Get Your Soul Right!

 My sisters and brothers of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, it is an honour to be standing before you as an ordained minister of the United Church of Canada, and as a servant of our God, the Trinity, for the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church.  In the tradition of our Protestant ancestors in faith, let us stand as we are able to hear read the Gospel of our Lord: 

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A reading from Luke 8:26-39

They sailed to a region of the Gerasenes, which is across the lake from Galilee.  When Jesus stepped ashore, he was met by a demon-possessed man from the town.  For a long time this man had not worn clothes or lived in a house, but had lived in the tombs.  When he saw Jesus, he cried out and fell at his feet, shouting at the top of his voice, "What do you want with me, Jesus, Son of the Most High God?  I beg you, don't torture me!"  For Jesus had commanded the evil spirit to come out of the man.  Many times it had seized him, and though he was chained hand and foot and kept under guard, he had broken his chains and had been driven by the demon into solitary places.

Jesus asked him, "What is your name?"

"Legion," he replied, because many demons had gone into him.  And they begged him repeatedly not to order them to go into the Abyss.

A large herd of pigs was feeding there on the hillside.  The demons begged Jesus to let them go into them, and he gave them permission.  When the demons came out of the man, they went into the pigs, and the herd rushed down the steep bank into the lake and was drowned.

When those tending the pigs saw what had happened, they ran off and reported this in the town and countryside, and the people went out to see what had happened.  When they came to Jesus, they found the man from whom demons had gone out, sitting at Jesus' feet, dressed and in his right mind; and they were afraid.  Those who had seen it told the people how the demon-possessed man had been cured.  Then all the people of the region of the Gerasenes asked Jesus to leave them, because they were overcome with fear.  So he go into the boat and left.

The man from whom the demons had gone out begged to go with him, but Jesus sent him away, saying, "Return home and tell how much God has done for you."  So the man went away and told all over town how much Jesus had done for him.

This is the Gospel of our Lord

Thanks be to God.

You may be seated.

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Let's pray together to our God, the Trinity, the words of the Psalmist:

O Blessed Trinity:

May the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be pleasing in your sight, O YHWH, my Rock and my Redeemer.  Amen.

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To be the church in this time and in this place is to be people enslaved to speaking and acting and living by Truth.  We are a people, and a creation, being actively reconciled to the Way, the Truth, and the Life - our Strength, the Lord Jesus Christ who proclaimed to a crowd of people,

"But I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself." (John 12:32)

The heartbeat of our Way of Life is to be drawn towards Jesus, our Master, who gives Life and makes it abundant.  And so, dear people of the Way - Christ's Way - we gather on this beautiful Father's Day to be the ecclesia of our Lord - a people summoned to this citizenry, the church, by the power of the Holy Spirit - to proclaim again and again and again the brutal torture, horrendous six-hour-long crucifixion, death, and glorious resurrection of Jesus, and to gather continuously in expectation of his miraculous reappearance for that which is to come.

It is with great privilege that I stand before you on this day.  I honestly never expected to see this day come, and I offer you thanks from the bottom of my heart, for being prayer warriors who have struggled through this process, in the Spirit, with me.  I also thank you for the invitation and honour to lead today's worship service and the Eucharist.  For you to give honour to me is to give honour to those who raised me and put wind at my back as I struggled through 8 years of post-secondary education.  To give honour to me is to give honour to the One who sent me to preach and proclaim the Gospel.  To give honour to me is to lift up my Mother, my Father, my sisters and brothers, my church, my friends, my mentors, my aunties and uncles, my grandparents, my pastors, my everything.  And so I offer you in this time, my deepest thanks for sharing in the vision of a mentor of mine who offered his gifts to the church as he spoke into us that which God was passionate about in this context, and stated this way:

To raise up leaders for the church.

Today, as we celebrate the 85th anniversary of our United Church of Canada, giving honour to our founding denominations and to those who have joined with us since, I give you thanks, and I give God thanks and praise, for without the life-giving and liberating Jesus Christ, I don't know that we'd be here for such an exhilarating moment in time.

Jesus had just shocked the hell out of his disciples as they crossed a lake.  He had fallen asleep and not long after a squall had come out of nowhere, rocking their tiny boat this way and that.  Jesus just kept on sleeping.  In terror they shook him awake crying, "We're going to drown!"  But Jesus got up and rebuked the wind and the raging waters and the storm subsided.  In typical Jesus-fashion, he casually asks them, "Where is your faith?"  And the disciples, of course amazed and terrified by this feat, asked each other, "Who is this?  He commands even the winds and the water, and they obey him."

Well, it seems that after they got to the other side of the lake they were in the region of the Gerasenes, and in particular, they were near a cemetery where a man with some sort of ailment had been hanging out.  When he saw Jesus he cried out, "I beg you, don't torture me!"  Jesus isn't typically known for his waterboarding techniques, so we read the demon-possessed man's bellowing with some intrigue.  The demons that possessed this man were so strong that "though he was chained hand and foot and kept under guard, he had broken his chains and had been driven by the demon into solitary places," like the cemetery where we now are.

We hardly ever want to admit how close the nearest cemetery is to where we live our daily lives.  You see, cemeteries are places where we remember how close we are to death and all his friends.  Cemeteries are the visible sign of a certain existential reality - that one day you will die, and that they will toss you in a hole in the ground, cover your face in dirt, and head back to the church to eat potato salad.  There is a certainty in today's narrative account of Jesus and a demon-possessed man, and that certainty is found where Jesus and this man engage his demonic symptoms in the middle of a cemetery - death is all around; death is certain.  Someday, you will die!

Those of you who love language will note that the roots of the word human come from the Latin humanus, which is related to both homo as in man and humus as pertaining to earthly beings.  The Book of Genesis begins with two differing accounts of the creation of the world.  The first account seems to be very cosmically-oriented, telling about the grand and sweeping development of God's universe.  The second account, however, is more deeply human in perspective.  God makes the heavens and the earth and then we find out that there was no human to till the ground.  So, we find out in the narrative that "YHWH God formed  the human from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being" (Gen. 2:7).  If we take the Hebrew into account we will notice a powerful interplay going on.

YHWH God formed the adam from the dust of the adamah and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being.  (Gen. 2:7)

Adam means man and adamah is the ground.  Isn't it funky how our humanity is so closely connected to the earth.  More broadly, in our human language there is often a connection between our humanity and our closeness to the earth.  After the man and the woman eat of the fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil YHWH offers a curse to Adam.  He says:

Cursed is the ground because of you;

through painful toil you will eat of it all of the days of your life.

It will produce thorns and thistles for you, and you will eat the plants of the field.

By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground,

since from it you were taken;

for dust you are and to dust you will return. (Gen. 3:17-19)

We are always so close to death.  It's just that nobody wants to admit it.  Especially in modern Western culture, the deaths of our loved ones tend to be hidden from us behind the funeral industry.  But as the church, our collective vision for God's world is built upon death - the death of God.  That is why we proclaim the crucified Christ.  As people of the cross we target "the catastrophic and the monstrous, the scandalous, the traumatic that are often hidden and concealed in the deodorized and manicured discourses of the mainstream" as brother Cornel West says.  That is why we proclaim Jesus Christ tortured and crucified.  This is why we meet Jesus and the demon-possessed man in a graveyard.

So, Jesus got off the boat that he and his disciples had journeyed across the lake on and they found themselves in the middle of a cemetery.  And Jesus, looking to control the demon in our possessed man, asks, "What is your name?"  When we name our demons we can control them so that they do not control us. Then, in reply, we hear, "Legion," because there was a multitude of demons in the man.  Once the demons had made the fatal mistake of telling Jesus their collective name they begged him not to cast them into the Abyss - which in the 1st-century Mediterranean world is a reference to the Greek underworld and place of the dead, Hades.  It can also be understood as Hell.

As the face-off between Jesus and the demons comes to its most critical point, they both see a herd of pigs feeding on a hillside.  Luke the Physician tells us that it is "a large herd of pigs," while Mark's Gospel says that the herd was, "about two thousand in number" (Mark 5:13).  So we know that we're not dealing with some hobby-farmer's pastime, but rather somebody's entire livelihood - a serious economic situation.  Anyway, Jesus gives permission for the demons to enter the swineherd after being driven from the man, and the pigs then collectively head for a cliff overlooking the Sea of Galilee and plunge to their common death as a herd.  Jesus fixes one problem and causes an economic catastrophe at the same time - you can see why the people ask him to get out of town.  He had just caused the mass extinction of some farmer's livestock - and I don't imagine that there was such thing as insurance back in the day - this farmer was now SOL - surprisingly out of luck.

Those who had been tending the pigs had witnessed the whole event and told everybody from the nearby town.  Of course when odd events happen a crowd automatically forms - this isn't Ripley's Believe it or Not, but it is about as close to it as you can get for 1st-century Palestine.  The crowd saw the man who had formerly been possessed by demons now "in his right mind" and "they were afraid."  There is nothing like the miraculous to terrorize good and sensible, liberally-minded modern people to their very bones.  There is no one like Jesus who can intimidate and menace a crowd with his signs and wonders.  Man, those people were upset.  And you can imagine why they would be.

In previous stories in the Gospel of Luke, such as when Jesus raised the son of the widow at Nain and when Jesus quieted the storm, the people who witnessed those events were afraid, but, unlike this story their fear and trembling in those stories ultimately "calls forth wonder and praise".  In our story today, the fear and trembling of the people only calls forth "dismay and aversion" and ultimately the request for Jesus to get the heck out of there.

But you also have to remember that Jesus is a Jew - part of the tradition he comes from views swine as unclean animals.  But, as you know, we're not in Kansas any more.  We're across the lake from Israel in the region of the Gerasenes, who didn't keep the same customs as the Jews, and so we can  assume that the reason there were pig-farmers there was that they did not view pigs as "unclean".  Regardless of the cultural differences between the Jews and the Gerasenes, Jesus was asked to leave, "so he got into the boat and left."  Before Jesus left, the formerly demon-possessed man begged him to go with him, but Jesus told him, "Return home and tell how much God has done for you."  As the church it is our high calling to name Jesus Christ into the world.

While on staff at Pelham Community Church down near Welland I had the pleasure of being involved in all sorts of ministries.  We have 4 ministry staff - a lead minister, a minister of pastoral care, a children's ministry co-ordinator, and me (I was the staff member that floated between all of the ministries).  I had the wonderful opportunity to be with people in the final stages of life and I remember one day as I was searching for a man in his mid-90s who had been on his death-bed for years.  He had been in and out of the hospital and so I spent 3 or 4 hours trying to locate him.  When I went to his house he was at the hospital and when I was at the hospital he had just been sent home.  Finally I got back to his house and Dick's best friend Ivor was at his best friend's house, like he is on every Wednesday, and when I opened the door to Dick's house I will never forget Ivor's reaction.  Ivor will be 95 this year.  Anyway, I opened the door and said, "Hello," to him and he turned to me with tears in his eyes and said, "I just know that God has sent you!"  I'm standing in the doorway looking up and down and over my shoulders trying to figure out who this old man is talking to - surely he can't be referring to the skinny Negro standing in the doorway of his best friend's house.  The same skinny Black man who mooned the Sunday school way back in Gr. 3.

While at the ordination service almost a month ago now I was deeply moved by those who stood with me on stage physically, and by those whose hearts were up on that stage with me.  I would have really loved to have invited you all to be up on that stage.  Two people stood out to me that night - Shirley Willis and Gord Walkling.  You could tell by their eyes that they had just witnessed a miracle.  Gord really knew because he had been my Sunday school teacher for many years - he knew all the trouble I could stir up.  You could tell from his eyes that he knew the day before that it was a possibility that I would be ordained the next day, but that it was a miracle nonetheless when it happened.

Friends, we are people of the cross.  Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ calls us to take up our own cross.  Like today’s story, the cross for us is a miracle in which the Trinity is named into the world.  But the cross is also, for us, a front row seat to our past, our present, and our future as the church.  It is our glimpse into God’s world - as Pat Morrison would say, our window into the sacred.  New ministries and new ministers are miracles - they are signs and wonders that God continues to be actively engaged in the world of the one who was, who is, and who is to come.  God does not leave humankind to its own devices - rather, God, in Jesus Christ chooses to claim the world for God.  Consider our earliest hymn in the church from the first chapter of Colossians:

Christ is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation; for in him all things in heaven and on earth were created, things visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or powers - all things have been created through him and for him...for in Christ all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace through the blood of his cross.

By the cross God calls the demon-possessed man, by the cross God calls the A.D.D.-filled child, by the cross God transforms them that they might be vessels of hope for the world.  Will you join to become vessels of hope?  Amen!