Galatians 3.23-29, Luke 8.26-39
The First Sunday after Trinity, 19 June 2022
Austwick, Clapham, Eldroth
“My name is Legion,” he said. “Because an army of demons has entered me.”
You may recall me having preached on the Gerasene demoniac in the past, explaining how this story shows that mental health is not simply a personal matter, that it cannot be reduced to just a problem which individuals must suffer alone, something we have brought on ourselves and which can only be treated in isolation. By contrast, the healing of the Gerasene demoniac drives home the truth that our mental sickness and our mental well-being are both a community effort. [1]
Now, I am using the term ‘mental heath’ here to embrace a person’s spirituality too. For it is what a community puts into people which creates Legions in them. This is about how a society demonises people. It is the circumstances we are placed in outside our control which can bedevil us, the expectations others place on us and the names that we’re called by those who judge us. Our spiritual and mental sickness and well-being are inseparable, and are both a community effort.
As one example, consider our society’s attitudes towards work. We associate work with self-worth but those we regard as doing the most socially valuable jobs we reward the least, and we highly reward those whose work is barely, if at all, necessary for the well-being of society. This creates anguish at every level. The low-waged struggle to survive whilst carrying the extra burden of society’s expectations that knowing they’re performing valuable tasks ought to be reward enough; whilst those in well-paid work which nevertheless feels pointless or unnecessary to them, find themselves frustrated, unfulfilled; those in jobs which offer good compensation and ample free time but who know they just do not contribute to the common good, find themselves diminished. All of this is psychologically damaging. All of this bedevils people. All of this creates Legions. [2]
The story of Jesus and the man of Geresa shows that the first step in exorcising the demons in our society is in naming them; the second step is casting them out; then can the previously troubled ones return to their ‘right mind’; then can those who have been set adrift in the world return, with thankfulness, safely to their spiritual home. Whilst all of this applies to troubled individuals - like the Gerasene demoniac - it can also apply to whole communities. For we well know that our society is ever-ready to demonise certain other groups who we think don’t fit.
We are blessed to be living in a well-loved area of the country where people enjoy holidaying and some who can, choose to make their home here because of the general sense of well-being they find in this place. But some of you, like me, will have at other times in our lives lived or worked in communities which were regarded in quite different ways, looked down on, sniffed at, even feared and avoided at all costs.
One parish I happily served in for a number of years used to suffer outsiders calling it a ‘sink estate’ and other injurious names, bedevilling us, making Legions, whilst the reality was far more nuanced: sure, there were all the social problems related to poverty, particularly connected with the rapid demise of all the large factories in the area, which for generations had been the foundation of the community’s social and family lives; and of the intentional dismantling of the welfare system driven by an ideology which explicitly demonised those seeking assistance from it… creating Legions… [3]
But despite all this there was also much to celebrate in the way that people continued to value that place and pulled together to support the vulnerable and to build it up over and over again, as they still are doing. [4]
A clergy colleague in this deanery this week told me of her surprise at the reaction she got from some of Bradford’s civic and church leaders when she moved there some years ago, having previously lived in rural North Yorkshire. ‘Why would you want to come here?’ they asked, shockingly demonstrating how they had become possessed by a negative spirit about the city they were placed to serve, dismayingly showing how they felt themselves to be lesser than their professional peers in other parts of the country because of somehow being tainted by Bradford.
This is just like the behaviour of the Gerasene demoniac who each time he broke his bonds, never tried to make his way back home: he went in the opposite direction, out into the wilds, lacking the self-esteem to try to reconnect with his people, instinctively sensing that because of his condition of bedevilment he could not belong with them any more.
‘Why would you want to come here?’ - sounds just like the demoniac asking Jesus, ’What have you to do with me?’ The truth is, of course, that in the gospels we find Jesus again and again drawn to places which have been bedevilled. Why would he want to go there? To uplift and renew them. And in the gospels we see Jesus again and again drawn to people whose spirits are in torment. What had he to do with them? He intended to release and restore them.
This vital gospel passage which rewards rereading, time and again, can encourage us that just as it is those spiritually oppressive attitudes that a society puts into people which bedevils them, so also our society, our community, may share in the joyful work of exorcising those demons and creating space for new beginnings and mutual flourishing. Creating circumstances for people to feel and be in control of their destinies, placing healthy, supportive expectations on people and calling them good names … All of this can renew, revitalise, resurrect us, people and places alike. Our spiritual liberation and our mental well-being are a community effort.
Jesus’ exorcism of the Gerasene demoniac invites us to consider the deep spiritual forces at work in our world, forces which operate on the personal level and that of whole communities, institutions, and nations, and which interact in complex ways between all these.
This story invites us to consider our own spiritual condition, and to try to name those different elements of it so that the good ones can be nourished and the bad ones cast out.
It invites us to consider the spirituality of the place or places to which we belong and to do the same with those - what are the spirits at work in Austwick / Clapham / Eldroth?
And where would we place ourselves in that conversation about Bradford? For this scriptural tale, so resonant today, also invites us to bring to mind those people and places who may be demonised by us, our community and our society, and provokes us, where we need to, to turn ourselves around to help restore good relations with them.
Having met Jesus this man of Geresa appeared ‘clothed, and in his right mind’. And, as Paul told the Galatians, ‘As many of you as were baptised into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ.’ So that like him, we too may spend our days ‘declaring how much God has done for us’; and by living in that spirit of thankfulness, we too may drive all evil away from ourselves and those around us.
Notes
[1] The Gerasene demoniac - our mental well-being is a community effort, preached at Austwick and Keasden in 2019; also Overcoming Legion in our village, preached at Little Budworth, 2013 and Queen Camel, 2016. Important texts behind these talks include Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? p.36 (quoting Oliver James, The Selfish Capitalist: Origins of Affluenza), and Paul Nuechterlein, Girardian Lectionary, Reflections, Year C Proper 7, with his notes and quotes from Rene Girard, The Scapegoat’, Chapter 13, ‘The Demons of Geresa’.
[2] Wikipedia: Bullshit Jobs; David Graeber, Bullshit Jobs: The Rise of Pointless Work, and What We Can Do About It.
[3] ‘Tim Nichols from the Child Poverty Action Group said his organisation believed government rhetoric on the issue was changing, having a real effect on those claiming benefits. He said: "It's without doubt got worse. It is very much linked to the fact they've got a major programme of cuts to social security under way, and are seeking a narrative to justify this. It's becoming increasingly hard for us to find people in poverty or receiving benefits who are happy to speak about their situation in the media. They fear the effect of this stigmatisation if they put themselves in the spotlight – how it might affect them and their children. They really are scared.”’ Peter Walker, Government using increasingly loaded language in welfare debate. Guardian, 5 April 2013.
[4] See for instance the work of Triple C (Liverpool), a community action charity founded in 2004 by the three Anglican churches of Norris Green and Croxteth, and thriving today.
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