Sunday, January 21, 2024
Spirit of Hope Lutheran Church, Lincoln, NE
Third Sunday after Epiphany
(narrative lectionary)
watch this service online (reading starts around 22:26; children’s sermon starts around 24:39; sermon starts around 35:38)
Reading: Mark 5:1-20
In the children’s sermon today, we talked about the work of chaplains – pastor-ish people who work in settings like prisons and hospitals and the military – in places where people might be suffering or under great stress or in need of hope. I talked especially about my experience working as a hospital chaplain. Like me, most chaplains don’t tend to have much of a medical background; we don’t have the knowledge or skill to heal sick and injured people who come to the hospital.
So I asked the children why so many hospitals would hire chaplains, knowing that they can’t actually make anybody better. We talked about what a blessing it can be for someone who is lonely or suffering or in pain to know that they aren’t alone, to know that someone cares. I asked them to think about times they have been lonely or sad or hurting and someone was there for them.
In our reading, Jesus steps off a boat and meets this man who is plagued with demons. His community doesn’t seem to know what to do with him, so they chain him up out in the cemetery and leave him there alone. He was already suffering from this whole demon situation, but no doubt this rejection and isolation from his community made things feel so much worse for him.
We imagined together how much different this man’s life might have been if his community had treated him with kindness and sat with him in his suffering. They didn’t have the ability to heal him, like Jesus does in the story, but we agreed that they could have made his life a whole lot better by showing him compassion.
It’s perhaps the most important lesson I learned as a chaplain: sometimes people are going through hard things that we just can’t fix. And we might be tempted to avoid them because there’s nothing we can say or do to make things better. But just showing up and being present, showing someone you care and that they’re not alone, can make more of a difference than we know. We can be a physical, tangible sign of God’s unfailing love in the moments when people need it the most – and that is an extraordinary blessing indeed.
Our reading for today from the gospel of Mark brings us one of the best known stories from the life of Jesus: the healing of this man possessed by a legion of demons. Or, as I’ve heard our bishop say, you could also read this story as the biblical origin of deviled ham. (lol) 😈🐷
There are a lot of layers to what is happening in this story. Jesus and his disicples have just crossed the Sea of Galilee. We skipped over the story, but they sailed through a massive storm, which you might remember Jesus calmed with a few words. And now they’ve landed on the other side, in gentile territory – the country of the Gerasenes. As they head toward the city, they walk by a cemetery, where they suddenly encounter a man tormented by demons, who lives chained up among the tombs. Jesus, being Jesus, immediately goes to heal the man and – after some brief negotiations with the demons – he allows the demons to possess a herd of pigs, which immediately run into the sea and drown. Super weird story so far, right? But it gets weirder.
The pig-herders whose ham just got deviled run back to the city and tell everyone what happened. And then, naturally, the people of the city run back out to see for themselves – “and when they came to Jesus, they found the man from whom the demons had gone sitting at the feet of Jesus, clothed and in his right mind. And they became frightened.” It’s not the demons, or the snapped chains, or even the possessed pigs – it’s seeing this man healed and clothed and in his right mind that really freaks them out. It’s only after Jesus frees this man from his demons that the people become afraid.
And you’ve got to wonder – why?? Why is *that* the moment that people are suddenly afraid – this moment of healing and liberation?
It’s possible that maybe the people are afraid because they think Jesus is somehow in league with the demons. The demons sure do seem to recognize him, and when he tells them to get lost, they listen to him. Maybe the people are worried about what else Jesus might decide to tell those demons to do!
Or conversely, maybe they’re afraid because those demons can probably be pretty scary. (I mean, demons sure sound pretty scary to me!) And so someone who’s strong enough to send a whole legion of demons running for the hills has got to be downright terrifying!
But it’s also possible that there’s another layer of meaning to this story that gives the people cause for fear – and there are some clues in the language of the story that seem to point us in that direction.
For starters, Mark’s gospel is famous for being relatively short on detail (Mark’s in a hurry to get this story told and he doesn’t really linger long on setting the scene!). And yet, here he takes the time to include Jesus’ conversation with this demon – and he even tells us the demon’s name: Legion. Obviously, a name like Legion tells us that there are a lot of demons hanging out inside this poor guy. But “Legion” was also a very specific term used by the Roman military for divisions of over 5,000 soldiers. And, in fact, if you look at the original Greek text, you’ll see that Mark literally uses the word “legion” – which is not a Greek word, but a Latin one – ie, the language of Rome.
And then there’s the title that the demons use to address Jesus when they start shouting at him. They call him: “Jesus, Son of the Most High God.” We hear that and think, “Well yeah, duh. He’s Jesus, that’s who he is” – and Jesus certainly doesn’t deny it. To our ears, “Son of the Most High God” sounds like a religious title. But under Roman rule, proclaiming someone to be the Son of the Most High God was a potentially dangerous thing to say. Because, to the Romans, there was exactly one Son of the Most High God, and that was: Caesar, the emperor – not this random Jewish guy.
So you get the sense that Jesus is really poking the bear here. This story not only implies Jesus casting out the Roman military – one of the most feared and powerful militaries in the world – it is also basically declaring that Jesus himself is the real emperor, not Caesar. You can see why all this might make people feel a little bit nervous!
In this light, ironically, it might not be that the people are frightened by Jesus’ demonstration of power. They might actually be afraid that Jesus isn’t powerful enough. Much like the ancient Judeans, the Gerasenes lived in territory that had been conquered and occupied by the Roman Empire. No doubt they would have been very familiar with Roman legions and with the cult of the emperor. They had probably seen up close just how powerful and brutal the Roman empire and its military could be. They knew that there was just no standing up against such a massive and overwhelming force. So I can imagine them being afraid that Jesus, with his words and actions, is essentially writing a check that he’s just not strong enough to cash – and they want no part of that! They can’t imagine anyone having enough power to change the way things are.
And I confess that I can relate to that feeling, that doubt and fear. It’s not the Roman Empire, but this world that we live in is so overwhelming sometimes. Our systems of care are so broken, leaving so many people sick and hungry and homeless. And our governing bodies are so gridlocked that nothing ever seems to change, with lawmakers trying to please the most extreme voices in their parties rather than ensure care for the vulnerable. I mean, I can’t speak for you, but for me, every time someone so much as mentions the 2024 elections, I just feel this deep sense of existential dread. And all this is to say nothing of the power-hungry strongmen across the globe who are hell-bent on expanding their territory and dragging the rest of the world into war.
In the face of so much violence and suffering and division – and so little political will to change things – it’s easy to feel hopeless sometimes, and powerless; easy to wonder what good faith and God and all that can do when things just seem so irredeemably broken.
But, unlike the Gerasenes in our reading, we know how the rest of the story goes. We know that Jesus does have the power – he has all the power! – because we know how Jesus’ story began. We know that he’s much more than some random Jewish guy – he is God made flesh, the author of all creation. He created seas and people and pigs, armies and emperors and everything that is. He is the Lord of life and death. And, in fact, the setting of this story among the tombs – in a place of death – almost seems to be foreshadowing of what’s to come. It points us forward toward the hope in Christ’s victory over death itself. I honestly don’t know how it could get more powerful than that!
And Jesus Christ is still our living Lord. His power is still on our side, as we work for the healing of this world. And that power flows through us as we work together to love and serve our neighbors, to advocate for justice, and to witness to our hope in God’s coming kingdom of peace.
Progress may be slow… very slow. We may not be able to exorcise this world’s troubles with a word, like Jesus can. We may not be able to un-devil anybody’s ham! 🐷 But we can have faith in Christ’s transformative power to free this world from the systems of sin that hold us bound. We can trust in the power of Christ’s love in us and among us, making all things new.
This is the Day 