to your possessions and your status, you can’t trust the promise that in the kingdom of God there is enough for everyone and all are equally children of God. We are offered what Paul describes in the second reading today – a baptism in which each and every one of us is clothed with Christ, so that now there are no more distinctions – no more Jew and Gentile, no more slave and free, no more male and female. Many people to this day find that thought very frightening.

But George – or whatever his name was – had nothing left to lose, and the people of the town came to see him, clothed and in his right mind, sitting at the feet of the teacher Jesus, learning the way of the kingdom, the way of freedom, the way of peace. And we are told that when the people of the town asked Jesus to leave, George asked if he could join the other disciples of Jesus and go with him. Please, Lord, get me away from these people! These people who looked down on me and ridiculed me and who are terrified of who I have become. Get me out of here, let me go with you.

But Jesus looked at him and said, no. They wanted nothing to do with you when they thought you were the one with the demons, and now that you see that they are the ones who are still in the grip of demonic powers, you can’t just have nothing to do with them. That’s not how the cycle is broken. No, go back to your people, and just tell them what God has done for you. Tell them, show them, what God has done for you, and they’ll see for themselves what God could do for them too, if only they will let go of their fear.

It is a wild story that we read in the gospel today. For all of its bizarre elements – the flying pigs and the legion of demons – this story has a real ring of truth to me. That the really scary demons are not bothering the crazy man in the cemetery, but are loose among the upstanding citizens of the town whose attachment to wealth and status prevents them from celebrating their neighbor’s restoration to health. That’s the world I know. So the task of the person who has experienced grace is not to do anything grander than simply honestly bear witness to their neighbors what God has done for them, even if those neighbors really don’t want to hear it.

This is what Jesus did in his life and ministry – by his words and actions to bear witness to the love of God and to the power of God’s kingdom to set people free, even when people were too attached to their possessions and status to hear it. And for us who in our baptisms have been clothed with Christ, who now sit at Christ’s feet to absorb his teachings and his ways, clothed and in our right minds for a change, all we are asked to do is to bear witness to what God has done for us. That task may not always be easy, the demonic forces still loose in our world can be scary. But – remember the pigs flying off the cliff! Jesus has already defeated those demons, the freedom of the children of God is yours, and no one can take it away.