Pentecost 4 C

So in our lesson today Jesus is just arriving in a new land, we learn that is a gentile land, a ways away from where Jesus spends the rest of his ministry. We're not sure why he went there but many people think it is because he heard about a man who needed healing. There was a man there who was tormented by demons. He was violent and mentally very unwell, he wouldn't wear clothing and couldn't be a functioning part of society. The local solution to this problem was to regularly chain him up, keep him under guard and make him live in the tombs. So Jesus came to this man looking to heal him. By this time rumors would have spread about Jesus' power to heal but despite this no one from the community comes out to ask Jesus to heal the sick man And when he tried to speak to the man the first thing Jesus heard was "what are you doing here son of God, leave me alone". This doesn't seem to matter though undaunted by the lack of welcome Jesus proceeds to heal this man who seems so hopeless.

Once healed all the man wants is to be Jesus' disciples he kneels at Jesus' feet and asks to follow him. This is a familiar reaction, we have heard this kind of thing about other people that Jesus encountered but once the man is healed other people from the community start to show up too, people who have heard about the amazing work that Jesus did. But they don't do what you might think they would. They don't praise Jesus, they don't ask for healing themselves, they don't even question Jesus. The scripture says they were afraid of Jesus and they asked him to leave. They acknowledge that Jesus is the son of God but even more than this they make it clear that they don't want him around.

This isn't how we expect a story to end, not a story from the bible and really not any other story. Jesus was a hero here, he healed a man who was literally chained in a tomb to protect himself and everyone else. Common sense demands a hero's reception for Jesus after that kind of thing right? At least a friendly reception right?

Maybe, though, when we think about real life it doesn't. Perhaps the people's fear made sense. Maybe Jesus was something to be afraid of. You see these people had a system. They had it figured out. Their solution might not have been the best but it worked, everyone was safe and sheltered. Maybe they had a community rotation to keep track of the sick man, everyone could feel good about it, they rallied around it and anyway it sure did make other problems seem smaller. But then Jesus showed up and turned that all on it's head.

What he had to offer might have been great, it might have meant healing for all, but what might they have to give up, they were scared, what would the new community look like if they let this man stick around? If they listened to this powerful teacher, if they exposed their weaknesses to this powerful healer. It was better that now that he had taken care of the worst of there problems he go away and not make any more changes to the lives that they had made fairly comfortable.

I recently went to listen to a speaker at Whitworth. Her name was Anne Lamott. She has written quite a few books and each one is more successful than the last to the point that she enjoys a great deal of fame and success nowadays. She writes books about her life and her family, about raising her son as a single parent and about her faith. She tells a story about a time when she was a young adult, say 25 and she was an alcoholic, unemployed and living full-time in a houseboat. She will certainly tell you now that these were times for her when she was tormented just like the man in the gospel lesson. At the time she might have called herself an atheist maybe a quasi-jew because she had a lot of jewish friends but she certainly wouldn't have let anyone call her a Christian! She had grown up believing Christians were hypocrites at their best and crazy at their worst. But as her life got more and more buried in pain and confusion there was this church that she would often walk by on Sundays that had beautiful gospel music that drew her to its door, she would stand there for the whole service but then during the last hymn she would practically run out the back door before anyone could talk to her or ask her to sit or stay. At the same time she happened to make friends with a local pastor of another church and as hard as she tried to hide all of a sudden everyone she encountered was calling her a child of God. She says that more than once she asked Jesus to leave her alone just like the people in the story but as many times as she asked people kept showing up, calling her a child of God.

This was the last thing she wanted because after a while she started to believe it. All of a sudden this new title started making her feel like she should give up the other titles, the title of drifter and alcoholic of unwanted and unemployed, so slowly at the prodding of many nice church people she started to realize that she was Anne, Child of God. Anne spends all of her time telling this story now, in news ways to new people, she tells about how it develops, how it moves forward (and backward because it does that too) how is stood with great fear and trembling and finally learned to let her herself be called child of God. Her story isn't very clean or pleasant, and she often isn't either but this might just make it one of the best examples of both what the people in today's gospel were afraid of and the ways that the gospel moves to overcome such fears.

At the font each of us is given a new name, as infants, teenagers, young adults or parents ourselves even as whole communities of people who ask Jesus politely over and over again to heal the big problems and then go away we are forever given the name child of God. Despite the fear and pain that surrounds change we are invited to the font and Christ slowly and gently washes all of our old broken places and makes us into shiny new creations who bear his own name.

In our second reading today Paul says that among the children of God there is no greek or jew, no male or female, no slave or free, no titles. Instead of these old names we are given something much better than any title we might ever have. We are all made one in Christ ans we will be cared for and healed according to the promise of Christ because in baptism we have been marked with the cross of Christ forever and we no longer have anything to fear.

This is good news. Amen