Galatians 3:23-29
Leader: Now before faith came, we were imprisoned and guarded under the law until faith would be revealed.
People: Therefore the law was our disciplinarian until Christ came, so that we might be justified by faith.
Leader: But now that faith has come, we are no longer subject to a disciplinarian,
People: for in Christ Jesus you are all children of God through faith.
Leader: As many of you as were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ.
People: There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.
ALL: And if you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham's offspring, heirs according to the promise.
Luke 8:26-39
26 Then they arrived at the country of the Gerasenes, which is opposite Galilee. 27 As he stepped out on land, a man of the city who had demons met him. For a long time he had worn no clothes, and he did not live in a house but in the tombs. 28 When he saw Jesus, he fell down before him and shouted at the top of his voice, "What have you to do with me, Jesus, Son of the Most High God? I beg you, do not torment me"-- 29 for Jesus had commanded the unclean spirit to come out of the man. (For many times it had seized him; he was kept under guard and bound with chains and shackles, but he would break the bonds and be driven by the demon into the wilds.) 30 Jesus then asked him, "What is your name?" He said, "Legion"; for many demons had entered him. 31 They begged him not to order them to go back into the abyss. 32 Now there on the hillside a large herd of swine was feeding; and the demons begged Jesus to let them enter these. So he gave them permission. 33 Then the demons came out of the man and entered the swine, and the herd rushed down the steep bank into the lake and was drowned. 34 When the swineherds saw what had happened, they ran off and told it in the city and in the country. 35 Then people came out to see what had happened, 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 were afraid. 36 Those who had seen it told them how the one who had been possessed by demons had been healed. 37 Then all the people of the surrounding country of the Gerasenes asked Jesus to leave them; for they were seized with great fear. So he got into the boat and returned. 38 The man from whom the demons had gone begged that he might be with him; but Jesus sent him away, saying, 39 "Return to your home, and declare how much God has done for you." So he went away, proclaiming throughout the city how much Jesus had done for him.
Children and Heirs
Sunday, June 20th, 2004
Proper 7 (12)
Jerusalem Baptist Church, Emmerton, VA
Luke 8:26-39
I was in the den, watching television, when the doorbell rang. I walked into the living room and opened the door. Charlie was standing there, looking calm and collected. His eyes were clear, but his air was a little disheveled. His hair gave away the fact that there was something not entirely well with him. Though it had begun to grow back, there were still places where you could see his scalp through a very recent covering of newly-growing hair. Charlie had taken a pair of scissors to his head a couple of weeks earlier, during a psychotic break, after which he almost set the building in which he lived on fire. Charlie was a client of my housemates’ in Louisville, who worked with men and women who suffered from various illnesses of the brain that manifested in harrowing and, for the families, tortuous ways. Claude happened to not be in that afternoon, and Charlie didn’t ask to come in.
I’ve often wondered what it must be like to be possessed. Whether it was the man in our passage this morning, or Mary Magdalene, whom we read about last Sunday, having 7 demons thrown out of her. What would it be like to have a legion of demons driving me to madness, to run naked, and live in caves and tombs, away from the normal people, SANE society?
Past and present Hollywood depictions of demon possession would have us believe one who is possessed to have red-rimmed glow-in-the-dark eyes, and a raspy, guttural voice, and a free-floating very flexible neck, the easier to allow the head to spin on, as well as an easy, now you see it now you don’t subjection to the law of gravity.
Biblical records tell of demon possessed individuals and make passing reference to understandably appalling conditions, but they do not go into detail about what the people looked or sounded like. That is left to our imagination, for the most part, though some information is given.
To be honest, my first thought in approaching the text today was, ‘it’s Father’s day, how in the WORLD am I going to tie this story in with that?’
Well, I didn’t have to look very far.
Father’s day is a tough celebration for me. In relation to my own and Leslie’s father, it couldn’t be easier. James Kenneth Park and Donald Kenneth Maccubbin have given me more than enough reason to be thankful on Father’s day – I’ll not say this too strongly or dwell on it too much, but I’ve made it my intentional prayer on Father’s day to give thanks to God for Fathers who make it easy to think of God as Father.
I remember the first time I thanked God for fathers who make it easy to think of God as Father. It was Thanksgiving, 1991, and we had invited about a dozen of our friends, including my sisters Becky and … I think Lolly as well, and my father, who happened to be in the States on business with the Spanish Baptist Publishing House in El Paso, TX, to celebrate thanksgiving with Claude and me at the house on Field Avenue. The friends included at least two women who had been sexually abused by their fathers, though at the time, I only knew the story of one of them. I remember hearing a … quick intake of breath, not quite a gasp, when I spoke the phrase, and I sensed a sort of collective bracing in the fabric of the dynamics of the room, but there was no interruption of the prayer.
Please hear me say this: I don’t want us to come away today thinking of God ONLY as ‘Father’, but I DO want us to recognize traits in our fathers through which we can catch a glimpse of the father-heart of God. And by the same token, I hope we can, in those instances where our fathers have been less than perfect, find that the grace of God still has the power to heal and restore what is beyond our ability or power to control or restore by ourselves. Sometimes that happens through someone stepping into the father role, sometimes it doesn’t, but it does happen.
Jay, my former college roommate and United Methodist Minister and I usually end up online at the same time for part of the evening anyway, on Saturdays. We usually chat a little about how things are going, and bounce ideas off each other about what we are preaching from. Last night he pointed out a phrase that we find mentioned twice in the passage from Luke, and that is the response of the townspeople when they heard and saw that Jesus had cast out the demons from the man – IT WAS FEAR. I’m not talking about the swineherds who lost the pigs; it would seem that they would have a leg to stand on, at least in the most superficial interpretation of the event, if they had something to be sore about. After all, they were out of their livelihood. I AM talking about the people who had, probably over the years or months during which this man was possessed, become accustomed to his presence around them. Perhaps he served as a kind of built-in entertainment for the surrounding population. Here again those three verses:
35 Then people came out to see what had happened, 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 were afraid. 36 Those who had seen it told them how the one who had been possessed by demons had been healed. 37 Then all the people of the surrounding country of the Gerasenes asked Jesus to leave them; for they were seized with great fear.
Doesn’t that seem odd to you? Wouldn’t you imagine that there would be a Positive response to Jesus’ casting out a legion of demons from a man who runs around with no clothes on in a cemetery? Doesn’t it seem to make sense that the end result, the man sitting in his right mind, clothed, next to Jesus would be a more desirable outcome than to have to continue to put up with him in his deranged state?
If there is a single argument for a high degree of historicity to the Gospel accounts of Jesus’ ministry, it is this: they are true to human nature, even when it seemingly goes against what one would expect to find in the middle of a work written for the express purpose of bringing the reader or listener to faith in Jesus. If the Disciples had had the services of a modern-day publicist, the passage would probably read “they found the man from whom the demons had gone sitting at the feet of Jesus, clothed and in his right mind. And they began to ask him about his encounter with Jesus, and thousands believed and followed Jesus that day. But it doesn’t come out that way. We find the same pattern in the passion narrative. The disciples didn’t behave in what we could comfortably call a noble or courageous manner.
So the scene begs the question: What were they afraid of? Were they afraid that perhaps the demons that had taken over this man were still at large, and might take them over as well? Were they simply afraid of the power Jesus displayed in ridding the man of the demons? After all, a legion was the term used to indicate a division of the Roman army, which consisted of 5,000 men so - drawing a loose parallel - we’re talking about a considerable number of otherworldly spirits inhabiting one person. Or was there something else going on?
Might it be that what they were afraid of was the CHANGE that the event could potentially mean for their individual, settled, to whatever degree they could be, lives in a quiet, rural area of the Transjordan?
They were confronted with another type of possession, in the person sitting beside the formerly demon-possessed man, the man they called Jesus. He was utterly and totally possessed by the living God. To the point where he could say, “if you have seen me, you have seen the father.”
I said earlier that Father’s day is a tough celebration – and I mean that in this way: it is tough FOR ME to think of myself as someone worth celebrating in the role as father. I feel inadequate to the task. More often than not, though I love my children, I wonder what damage I am doing to them; their psyches, their spirits, their sense of self… these last three days with Leslie gone have been good and sometimes bad, easy and sometimes hard. There are times when I can really identify with what it must’ve been like to be possessed by something not good for children. It’s funny, when it comes to dealing with my children, I find myself fairly often repeating Paul’s words in his letter to the Romans, we find it in chapter 7, verse 15:
“For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.”
It is in those moments that I think I can really identify with being possessed by demons.
I was honestly looking forward to the time to be with the kids. I thought last night as I was giving them their baths, about asking them what they liked most and least about me being their father. I didn’t ask. I chose not to. I know they love me, and I know they know I love them. Everything else I have to remind myself to give over to grace.
What does this mean for Jerusalem Baptist Church at Emmerton?
What this means is this: Can we, as fathers, mothers, brothers, and sisters, as children and heirs of the promise of life, look at the person sitting next to us and say in humility and love, “if you’ve seen me, you’ve seen the Father”?
Can we so form our lives, so discipline ourselves, to the point where, as Leslie Sanders mentioned last Saturday morning, the first thing people will think of when they see us is, “there is a child of God.”?
Let’s pray.
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