Galatians 3.23-29, Luke 8.26-39
Queen Camel, Trinity 4, 19/6/2016
...they found the man from whom the demons had gone, sitting at the feet of Jesus, clothed and in his right mind. And they were afraid. (Luke 8.35) [1]
But they weren’t afraid before. When the man who they knew well was roaming naked on the outskirts of their village, their lives went on as normal. They weren’t afraid at all, when the man in question, with an immense strength, would break free from the chains and shackles with which he had been bound. On those days when the mad strongman, the strong madman, was on the loose again, there was no fear in the village at all. But after Jesus healed him, and the madness left him and peace descended on the man, then, in those moments, fear struck the villagers. Why would this be?
Now, I think it’s true to say - and it features strongly in our society’s collective imagination - that many towns have their madmen, or villages their idiots, or religious groups their zealots: their people who belong to them but only to be treated as freakish, or regarded as evil, and cast off to the outskirts.
In some deep, unspoken way, they are so much part of the life of the village that the community would not be itself without them.
I vividly remember a cycling holiday in Shropshire where one evening, on a stroll through the village of Clun, the still summer air was punctuated by the most awful yells and cries, similar to the sound of a cat in deep distress, and barks harder and deeper in tone: it was clearly a human voice and it was very disturbing indeed. But in the village store and the local pub and at the reception desk of the B&B no-one local blinked when those awful sounds wafted in through open windows. Only when the source of the cries emerged from the background and came through the door of the pub, did anyone flinch. ‘Evening George,’ said the publican to the howling man, ‘Time you were on your way now,’ and he gently turned the man around in the doorway and sent him homewards, howling at the sky, barking at people he passed on his way out to the edge of the village. This man, I suggest, performed precisely the same role in the village of Clun as the demon-possessed man of Geresa did in his.
This is how communities keep life ticking along as normal, when so often the delicate balance of life threatens to be upset. This is how communities smooth things over when underneath the surface of community life dark, dangerous creatures linger and threaten to erupt. We keep our sense of belonging to something sane, solid, supportive, strong, by casting out of our company the unstable, the broken, the weak - anyone who threatens our sense of normality. Those who are difficult or different from us we cast out to the edge, to keep our identity strong and our well-being intact. We tell them they don’t belong to us; but deep down we know we wouldn’t be the same without them. In a very real way they do belong to us - for they are our ‘safety valve’; without them we would have to find other ways to deal with the dark side of ourselves.
Religion justifies this social behaviour. At the very heart of our Christian story there is an example of it, in the words of the high priest Caiaphas: ‘It is better that one man should die for the people than for the whole nation to be destroyed.’ (John 11.50) Cast out the mad ones, the troublesome and troubled ones, and things will continue to be all right for the rest of us. It’s easy enough to find examples of this today, in a week dominated by the terrible news of the actions of Omar Mateen, the gunman who killed 49 people in an attack on a gay nightclub in Orlando, and Thomas Mair the murderer of MP Jo Cox in Batley.
Here are two deeply troubled characters who some are calling madmen - a loaded and debatable term, but if it is true, then the question remains for us: what made them mad? What forces in society formed them into the people they became, to do the things they did?
Here are two marginalised characters - Mateen, one vulnerable to being doubly-demonised in our society for his bi-sexuality and his Muslim faith [2]; and Mair, whose extreme rightwing ideological and white-supremacist views distance him from the respectable society through which those views were formed. [3]
What happens to those who society casts-off? Surely a sadness will descend on them, for we are all sociable creatures, and all we want to do is to belong. If they feel this rejection time and time again, if their head becomes full of those many many voices repeating to them the mantra: ‘Time you were on your way now George’, a Legion of voices condemning and excluding them, then surely after a while a madness will descend on them too.
As they begin to question themselves, they begin to believe the voices; like the tormented man of Geresa who Jesus met, they begin to beat themselves up; like the tormented man of Clun, they begin to howl alone at a world that no longer wants them, and can’t and won’t explain why. The gay Christian, longing to belong to the wider group, gives up their Christian faith so they can be embraced back into the gay community; or they give themselves to be treated by a Christian prayer ministry, to ‘heal’ them of their sexuality, to cast out the so-called ‘spirit of homosexuality’ from them. It might look like a healing but it is more of a humiliation. The pain these people suffer is part of the process of reinforcing the cycle of belonging and rejection which is so much part of our human societies that we don’t even see it most of the time.
This is the cycle which Jesus broke that day in Geresa, when he rid the man of his demons, and because he broke it is the reason why the villagers became afraid. Because if you break this cycle then how do you now deal with the demons in your village? If you can’t put those demons onto the back of the one who doesn’t fit, and cast that person out, then your demons now have to stay at home for you to deal with. And that is frightening.
The man who Jesus healed followed Jesus as he made to leave, and asked Jesus if he could travel on out with him. But Jesus sent him home. ‘Return to your home, and declare how much God has done for you,’ he said. By doing this Jesus forced the people of Geresa to face their demons, to find new ways of talking about who they were and how they belonged to each other, to stop dealing with the difficult issues by scapegoating vulnerable ones and sending them away, to listen to the one they had previously rejected, and learn from him.
Two recent news stories from the world of religion throw new light on this gospel story of old.
The Pope has broken a silence which may have existed for centuries by speaking of ‘a stream of corruption’ in the Vatican. The corruption of which he spoke includes the presence of ‘a gay clique in the Vatican hierarchy that has successfully lobbied for positions of influence, and then been targeted by blackmailers’, which has surfaced in recent years. The silence had its victim, as ‘sleaze is thought to have been a key reason for Pope Benedict’s resignation’. It was better for one pope to leave the Vatican than for the whole establishment to begin to crumble. But Pope Francis has done the the frightening thing, the Jesus thing, by forcing conversation about these issues. Now the Catholic hierarchy will have to find new, and positive ways to address the question of what it means to belong together. [4]
And Alan Chambers, previously head of Exodus International, a fundamentalist Christian ministry that preached a 'cure' for gay people, has issued a letter of apology to the gay community, saying, "For quite some time we've been imprisoned in a worldview that's neither honoring toward our fellow human beings, nor biblical. From a Judeo-Christian perspective, gay, straight or otherwise, we’re all prodigal sons and daughters." [5] He too has done the frightening thing, the Jesus thing, for now the members of the 200 Exodus International churches which have now closed, are finding new ways to face their demons, revisiting the scriptures to ask what new thing God may be telling them about what it means to belong to him.
Jesus’ healing of the Gerasene demoniac tells us how compassionate he is for those who society cast out, casts off: scapegoats. And Jesus sending the man home to talk with the people about what God had done, shows us that he insists that we can find other ways to belong together, ways which enable us to become communities of sincere fellowship and love.
I think that this story is a vital guide to us for these times we are living through. It invites us to consider our own society’s hidden fears, those things which drive us to scapegoat others. It encourages us to ask the difficult questions about who we are demonising and what that demonisation is doing to them and to us. In this week when we are invited to vote on Britain’s membership of the European Union we would do well to read and re-read every day the story Jesus’ healing of the Gerasene demoniac, for the perspectives on human behaviour it offers us, and the encouragement that we can break free from the oppositional way of the world which creates demons and contributes to the madness of us all.
Can we unlearn this ‘in-out, in-out’ hokey-cokey way of moving, and learn to enjoy instead the more nuanced sequence of steps towards unity and love which we’re invited to join in by that wonderful performer, the Lord of the Dance?
Notes
A version of this sermon was previously preached at Little Budworth, 23/6/2013
[1] This sermon owes a great deal to James Alison, ‘Clothed and in his right mind’, Ch 6 of Faith Beyond Resentment: Fragments Catholic and Gay, p.125-143, which in turn is ‘entirely indebted to Rene Girard’s ‘The Demons of Geresa’, Ch 13 of The Scapegoat.
[2] Ed Pilkington and Jessica Elgot, Orlando gunman Omar Mateen was a regular at Pulse, says nightclubber, Guardian, 14 June 2016.
[3] Daniel Boffey, Jo Cox murder accused gives name as 'death to traitors, freedom to Britain’, Guardian, 18 June 2016.
[4] Pope Francis ‘confirms Vatican gay lobby and corruption’, BBC News, 12 June 2013
[5] 'Gay Cure' Exodus Ministry Closes After Leader, Alan Chambers, Admits Being Attracted To Men, www.huffingtonpost.co.uk, 21 June 2013
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