Sermon for Year B, Proper 7: "Holy, but not yet..."

Preached on Sunday, June 21st, 2009 at Christ & Saint Stephen's Church. Texts this sermon is based on can be found here.

For millennia, some have gone down to the sea in ships to ply their trade in deep waters as our psalm for today tells us. And there they have beheld the wonders of the Lord and his wonders in the deep. There are wonders to behold upon and in the oceans, that’s for sure. But a life at sea is hard and dangerous work. It requires long absences from home, often daily danger. And as we know, there is no shelter on the open sea from the storms that brew over the oceans.

For many of us, the seaside is a place of repose and rest. We love the beach, most of us. We love to frolic in the surf. But the sea itself is a troubling, dangerous, unpredictable force in our world. Tsunamis, hurricanes and perfect storms on the sea can be deadly to those on land, and much more so to sailors and fishers.

But as awesome and powerful a force as the sea is, it too is subject to the will and command of God. That is certainly God’s rebuke to Job in our Old Testament reading for today. God reminds Job that he is the architect and masterbuilder of all the earth. And it is God who has ‘shut in the sea with doors…’ and ‘proscribed the bounds’ of the oceans.

And in our gospel reading from Mark today, Jesus is able to quiet the Sea of Galilee upon which the fishers of people, his disciples, fear they are to perish. Jesus rebukes the storm in a similar manner to how he rebukes the unclean spirits that torture the Gerasene demoniac. The disciples see that this rabbi and teacher might be a bit more than just a wiseman, more even than a prophet. He has command over the physical realm, like the Almighty God.

The explicit message of today’s readings is abundantly clear. Our God in the person of his son Jesus is the king of creation and over all things he does most gloriously reigneth.

Pretty simple, pretty clear… But then we come to the poor fellow living in the cemetery at Gerasa. One of those strange and confounding gospel stories that so intrigue us. Our gospel tells us that Jesus comes to Gerasa after sailing over the Sea of Galilee. The other side of the Sea of Galilee is gentile territory.

There are some real tensions in the location and the situation of the Gerasene demoniac that would be very apparent to a first century Jewish reader. First of all, the demoniac is a gentile, living in a gentile country. Secondly, he is living among the tombs, in the city of the dead. There were, as you know, many prohibitions about congress with gentiles for the Hebrew people, and many taboos about contact with the dead.

The Gerasene demoniac is possessed by what the Mark calls an ‘unclean’ spirit’. He is a possessed gentile living among the dead, he is just about as ritually impure as you can get.

The demon that possesses the man knows Jesus to be the son of God and says so, begging Jesus not to torment him. The unclean spirit knows instinctually what the disciples are only beginning to understand: Jesus’ authority is that of the Almighty God. The demons complete a picture of Jesus begun in the previous episode where the disciples saw Jesus commanding the physical realm. They see Jesus as one with power over the spiritual realm as well.

Then when Jesus asks the demons to identify themselves, they say to him, “My Name is Legion, for we are many.”

There can be no mistaking exactly what is being referred to here. A legion was a vast cohort of Roman soldiers who at this point in ancient history occupied all of Israel and the surrounding regions. Roman legions were more than soldiers; they were the administrative forces of the imperial occupation. oman legions made sure that taxes were paid to the emperor, that Roman laws were upheld, that Roman religion was honored and most especially, that any threats to Roman authority were dealt with swiftly and mercilessly.

The anthropologist Barrie Reynolds has studied the exorcism practices of Barotse people in what is now Zambia – but what for much of recent history was the British colony of Northern Rhodesia. In the middle part of the last century, there arose among the Barotse a new type of demonic possession. Formerly, the Barotse might have visited the exorcist for an ailment known as mahamba, possession by an ancestral spirit. However, as the 20th century and British colonial rule progressed, a new ailment was discerned. The people began to suffer from something they called bindele, which is their word for European.

The Barotse were being driven mad by occupation and colonization. The political possession of Zambia by Europeans was felt, was expressed, and was manifest in a spiritual possession of the individual – a sort of conflation of the human body with the body politic.

The body of the Gerasene demoniac is possessed by evil spirits that bear the name of the imperial powers that possess his country and the entire region.

In a bit of a foreshadowing as well as a poetic reversal of the coming trial and execution of Jesus at the hands of the Romans, this legion of demons recognizes Jesus’ authority and begs Jesus to be spared. They beg him not to be sent out of the country. Foreign occupation forces hate that! Instead, they ask to be sent into a herd of swine.

A double pun is at work here. Of course, swine were viewed as unclean by the Hebrews –- so the demon named Legion convicts himself with his request. But it’s also interesting to note that the 10th Legion of the Roman army which was at this point stationed the cities of the Decapolis, took for its totemic animal the boar. Legion wants to remain in possession of the country, to remain as fierce as the boar they use to represent their power.

Jesus does allow them to enter the swine -- but then the swine plunge themselves into the sea where they perish. In this episode, it is Jesus who triumphs over the Roman oppressors. Such was the hope of many in first century Palestine who looked for the messiah to come and banish the infidel Romans.

And yet others, at the trial of Jesus, and in our story today, are uncomfortable with the power Jesus represents. These are they who cry for Jesus’ crucifixion. These are they who want Jesus to leave Gerasa and to stop exorcising demoniacs.

Roman occupation may be bad, but hey… the devil you know -- by name in this case -- might be better than the unknown.

What do we want of our God? Do we want equality and liberty? Do we want mercy for all? Do we really want God’s justice to reign on the earth? Do we want an end to oppression and exploitation? Do we really want to be lead to honor one another and serve the common good?

Or are we maybe a bit ambivalent about what God’s justice for the world might look like? If the wealth of creation and the bounty of the earth were to be more equitably distributed, if we truly used the resources of the earth rightly in the service of others we in this country would certainly be the poorer for it.

If there was an end to exploitation, we would surely start to pay a lot more for our clothes, our toys, and almost everything else that comes to us as a result of cheap third-world labor. We may pray for a world in which the God that commands the sea and the spirits reigns, dispensing healing, and justice and mercy to all. But we also might be trepidatious about such a world, if we have to relinquish some of the imperial benefits that we enjoy. [For more on the real cost of cheap consumer goods, see the New York Times Book Review's July 19th issue about "Cheap" by Ellen Ruppel Shell.]

We might like Almighty God to take command of our troubled hearts, to cleanse our spirits and to comfort our souls. But do we also want God to take command of the world and its wealth? Do we really want God’s kingdom on earth, or are we more comfortable with God’s kingdom when it’s safely tucked away in heaven? We may find that our truest prayer is the prayer once prayed by St. Augustine, “Lord, make me holy -- but not yet.”

If we’re honest with ourselves on a spiritual level, we might be somewhat conflicted about what we want of our God. But I think we can be clear about what our God wants of us. As Jesus begins to depart Gerasa, the former demoniac asks to accompany him. But Jesus tells him "Go home to your friends, and tell them how much the Lord has done for you, and what mercy he has shown you."

Well, that I can do, and so, I expect, can you. The fate of the world, the powers and principalities that rule the earth, might be beyond our control, whether we detest them as we should, or cling to them as we perhaps do.

But I expect we can all tell how much the Lord has done for us, and the mercy he has shown us -- in some respect, great or small. And maybe if we do that, maybe if we tell our truths -- to others and to ourselves-- we’ll become a little bit more ready to be as holy as our God wants us to be.

Maybe if we tell of how our God reigns in our hearts, we’ll help make our world a place where God’s justice can reign over all the earth – as well as in every human heart. +Amen

© The Rev. Mark R. Collins