Ann I. Hoch - Sermon Untitled (June 21, 1998)
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| - | The second reading is from the Galatians, chapter three. | 0:07 |
| Now before faith came, we were imprisoned, | 0:12 | |
| and guarded under the law, until faith would be revealed. | 0:16 | |
| Therefore the law was our disciplinarian, until Christ came. | 0:20 | |
| So that we might be justified by faith, but now that faith | 0:26 | |
| has come, we are no longer subject to an disciplinarian | 0:31 | |
| for in Christ Jesus, we are children of God through faith. | 0:34 | |
| As many of you were baptized into Christ, have closed | 0:39 | |
| yourself with Christ, there is no longer Jew or Greek, | 0:43 | |
| there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer | 0:47 | |
| male and female, for all of you are one in Christ Jesus. | 0:51 | |
| And if you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham's | 0:58 | |
| offering, heirs according to the promise, | 1:01 | |
| this is the word of the Lord. | 1:06 | |
| The third reading is from the Gospel | 1:12 | |
| according to Saint Luke, chapter eight. | 1:15 | |
| Then they arrived to the country of | 1:18 | |
| Gerasenes, which is opposite Galilee. | 1:20 | |
| As he stepped out on land, a man of the city, | 1:23 | |
| who had demons who met him, for a long time | 1:26 | |
| he had worn no clothes, and he did not live in a house | 1:29 | |
| but in a tomb, when he saw Jesus, he fell down before him, | 1:33 | |
| and shouted at the top of his voice, | 1:37 | |
| "What have you to do with me, Jesus, son of the most | 1:40 | |
| high God, I beg you, do not torment me!" | 1:42 | |
| For Jesus had commanded the unclean spirit to | 1:47 | |
| come out of the man, for many times it had seized him, | 1:50 | |
| he was kept under guard, and bound with chains and shackles, | 1:55 | |
| but he would break the bonds and be driven by the demons | 2:00 | |
| into the wilds, Jesus then asked him, "What is your name?" | 2:03 | |
| He said, "Legion," for many demons had entered him. | 2:10 | |
| They begged him not to order them to go back into the abyss. | 2:16 | |
| Now on the hillside, a large herd of swine was feeding, | 2:20 | |
| and the demons begged Jesus to let them enter these. | 2:25 | |
| So he gave them permission, so then the demons came out | 2:28 | |
| of the man and entered the swine, and the herd rushed | 2:32 | |
| down the steep bank into the lake, and was drowned. | 2:36 | |
| When the swine herd saw what had happened, they ran off | 2:41 | |
| and told it in the city and in the country. | 2:44 | |
| Then people came out to see what had happened. | 2:47 | |
| And when they came to Jesus, they found the man, from | 2:50 | |
| whom the demons had gone, sitting at the feet of Jesus | 2:54 | |
| clothed and in his right mind, and they were afraid. | 2:57 | |
| Those who had seen it, told them how the one who had been | 3:04 | |
| possessed by demons had been healed. | 3:07 | |
| Then all the people of the surrounding country of | 3:10 | |
| the Gerasenes, asked Jesus to leave them, for they were | 3:13 | |
| seized with great fear, so he got into the boat | 3:17 | |
| and returned, the man from whom the demons had gone | 3:21 | |
| begged that he might be with him, but Jesus sent him away | 3:25 | |
| saying, "Return to your home, and declare | 3:30 | |
| how much God has done for you." | 3:34 | |
| So he went away, proclaiming throughout the city how much | 3:37 | |
| Jesus had done for him, this is the word of the Lord. | 3:41 | |
| [Congregation] Praise the Light. | 3:47 | |
| - | I'd like to take a moment of personal privilege, | 4:00 |
| to give thanks to God for the ministry of this place, | 4:04 | |
| for the staff and the congregation and all those here, | 4:10 | |
| and especially on this day to give thanks to God for | 4:14 | |
| the ministry and witness of Deborah Brazil. | 4:19 | |
| I preached in this chapel on Deborah's first Sunday, | 4:23 | |
| and I recalled it last night, and I think it's | 4:26 | |
| a fitting close for both of us to be here, sharing | 4:29 | |
| in the leadership of worship this morning. | 4:33 | |
| But I do thank you, Deborah, for what you have meant to me. | 4:36 | |
| Let us pray. | 4:42 | |
| Oh, God, silence in us any voice but your own, | 4:47 | |
| that hearing your word, we may believe and obey, amen. | 4:53 | |
| Our culture | 5:02 | |
| is often loathe to name things | 5:05 | |
| what they are, | 5:08 | |
| we disguise the truth with clever words, | 5:12 | |
| firings become downsizing, | 5:17 | |
| lying or cheating is a character flaw, | 5:21 | |
| unfaithfulness becomes an affair of passion, | 5:27 | |
| gluttony, drunkenness and greed | 5:34 | |
| get labeled addictions, | 5:38 | |
| evil moreover, is represented by | 5:42 | |
| a vapid theology that suggests nothing worse | 5:47 | |
| than mere unpleasantness | 5:52 | |
| or absence of good, | 5:55 | |
| the scripture lesson for today, | 5:59 | |
| forces us to take seriously the | 6:02 | |
| demonic dimension of life | 6:05 | |
| and Jesus' power over it. | 6:09 | |
| But first, we need to ask | 6:13 | |
| just where is the demonic located, | 6:17 | |
| this story from the Gospel of Luke, sheds some light | 6:23 | |
| on the answers to that question with straight forwardness | 6:27 | |
| and an ironic twist, | 6:32 | |
| lets consider first the situation | 6:37 | |
| of the man from the city, Gerasenes, | 6:41 | |
| he is unwelcome, | 6:46 | |
| the one rejected by his community. | 6:49 | |
| Granted, he wore no clothes | 6:54 | |
| nor lived in a house, | 6:58 | |
| pretty strange by any conventional standards, | 7:01 | |
| his neighbors did not want him running loose | 7:05 | |
| in their neighborhood, so they kept him under guard | 7:09 | |
| and bound with chains and shackles, | 7:13 | |
| but he broke the bounds, and ran into the wilds | 7:18 | |
| and lived among the tombs, | 7:23 | |
| you know it seems every community | 7:28 | |
| has some unwelcome element we would like to | 7:30 | |
| keep out of the spheres of our lives, | 7:35 | |
| not in my neighborhood, how many times have we heard | 7:40 | |
| that, better yet, | 7:45 | |
| how many times have we said that? | 7:48 | |
| The public schools decide to place children | 7:53 | |
| impaired with a variety of emotional, cognitive, | 7:56 | |
| and physical conditions in all classrooms. | 8:00 | |
| We worry about how the teachers and other children | 8:07 | |
| will be affected, | 8:09 | |
| why can't special education classes | 8:12 | |
| have their own rooms, corridors, even entrances? | 8:16 | |
| The county buys a house for the rehabilitation of | 8:24 | |
| substance abusers, uh-oh, | 8:27 | |
| recovering addicts are unpredictable and uncontrollable. | 8:31 | |
| What if they back slide, they will share our | 8:36 | |
| sidewalks, and lurk outside as we walk to our cars. | 8:41 | |
| There are numerous ways to deal with those | 8:49 | |
| who are unwelcome, to banish them, control them, | 8:51 | |
| keep them out of the way, | 8:58 | |
| Pat Conroy, in his novel, | 9:01 | |
| Prince of Tides, describes starkly what | 9:03 | |
| it must be like from the other side. | 9:06 | |
| In mental hospitals, no matter how humanistic | 9:10 | |
| or enlightened, | 9:14 | |
| keys are the manifest credentials of power. | 9:16 | |
| The steel asterisks of freedom and mobility. | 9:21 | |
| The march of orderlies and nurses is accompanied | 9:26 | |
| by the alienating cacophony of singing keys, | 9:29 | |
| striking against thighs, annotating the passage of | 9:33 | |
| the free, when you find yourself listening to their | 9:38 | |
| keys and owning none, you will come close to | 9:42 | |
| understanding the white terror of the soul, | 9:47 | |
| that comes from | 9:52 | |
| being banished from all commerce with human kind. | 9:53 | |
| We have a glimpse of where the | 10:01 | |
| demonic is located from one angle. | 10:03 | |
| But I do not mean to imply that there isn't more. | 10:08 | |
| And here it is, the unwelcome power. | 10:12 | |
| The unwelcome power is any source of evil, | 10:20 | |
| whether in an individual or human systems and structures. | 10:25 | |
| One biblical commentator writes of this story about | 10:31 | |
| the demoniac, even if one were to accept demon | 10:36 | |
| possession, as a way to name the disintegration of | 10:40 | |
| someone's personality, that we recognize as mental | 10:45 | |
| illness, and even if we were to recognize exorcism | 10:48 | |
| as a way to speak about healing, Luke's story is | 10:53 | |
| marked by such grotesque and fantastic descriptions, | 10:59 | |
| that it is like a caricature, | 11:04 | |
| drawn in primary colors. | 11:07 | |
| The fact is that we are not simply faced with | 11:11 | |
| an interesting medical case, but with the presence | 11:15 | |
| of the demonic, | 11:20 | |
| evil is real not theoretical, | 11:23 | |
| and none of us has to look further than ourselves, | 11:29 | |
| to know the demons that we struggle with. | 11:34 | |
| Self absorption, control, addictions of | 11:37 | |
| every kind, dishonesty, mistrust, jealousy, | 11:41 | |
| we can fill in the blanks for ourselves. | 11:47 | |
| Then there are the movements in which groups | 11:51 | |
| get caught, that work for evil. | 11:54 | |
| Whether it is in the senseless bombing of a | 11:58 | |
| nightclub by a militia group, people yelling | 12:01 | |
| obscenities and throwing rocks at other people | 12:05 | |
| because they have a different skin color or | 12:08 | |
| practice a different religion, or an undeclared and | 12:11 | |
| illogical war, | 12:16 | |
| we see the enslaving power of the | 12:18 | |
| demonic, an unwelcome power, | 12:21 | |
| if we are going to take seriously the force of evil, | 12:28 | |
| then even more | 12:33 | |
| we need to take seriously what God does about it. | 12:34 | |
| God sends Jesus | 12:41 | |
| to prevail over the demons, | 12:44 | |
| and defeat them he does, | 12:47 | |
| central to the ministry of | 12:52 | |
| Jesus and the Gospel of Luke, is Jesus' power | 12:53 | |
| to cast out demons, Jesus announces | 12:58 | |
| that a new age is breaking in, | 13:03 | |
| the Kingdom of God is here, | 13:06 | |
| therefore, he commands the demons to depart. | 13:09 | |
| That is why the demons cry out when they meet Jesus. | 13:14 | |
| They know that for them his coming means | 13:19 | |
| the beginning of the end, | 13:24 | |
| two chapters later in Luke, | 13:29 | |
| the 70 commissioned followers | 13:33 | |
| of Jesus joyfully report, "Lord, in your name, | 13:35 | |
| even the demons submit to us." | 13:39 | |
| to which Jesus replies, "I watched Satan | 13:43 | |
| fall from heaven like a flash of lightening, | 13:48 | |
| see I have given you authority to tread | 13:51 | |
| on snakes and scorpions, and over all the power | 13:56 | |
| of the enemy, and nothing will hurt you." | 14:00 | |
| Luke delights in Jesus' display of power over demons. | 14:06 | |
| And what a demonstration of power of Jesus | 14:12 | |
| unfolds in this story about the Gerasenes. | 14:17 | |
| Immediately, upon stepping out on land, | 14:22 | |
| Jesus is recognized by the demons, | 14:28 | |
| I said demons, not just one, but Legion, | 14:33 | |
| there were many, the possessed man falls | 14:38 | |
| upon the ground, and foolishly, the demons | 14:43 | |
| negotiate with Jesus so as not to | 14:47 | |
| be sent into the abyss, | 14:50 | |
| Jesus agrees to their | 14:54 | |
| request to enter the swine, but they wind up | 14:56 | |
| in the abyss anyway and are drowned. | 15:00 | |
| The spectacle Luke records had many witnesses, | 15:07 | |
| and the man sitting clothed and in his right mind, | 15:12 | |
| gave truth to the testimony of those who told the story. | 15:18 | |
| Now if Luke's story ended here, we could all | 15:26 | |
| joyfully celebrate the arrival of a power | 15:31 | |
| greater than evil, claim that all is right in the world, | 15:34 | |
| and go home, | 15:39 | |
| but it doesn't and we can't, not yet, anyway. | 15:42 | |
| The ironic twist Luke presents is this, | 15:50 | |
| Jesus is the unwelcome | 15:57 | |
| power of good. | 16:01 | |
| The very folk who tried to control | 16:05 | |
| and contain the Gerasenes, recognized the mystery | 16:07 | |
| and power of what has taken place, | 16:12 | |
| but they cannot make a place for it, | 16:15 | |
| or accommodate it in their lives, | 16:18 | |
| and they asked Jesus to leave, | 16:21 | |
| Jesus' power of good is unwelcome, he is rejected. | 16:24 | |
| And in that, to be sure, the demonic is | 16:31 | |
| located as well, | 16:36 | |
| it is only the one from whom | 16:40 | |
| the demons were exorcized, | 16:42 | |
| who appreciates Jesus and his power, | 16:46 | |
| the neighbors, Luke records, | 16:52 | |
| were seized with great fear, | 16:55 | |
| fear of what? | 17:00 | |
| Power over the demons, | 17:02 | |
| I suspect it's something more. | 17:06 | |
| A psychiatrist friend has written | 17:11 | |
| that when a destructive force of behavior is driven away, | 17:14 | |
| it has to be substituted with a good force. | 17:20 | |
| A community that wants to rid itself of war making, | 17:25 | |
| needs to substitute it with assertive peace making. | 17:30 | |
| A bad habit has to be replaced with a good habit. | 17:35 | |
| Perhaps this community of the Gerasenes was so | 17:41 | |
| accustomed to the evil presence, that it | 17:46 | |
| could push away or work around that freedom | 17:49 | |
| and wholeness were scary to them. | 17:55 | |
| They couldn't change and accept and unknown power. | 17:59 | |
| Even Jesus' power of good over the known | 18:05 | |
| and predictable power of evil, | 18:11 | |
| and that is often | 18:16 | |
| the response to workers of justice and righteousness. | 18:17 | |
| Julia Esquivel, is Guatemalan, a human rights | 18:24 | |
| activist, theologian, and poet. | 18:29 | |
| Her poem, I am Not Possessed, is dedicated | 18:34 | |
| to the many valiant women of her Quatemala, | 18:39 | |
| it goes, | 18:45 | |
| "I am not possessed, I am not crazy, obsessed | 18:46 | |
| with an idea, I am simply a women with a human heart, | 18:50 | |
| I am a rebel when faced with a cold and calculated | 18:56 | |
| correctness of a bureaucrat, | 19:00 | |
| he who is always bound | 19:04 | |
| by the limits of the correct, the objective, and | 19:06 | |
| the prudent of an always neutral balance. | 19:11 | |
| The one who avoids taking risks for the sake of his | 19:16 | |
| office and his prestige, | 19:19 | |
| I am the possessor of not | 19:23 | |
| possessed by the normality | 19:27 | |
| of a woman that rejects | 19:30 | |
| and always will reject the disorder constituted | 19:33 | |
| by macho's, all of them potential generals, | 19:36 | |
| by all who place the law above life, | 19:42 | |
| the institution above humanity, the personal project | 19:46 | |
| above truth, fear above love, | 19:51 | |
| ambition above humility, | 19:54 | |
| that I must admit to those obsessed with | 19:58 | |
| such criteria, | 20:02 | |
| I am a red hot coal, lighted | 20:04 | |
| by the fire of a great love, | 20:09 | |
| brother, do you know | 20:14 | |
| the story of the burning bush that was never | 20:16 | |
| consumed?" | 20:20 | |
| Juliet Esquivel has been exiled from | 20:24 | |
| Quatemala since 1980, | 20:28 | |
| the unwelcome power of good. | 20:34 | |
| So if the man who's demons were exercised, | 20:40 | |
| is the only one who appreciates Jesus | 20:45 | |
| and his power of good, what does that mean for us? | 20:50 | |
| I believe Jesus' power of good will continue to | 20:57 | |
| be unwelcome to us, until our own demons are | 21:01 | |
| exorcized, and Jesus' power of good is welcomed | 21:07 | |
| as a way of life, | 21:12 | |
| exorcisms are largely ignored | 21:16 | |
| in our culture, as Kathleen Norris notes in | 21:19 | |
| her new book, Amazing Grace: | 21:24 | |
| A Vocabulary of Faith, | 21:28 | |
| "I suspect that most people have experiences that | 21:31 | |
| need to be exorcized," she writes. | 21:34 | |
| Fortunately, exorcisms have not been quite killed off | 21:38 | |
| in the modern Protestant Church, I enjoy finding | 21:42 | |
| them tucked away in hymns, where people tend | 21:47 | |
| not to notice them, what might be considered | 21:52 | |
| Martin Luther's theme song, the tough and resolute | 21:56 | |
| a mighty fortress is our God, | 22:01 | |
| puts it well, | 22:05 | |
| in the third stirring verse, | 22:06 | |
| and those this world, | 22:12 | |
| with devils filled, should threaten to undo us, | 22:14 | |
| we will not fear, | 22:19 | |
| for God hath willed his truth | 22:22 | |
| to triumph through us, | 22:26 | |
| the Prince of Darkness Grim, | 22:30 | |
| we tremble not for him, | 22:32 | |
| his rage we can endure, | 22:36 | |
| for low his doom is sure, | 22:39 | |
| one little word shall fell him. | 22:44 | |
| We need to believe what we sing, | 22:50 | |
| that little word is Jesus. | 22:54 | |
| Jesus is the one who dispels all demons | 22:58 | |
| and leads us to a new way of life, | 23:03 | |
| a life in which | 23:07 | |
| each and every one who calls upon his name, | 23:09 | |
| welcomes the unwelcome, | 23:14 | |
| engages evil as the enemy, | 23:18 | |
| defeats the demonic, | 23:23 | |
| and works towards good, | 23:26 | |
| even when it is unwelcome. | 23:30 | |
| My friends, | 23:34 | |
| Jesus' power is good news, | 23:37 | |
| and it is the only hope we have to transform | 23:42 | |
| the world into what is not yet, | 23:47 | |
| and to purge it from what seems to be, | 23:51 | |
| amen. | 23:57 |