Sunday, June 19, 2016

Sermon IX

Another sermon? Huh. OK then.


All glibness aside, I preached again today which was--as always--a great pleasure and honor. Here it is for your reading pleasure.

The lectionary (I used 1 Kings as opposed to Isaiah):

http://www.lectionarypage.net/YearC_RCL/Pentecost/CProp7_RCL.html


This morning we have an odd story. Jesus travels across the Sea of Galilee to the country of the Garasenes and is immediately confronted by a man possessed. A demoniac afflicted so severely that all efforts by his community to subdue or calm him have been unsuccessful. And when Jesus sets himself to perform--what seems to be--just another exorcism, the demons in the man...haggle. We are offered the strange sight of Christ negotiating with evil spirits and conceding to their demands. Which results in the equally strange, and quite a bit distressing, death of a herd of pigs; the terrified troupe of possessed swine flinging themselves to a watery grave. What is happening here?

I don’t have an answer and I’m not entirely sure there is one. Additional context can be provided but it remains one of those enigmatic tales of Jesus, leaving far more questions than answers. But if we ignore the pigs and the haggling it is a beautiful story about the opening of God’s grace to all people, regardless of origin or personal history. The land of the Garasenes--across the Sea of Galilee--is gentile country and this healing is one of only a handful of times that Jesus’ ministry takes him beyond the borders of Judea and Galilee. In the purity obsessed minds of ancient Jews, what Jesus does there would have been almost unthinkable. 

Gentile land was impure. Gentiles were impure. Demons, by definition, are impure. And, according Jewish teaching of the day, the dead and their resting places were especially impure. The demoniac hits every mark yet Jesus does not shy away. This naked, raw, broken, and abandoned man, an outcast unlike any Jesus has witnessed before, was worthy of Christ’s healing love. The demoniac, who had no logical right to divine grace, had a share in Christ’s salvation. When viewed through this lens we should rightly be astonished at the limitless nature of what God in Christ is willing to do, where divine love is willing to go.

But I still struggle with this story because of its ending. Though the man once possessed can be healed by Jesus and share in the wholeness of God’s grace, he is explicitly denied the opportunity to join Jesus and his companions. He is instructed to “return to [his] home and declare how much God has done for [him].” Mark’s gospel adds the particularly cruel word “friends” to the command--“Go home to your friends, and tell them how much the Lord has done for you...” What friends? What home? This supposed home is the same place that he was bound in chains and shackles and kept under guard. This supposed home is the same community that left him to fend for himself, alone and naked in the wilderness for years. And now he returns, healed, to a community that has just lost a significant portion of its livelihood and income. He will be viewed suspiciously at best and likely scapegoated as the cause of this financial catastrophe. He was an outcast before the exorcism; will Jesus’ healing really change that?

With all of this in mind, I want turn to 1Kings and the unforgettable tale of Elijah’s brush with God in the wilderness. Elijah, fleeing the wrath of Jezebel in the aftermath of his bloody triumph over the prophets of Baal, has decided he wants to die. Life is too difficult, too trying, and he is too alone to handle it. After being fed by angels and wandering for 40 days and nights, Elijah finds himself atop Mt. Horeb (also known as Mt. Sinai), still alone and still frustrated--convinced that he has been abandoned by Israel and might as well be abandoned by God too. It is particularly jarring to see Elijah this way--suffering from Reluctant Prophet Syndrome--when we consider that just moments before in this story Elijah was pitting Yahweh against Baal and slaughtering his competition after Yahweh’s victory. But God is patient with Elijah and decides to reward his honored prophet with an personal and intimate experience of the Divine. “Go out and stand on the mountain before the Lord, for the Lord is about to pass by.” And so there is a strong wind and a shattering earthquake and a raging fire, but God is in none of these. Until finally there is the “sound of sheer silence”--rendered in the King James Version as “a still small voice”--and Elijah returns to his cave placated.

The temptation, I believe, is to see this silence as exclusively representative of God; since God was not in the wind or fire God must never be in those sorts of dramatic displays. Only by retreating to quiet places, by spurning company and seeking solitude, can we find God. That is not the point of this story though; lest we forget, God also spoke to Moses on Mt Horeb and that first occasion was filled with plenty of wind and fire and quakes. The tale of Elijah on Mt. Horeb is merely an addition, a gentle reminder that God can be found in the silence too.

Hindu teaching speaks of atman and brahman which are best translated as personal soul and cosmic soul. Yet these two distinct ideas should be understood as being one: atman is brahman. Atman is God within us and it is no different from God the way we normally conceive of it--vast, grand, and powerful. God can be found in the great expanse of the natural world but God is also equally present in our selves. It does not matter which you seek or how you experience God; neither is greater and both are equally True. Atman is brahman.

Perhaps I’m stretching things a little bit but that is how I like to perceive Jesus’ abandonment of the Gerasene man. He was blessed to experience God outside of himself, to see the divine as personally revealed in Christ, and he was changed by it, exorcized of his demons and made new. This experience, this intimate vision of God’s healing, is Brahman, it is the smoke and flame shrouding Moses on Mt. Horeb, it the mystical experience, the born-again moment, the parting of the curtain, and the Gerasene--understandably--wants more. He has seen God and cannot have enough. But as Jesus reminds him and us, eventually we have to return. We have to come down from the mountain top, step away from our ecstatic union with God, and get back to the messy business of living. We have to trust that God is still there, even as we move from what was our most profound and personal experience of the divine. We must let go of the desire to control how God is revealed to us and accept that our faith is not diminished by the mundane or everyday. Sometimes we must search for God in a new place. And more often than not, we fail to search in the nearest place available--ourselves. God is in the sheer silence too. 


We do not know what happened to the Gerasene man next but I must admit that I admire his approach. Despite his disappointment and, likely, quite a strong dose of fear, he takes Jesus’s instructions to heart and goes on his way, “proclaiming throughout the city how much Jesus had done for him.”

1 comment:

  1. I dunno, Hamlin. You sound WAY too happy about going back to Gerasene. (Actually, we're all ecstatic for you and wish you the best of luck in your new adventures.:))

    ReplyDelete