Gerasene Demon, by Toonfed (Frederico Blee)
“An Army of Demons”
Fifth Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 7C)
8 a.m.said and 10:00 sung Eucharist 19 June 2016
Homily
Parish Church of Trinity, Ashland
The
Rev. Dr. Anthony Hutchinson, Rector
God, take away our hearts of stone
and give us hearts of flesh. Amen.
Most healing stories in the gospels are
pretty simple: There’s an afflicted
person, and Jesus fixes them. Here, Jesus
confronts what seems to be a primal force of nature, uncontrollable and
uncontrolled. “For a long time [the afflicted man] had worn no clothes… Many
times [the demon] had seized him; he was kept under guard and bound with chains
and shackles, but he would break the bonds and be driven into the wilds.” This guy has been through the wringer—multiple
possessions, getting worse until he ends up raving, naked, and bleeding in a
graveyard. Here is something deeper and
darker than normal illness, something intractable and overwhelming.
Jesus starts to cast the demon out; it
argues with him, “Why am I any of your business? Don’t hurt me!” Jesus asks the demon its name, a prelude to
exorcism in that day and age. It replies, “We are legion.” Not very helpful: more a taunt than a
name. “Legion” was a 6,000
soldier-strong battalion in the Roman Army.
“My name? I am so numerous as to
be almost chaotic, as strong as the Roman imperium, and as violent as an
army. My name? Legion.”
These demons are violent and expect the
same of Jesus. They call him Son of God but
think this just means someone more violent and powerful than they are: “Don’t
torment us, or cast us into the pit!” But
instead, without using violence, he drives them out of the poor man. He even gives them their wish, to go into a
herd of swine. But alas, the violence of
the demons is just too overpowering: the pigs panic and run headlong into the
sea, drowning. This terrifies everyone there.
They beg Jesus to leave, just as afraid of violence from him as the
demons.
This story is about healing a mental
illness, since people then blamed demons for madness. But “demons” also had
another meaning. They often are the
personification not just of personal interior conflicts, but also of the unseen
movers behind the world we see, the drivers we cannot see or explain. When Paul talks about “thrones, dominions,
rulers, and powers” (Col. 1:16) in God’s creation, he is thinking of spiritual
beings, whether angelic or demonic, at work in the world around us. We
identify these same forces more abstractly, and less personally. We call them
institutions, cultures, governments, corporations, power structures, ideologies,
and value systems.
That’s why the great social conscience
theologian of our age, Walter Wink, entitled his books Naming…, Unmasking…, and, Engaging the Powers. He saw with clear vision these dark forces
in the world around us that fight against God’s good intention for creation: abundance,
peace, and justice.
We saw dark forces at work in the world
this last week: last Sunday morning’s news of murder of 49 people at a gay and
lesbian nightclub in Orlando, most of them Latino or Latina. It shocked,
but did not surprise anyone: another case of assault weapons in the hands of an
angry male run amok, a problem that our society doesn’t want to deal with. Orlando’s mass murder, driven by hatred of
gays, occurred one year to the week after the mass murders at Mother Emmanuel
Church in Charleston, driven by racism. The killer made reference to his faith (he was from a Muslim family) and an allegiance to Da'esh in a phone call to the police during the shooting, but little evidence has been uncovered linking him to terrorist planning networks. At the very least, we can say the act was a hate-crime against gay people.
The demons, primal and intractable,
that possess us as a people are seen in this. These demons are not named Azazel or
Beelzebub. They have different names,
and Jesus has something to say to each:
Violence: It seems that the violence that plagues us is uncontrollable,
just like Legion. We
glorify violence in our arts, have movies that tell stories of the good guys
blowing the bad guys away, use armed force as a major component of our foreign
policy, proclaim it in our political memes, and think that capital punishment
is the ultimate solution to horrible crime.
Guns are an important part of this culture of violence.
Richard Slotkin in Gunfighter
Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth Century America says that our
culture embraces the idea that there is no problem so severe that it wouldn’t
improve if we could just shoot someone. Walter Wink called this the false
“myth of redemptive violence.” To
this, Jesus says, “those who live by the sword will die by it,” and “if someone
strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him your left.”
Fear: Closely tied to this fascination with
violence, is fear. Most people who buy
guns and who argue for no restrictions on gun ownership appeal to
“self-defense” as their motivation. They
buy guns and want others to buy guns because of fear. Fear makes us hunger at a banquet, be stingy
with abundance, and externalize all our problems. To this, Jesus says, “be
not afraid, I am with you.”
Rejection of the Stranger: Blaming our
problems on someone else, we scapegoat.
We make them bear the blame, and
take it outside the wall. If you don’t
have a wall, build one. And make the
stranger pay for it. To this Jesus
says, “welcome and care for the alien and foreigner, for you too were once
aliens,” and “the only thing that will matter on the last day will be whether
you cared for the most vulnerable and least able to care for themselves.”
Disgust at the Strange: Blaming our problems on other people might
seem a bit too unfair. So we say “love the sinner hate the sin.” We objectify evil and bad and identify it
with anything that is different than we are, anything with which we are
unfamiliar or uncomfortable. Disgust is
the most common emotion we experience as we do this, and we often link the
object of our disgust with the impure, the unclean, the corrupt. Disgust is an instinctual emotion that tries
to keep us safe by keeping us from eating or touching poisonous or contaminated
things. But when it becomes part of a
system of exclusion, oppression, or power relationship, it is a demon of great
power.
Using any reason—different sex,
language, cultural practices, sexual orientation, skin color or hair
texture—any reason to take away in our minds the image of God that God left in
creating a person and replace it with a cartoon caricature that disgusts us is
evil. That is what the parable of the
Good Samaritan, the parable of the Pharisee and the Tax Collector, and stories
about Jesus spending his time with sinners, drunkards, and whores are all
about. Disgust must never get in the way
of generosity and welcome. Let me be
clear: Homophobia is a sin. Sexism is a sin. Racism is a sin. Xenophobia and nativist political ideology
are a sin. It’s that simple. Jesus
says, “the last will be first, and the first last,” and “follow me” when he spent
most of his life with the very people his religion told him were unclean and
unworthy. And this was not simply so he
could fix them and make them less disgusting.
Remember the story of him and
the Canaanite woman? He learned from her
faith to accept what he previously found beyond the pale.
Of course, the demons of Power,
Control, and Wealth are all here too. The gun lobby draws its strength from the
money of gun manufacturers and sellers and the greed of politicians eager for
it. To all these, Jesus says “You need
to lose your life in order to save it,” “not as I will, but as you will,” and
“You cannot serve both God and money.”
Bigotry seems always abetted by religious
hierarchies seeking to preserve their privilege. They shame and condemn those they see as
unclean and unworthy of God’s blessing. Some
say the problem is a lack of godliness in our society, mainly in the groups
they do not like. “We are only trying to
follow God’s commands,” they say. The
curious thing is that some of these are talking about the Bible, and others are
talking about the Koran. Christian and
Muslim fundamentalist fanatics have many of the same habits and arguments. Jesus says “love your enemy,” and, “sinners
will go into the kingdom of heaven long before the religious and righteous who
oppress them,” and, “judge not, lest you
be judged as well.”
Unhappily,
the Scriptures of Judaism,
Christianity, and Islam all contain a few passages that incite violence against
the ungodly and the impure. These do
not represent the heart of God. The
unstable and the unscrupulous can exploit them to stir up horror in the name of
God. These same Scriptures also all dream
of a world from which murderous violence has been finally exorcised. The prophets sing of a world where swords
have become farming tools and where natural enemies dwell in peace together.
All three faiths teach that God’s most basic nature is steadfast loving
kindness.
Facing Orlando, San Bernardino,
Roseburg, Charleston, Sandyhook and Columbine, we as a people are flummoxed. We cannot even agree on the names of what is
at work here. And we all tend to demonize those who disagree with us: violence
and scapegoating are part of who we are.
One
definition of insanity is always trying the same thing over and over again, and
expecting different results. In
America, guns and our obsession with power and privilege have made us crazy. Our original sin is racism and all the other
“isms” of bigotry that mimic it. This
demon is both a mental illness and the powers at work in society.
Those songs of the prophets tell of a
world no longer haunted by war, horror, or hunger.
This should should give us hope.
This is what God wants for us. In
the end, God will win. Love will win.
Exorcism, tapestry, Andrei Madekin
Legion, breaking all the chains
and bonds, bursts forth to terrorize us. Legion brings us to the grave mourning
again and again. Orlando, I fear, is the
latest, not the last of his appearances.
We wait in the graveyard, head bloodied and body aching, for
deliverance. This legion of demons has
us in his thrall. So we wait, we pray,
and we keep on trying to drive the demon out.
Gay people, straight people, trans people, whites, blacks, old Americans
and newcomers, citizens and aliens, Muslims, Christians, Jews, and everyone else—we
wait and we hope. We, not them and us. And
we pray that those songs of freedom and peace open all our hearts and that we
work together to drive away the army of demons. To do otherwise is to accept the fate of the
Gadarene swine.
Jesus in today’s story assures
us one day we will sit together, clothed and in our right minds.
