Sunday, June 19, 2016

Jesus, Please, Just Go Away

Scripture Lessons:

Our gospel reading this morning reports one more of Jesus’ miracles. It’s a colorful one.

Jesus meets a naked, crazy man who lives among the tombs. When the demons who torment him are cast out, they invade a herd of pigs. The pigs go crazy. They stampede down the hillside to drown in the Sea of Galilee.

This miracle story may seem just another one of Jesus’s spectacular miracles. It is, however, much more dense. It has something important to say about the costliness of healing. I want to speak about that this morning, for we may find this story speaks very pointedly to us today.

But to hear its message, we need to spend some time looking at the story’s details.


The first thing we should note is that this story takes place on the east side of the Sea of Galilee. This is a region inhabited primarily by Gentiles, not Jews. In Luke’s gospel, in fact, it is the only time Jesus ever travels into Gentile territory.

That’s a curious fact. Luke after all is a Gentile Christian. In the book of Acts he tells how the Christian gospel expands widely out into the Gentile world. But in Luke’s gospel, Jesus enters Gentile territory only once, in today’s story.

When he steps onto shore, he confronts a truly crazy man. This man has apparently been insane for a number of years. He has either fled the town or been cast out of it. He lives among the dead in the cemetery. He wears no clothes.

He reminds me of the many homeless men and women I used to see living under the highway overpasses in Dallas, where I lived for 17 years. They were dirty, smelly, and often exposing parts of their body that should have been covered. They were often too, mentally ill, living with voices and obsessions that made them anti-social.

The First Presbyterian Church, which my wife and I attended, had a ministry to these homeless people. It was called the Stewpot. It fed 500 to 600 of these homeless five days a week. It also provided a variety of other care and rehabilitation services.

It was an essential ministry of the church. The church supported it generously in both funds and people. But it was not an easy ministry. It demanded much of the church.

Part of the homeless problem in America today results from the decisions of Americans to opt for more limited government. As state revenues have been reduced, so has funding for public-supported mental hospitals and clinics.

Take New York State, for example. The New York Daily News reported in 2012 that in 1955, there were nearly 600,000 mentally ill patients receiving treatment in the state’s mental hospitals. In 2010, after years of hospital closings, the state had only 43,000 spaces left in state psychiatric hospitals.[1]

We find a similar story in state after state. We here in Virginia know the tragic story of how Senator Creigh Deeds’ son attacked his father with a knife before killing himself. All because there was no mental hospital bed available where he could get treatment.

Patients who were once cared for in a medical setting have been released to the streets to fend for themselves. So we have hundreds of mentally disturbed homeless people wandering our streets just like this crazy man in the gospel story. Or incarcerated in jails, as a Washington Post cover story reported last Sunday.

I share the desire many Americans have for more limited government. Nonetheless let’s not forget that lower taxes have their social costs.

When Jesus confronts the man, he begins to heal him, by ordering the demonic spirit in him to leave him. But it turns out that this man’s mental disorder is much more complicated than Jesus or anyone else realizes.

Jesus asks the name of the demon, and the man responds “Legion.” A legion was a unit of the Roman army that consisted of about 6,000 troops.

By hearing this name, we are meant to realize that this man’s disorder is complex. Under normal therapy today, it would take years or even decades for this man to be healed, if he could be healed at all. He’s a real basket case.

The demons beg Jesus not to send them to the abyss, which Jews believed would be the ultimate prison for demons at the last judgment. So Jesus allows them to go elsewhere. They invade a herd of pigs on the hillside. This drives the pigs crazy so that they rush mindlessly to their destruction in the lake waters.

Terrified over this result, the swineherds rush into the city, inform the citizens, who probably included the owners of the pigs, of what had happened. The citizens rush out to check it out for themselves. There they find the crazy man indeed healed. He is sitting at Jesus’ feet, fully clothed, and in his right mind.

In other gospel miracle stories, the crowds respond by glorifying God and marveling on the great miracle. But not this crowd. They are terrified. They immediately ask Jesus to, please, just go away. And Jesus does.

As he departs, the healed man begs to go with Jesus. But strangely, Jesus does not permit him. Instead, Jesus asks him to return to his hometown and declare how much God has done for him. With this simple instruction, Gentile evangelism begins in Luke.

Although the gospel writer presents this story as a healing by exorcism, what we find in it is a rather clear example of serious mental illness.

We are not told how this man became ill. Did he go mad from a chemical disorder in the brain, from a traumatic experience, or from a childhood of abuse? We are not told. Instead we see the ravages of his disorder. And we sense its roots are deep-seated and multi-dimensional.

Yet Jesus heals him. Jesus exercises amazing power. No wonder the crowds are constantly asking, “Who is this man?”

But what I want to focus on today is that small detail where the town’s citizens come out to Jesus and beg him to go away. Please, please, Jesus, just go away.

They note that the crazy man has been healed. But rather than rejoicing, they are terrified. They do not want this healing power in their town. “Let’s get this Jesus out of here as fast as we can.”

Now here’s the odd thing about healing, whether it be our own healing, the healing of a person in our family, or the resolution of a deep social problem in our community. Healing can make us very anxious and sometimes extremely upset. For healing can be costly.

In our gospel story, it is economically costly. The man’s healing has taken place at the cost of a herd of pigs being lost. The gospel of Mark says the herd numbered 2,000. That represents an enormous financial loss for the herd’s owners.

If healing is going to cost us money, maybe healing is not all that important. Maybe we can live with a few diseased people in our midst, as long as they don’t include us or live in our neighborhood.

Isn’t that what we as a society are saying when we yank funding away from the mental hospitals and other medical services that are funded by government, especially when they serve the more disadvantaged in our society?

Are we not saying then that as a consequence, we as a society are accepting the fact that periodically we are going to have to live through the horror of deranged young men, tormented by their inner demons, picking up assault rifles and slaughtering innocent children and adults? We have indeed been living through that again these past 10 days.

There is indeed a cost if we say our goal is a healthy, peaceful society.

But there is another cost in healing, one that we do not always recognize consciously, but is very real.

Talk, for example, to psychologists and therapists who operate out of a family systems understanding of illness. They will tell us that sometimes when an individual in a family becomes physically ill or acts out in troubled behavior, it is because that ill one has become the locus of a dysfunction that pervades the whole family as a system.

The family maintains some semblance of stability and normalcy by displacing all the disorder of the family onto one family member. That man or woman, that boy or girl, becomes the ill member of the family. All this happens unconsciously. The system therefore remains hidden.

If the ill one begins to become healthy, this often creates great anxiety in the wider family. Why? Because if the ill one becomes healed, then the other members of the family must face and deal with the disorder that lies behind the illness or the troubled behavior.

And that can be painful for the family as a whole. In such situations, the family has a psychological investment in the sick member being sick. So the family may work unconsciously to make the ill one ill again if he or she starts to get healed. In this paradoxical way, the family system can return to its stability.

Now this may sound very strange to you.[2] How can any family have a psychological investment in the illness or misbehavior of one of its members? But if you talk with psychologists and therapists, they will tell you they encounter it all the time. Healing can be very costly in terms of family dynamics.

Healing can also be very costly spiritually, as our epistle reading today suggests. In it the apostle Paul alludes to the implications of our Christian sacrament of baptism.

In the ancient church, when a person was baptized, one took off his or her street clothes, entered into the baptismal pool naked, was immersed under the water, and lifted up out of the water to be clothed in a new white garment. From the baptismal pool, one was then led into the church community for one’s first participation in the Lord’s Supper.

Baptistry in the ruins of the Church of Mary
During a trip to Turkey that my wife and I made three years ago, we visited one such baptismal pool in a ruined church in Ephesus.[3] It had steps on one side where a person entered the pool and steps on the other side where he or she emerged.

As a part of that experience, one renounced sin, evil, and the devil, and one declared one’s trust in Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior and committed to living in the way of Jesus. We still make these ancient promises in our Presbyterian baptismal service today.

Baptism was therefore the decisive moment when one ceased to be a pagan or a Jew, and one became identified as a Christian. It was a very important psychological and spiritual moment in a Christian’s life.

For the apostle Paul, it was much more. It was a revolutionary moment. Hear his words again:

… In Christ Jesus you are all children of God through faith. As many of you as were baptized into Christ have clothed yourself with Christ. There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female, for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.

For Paul, baptism brings about of a healing of religious, class, and gender divisions in society. These divisions are the source of constant disorders in the lives we live.

One needs only to look at the stresses and strains our world continues to experience through interreligious conflict, through social strife between races and economic classes, and through the constant struggle between men and women in family relationships.

If we understand the meaning of baptism, says Paul, we rise out of the baptismal waters as one in Christ. We are healed of the divisions not by erasing them, but by our being brought into harmony with one another in Christ.

We are healed, that is, if we are willing to accept the cost of healing. That cost is the letting go of the prejudices, the attitudes, and the inherited social patterns we have grown up with. We allow these divisions to become secondary to our union in Christ.

That is a cost, however, that many Christians have been unwilling to accept through the ages, as we have worked hard to keep the distinctions of religion, race, social class, and gender actively in place. We have, in fact, actively used the Bible to support them.

Healing is costly, and time after time each one of us says along with the Gerasenes, “Please, Jesus, just go away.”

But Jesus does not. It is true he does not allow the healed man to follow him. Instead he sends him home to declare how much God has done for him.

In so doing, Jesus gives the Gerasenes a second chance. As they witness the healed man in their presence… as they watch how his healing is real and permanent…as they experience his change in behavior…maybe, just maybe they will come to realize that the healing is worth the cost.

And so, I pray, may we all. Thanks be to God. Amen.

                                                                                    -- The Rev. Gordon Lindsey
                                                                                        June 23, 2013



[1] James Panero, “The Danger of Closing ‘Asylums’,” The New York Daily News, December 27, 2012.
[2] A good presentation of family systems theory can be found in Edwin H. Friedman, Generation to Generation: Family Process in Church and Synagogue, New York: The Guildford Press, 1985. Friedman’s book deals with the application of family systems theory to the life of religious congregations, but it contains a good summary of family system theory in general.
[3] The church was the ruined Basilica of Saint John in the Turkish city of Selçuk.

Wednesday, June 15, 2016

Sharing Our Faith: Marilee Lindbeck

I have been coming to Cove since Dillon was 2 ½ years old.  He is now 26.  George was just embarking on his career at the UVA emergency department.  We lived here in Covesville on our farm.  We came to church together and we came pretty regularly.  As time went on, George was more about his rare weekends off and I was not leaving my church to hang out with him on Sunday mornings.

I knew that it was good to give something to your church when the plate came around.  I have absolutely no recollection of what we gave back then.  Then there were a few good sermons and stewardship messages over the years that made me pay more attention to our giving and what that really was supposed to mean.  I am still learning about what stewardship means.

Anyway, once George made it clear that church was my thing and not his, we had to have a conversation about the support I wanted to give to Cove.  So that was when I began to figure what I could give to my church.  I always have had to take into account that George is the wage earner and I am the church-goer.  But the great thing is, George has clearly recognized how important Cove is to me.  So I have maintained regular monthly checks and each year I have increased that by a certain amount.  It adds up over time.

There have been times over the years when it seemed to me that my monthly giving was just helping to pay the bills.  But as my faith has grown, so has my understanding of the need to help Cove be here for me.  The building itself, yes, but more importantly, what happens within when we are all gathered here.  And it seems to me, that the more funds we have available, the more we want to give.  Our mission outreach makes me very proud to be a part of this congregation.  I am in for the long haul!

Marilee is a member of the newly formed stewardship team.

Sunday, June 5, 2016

Called


But when God, who from my mother’s womb had set me apart
and called me through grace….
O Lord, Paul’s soul was dead.
Through your grace, you called him back to life, to live in you.
Christ, call us.
Through these words, call us to your love and to your grace.
And let that call be enough for us.[1]
Amen.

Paul is a fascinating character in scripture. Fascinating, frustrating, fanatical – a lot of people have used a lot of F words in relation to Paul. One description I might choose is “full of himself.” In our passage today, Paul claims that God “was pleased to reveal the Son in me” and, at the very end, he says, “They glorified God because of me.”

Paul sounds pretty infuriating! Not the kind of guy you’d want to invite over for dinner. In fact, this letter, which Paul sent to the church he founded in Galatia, was written in response to a group that was trying to tell people to ignore him altogether. Even today, there are Christians who would be happy to take such advice – based on Paul’s words about women not teaching within the church and his support for slavery, to name just a few items. 

But that would be difficult, as thirteen books in the New Testament bear his name. It would also be a great loss; scholar Richard B. Hays explains that “Both [Saint] Augustine and Martin Luther ... took their bearings from Paul’s message of radical grace, apart from works of the Law. The letter to the Galatians is the fountainhead for all [thought on] justification by faith, the cross, the power of the Spirit, and the meaning of Christian freedom.”[2]

These are, obviously, crucial components to our faith in – and understanding of – Christ. So, it seems, we are stuck with this insufferable figure. But maybe if we take a closer look, we’ll discover some of Paul’s redeeming qualities. Perhaps we’ll see why God would call such an odd figure to turn away from destroying the emerging church and turn toward shaping and guiding it.

Before he was Paul, he was Saul, a Jewish man who was passionately devoted to his faith. In his letter to the church at Phillipi, he gives his credentials: “If anyone else has reason to be confident in the flesh,” he writes, “I have more: circumcised on the eighth day, a member of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew born of Hebrews; as to the law, a Pharisee; as to zeal, a persecutor of the church; as to righteousness under the law, blameless.”

I can’t stress this enough: all these qualifications are evidence of another F word we can apply to Saul: faithfulness. Perhaps even his acts to “persecute” the movement that was taking shape after Jesus’ death and resurrection!

Imagine, today, if an influential Christian got on television and said, “Christianity is all about meeting your own needs first. If you have time left over, then you can think about helping the poor.” That runs in stark opposition to what we actually believe, and I would hope that we would all reject such teachings. Saul felt Jesus’ teachings were opposed to the traditional practice of Judaism, and he reacted accordingly; still, I hope none of us would resort to his methods.

The book of Acts tells us Saul was present during the stoning of Stephen, the first Christian martyr, and that he “approved of their killing him.” It also says that he was “ravaging the church by entering house after house; dragging off both men and women, and committing them to prison.” He even went to the high priest to ask permission to go to a place called Damascus, just in case there were any of Jesus’ followers there. He got permission and set off on his journey, and that’s when everything changed for him.

As Saul was getting close to Damascus, a light from heaven flashed around him. He fell to the ground and heard a voice saying to him, “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?” He asked, “Who are you, Lord?” The reply came, “I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting.” Saul opened his eyes and, to his horror, he couldn’t see anything. His companions helped him stumble into Damascus, where he remained blind for three days.

Meanwhile, God called to another disciple, named Ananias, telling him to go restore Saul’s sight. Ananias was, understandably, a little concerned about this request. “Lord,” he replied, “I have heard from many about this man, how much evil he has done to your saints in Jerusalem; and here he has authority from the chief priests to bind all who invoke your name.” But God said to him, “Go, for he is an instrument whom I have called to bring my name before Gentiles and kings and before the people of Israel.”

So Ananias went to the man who, just three days before, would’ve killed him. And he laid his hands on Saul and said, “The Lord Jesus has sent me to you.” And something like scales fell from Saul’s eyes, and he was no longer Saul, the persecutor; he was Paul, the apostle.

There are moments in our lives when God breaks in, disrupting everything we thought we knew, turning the world upside down for us. Sometimes these moments come with a blinding light and a flash from the heavens. More often, though, they come quietly, innocuously – but no less shockingly. These are the moments in which we are called by God. 

The poet David Whyte writes about these moments:

Sometimes,
if you move carefully through the forest
breathing like the ones in the old stories
who would cross a shimmering bed of dry leaves
without a sound,
you come to a place
whose only task
is to trouble you
with tiny but frightening requests
conceived out of nowhere
but in this place beginning to lead everywhere.
Requests to stop what you are doing right now
and to stop what you are becoming while you do it,
questions that can make or unmake a life,
questions that have patiently waited for you,
questions that [will not] go away.
[3]

When have these questions come to you?

One of them came to me, not out of a burning bush or a lightning bolt from the sky, but out of the mouth of a friend – a mentor – named Doug. He was the director of music at the church where I ended up doing my internship, and also the leader of the Wednesday afternoon children’s program. “Hey,” he said one day, “Would you mind helping me out for a few weeks? I need someone who knows how to use a digital camera. We’re going to be learning about the transfiguration.”

I had never worked with children before – I’d never so much as babysat a cousin! The very concept was terrifying! But, for some reason, I said yes. The initial four weeks turned into eight weeks and, ultimately, three years of working with Doug and the kids, and I discovered gifts I never would’ve guessed I had: the ability to patiently sit with a child who was melting down in a crying fit; the ability to connect with kids on their level and talk to them about important things; the ability to listen to parents’ joys and worries.

You may have already guessed what I couldn’t possibly have known at the time: that question – “Can you help me out for a few weeks?” – was preparation for the career I now have as a chaplain working with children – and for my calling as a father.

You see, God’s call isn’t just for apostles like Paul; so often we use the term “calling” to refer only to ordained ministry. But God’s calling is for all of us. Farmers, nurses, teachers, writers, appliance salesmen, garbage collectors, students, husbands, wives. 

Author Frederick Buechner puts it this way: “The kind of work God usually calls you to is the kind of work that you need to do and that the world needs to have done. … The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.”[4]

Saul only got half the equation right. His deep gladness was in spreading a message. But it was the wrong message. It was a message of legalism and uncharity. The world was starving for a message of grace and inclusion, and that’s when God stepped in.

When Paul said that God had “revealed his Son in me” he wasn’t being boastful or arrogant. He was pointing out that Jesus is revealed in all who are shaped by God’s calling; that Jesus is revealed in the radical changes that come over a person when he or she begins to listen to that still, small voice; that Jesus is revealed when the task in front of you seems impossible, but you decide to trust God and give it your all anyway.

So… What questions have been wriggling around in the back of your mind lately? What prompting or guidance or urging do you sense? What is it that God has put in your heart to do or to be? What does the world need from you?

I hope you’ll think about it this week, and then come back here on Sunday and let us know: To what are you being called?

Amen.


[2] Richard B. Hays “The Letter to the Galatians” in The New Interpreter’s Bible, vol. XI (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2000), 183.
[3] David Whyte, “Sometimes” in Everything is Waiting for You (Langley, WA: Many Rivers Press, 2003), 4.
The last line was originally “questions that have no right to go away.”
[4] Frederick Buechner, “Vocation” in Beyond Words (New York: HarperSanFransisco, 2004), 404-405.