Saturday, June 18, 2016

Pentecost 5, Year C, Proper 7, June 19, 2916

Sermon for The Fifth Sunday After Pentecost
Year C, Proper 7  ~  June 19, 2016

Holy Trinity & St. Anskar 
All the people …. asked Jesus to leave them; for they were seized with great fear.

+In the Name of God, the Holy and Undivided Trinity

Exorcism is bad for business. Freeing people from domination by mysterious, unseen forces can upset the status quo and annoy powerful people. This may have happened in the case of the Gerasene demoniac as it does later in the Acts, when Paul and Silas are thrown into prison in Philippi for spoiling the business of the owners of the slave-girl medium they had healed.
Two details of today’s incident jump out to me:
  1. The liberated man wants to go with Jesus, but Jesus tells him to stay put.
  2.  The people who know what happened beg Jesus to go away, because they are seized with great fear.
There are two sermons here, so I will just give a nod to the first, and concentrate on the second.  Salvation comes through following Jesus, but He does not call everyone to follow Him. We know that Jesus will save those who follow Him. But that does NOT mean that those He tells to stay put are condemned. Not at all. We know where the Church is; we do NOT know where the Church is NOT, said the Russian theologian I never tire of quoting. From today’s story, it appears that Jesus doesn’t even WANT everyone to follow Him, at least not in the same way.  We must never think that we can tell anything about God’s relationship to other persons. One size does NOT fit all!
So on to the second sermon! Why did the locals want Jesus to get out as fast as possible. Maybe it had something to do with the dead pigs.
…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. Those who had seen it told them how the one who had been possessed by demons had been healed. Then all the people of the surrounding country of the Gerasenes asked Jesus to leave them; for they were seized with great fear.

Why were they so afraid, with a fear underscored in the passage? On first glance it might be fear of Jesus: fear of Someone with great, supernatural power. But where else do we find such a reaction? Other miracle stories lack this detail. People rejoice, people are amazed, people are thankful, &c, but not seized with great fear. What are they afraid of? I suggest that it has to do with the pigs. A large herd of them, feeding on the nearby hillside.
…Those who had seen it told them how the one who had been possessed by demons had been healed.

Which means they told them about what happened to the pigs, and
 …Then [everybody] asked Jesus to leave them; for they were seized with great fear.

Let’s think about that. Somebody must have been buying the pork. But why such a big herd? Pagan farmers could raise their own pigs, so who was buying those culled from a herd of hundreds – or even thousands? The Romans, that’s who! That’s one theory, at least.
There were Roman soldiers all over the place, legions in garrisons and higher officers living on their own. That would account for the large pork business that Jesus destroyed in the process of freeing the Gerasene demoniac. The owner would have been livid. A kind of “defense contractor,” he would have been quite well-to-do and influential. His hired swineherds ran into town to inform him, to explain that it wasn’t their fault. The crowd knew that he would arrive any minute – probably with Roman soldiers – and that would account for their fear. They wanted to put as much distance as possible between themselves and the meddlesome Outsider, Who destroyed the herd. Apparently, our Lord took their point and left immediately to go back across the Lake.
Exorcism is bad for business. In this instance, it is also – arguably – bad for imperialism. In freeing the poor kid from the unseen forces that dominated him, Jesus also indirectly challenged Roman imperial rule. It is not just an accident that the demons called themselves, legion, referring to a unit of the Roman Army. It’s a Latin word, and Jesus was throwing these Latin-named demons out. He sent them directly to destroy the swine, unclean food intended for the occupying imperialists.
Exorcism is bad for business. In this case, it attacked not only the Empire’s food-supply, it also destroyed a fair amount of capital. If the demons were really comparable to a legion it meant –  at the time – about five thousand of them. At one demon per pig, that was indeed a large herd: an extraordinarily substantial capital accumulation. Jesus interfered with the market intended to support the current system of imperial governance. 
As the Gerasene demoniac was enslaved by the demons whose name was Legion, so the People of God were dominated by the Roman legions. And not by military force alone: a small number of local civilians grew rich by collaborating with the imperial overlords. This was a kind of First Century Military-Industrial Complex. And as we just heard, Jesus assaulted it by destroying the collaborator’s wealth. THAT is why those who saw it were seized with great fear.
So, it should be obvious that exorcism – the freeing of human beings from the forces of evil that corrupt and destroy the creatures of God, the forces we renounce at Baptism – is not ultimately about wicked ghosts. It is about systemic evil – the mysterious, unseen forces that seem to have a life of their own, that cause increasing misery and now threaten our very survival.
The Gerasene demoniac represents God’s creation, enslaved and disfigured and mortally endangered. The One through Whom all things were made is come to set us free. If that entails destroying whatever feeds and nourishes those mysterious, unseen forces along with the wealth of those willing to collaborate and support them, so be it.
Exorcism is bad for business.
AMEN
 MARANATHA
COME, LORD JESUS!



This page is powered by Blogger. Isn't yours?