June 24, 2007
The Fourth Sunday after Pentecost (Year C)
Worship in the Park and Baptism
I Kings 19:1-15a; Psalm 42:1-7; Galatians 3:23-29; Luke 8:26-39
Sometimes when I read bible stories, I am immediately aware that I am reading metaphor. And sometimes I think we want to take the metaphors of the bible and analyze them in the same way we analyze newspaper articles or academic history.
And I forget that the metaphors of the bible are rich with symbols and meanings, meanings meant to instruct us in our spiritual lives, not to be the object of an academic test. The metaphors of the bible are for testing our souls, and this morning I think our lessons are ripe with spiritual challenges and layers of meaning.
While I am only going to speak of the reading from Luke, I hope that you will take your booklets home and think about the rich spiritual fodder there is in the other lessons as well.
Jesus arrives in the country of the Gerasenes, foreigners. And he encounters a demon filled man, a crazy man, we would call him today, paranoid or bipolar, multiple personality, possibly schizophrenic. But most of all he was then and would be now, an “unclean man,” one that should not be touched, who would not have been touched by anyone around him in years. Fear would have surrounded him like a plague filled fence, and fear would have caused those who saw him to point fingers, or even worse, I suppose, to look the other way.
But Jesus saw this man, not as some village idiot, not as some pathetic, unclean monster, not as a sick, sick man, not as someone who needed to be medicated, but as a man, plain and simple. Jesus accepted him for who he was, as he was. And the voices within the man cried out for Jesus’ attention.
Now metaphorically speaking, pigs were a symbol to first century Palestinians of the ultimate in what would be defined as unclean. Jews didn’t eat pig and Jews didn’t herd pigs. Foreigners did, the outsiders; they handled the pigs. Pigs for demons would make pretty good sense to a first century Jew. What better place to put those “unclean spirits than into an already unclean pig?”
To us sending a pack of swine into the lake to drown sounds pretty calloused, but it was a different world with a different set of premises in the first century.
But here is the miraculous thing that happened in this story, not the pigs or the unclean spirits, nor even the healing of the formerly crazed human being, it was that the man was converted into understanding who Jesus was/is by the experience. The man became an evangelist. He went away proclaiming throughout the city how much Jesus had done for him.
The encounter with Jesus transformed his life in ways that nothing else ever could or would, and it made a person, formerly unacceptable by society, into one who could convert the masses. What a powerful proclamation that is, a true story of true change!
This morning we will baptize Jared, and we will do metaphorically what Jesus did with the pigs. We will renounce evil, and claim Christ as the center of his life from this day forward. Now, of course, we never rejected Jared and we never put him outside the fold. But there were times in Christianity when the un-baptized were outside, There have been times in Christian history when people by category were outside the fold and seen as untouchable just as the crazed man in today’s gospel. There were slaves. There were women, yes, women. There were unmarried folks, divorced folks, gay folks, all of them outside the fold. And speaking non metaphorically, there have been Christians who have espoused that they be kept outside the fold and marked as unclean forever, that the reaching salvation of Christ was outside their reach. But this story says differently. This story tells us that Jesus comes to the outsiders and pulls them inside.
Because I am the kind of person I am, one who is always looking about twenty to forty years ahead of things, I often ask myself questions like: who is on the margins today? Who is it that we see as filled with demons and untouchable? Who is it we want to transform with swine and magic words? All so that we can make everyone “more like us.”
Then this story takes on new layers of meaning for me. For I think we, including me, tend to treat people with mental illnesses as though they are not fully human. I think we put them on the margins, and we think them incapable of an important opinion or of being someone not worth listening to. We tend to look away when we see them, or worse, to stare at them in disgust. When we encounter a person who is unmedicated and living on the street, we are irritated and angry. We cast aspersions and want to either fix them or condemn them.
So we are not so great to those who suffer from what we term as mental health conditions that set them apart in some way. And I wonder if there is not a challenge to us in that? I wonder if those who suffer from mental health disorders – and I am not talking about antisocial behavior that causes harm to others here – but those who have severe depression, or paranoia or other “not your average Joe” conditions that set them apart from the norm or from people like us, I wonder, from a historical sociological vantage point, if they are not tomorrow’s gay, lesbian, and transgendered people. I wonder, metaphorically speaking, if they are not tomorrow’s slaves or demoniacs. I wonder.
Today as we baptize Jared, we will promise to respect the dignity of every human being as we reaffirm out baptismal vows in his honor and as his parents and godparents make them for him. I wonder if we can be an example for him of how to live into that promise in how we treat others, especially those others that our culture labels in some way or excludes in some way? I hope so.
And I also hope that by what we do here today, Jared is not just marked as Christ’s own forever with a surface cross and a candle and a few prayers. I hope the words we pray and the action we take seep into his soul and mark him as Christ’s own forever in ways that allow him to be as Jesus was/is, as one who sees in everyone a beloved creation of God, someone who belongs and is worthy of His time and energy. May it be so!
Amen.
The Rev. Dr. Gale Davis Morris
Church of the Good Shepherd