“An Army of Demons”
Second Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 7C)
9 a.m. Sung Eucharist
22
June 2025
Homily
Emmanuel Episcopal Church, Coos Bay OR
The Rev. Dr. Anthony Hutchinson, homilist
Isaiah 65:1-9; Psalm 22:18-27; Galatians 3:23-29; Luke 8:26-39
Tamer of Legions, heal us and make us whole,
When I was first ordained a deacon in preparation for being priested, I was living in Hong Kong and working as the Public Affairs Officer at the U.S. Consulate there. The Consulate was just am 8 minute walk down the hill from our apartment, Saint John’s Cathedral another 2 minutes further. I was often on the rota for the 7 a.m. or noon masses on workdays. And I was supposed to be in clericals when I was at the Cathedral, and a regular business suit at the Consulate. So I often found myself changing clothes in my office at the Consulate before or after the brisk walk to or from the Cathedral. One day, as I was changing, a knock came on my door. “Just one moment, please,” I said, and when I had finished changing, opened the door. It was my deputy, with some urgent question that he needed me to answer before I took off for my lunch hour work in that other world. He eyed my newly-donned clerical collar with a raised eyebrow. “Kind of like Superman in the phone booth, huh?” he said. “But the question is,” he added, smiling, “who are you now—Superman or Clark Kent?” As humorous as this was, I found the question very helpful in the coming months and I found myself coming back to it several times—which was my real identity and which was my assumed one? Was I a priest putting on diplomat’s clothes to earn my bread, or a government organization-man play-acting as a churchman? Where were my closer relationships—with my fellow State Department officers at the Consulate, or with my fellow priests at the Cathedral? Where did the heart of my identity lie?
Last week on Trinity Sunday, we heard Luke telling us that it is relationships and not roles that matter. Today’s strange reading from Luke is about identity, that subtle mixture of the roles we play and the relationships we are in.
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 demonic power. “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.
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 because a name was seen as summing up a person’s identity. The demon 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 numerous as chaos, strong as the Roman imperium, and violent as an army. My name? Legion.”
These demons are violent and expect the same of Jesus. “Don’t torment us, or cast us into the pit that we crawled out of!” But instead, without using violence, Jesus releases the man from the army of demons; and then allows them to enter a herd of swine, farm animals raised for food in that gentile land. Then, in the closest thing the Bible has to the Buddhist concept of humans and animals all as “sentient beings,” even the swine go mad and drown themselves.
“We are legion.” Clearly whatever has happened to this poor man, he has very little identity left to call his own, very little “I” left. All he has left is the name of what assails him, has occupied him, has thrown him naked and bound among the tombs. No identity left but the urge to isolate himself, harm himself and others.
“We are legion.” Most of us have known someone in our lives—a family member, a co-worker, or a neighbor—with some kind of severe mental illness. Whether perceived as demonic possession, illness, or sin, we lose ourselves. Whether called obsession or compulsion, schizophrenia, bipolarity, schizoid affect, dissociative identities or multiple personalities, or addiction to drugs, alcohol, or a range of self-destructive and hurtful behaviors, such conditions really are like being enemy-occupied territory. Who we are, our relationships and what makes us particularly us, all this goes by the boards and we are left with nothing we can rightly call us.
Now I’m not saying that all these things can or should be cured or remedied by faith healing. As medical science has learned more and more on these conditions, it is able to assist more and more. But the basic problem remains: lost or weakened identity.
One of the main drivers in identity loss in our culture is our consumer economy and advertising culture.
“We are legion.” Dozens of times each day, we are exposed to carefully crafted images and messages telling us that we are inadequate, insufficient, not whole, and that we need only to buy or use some product of the economy to be recover our true selves. We are too old, not old enough, too fat, too skinny, too boring, overly controlled, not muscled enough, too muscled, too light, too dark, too short, too tall, not smart or witty enough, too much of a snob, not enjoying our lives enough. Men are not virile enough; women not alluring. Our teeth are too stained or crooked. Our bodies have bad odor, as does our breath. Our clothes are out of style.
If only we use a particular product, a newly discovered treatment, take a special course, get new and stylish items to wear, then we shall be fixed and be glittering, happy people like the beautiful smiling ones we see in the advertisements. Billions of dollars a year in “buy or die” commercial advertising are spent trying to make you feel inadequate, unhappy, and dissatisfied with who and what you are. With all the varied and contradictory roles and identities advertising seeks to assign you, it is easy to lose oneself.
Another way we lose our identity is, ironically, identity politics. If a charismatic leader or faction wants to enlist you wholeheartedly into the cause, they often resort to dog-whistles that pander to your sense of belonging to a particular group, or more importantly, of NOT belonging to another group, generally vilified as “other,” “wicked,” or “foreign.” Such political-pandering of group identity is like commercial pandering of product: you are supposed to not feel completely yourself if you don’t buy the product, if you don’t participate in the performative acts and words that set you and your group aside as something special. And this is so whether that leader or faction is on the right or the left.
But are identity politics or consumer culture “demons?” “Demons” in the bible often are the personification not just of personal interior conflicts and illness, but also of the unseen movers behind society and the world we see. When Paul talks about “thrones, dominions, rulers, and powers” that run the world (Col. 1:16), he is thinking of spiritual beings, whether angelic or demonic, at work in the world around us. We moderns identify these same forces more abstractly, and less personally. We call them institutions, cultures, governments, corporations, and power structures, including ideologies and value systems like nationalism, partisanship, and identity politics, or the constant need to buy things to make us feel better about ourselves.
The great social conscience theologian of our age, Walter Wink, entitled his books Naming…, Unmasking…, and, Engaging the Powers. He saw with clear vision the demonic character of the dark forces in the world around us that fight against God’s good intention for creation: abundance, peace, and justice.
Here’s the thing: we are God’s good creations. wondrously made, complex and varied. And finding our true identity involves living in to who we already are, not conforming to something imposed or sold from others, especially those who really don’t care at all about who we are. By reducing us to one thing, to one identity, and in so doing encouraging us to reduce, belittle, and demean the identity of others, these hucksters make us lose our identity.
In today’s story, Jesus heals the man occupied by Legion. He puts him in his right mind, and then overthrows the many spirits that have been tormenting and dementing him. This all takes place in a foreign land that many of Jesus’ compatriots called a latrine.
It is Jesus who crosses the border and enters the foreign land. Joan Puls, in her magnificent book Every Bush is Burning, writes about such border crossings, “We live limited lives until we 'cross over' into the concrete world of another country, another culture, another tradition ... I have left forever a small world to live with the tensions and the tender mercies of God's larger family.” Again, welcoming diversity and difference is the way to find our true identity, not lose it.
It is Jesus who reaches out to the one lost amongst the tombs, naked, hurting himself, muttering in one voice and then another, the voices of the chaotic committee inside his head.
It is Jesus who drives away the false identities, fears, inadequacies, bigotry, illusions and delusions that torment us, making us lose our identity. That’s why the people around the demoniac who have witnessed the scene are terrified by Jesus. He is bad for business that profits from identity loss, from identity theft. He is bad for politics that benefit from faction and hatred.
Jesus tells the healed man to go home, reconnect with his loved ones, wash up, have a good meal, and then “tell what God has done for you.” Tell others how you found who you truly are through me, he says.
Sisters and brothers, know that each and every one of you is a beloved child of God, a unique and complex beautiful work of the creator of all. Jesus loves you. God is crazy about you. You are enough. You don’t need anything more than God has already given you. Don’t listen to those voices that tell you are inadequate unless you swallow some magic pill, recite some magic oath, belittle others so you can feel bigger yourself. Go forth free of the legion of demons. And then tell others all the good God has done for you.
In the name of Christ, Amen.