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.
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| 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
[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.
