Trinity Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.)

Sermons 

Have you noticed …

how full of weird stories the Bible is?

Stories we never heard as children in Sunday school,

or in Vacation Bible School …

or if we did hear them,

they were carefully sanitized versions.

It’s kind of cool to think about Jesus healing people,

even if we do use language like "casting out demons."

But it’s weird to think about

letting the demons persuade Jesus to send them into a herd of swine,

who then promptly head off for their last swim.

It’s maybe even weirder to think that after such a healing,

people would be fearful rather than grateful.

Wouldn’t you think the townspeople would react with something like,

Wow, Jesus, that’s amazing.

No one has ever done anything like that before.

Do you think you could do something for my hernia?

For my mother’s failing eyesight?

For my son’s broken leg that didn’t heal right?

Certainly, I think, that would be my first reaction.

Our Gerasene friends, however, don’t react as we might predict.

Instead, they are frightened out of their wits.

A man possessed by demons …

a man with severe mental illness, if you want to think in 21^st-century terms …

someone that they have been deathly afraid of,

has been healed.

But rather than celebrating with him,

they transfer their fear to the healer,

and beg him to leave them at once.

I used to think that maybe it was because

they were afraid that if Jesus stayed around,

But think about that:

these are Jewish people, after all;

what would any of them be doing having a herd of swine?

Why raise domesticated animals

that neither you nor your neighbors can eat?

Seems to me there wouldn’t be a huge risk

of an epidemic of piggy suicides.

There’s something else going on here.

Something far more basic to the human condition.

Simply this:

What we know, and have become accustomed to,

even if it’s painful, even if it’s scary,

even if it requires constant vigilance to control it,

still seems preferable to what we do not know,

and do not understand, and cannot control.

In our common and typical human desire for stability,

it’s better to have a naked madman out chained among the tombs,

requiring round-the-clock guards to see that he doesn’t escape …

than it is to see that man healed by some force we can’t grasp,

standing among us "clothed and in his right mind."

We know this in our own day and time

from those who counsel with alcoholics and those struggling with other addictions

… and with their families.

Because what happens when a person has a substance abuse problem

is that the family gradually reshapes itself

to cope as best it can.

Sometimes they cover for the person,

sometimes they deny that there’s a problem,

sometimes they try to be hard-nosed about it.

They reach a kind of stability – an uncomfortable stability, to be sure,

but stability nonetheless –

as a family with a member who’s not functioning as they should.

And what happens when a person goes into rehab,

and gets off of whatever it is they’ve been on …

if no work is done with the family as well,

there’s almost no hope that the person can stay clean, stay sober.

A system has been engineered

that is only stable if there is an addicted person in it.

Family members must re-learn how to relate to their loved one:

how not to assume they will have to cover for them,

how not to be in denial when there are problems,

how not to suspect or fear the worst

every time that loved one is out of their sight.

The whole system has to reshape itself.

The same kind of thing happens in military families,

particularly if it’s Dad who has to be away for awhile,

serving an overseas tour.

Mom and the kids learn how to get along as a unit.

Things aren’t perfect, of course, but they function,

and things get done, and everyone knows what their role is,

and when Dad comes home and back into the system,

everything has to change.

Mom may resent his wanting to pay the bills

when she’s been doing it just fine without him.

Kids may resent being disciplined by a parent

who hasn’t been around for several months.

The whole system has to readjust,

and it’s not easy.

So, when your village madman suddenly appears among you in his right mind,

the first reaction is probably not going to be

hallelujah, throw a party, brother Bob is well at last.

There’s going to be fear:

do we dare trust him in our midst?

What if not all the demons are gone?

There’s going to be suspicion:

if he’s all of a sudden doing so well,

surely he must have been faking some of his symptoms.

There’s going to be resentment:

how dare he act up for all these years,

and then show up and just expect us to accept that he’s changed?

By healing the man with demons,

Jesus has upset the equilibrium of an entire village.

And, perhaps rightly so, they are afraid.

Afraid not only of one who has power to heal,

the likes of which they’ve never seen before …

But afraid also of what it means about the changes they are going to have to make

in response to the change in the life of someone they know.

It is, perhaps, easier to live in fear of one crazy man,

whom you can keep controlled at least most of the time …

than to live in fear that a healer, a savior, a messiah

might have the power to make changes in your life

when you weren’t even crazy to begin with.

It’s one of life’s little truisms to say that

"the devil you know is better than the devil you don’t,"

and perhaps there is some truth to that.

If there is a problem, an evil, a hurt in your life

that you’ve learned to manage and to live with,

it may well be preferable to a problem, or an evil, or a hurt

that is going to require new coping skills, new attitudes,

and a period of new pain.

The difficulty for our life in faith comes

when our fears bring us to a point where

the devil we know and can manage

becomes preferable to the savior we may know but cannot control.

Following Jesus is risky.

And it’s not so much that Jesus will change our life

by making us go out and do something we don’t want to do …

Rather, Jesus will change us by making us into

a person who wants to do whatever that thing is that used to frighten us.

I can understand why, toward the end of this morning’s story,

the man who has been healed asks to go along with Jesus.

It’s not just gratitude,

though there may be some of that as well.

He sees that the townspeople are afraid of him, still.

Undoubtedly, they’re afraid of Jesus as well,

but they’re also afraid of a healing they cannot understand.

I suspect he has already figured out that,

it doesn’t matter if he really and truly is healed and in his right mind,

they are not going to accept him back.

In some respects, he is even more scary now

than when he was chained and raving among the tombs.

They could understand that;

madness or possession happens to people from time to time;

they knew from long history how to cope with it.

They don’t know how to cope with his being well,

and they don’t understand it,

and they are afraid.

If it were me,

I’d want to get out of there, too.

Fear puts all of us at risk for behaving badly.

Even if it’s the fear of something that might be quite good.

What are we afraid of?

What are you afraid of,

what am I afraid of?

Are we more afraid of the madman among of the tombs,

or of the savior who can make him well?

Are we more afraid of grief and hurt,

or of the God who invites us into loving relationships

where grief and hurt are a part and parcel of living?

Are we more afraid of our neighbors,

or afraid that Jesus might teach us to love someone really different?

Are we more afraid of dying,

or of resurrection?

Make no mistake: Jesus remains with us

even when we have allowed our fears to paralyze us.

He doesn’t give up on us;

he doesn’t throw up his hands in despair and walk away.

But he can only really use us

in those places and those moments

where we have invited him to take away our fears

and to place us in service some place that we once thought was scary.

Are we more afraid of the devil we can manage,

or of the savior we can’t?

And what will we do if the answer isn’t what we want it to be?

Amen.

© 2007 Julie Adkins (e-mail: DrJAdkins@trinitypresdallas.org)