The Gerasene Demoniac & Empire Proper 7C

 

The Gerasene Demoniac & Empire    Proper 7C

I’ve been pondering our story of a naked, demon possessed man in the gospels (Luke 8:26-39), and St. Paul’s assertion that for those of us who dare to claim we are of the Body of Christ there is no male and female, no free and slave, no Jew and Greek (Galatians 3:23-29). Were Paul alive and writing letters today one can safely imagine he would add, “there is no liberal and conservative, no red states and blue states, no MAGA and Woke people, but in the Kingdom of God Christ lives, died, and rose from the dead for, we are to Be and Act as One in Christ for the sake of the life of the world. In Christ there are to be no such divisions. 

Meanwhile, we are seriously considering to enter into the widening war between Israel and Iran. Mike Huckabee, our Ambassador to Israel, and an Evangelical Zionist Christian who believes that a Middle East War will precipitate a return of Jesus, urges our president to listen to the voice “he will hear from heaven,” and take advantage of an opportunity “we have not seen since President Truman,” who ordered the drop of two nuclear weapons on Japan, destroying two cities and killing somewhere between 240,000 and 260,000 people, not including many more civilians and soldiers who died in the subsequent weeks, months, and years due to injuries, burns, and radiation poisoning. The ambassador seems to feel this is the time to drop The Bomb on Iran. And bring Jesus back – as if we have the power to do such a thing. 

Enter a man possessed by demons. We might take the story of this man as primitive, but no one in his or her right mind can deny that there is set before us any number of demonic options of how to proceed as a nation that many want to call, or categorize, as Christian. As I was running the other morning the following quote popped into my consciousness:

“My point, once again, is not that those ancient people told literal stories and we are now smart enough to take them symbolically, but that they told them symbolically and we are now dumb enough to take them literally.”

John Dominic Crossan, Who Is Jesus? Answers to Your Questions About the Historical Jesus 

Crossan, also wrote, God and Empire: Jesus Against Rome, Then and Now, in which he argues that in contrast to the oppressive Roman military occupation of the first century is the non-violent Kingdom of God prophesized by Jesus, and the equality and breaking down of all “us and them” categories advocated by Paul. Crossan contrasts these messages of peace with the misinterpreted apocalyptic vision from the Book of Revelation, which has been misrepresented by modern right-wing theologians and televangelists to justify U.S. military actions in the Middle East. Seriously, does anyone believe that Jesus, who on his last day walking upon this Earth made clear to Pilate, the Empire’s local toady, that he had no army, and had no plan to fight; that he came to announce the kingdom of God as a kingdom of justice and peace for all people with respect, mercy and love for every human being; does anyone think that Jesus, our Jesus, would justify military action anywhere as a solution to anything whatsoever? Let alone trigger his return. 

Then I asked myself, who is the demon possessed man, chained and shackled by others, separated entirely from his home community, living among the dead in the tombs? Might he symbolically represent Israel, and any other of the client states of Rome, oppressed by an Empire just as the Hebrew children were by Pharaoh in Egypt? Like those Exiled to Babylon after destruction of the First Jerusalem Temple? Like those in the first century under a military occupation such that home is no long home, but a land oppressed and forced to feed the needs and greed of the Roman Empire, causing great poverty, loss of family lands, and unhappiness? 

We note that the demons identify themselves as Legion, “because we are many.” Is it too far fetched to think they represent the Roman legions who occupy the homeland? And they ask to be sent into a flock of un-kosher pigs, which tells us that Jesus is in Gentile territory and interested in helping a Gentile who has been ostracized from his home community. Again, if someone mentioned that the Tenth Roman Legion was responsible for burning down all of Jerusalem and the Temple, and that the Tenth Legion’s emblem was a Boar, is it to far fetched that those watching this drama unfold might see the irony and the hope that this young Jew might be the one who could end the nightmare of Roman occupation and send it headlong into the sea? 

Jesus is there in the region of the Gerasenes to demonstrate that Paul would eventually “get it,” and recognize that in the kingdom Jesus comes to announce and inaugurate is to be a peaceable kingdom as Isaiah had envisioned some six hundred years earlier. He reaches out to this dangerous looking demon possessed man and recognizes him as a human being like any other, someone’s son, someone’s brother, perhaps someone’s father. Even the townspeople seem to have recognized him as someone who has some relationship to their community, or else they likely would have treated him like a mad dog, and put him down. But they do not. 

As soon as they see him properly dressed, demons gone, in his right mind at the feet of Jesus, they are afraid. They see that the power of love and mercy is stronger than any Empire, than any and all attempts to divide the community into acceptable and unacceptable persons. Others were upset that pork belly futures had literally sunk into the roiling surf. They asked Jesus to leave. 

But before he can even get back into the boat, the boat which the night before had nearly sunk in a storm, the man whom Jesus had accepted as one more human being deserving of respect, and justice, and God’s mercy and shalom, begs Jesus to take him with the others, the oft bumbling disciples who were frightened out of their wits the night before, and even more so when they saw this man, naked and wracked with demons. 

But Jesus says, “No. Go back to your city and tell people what the God of the Exodus, the God of Return from Exile, the God who will be with me as I hang on a Roman cross, and like you, will raise me from the dead; tell everyone the things our God, my Father, did for you.” And he did. And with no ire for those who had chained him and tossed him into the wilderness, he proclaimed to one and all the good news of Jesus Christ the Son of God. 

When we find ourselves isolated like this man; when we feel surrounded by demons of all kinds; when we find ourselves being encouraged to draw lines between ourselves and others; when home suddenly no longer looks or feels like home anymore; when it seems as if more violence is the only answer to a world of violence; what are we to do? Will we have the courage to respect the dignity of others – all others? Will we truly love our neighbors as ourselves – no exceptions? Will we proclaim a new kingdom, a new world, of justice and peace for all people? Can we find ways to allow Jesus to open us to the world he imagines; the world which his Father and our Father wills? For in such a time as we now find ourselves, this is what this story is meant to inspire us to become: the Body of Christ. Amen.

Trinity & Communitas Trinity Sunday (C)

 

Communitas    Trinity Sunday (C)

Bob Dorough, teaching about the number “3” on Schoolhouse Rock, used to sing:

Three is a magic number.

Somewhere in the ancient, mystic trinity

You get three as a magic number.

The past and the present and the future,

Faith, hope, and charity,

Give you three.

A man and a woman had a little baby, yes, they did.

They had three in the family.

That's a magic number. 

Three makes a family. A family is a small community. Community: from the Latin “communitas,” commonly referring to an unstructured community in which people are equal. A root understanding of community then is an unstructured group in which the people, or in the case of the Trinity, the personae, are equal. Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, then, can be seen as such a family or community in which the essence of the community is that the three are equal. Or, as we take some liberty with that equality, they are One. 

Those third- and fourth-century Christians who were under command to make some creedal assertions about the nature of Christian communitas referred to the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit as personae, as in a Greek play in which a single actor assumes the persona of two, or three, or more characters simply by changing masks – masks that represent the various characters the actor is playing. Those hammering out the creeds adopted as a metaphor the language of the theater, that artistic discipline which at its very core plumbs the diverse depths of human nature in story and narrative. 

So here, in our creeds and our theology, the single actor (God) is capable and has been perceived, and experienced in history, as having three basic, somewhat distinct personae or characteristics: that of a nurturing Father whose essence is Love; a Son who lives and acts among us as a representative of the essence of the Father; the Holy Spirit which sustains the actions of the Son as an ongoing essence of who we are, both as individuals and as a community of the Father and the Son. Trinity, then, means to express a communitas of three personae, the essence of which is Love. 

Paul, in his letter to the emerging church in Rome, recognizes this when writing that the peace, or Shalom, of God, is present in the Christian communitas because God’s essence, which is Love, has been poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit. That is, in Christ, we are to become a community of God’s love in all that we say and all that we do. 

In this sense, what we call Trinity is the work of Christ and the Holy Spirit infusing those of us who dare to call ourselves Christian with the Love of God. At the same time, these personae of God’s Love – Father, Son, and Holy Spirit – are, in a sense, a communitas, or family of three. The famous Rublev icon depicts this family of three somewhat androgynous Beings in that all three have long hair tied back with a long braid down their backs. In the background is a tree, perhaps the tree in the original garden, perhaps the tree upon which hung the world’s salvation, or perhaps the tree of the renewed and resurrected garden imagined by the revelation of St. John   the Revelator, with the crystal river flowing through the middle of the city, with trees from which hang leaves meant for the healing of all nations. 

When we try to speak of God, the God who has created all that is seen and unseen, a universe of some 14 billion years of light and love, we have no choice but to speak in metaphor. We speak of past, present, and future as a way of describing what we mean by “time.” This does not really give us a full picture and understanding of time; it doesn’t account for perceptions like when time seems to stand still or speed up. Certain times dissolve us into tears, other times give us great joy. Past, present, and future, then, gives us a framework to help us understand at least a part of what time is like. 

Ritually, we speak of this family or community of love as “Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.” Others call these three personae “Creator, Redeemer, Sustainer.” Former Presiding Bishop Michael Curry sometimes invokes the “Loving, liberating, and life-giving God.” The New Zealand Prayer Book describes our God as “Earth-maker, Pain-bearer, and Life-giver.” All are attempts to describe this sacred Family: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

 A family, and yet a unity. Three experiences or co-equal essences of the One God. Of Love. 

The deeper truth of it all is that the revelation of God is not dogma, not theology, not a doctrine, not a creed – not even a belief. For us, the revelation of God is a person – Jesus Christ, a person whose every story and teaching gives us some deep truth about the life, love, and the will of our God. Jesus reflects the very truth of creation – creation that is not static but ever unfolding with newness and more diversity. Things yet unseen come into being. And if we let ourselves enter into the diversity of God’s Triune Being, we learn that we are ever-changing, just as the whole universe is constantly coming into being. 

Paul tries to sum this up when he writes, “We have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.… the love of God has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us” (Romans 5:11-5). This gift of the very Spirit of God’s love constantly transforms us into a community that reflects God’s love. Of course, as important as is the giving of this gift, so is the receiving. Like all of creation which continues to unfold, when we allow ourselves to receive the love of God that the Spirit pours into our hearts, we become love made new. 

One last name for this Community of Love we call “Trinity” was coined by Evelyn Underhill, someone who wrote extensively on the mystery of God. She calls the Trinity “The School of Charity.” As Paul also wrote to the Corinthians, “Faith, hope, and charity, abide these three – but the greatest of these is charity” (1 Corinthians 13:13 KJV). We who are created in the image of God – imago Dei – are to become those people who abandon self-love and the greed and acquisition that grows out of such self-love, and become more like Jesus, God’s divine charity in human flesh and blood. We are to become a giving, sharing, self-emptying community of God’s divine charity, sharing the unending, unqualified love of our creator with all people and all nations, especially with all those who are utterly unlike ourselves. We are to be students of the Trinity so that we may become the School of Charity, a communitas of equals, and like the Trinity, ever-changing, yet the same, as a Community of Love. Forever and ever. Amen.