Living in the graveyard

Proper 7, Year C, RCL

Isaiah 65:1-9
Psalm 22:18-27

Galatians 3:23-29
Luke 8:26-39

Living in the Graveyard

An old friend of mine used to say, “People will walk a thousand miles to kill a peaceful man.”  Most of the time I bristled at my friend’s never deigning to use inclusive language but I learned a lot from him and I still think about him a lot.  Maybe he in turn was quoting Tolstoy or Shakespeare, his two favorite referents, although maybe it was Jesus, who was gaining on first place near the end.  I kept hearing Mr. Lange say this about the peaceful man as I read and re-read today’s lessons. 

Here the obverses are operating, however, as in both Isaiah and Luke the peaceful man is, in the first instance, shunned by rebellious people and in the second begged off.  The point is that rebellious, demon-infested people don’t want to have anything to do with do-gooding peaceniks.  Sometimes this phenomenon will take a violent tack and we end up with the peaceful person being murdered like Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr., or being imprisoned like the thousands of peaceful dissidents languishing in jails the world over, a current prominent example being Aung San Suu Kyi of Burma whose “crime” was winning a democratic election.

No, people who sacrifice in gardens, offer incense on bricks, sit inside tombs and spend the night in secret places, eat swine’s flesh and toss it down with abominable broth, who run around naked and rattle their chains do not like it one bit when their tormentors, even if they are well intentioned, approach.  Who would?  I don’t know if you’ve ever felt this way, but I have plenty of times, when I am so out of sorts that the last thing I want is a helping hand or helpful advice or a shoulder to cry on.  I can hear myself saying, “I wish everybody would just leave me alone.”  I think we all realize this is the last thing anybody ever really wants but at this miserable time that I’m talking about, it seems to be the thing.  If people would just quit nagging me, pestering me, let me do what I want, I would be alright. And I don’t want to hear anything about duty or responsibility nor love or God or Jesus neither.  God never did nothin’ for me and so forth and so on. 

It’s at this point that someone comes along and shows compassion—loves us—and we are healed—clothed and put in our right mind.  Most of us don’t have to go down as far as the Gerasene demoniac before we get it that healing love is a reality.  But what if this story is not so much about Jesus and the demoniac but about us as observers of the scene, the bystanders, the people in the city and the country who ran to see what happened?  Remember, these were they who were seized with a great fear and begged Jesus to depart from them.  Twice now in this story Jesus is begged to depart—by the possessed and the not-possessed.  Who does he listen to?  “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.” 

What Jesus is showing us is that it is the love we love with, not the love we get, that is the healing love.  While on one level, the personal, we may identify with the demoniac, it is on the broader, deeper level of society that we can see our whole way of life condemned to the graveyard.  We try everything-wars and prisons on the one hand and endless distraction and self-indulgence on the other, and still it’s the graveyard.  What is the way out?  Compassion.  Not only does Jesus have compassion for the possessed person—he, unlike the rest of us bystanders, does not propose more, other, new, different chains—no he simply engages the demons (asks their name) and then, of all things, accedes to their wish not to be cast into the abyss, but sends them where they think they want to go.  More than casting them out or overcoming them in any manner, he dispels them, gives them permission and then they leave.  In this story and unlike conventional wisdom, it seems that Jesus loves not only the sinner but the sins as well.  Jesus, the absolute embodiment of compassionate love, is completely unruffled in the face of a legion of demons.  Love, simply, conquers all.  What if we, the bystanders, the city and country folk, were to love instead of always and ever trying to “guard with chains”?  (Such a curious expression…) 

I think we would all get out of the graveyard.  We would all be clothed and in our right mind.  We’d all be begging Jesus to take us with him.  Who, after all, in their right mind asks Jesus to go away?  Only graveyard dwellers like the ones who eventually condemn him to death and execute him at the place of the skull; only people whose fear of peace outweighs a natural sense of well-being and reason; only those who refuse to see a broken one made whole, who will not participate in forgiveness or healing or whatever we want to call restoration—but lucky for us the name for that process is legion too. 

Let us live in the garden instead of the graveyard—we have nothing to lose but our chains…

Carol Bernice, CHS
Chapel of the Holy Spirit
Melrose

June 20, 2010