5. Sunday after Pentecost, 06/23/2013

Sermon on Luke 8:26-39 (RCL), by David Zersen

Stories are wonderful because they provide so many points of contact for the listener. Whether children or adults, we love stories because we can always find something that intrigues us or makes us want to hear more. This is true whether the story is told in a text or in a picture. Some years ago, I took a photo of our young son floating a sail boat in the pond in the Tuileries Gardens outside Paris' Louvre Museum where generations of youth had previously done the same thing. I showed this picture to a professional photographer friend and asked him what he thought of the picture. He responded that the only thing that interested him in the picture was the identity of a man sitting next to the pond on a chair with his back to the camera. I had not even noticed the man, but this photographer had his eye trained to look for things that were important to him.

In the story contained in today's text there are many items that could be explored, and generations of preachers have done just that. In the seminary, budding preachers are taught to look for the main point, yet years of experience suggest that depending on whether one is using literary, theological or cultural analysis, different main points can be identified. For instance, some animal rights types have become so concerned about the pigs that were driven over the cliff in the story that they have written off Jesus as capable of true compassion. Others, with a view to historical locations, have questioned whether Gerasa or the region of the Gadarenes could be the right location because it is a distance from the Sea of Galilee and there is no cliff there. This reflection leads them to reject the story in its entirety. However, Dr. P. Solomon Raj, a Lutheran theologian and artist, chooses to make joy the main point of this story. The man who lived in caves because his mental challenges didn't allow him a place in society jumped for joy when he was freed from his burden. The ecstatic and dramatic nature of his leaping draw us into Dr. Raj's perspective as we view the picture, and we are forced to ask whether we have been freed from such burdens and what such emancipation should call for in our own situations. It is the task of all artists, whether visual or literary, to encourage the viewer/reader to ask such questions in order to make the artistic work relevant. Who is this man, we need to ask. Do we know him? In what sense may he be me?

Being restored, not just cured

To understand this man, and to understand ourselves, for that matter, we need to explore his problem, as well as our own. In reality, if we take the whole story into account, the man's problem was not that he was crazy or that he lived in a cave where people were buried or that he scrounged for food. His real problem was that he was excluded from society, abandoned by his family and left to cope with solitude. He wasn't in a prison, in a real sense, but in a figurative sense he might as well have been.

In a recent editorial, a comparison of the views of David Brooks and Thomas Friedman clarifies this. Friedman has written about the hyper-connectivity among people in our society resulting from technology and communication that reduces barriers and places everyone in touch (The World is Flat). David Brooks, in commenting on Edward Snowden, the young man who recently leaked government secrets to the press, describes him as a product of the atomization of society. In other words, Brooks regards Snowden as a part of a society that has separated itself into unrelated segments which have no commitment or relationship to one another. Whether you agree with the political implications of such analyses or not is of less importance than whether both Friedman and Brooks have pointed to a problem in our modern world. Increasingly, we no longer live in tribal communities in which people have commitments to one another and even to the stranger. Rather, in many parts of the world we have only limited contacts with a variety of people through email and twitter and we are becoming loners who make decisions about what is right and wrong without the benefit of connectedness with others that alone can make us whole.

By contrast, Jesus' way of dealing with the mad-man of Gerasa is not to be seen so much as a psychological readjustment as a restoration of a disenfranchised lost soul to a context of human relationships. Without such an insight, a reader can assume that Jesus just walked about snapping healings out of his sleeve because he was a compassionate kind of guy. The blind see, the lame walk and the poor have good news preached to them. Well, good for them. This is their lucky day. There is more to this story, and to ours, than such flippant observations. Who were these people that Jesus healed? Were they the well-to-do, the leaders in their communities, the scholars and the rabbis? No, for the most part, they were the men and women on the margins of society. Yes, they had physical and psychological problems. They were lepers, blind people, deaf people, women with hemorrhages, men with mental problems. However, those weren't the real issues. As a result of such maladies, they had been relegated to the outskirts of those who knew themselves to be acceptable. Not only were they marginalized because others feared that they might catch diseases for which there was no cure, but the spiritually elite excluded them from the community of God's people because they were almost, to use a term from a different ethnic community, untouchable. The extremist Essenes, for example, said that no lame or deformed or disreputable person could enter into the community of God's people.

Jesus rejected this notion, as our Gospel lesson for last Sunday made clear. Who has been forgiven much, he reprimanded Simon, his condescending host, also loves much. Community is not only for the pious but for all those who have experienced the touch of God's love. What should this mean for you and me? Surely there are ways in which the loneliness, the confusion, and the rejection of the cave-man of Gerassa are known to us. No matter how successful we may be in some areas, there are other areas in which we feel unneeded, unheeded and unwanted. Even those who are the "life of the party" or the one everyone looks up to sometimes go home at night to bitterly lonely caves in which their place in life and work is uncertain. Why is it that so many returning veterans commit suicide? Why is it that mental health professionals see more patients around the holidays than at any other time of the year? Why is it that couples who seem ideal to others sometimes feel lonely in their own bedrooms? A profound reason has to do with acceptance and affirmation from those around us and those closest to us. All of us know something of this, and all of us know something of what the Gadarene demoniac, as older texts called him, felt. Most importantly, we can also know what Jesus was all about when he sought not just to pop a cure here and there, but to restore people to community in the midst of our hyper-connected and yet atomistic society.

Looking for joy on the margins

When I look at Dr. Raj's image of the man leaping for joy at his restoration to community, I ask myself what counterparts to such joy have I discovered in my own human relationships. I think of Christmas around the tree when our four small grandchildren open one after another of an almost obscene amount of presents to which they have been looking forward. Of course, they think about what they will do with this or that, how they will play with a pirate ship or a doll that wets its diapers or an electronic game that lets you fish at your television screen. Most important, though, this is the kind of affirmation that we annually provide and which others are encouraged to anticipate. They are loved and accepted through these many things. They can know that they belong, that this is family, and that joy is real. However, misguided some of these notions may be, they are a regular part of an affluent society which has been encouraged by media advertising, by store sales and by general holiday hype to seek meaningful affirmation through material trinkets given by those who are uncertain of the best way to express their love.

It's worth thinking about some alternatives to fashioning community among those who need to belong, but who aren't yet certain why community is better than isolation and how affirmation exceeds alienation as a primary human experience. Let me use the example of the church as a beginning. Many have wondered why church attendance, especially in large urban centers across the world, has declined in such radical numbers. Is the church's message irrelevant, outdated, and unfocused? To some extent, such suggestions can be true, and many are the congregations that have attempted to refresh and rejuvenate the church's image with contemporary music, drama, and architecture as well as relevant social and educational programming. However, the problem is not so much the church as it is the people who are so atomistic, so separated from one another in terms of personal interests and understanding of vital needs, that they can't yet grasp what's missing in their lives. What the church offers, community, is not thought to be important to isolated people who apart from their work life and immediate family contexts as yet see no need to belong, to be embraced, to be a part of a larger whole.

Enter Jesus. Let him approach the manicured suburbs, the high-rise urban centers, the struggling low-rent ghettoes and the rural distanced farmsteads. Where in all these settings are troubled, lonely, often desperate people? Are community, personal relationships, and a sense of affirmation and belonging what such people need, or are they simply the last to admit it? I confess when I sit in the pew and look at the people who come forward to gather symbolically around the family table that their diversity inspires me. Whole generations, children, adults, grand-parents, singles, mixed-races, whites, blacks and Hispanics, gays and straights-a rich mixture of the human community approaching as many to become one in Christ. I know of few settings in society where such community is embraced and fostered. In such a setting where burdens and troubles of many kinds are borne by individuals, Jesus calls us to throw off the baggage, to share his peace with all and to eat and drink together as if family were not only never lost for us, but now has a new and empowering meaning.

I think of this new meaning in terms of a phrase shared by Nelson Mandela, former president of South Africa. In May of this year, Nigerians remembered the death of the greatest of Nigerian, and, for that matter, African writers, Chinua Achebe. His greatest novel, All Things Fall Apart, written some fifty years ago, let all readers know that Africans could write about the human experience, just as well as Europeans or Americans, and all could discover that the subject matter was not just African, but international. Nelson Mandela, himself now facing his mortality at 94, says that when he read Achebe during his 27 years in prison, the walls around him fell down. This profound image is meaningful to us as Christians. Although walled in by burdens, or feeling hemmed by thoughts of inadequacy, Jesus enters this room to set us free. He calls us from our caves, from our apartments, from our mansions to affirm us with forgiveness, acceptance and love. He enables us to reach out to others and insist that we are here for them because God has made us one family in the love that Jesus shares with all.

The same artist whose work I referred to earlier, P. Solomon Raj, has another painting of last Sunday's Gospel lesson. He must have asked himself, "How do I use a visual form to illustrate what filled the room on that day when a woman washed Jesus feet with expensive perfume?" The painting depicts simply a pair of feet, a smiling woman washing them with her hair, and an alabaster jug out of which perfume, like a genii's essence, flared out and filled the room. There was joy in the room that day because love filled it to the rafters. And there is joy in this room today because we know that the same love that restored the mad-man of Gerasa to his community seeks to embrace us, hand-shake by hand-shake and hug-by-hug.

Such an insight does not provide a full resolution to our loneliness and our secret despair. However, it makes a beginning at saying that because Jesus is at the heart of the church's proclamation, the church, despite all that can be said against it, calls people to experience the community that we need, even when we haven't decided that we deserve or desire it.

That is why P. Solomon Raj preaches the Gospel so powerfully when he has the lonely cave-dweller dancing acrobatically with joy. He has been allowed to go home.

And that is why you can ask yourself whether Rotary or a book club or the local tavern or a gang conclave or a professional association or a sport team can offer you what the church offers to those who gather regularly around the table of the Lord.

This day your legs have been set to dancing.

This day you know that you-even you-are home.

Prof. Dr. Dr.,President Emeritus, David Zersen
Austin, Texas
E-Mail: djzersen@aol.com

(top)