Luke 8:26-39
“Facing Them Down”
June 22, 2019
Fear is universal. We all have been instilled with certain fears that keep us alive and safe. We know to get out of a building if a fire alarm goes off. We know not to touch a hot burner on a stove. We are taught from a young age to look both ways before crossing the street – although we can grow somewhat lax with that one after living so many years on a quiet Vermont road. Fear is a common tactic used by those running for office. Vote for me, they say, or your taxes will go up or your guns will be taken away or your local school will be closed. Fear of the other – pointing it out, stoking it with stereotypes or generalizations, attaching it to undesirable or even dangerous traits – is how societal injustices have thrived throughout the centuries and still do. Many of us lived through the civil rights movement in this country and still decades later heard the same ugly rhetoric of fear when a black man ran for president. Currently it is those fleeing danger and poverty from Central America who we are told are the ones we should fear. For some, fear is a tremendous motivator. To stay in that place of intimidation and always on the lookout takes a tremendous amount of energy, though. Consider the time and emotion you’ve ever devoted to fear. It likely means that some other emotion got pushed aside because fear, if we let it, can control our lives to the point that we have little room for growth and kindness to take root. It can even rob us of our freedom, if we let it.
Today’s story of Jesus and the troubled man happens because of a detour. There were no crowds or authorities or anyone he knew sending Jesus across the lake to the land of the Gerasenes from all that was familiar in Capernaum and Galilee. Maybe Jesus was searching out the troubled man, the lost one. From all we can gather, this man suffered from what we would now call mental illness. All of us know folks who also have struggled in ways that they cannot manage their own demons. Some of us have relatives with depression. Maybe a neighbor lives with bipolar disorder or schizophrenia. Now, through therapy and medication, most of these folks are living long and productive lives side by side with all of us. And still there is fear.
During my last year of seminary, I completed my two semester chaplaincy at Westborough State Hospital, a since-closed psychiatric hospital not far from Worcester, Massachusetts on a locked unit. I remember when I first told some friends and family that this is where I would be ministering and learning two days a week for eight months, one of the first questions they would ask me was, “Aren’t you afraid?” For these people the image was a noisy and violent place filled with people out of control. Frankly, I wasn’t afraid until these well-meaning folks planted the idea in my head. Thankfully, I soon learned that there wasn’t much to be afraid of on the locked units because it was a calm and controlled environment and these patients were all on medications that, for the most part, allowed them to confront their demons and learn strategies for controlling them through the work of group, art and music therapy. Interestingly, the closer some of them got to working on an exit plan to re-enter the world, that was when fear sometimes would overtake them and then they’d start going backwards, often acknowledging that they were not ready to face the judgment and disappointment and disapproval that, for some of them, had marked their entire lives. It is also important to realize that trauma was a key variable they almost all shared. Think of this man Jesus is facing- he has abandoned wearing clothes, he had often been held captive and bound with chains and was living in the only place he wouldn’t be ostracized, the tombs of the dead. And he is very afraid. And he is not alone.
Mental illness in some form affects almost 50 percent of the population and less than half of those folks will ever get treatment. This includes those enslaved by addiction. Jesus has arrived here from recently healing the woman who was bleeding and isolated for years as well as the 12 year old girl near death.
In all of these cases what Jesus offers is freedom. In his healing acts, Jesus is challenging those powers that stop them and any of us who wish to move away from fear. He is offering a freedom that says we as human beings were made in the image of God. Jesus approaches this man whose illness may not be clear but his distress certainly is. He has lost control of his own life and Jesus, in chasing away the demons, gives that back to him – so much so that the man wants to come with Jesus but not before the pig handlers and all the townsfolk they’ve gathered show up after hearing of how Jesus transferred the demons from the man into the pigs who then drowned in the lake and rather than celebrating the new found freedom of the man, they are afraid. For them such freedom seems too dangerous to handle and they want the source of such freedom, Jesus, to disappear.
What were they so afraid of? Was it being close to such power? Was it that they might have to change their whole way of thinking about mental illness – making the difference between seemingly sane and insane seem too flimsy and now the one who they had demonized was now like them. Would that mean they could become like him? If everyone has the potential to be free of demons then could we be afraid of losing some measure of control? The social order has been upset for them. This man is no longer an outsider but rather one of them. Think of those who are treated as others or outsiders – those who worship God differently, those who dress or act or speak or love differently, those from a different place – if they become insiders what does that make us?
When Jesus explains the whole reason for all that he is and does, he says, “The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to set the oppressed free.” (Luke 4:18, NIV) That then brings us, we who claim the name Christian and the identity of disciple, into the freedom business also. Each of us has been set free like the man previously possessed. And what does Jesus instruct him to do? “Go back to your people and tell them what God has done for you.”
We are to be proclaimers of freedom and that means we cannot just wish it for ourselves and our loved ones. The way we do that is to be light bearers. Barbara Brown Taylor describes fear as “a small cell with no air in it and no light. It is suffocating inside and dark. There is no room to turn around inside it. You can only face in one direction, but it hardly matters since you cannot see anyhow. There is no future in the dark…When you are locked up like that, tomorrow is as far away as the moon.” Jesus offers a freedom that is light and life and room to breathe. First we must take hold of that freedom from fear and then offer it with open hands and hearts to all of God’s children. Amen.