"What news, my lord?"

 

"And either master the devil, or throw him out With wondrous potency"

Preached at GPC 6/22

8.26 And they sailed down to the land of the Gerasenes, which is across from Galilee, 

27 and having gone out onto the land a certain man from the city met them, who, having demons for some time had not worn clothing nor lived in a house, but rather among the tombs.

28 Seeing Jesus, crying out, he fell before him and in a loud voice said: “What shall be between me and thee, O Jesus, son of the most high God? I beg you may not torment me.”

29 For Jesus had strictly commanded the unclean spirit to come out from (the) man, since for a long time (it) had held him and, being guarded, he was bound with chains—and breaking the bonds he was driven by the demon into the wilderness.

30 Jesus questioned him: “What is your name?” And the man said “LEGION, since many demons had entered into him,

31 and they begged Jesus lest he command them to depart into the abyss.

32 There was there a drove of a certain number of pigs being pastured on the hill, and the demons requested that he permit them to enter into the pigs—and he permitted it.

33 Having come out the from the man the demons penetrated the pigs and the drove rushed down the steep bank into the lake and was drowned.

34 The swineherds, seeing what had happened, fled and announced what had happened in the town and surrounding fields.

35 The people went out to see what had happened and came to Jesus and found the man seated from whom the demons had gone out, both clothed and in his right man beside the feet of Jesus—and they were frightened.

36 Those who had seen it told to them how the demon-possessed man was saved,

37 and the whole crowd of people from the region of the Gerasenes requested that Jesus depart from them, since they were gripped with great fear. And he, embarking in a boat, departed.

38 But the man from whom the demons had been driven out requested to be with him; but Jesus sent him away, saying:

39 “Return to your home and account for what God has made of you.” And he left, announcing through the whole town what Jesus had made of him.  

If I happened to meet any one of you beside a check-out belt at Wegmans later this afternoon, we would say “hello” to one another. It would be good to see you. It would be perfectly normal for us to shake hands and to make some conversation about church and our shared experience of Sunday morning worship. None of you would be surprised or troubled if, upon packing my bags of groceries into the cart and summoning my scattered children, I might say to you, “God bless.”

But imagine how you might react if instead of saying “God bless,” I told you “May God protect you from any demons in your day,” or “May Satan not touch you,” or “I hope that you encounter no evil spirits.”?

We feel comfortable and reasonable using language about God, but except in very specific contexts (we do renounce the devil and his works at baptisms) the language of the demonic feels like an uneasy step for most of us—a departure from the reasonable to something fanatical and superstitious. 

There is an implied cosmic question in this hypothetical Wegmans conversation, a question about what sort of world we live in. I find that question fascinating and would like to walk around its perimeter with you, but I’m sorry to say that I don’t have any useful answers. I would love to know whether the God that we serve is the sort of God who eons ago wound up the dial of the universe like a finely constructed watch and has let it run according to its own mechanism ever since, governed entirely by its own predictable and definable physical laws, or whether we live in a world where the miraculous is possible and even just around the corner—where people pray and are healed, where holy places tingle with the presence of the divine, where relics can be windows to the power of God and where the holy might break in on you at any moment. And I’d love to know whether God, the one God, is the only supernatural actor in this world, or whether there are angels and demons, maybe even cherubim and seraphim and that interact with us, with each other, and with God’s creation. By what principles would these powers be governed, then? Should we be worried about them? How many of them could dance on the head of a pin?

My own curiosity about these unanswerable questions was kindled in the church library at Albion Free Methodist, where I as a child would wile away several hours every Sunday morning while my parents ran rehearsals. You should never discount the importance of maintaining a well-stocked church library, and I hope that those of you who look after our library feel appreciated and important. It was in the Albion library that I first found some Christian paperback thrillers by Frank Peretti, in which personal and antagonistic slobbery comic-book demons committed such evil acts as sabotaging a main character’s truck engine so that he wouldn’t be able to get to church on time. In a slightly more sophisticated look at the malevolent divine, it was also in this library that I found a copy of C.S. Lewis’ “Screwtape Letters”, a creative portrait of a senior “tempter” advising a junior colleague through a series of letters on how to seduce the soul of an unseen human character.

I didn’t walk away from my time in the church library with a definite sense of whether there are or aren’t such things as demons—or what they might be like, or what sort of agency they might have if there are. I think that I’ve seen more evidence of the reality of evil by reading plain old 20th century history. A world that contained Eichmann, Pol Pot, Stalin, Hitler, Adam Lanza, and Jeffrey Dahmer needs language about the demonic in order to describe the brutal wickedness and cruelty that has been practiced and continues to be perpetrated in the dark corners of our world. It’s depressing to think about, it’s unpleasant to hear about, and it is possible (in an age of smartphones) to ignore. But we are refusing to engage with the reality that God has entrusted to us if we don’t ever pay attention to the worst evils—the unsettling evils—in God’s good creation.

So if we can’t answer the question of “what sort of a world” we live in, I’d like to spend some time thinking about why Jesus was so determined to tell stories in which demons played a part. And Jesus does have a lot to say about demons. There are at least twelve episodes in the gospels where Jesus casts out a demon, and in multiple other teachings and commissions he gives his disciples authority to drive out demons on his behalf, or references the problematic reality of a powerful devil or satan.

To walk through Jesus’ language of the demonic I’d like to tell you about three books that I re-read every year. These are longtime favorites for me—and the first is Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen. If you’ve never read it, I can’t recommend it enough. It’s the story of Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy, who start the novel in mutual dislike but fall in love and marry by the end of the story. There are some inconveniences along the way, but the real charm of the novel is its capture of the manners and courtesies of 19th century England. The social conventions in the story—the protocols of who dances with whom at a ball, how officers and gentlemen are received in public life, what young ladies can and cannot say to young men—these forms are as much a part of the story as the actual events of the plot. (There isn’t much action in the actual plot: As one less than enthusiastic reader of the book once noted—“all they do is go over to each other’s houses.”)

My wife teases me whenever I pick up Watership Down, by Richard Adams, or as she calls, it “The Bunny Book.” On the surface (and on the cover) it is a book about bunnies. It’s a children’s story of some rabbits who escape death at their warren and have adventures in the course of establishing a new home. But it’s so much more than that, because the form of the book (a children's novel) and the setting (talking rabbits) frees the author from the constrains of England in the 1960s so that he can retell the adventures of classical mythology: Cassandra and the sack of Troy, the abduction of the Sabine women, and the tricks of Odysseus. In re-telling these stories among anthropomorphized rabbits, he’s really telling stories of courage, heroism, friendship, and adventure.

Finally, Catch-22 by Joseph Heller is an alternately bleak and uproarious picture of life among a company of American bombardiers stationed on an Italian island at the end of World War II. It’s a deeply nuanced critique of the futility of war, the perverse relationship between capitalism and the military establishment, and the twisted hierarchy of military rank. 

Here’s what I want to say about these three books, each of which I love for completely different reasons: Their genres are part of their story, and the form of these stories (as much as the story itself) is necessary to get at the unique bit of truth-telling that each one captures.

Pride and Prejudice expresses some of the deepest realities of romantic love, the intersections of family, identity, and how men and women interact with each other—it is a joyful and noble picture of marriage and romance. You couldn’t tell the story of Pride and Prejudice in the world of Watership Down. The rabbits are too rabbity for romantic love stories. Nor could you tell Pride and Prejudice in the world of Catch-22; Heller’s world moves too quickly and too violently for the problem of attractive wealthy people who want to mate, but are restrained by social convention.

Similarly, you couldn’t have the adventures of Watership Down if your setting was the world of Pride and Prejudice—even though they are geographically almost in the same place. And yet, even though the forms of these stories are incompatible with one another, they are both saying something true about the way the world works. And Watership Down, which is all about the heroism of fighting against impossible odds and the greater good of self-sacrifice tells a truth which directly contradicts the message of Catch-22. Catch-22 would be nonsense in Victorian England or among talking rabbits—it’s nearly nonsense in WWII Italy, but its contrarian sarcasm expresses wisdom about war, death, and power that is worth hearing.

We come back now to Jesus. Jesus needs the genre of demons and the demonic to tell his story—the story of how Israel’s god keeps his promises and becomes king, how he calls his people back from sin and exile and defeats their enemies. In telling his story, Jesus does something extraordinary. He subverts the genre—the form of the story—that his listeners are expecting to hear, criticizes them while loving them, and finds a way out of a tangle of violence and ideological stubbornness to wholeness and restoration. This is why Jesus’ stories are world-changing for our own times as well as for his.

This whole episode of the Gerasene demons has a lurid quality that stands out more sharply in Jesus’ cultural context. Jesus, an observant Jew, has crossed (for reasons never quite fully explained) from the Jewish side of the Sea of Galilee to the Samaritan side—the unclean side. Anyone who eats or associates with those (like the Samaritans) outside of Torah and its ritual purity laws is running the risk of exclusion from God’s people. Jesus starts this story by going to the unclean.

Once he’s there he goes among the graves of the unclean dead—another way to be defiled. The name of the possessing demons that he meets there are the name of the occupying Roman force—Legion—and when these demons recognize Jesus’ authority with terrified supplication he orders them enter a drove of pigs—the most unclean animals that a faithful Jew could imagine, one of the clear boundary markers between the Jewish people and their Gentile neighbors. When the demons “enter” the pigs it is with borderline sexual language, and they then meet their end with horrifying violence and chaos. The sheer skin-crawling creepiness of it all might have sounded to Jesus’ hearers as it would sound to us if he’d climbed down into a nest of poisonous snakes.

If you asked a faithful Torah-observant Jew of Jesus’ time—perhaps one of the Pharisees, who are so often Jesus’ foils—“what is the problem that the Messiah will solve?” they would answer that their God needed to save them from the Romans in their city. They would point to the problem breakaway, hostile Samaritans living to their north. They might point out the corrupt leadership of their ruling elite, the chief priests and Sadducees. They would certainly acknowledge that faithful Israel was under the foot of oppressors. This is how they would frame their story.

This political reality is where Jesus’ symbolic actions and storytelling intersect with our own 21st century problems. Jesus is aware of real evil in his world in the form of the Romans. But he doesn’t rail against the Romans or call to arms against them. Rather, he serves a Roman centurion by healing his child and recognizes the seed of faith within him. He doesn’t do the “just” thing and keep Torah by shunning the unclean demoniac in the Gerasenes—he draws the evil within him to a head and purges it. He makes what was sick and unclean whole and clean.

These sorts of radical, deeply symbolic actions are the template for a world with Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump. Yes, there is real evil in these men do and say. But Jesus is more concerned with driving out the evil behind their actions than in a mere political or military victory over the presenting person that the evil is working through.

Similarly, Jesus did not hesitate to invoke the language of demons to criticize his own side—the Pharisees, the religious faithful of his own day, and even his own disciples. Those who were doing their best to honor the one true God and to live according to his commands he loved and cared for, and also named as victims of the satan’s “sifting like wheat.” Jesus did not name demons only for the other and the enemy—he recognized that demonic forces could and did twist his own followers’ good intentions into perverse caricatures of God’s real purposes. 

This whole Gerasene passage feels like it’s being set up in the genre of an Old Testament hero story—like Joshua bringing down Jericho, David routing the Philistines, or even the story of the Maccabees. A great warrior is going to come and take up arms for God’s people. By his strength, courage, and faithful observance to Torah he will be blessed—anointed—christened by Israel’s God to violently drive away the Gentile oppressors. Jesus subverts this expected genre. Jesus, without violence, names the evil behind the presenting evils that his countrymen wish to fight against. The Messiah himself is the cure to the power of demons. The demons are destroyed, but the demon-possessed man is not—he is made well again.

Jesus’ redefinition of this “hero-story” genre refocuses Israel’s problems and changes the narrative of how those problems ought to be solved. It changes the hopes for the Messiah from a warrior-story about a hero who will lead the people armed with daggers to rise up against the Romans into the story of a servant who will change the people from within so that they can defeat the power behind the Romans. They are expecting a war story, but Jesus gives them a love story. They are expecting Watership Down, and Jesus tells them the truth of Pride and Prejudice.

What kind of a world do we live in?

I do not know. It’s such a complex world that it requires multiple kinds of stories to tell multiple kinds of truth about it. But I see, in a world really is still beset by evils of every imaginable intensity and perversity, that whatever sort of world this might be, it is one that is subject to the power and the name of Jesus of Nazareth. Our task is to surprise the world around us by telling tales that turn out to be Jesus stories. Let us sing.

"She took the fruits of my advice"

"Let me be no assistant for a state, But keep a farm"

Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus walked up the dusty path that led to his villa to the shouts and applause of his neighbors. The spreading elm branches overhead resounded with their cheers and clapping.

“Hurrah for Cincinnatus!”

“He’s saved the republic again!”

“Well fought, Cincinnatus!”

“Three cheers for the Dictator!”

Cincinnatus stopped, held up his hands, and humbly addressed the men gathered beside the road. “My friends, I am your Dictator no longer. Now that I have defeated the Aequi I have laid down my title and wish only to return to my humble farm. I am no great man, only your neighbor and your fellow-citizen. I am, like all of you, just a lowly farmer again.”

“What a noble Roman!”

“Hurrah for Cincinnatus the humble!”

“He’s saved the republic twice over by such an act!”

Cincinnatus opened the broad wooden door to his culina and found his wife, Racilia, preparing a meal inside.

“Wife,” he declared, “I have come home from defeating the Aequi and have laid down my sword and my title. I am once again only a humble farmer!”

“I am glad to see you, husband,” she said, kissing him in welcome “And I’ve prepared a meal to celebrate your homecoming. It’s almost prepared, could you perhaps just fetch me some fresh basil to finish it off?”

“Ah, basil!” declared Cincinnatus. “The growing of such herbs, grains, and vegetables will be my only concern from now on. I planted some shortly before I left for the campaign. Would you like to come with me and see how it has fared?”

Cincinnatus and Racilia walked hand in hand to the patch of earth behind the culina. A large clay planter stood there, overflowing with weeds, but no basil.

“Hmmm…” said Cincinnatus. “Perhaps there was something wrong with the seeds that I bought.”

“What kind of soil did you use?”

“You know, soil. Dirt. The regular type.”

“But did you use dirt, dirt? Or a raised-bed mix?”

“I don’t know. It was whatever they were selling in the forum before I left. I just grabbed a couple bags of it. I used plenty, though.”

“Was it this bag here? Because this says it’s for ‘desert plants, cactuses, and palms.’ I’m not sure you can grow basil in this.”

“I still think there was something wrong with the seeds.” Cincinnatus grinned. “But I’m sure your cooking will be delicious even without the basil. Shall we eat soon?”

His wife shook her head. “I want to finish the dish with some kind of herb. I know! Let’s top it with some mint! There’s always mint growing along the western side of the house.”

“Well, there used to be. I mowed over the mint.”

“But I USE the mint.”

“Yes, but I was MOWING.”

“Well, do you have any other herbs planted somewhere on the property?”

Cincinnatus hung his head. 

“I planted thyme and rosemary last year. And peppers and spinach and carrots. But none of it came up.”

“I thought you grew up on a farm! I thought you came from a farming family!”

“My cousins are all farmers, but the farmstead that I grew up on wasn’t a real farm. All we had were some chickens.”

“Well, are you going to get some chickens for our farm, then.”

“No, we’re never having chickens.”

“I don’t think you’re a very good farmer.”

“I’ll see if I can get my job back as Dictator.”

"In her excellent white bosom, these, etc."

The group gathered together for a picture. It was the end of the church staff retreat. Short people were moved to the front, and the tall to the back. 

"Everyone suck in your stomachs. Except for Julie, ha-ha!"

We were having some clothes altered by a garrulous older woman at J's church, the mother of one of her choir members. I was having some pants hemmed, J was having a dress altered. The older woman instructed Julie to strip and pull on the dress. She opened the door to step out and seemed to be expecting me to follow, then reconsidered with a conscious grin and said "I suppose this is something you've seen plenty of times before."

J rattled down the steps in the usual Sunday morning hurry, fresh out of the shower. She was in a dress I hadn't seen for a while, a light and colorful summer sundress under a denim jacket. She saw me notice and turned about to model it, delighted with the way it fell on her body...and then her face clouded over. "No, I'd better change...there's no place for my pack." She was referring, of course to the wireless microphone pack that she clips onto her pants most weeks. But she was referring even more to the effort of fending of the "helpful" men who volunteer in the sound booth and seem to assume unless explicitly told otherwise that she needs their "assistance" fastening the pack to her clothing each week.

We both work in churches. We are both public figures within our church communities, not only attending but visible every week on the platform and on the camera. J especially is on microphone with her congregation every week, leading them through the emotional journey of worship, connecting element to element, and making every effort to have empathetic eye contact and connection with all who enter her space.

This makes her, apparently, public property. There isn't anything terribly surprising about this. She's a slim, well-dressed, very attractive woman. She radiates warmth and goodwill, at least in public. (She doesn't fail to radiate warmth and goodwill after church, she's usually just half asleep from the effort of the morning.)

The questions of appropriate church dress (not only "modest" dress, but finding outfits that are sufficiently formal but not TOO formal for Sunday morning) and the strange and complicated manner in which your body is a part of your presented performance find strange and uncomfortable expressions on a regular basis. If she were heavier, crabbier, or plainer she wouldn't attract so much attention. But, as she is, she is assumed to have invited comment on what she is wearing and how she looks in it.

Things get even weirder when we show up to each other's churches. I suspect that people get used to always seeing us on our own, and there is a borderline prurient interest in seeing the known but ever-unseen spouse. We'll be sitting out in the car sharing coffee and waiting for youth choir to end, and we get gawked at.

It's a weird dynamic. I'm convinced it wouldn't exist if we weren't both up front so much. It's one that (thankfully) doesn't extend beyond the few hundred people in our respective congregations. But it's definitely real, and encouraged by the reality-bending assumption that because a congregant sees you all the time they feel like they really know you. As in, know you well enough to have opinions on what pants you look good in.

"At our more considered time we'll read"

 This hasn't been a great stretch for reading, but with the final two orchestra concerts of the regular season this weekend I'm hoping to have some more time for books. A few winners from the previous few weeks

Garrison Keillor poems--Oh, What a Luxury!

Memorial Days--a memoir that J recommended about a journalist who lost her husband and goes to a semi-deserted island off the coast of Australia to grieve his passing several years after the fact. (Very well written)

Knife--the story of the attack of Salman Rushdie at Chautauqua 

Table for Two--Amor Towle's new book of short stories

Bird by Bird--Anne Lamott's musings on being a writer and the writing process

True Raiders--A chronicle of one of the actual attempts at finding and excavating the Ark of the Covenant in the early 20th century.

A Book of Voyages--A collection of papers, journals, and letters edited by Patrick O'Brian that detail European exploration in the 17th century and were apparent source fodder for the Aubreyad. 

"And now, Laertes, what's the news with you?"