Sermon – 1 Kings 19.1-15a, Luke 8.26-39, P7, YC, June 23, 2019

Tags

call, demons, faith, fear, God, goodness, grace, love, paralysis, release, scary, Sermon, trust

I remember when I was discerning one of my first calls to a parish, I heard a distinct word of encouragement from God that made me confident I should accept the call.  Or at least I thought I heard a distinct word from God.  Moments and days later, I began to doubt myself.  Maybe the words I heard in my head were my own.  Maybe I imagined the whole thing or, in hoping from a word of clarity, I made up the words myself.  And as soon as I began questioning what I heard, I started questioning the guidance of the words.  Either I was boldly following God’s distinct word to me or I was misguidedly making decisions based on an imagined experience.  Saying yes in that fog of doubt became one of the scariest experiences I have had.

That’s the funny thing about our relationship with God.  Most of the time when we talk about our relationship with God, we talk about the God of love.  But real, vulnerable, authentic experiences with God are scary too.  Whether we are trusting God through a major life crisis, we are taking a new path we are not certain is the right one, or someone challenges our life choices, following God in everyday life is scary.

We see that reality in two of our scripture readings today.  To understand why Jezebel wants to kill the prophet Elijah, we have to recall what happened in the previous chapters.  In an effort to proclaim the supremacy of Yahweh, Elijah challenges the god of Jezebel’s prophets to a duel of sorts.  All day long the prophets of Baal cry out to Baal to reign down fire on a sacrifice and are unable.  Elijah, fully confident in the power of Yahweh, immediately calls down fire, victorious over the prophets of Baal, and then proceeds to slaughter the whole lot.  But Jezebel’s answering threat on Elijah’s life sends him running.  No longer full of prophetic nerve[i], he runs to the wilderness, and asks God to take away his life.  Once so confident in the power of God, Elijah would rather cower in a corner and die.  Even when God’s voice come to him in a word of encouragement, Elijah can only see what is in front of him; in fact, he can only see the limited view he has, not the wider, sweeping view of God’s power to save.   Fear leads Elijah to paralysis.

Meanwhile the Gerasenes are equally scared.  They have developed a system for dealing with the possessed man of their village.  They know when to bind him and when to abandon him.  They know he is dangerous, and unclean, but they have figured out how to keep the town safe.  He is the identified patient of the town – the one who has the “real” problems.  By identifying the demoniac as the patient, no one else has to look at their own demons – the ways in which each of them are “vulnerable to forces that seek to take [them] over, to bind [their] mouths, to take away [their] true names, and to separate [them] from God and from each other.”[ii]  So, when Jesus casts out the impossible demons, and sends them to their death through their herd of swine, and the townspeople find the demoniac healed, clothed, and sitting in his right mind at the feet of Jesus, they do not celebrate or thank God for healing.  Instead they stand afraid of the power of God.  Now the demoniac is healed, they are afraid this Jesus will see their demons or challenge their feigned health.  In response, they do not ask for an explanation, but ask Jesus to leave.  Their fear leads to paralysis too.

To be fair, fear is a natural and sometimes necessary emotion.  Fear helps us develop a healthy sense of preservation.  Fear allows us to make necessarily cautious decisions.  Fear can keep us safe.  But fear can also lead to paralysis, and perhaps more importantly, to a lack of trust.  And when we are talking about God, a lack of trust evolving from fear gets us into trouble.  We start doubting the graciousness we know God intends for us.  We start avoiding the very work that will give us joy and fulfillment.  We start losing our sense of connection to God – who happily emboldens us when we allow God to do so.

We see in Elijah and the Gerasenes’ story the goodness that can happen when we work through our fear.  For Elijah, despite the fact he is terrified and despondent, convinced he would be better off dead, God provides food for him the wilderness – twice!  The angel of God feeds him with food so sustaining Elijah is able to make a forty-day journey.  And despite the fact that Elijah is so afraid he becomes convinced he is all alone in God’s work, God not only speaks to him, but opens up a vision of God’s work that is bigger than Elijah and extends well beyond his lifetime.[iii]  As Elijah slowly loosens his grip on fear, he opens himself up again to God’s guidance, protection, and confidence – even though the guidance, protection, and confidence had been present all along, hidden in the presence of gripping fear, but there nonetheless.

The same is true for the Gerasenes.  Despite the fact the townspeople are fearful of Jesus’ power, Jesus brings about healing anyway.  And knowing the people of Gerasene may continue to be fearful, Jesus has the former demoniac stay behind so he can testify to the salvific work of God.  As scholar Debie Thomas points out, “The story ends with Jesus commissioning the healed man to stay where he is and serve as the first missionary to his townspeople — the same townspeople who feared, shunned, trapped, and shackled him for years.”[iv]  Jesus does not scold, shun, or shame when he is asked to leave.  Jesus keeps holding out hope in the face of fear – Jesus holds hope that the townspeople might be healed like the demoniac is healed.  Jesus loves graciously and expects transformation in the face of hopeless fear.

One of the main tenants of practicing yoga is while you are practicing, you are to clear you mind of thoughts.  I am pretty sure every yoga instructor knows this is an impossible goal, because the other thing one learns in yoga is how to clear your mind once your mind becomes distracted – not if your mind becomes distracted.  There are all sorts of methods, but the primary instruction is to acknowledge the thought and then let the thought go.  In other words, when you catch yourself on the fifth thing on your to do list, you stop yourself by acknowledging you got off track, let the failure go, and try to clear you mind again.  There is no need for judgment, just acknowledgment and release.

That is our invitation today too.  Fear will always be with us.  No matter how strong we are in our faith life, we will sometimes be paralyzed by fear.  But if we can take a cue from yoga by pausing, taking a deep breath, acknowledging our failure in the face of fear, and trying again, perhaps we will be able to release the paralysis fear causes and step boldly back into the path God establishes for us.  Today’s lessons remind us there is encouragement for this work all around us.  There are angels that feed us when we want to give up the fight.  God speaks to us, reminding us how God is working at a much higher level, supporting us in ways we do not even realize we need.  God sends healed messengers to testify to us, to remind us of the ways in which we need healing more than those we have labeled as sick.  In breathing and letting go, we open our eyes in fresh ways to see God all around us acting for good.  And with each breath, and with each relaxing of our grip on fear, God washes over us with grace, kindness, compassion, and love.  Yes, letting go is scary.  But God shows us over and over again how when we let go of our fear, God is there with abundant, wonderful, powerful love.  Amen.

[i] Trevor Eppehimer, “Theological Perspective,” Feasting on the Word, Yr. C, Vol. 3 (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2010), 148.

[ii] Debie Thomas, “Legion,” June 16, 2019, as found at https://www.journeywithjesus.net/lectionary-essays/current-essay, on June 19, 2019.

[iii] Kathleen A. Robertson Farmer, “Theological Perspective,” Feasting on the Word, Yr. C, Vol. 3 (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2010), 151.

[iv] Thomas.

Sermon – Luke 22.14-23.56, PS, YC, March 20, 2016

Tags

burden, church, depravity, Easter, failure, gift, gratitude, Holy Week, Jesus, liturgy, Palm Sunday, profound, release, Sermon, sin

What strikes me this year about the passion narrative is the profound depth of failure.  We start off today with the glorious action of waving palms and declaring Christ to be the King, only to betray him and to deny that truth over and over again.  Judas, one of Jesus’ faithful disciples, fails Jesus by betraying him to the authorities.  The disciples fail Jesus by getting caught up in an argument about whom among them is the greatest – a self-centered argument on the best of days, but an utter failure of focus on Jesus’ last day.  Later the disciples fail Jesus by falling asleep while he prays in Gethsemane – when he had specifically pleaded with them to pray with him.  One of the disciples fails as he resorts to violence, striking one of the slaves of the high priest.  Peter, one of Jesus’ most loyal and insightful disciples, three times denies having known Jesus before others.  The leadership of the faithful fail over and over as they insist on Jesus’ death out of fear.  Pilate tries three times to release Jesus but succumbs to peer pressure and has Jesus killed despite the fact that he knows Jesus is innocent.  All the people gathered are willing to release a known murderer and insurrectionist in order to kill innocent Jesus.  Hanging in death, one of the two criminals by Jesus’ side derides Jesus to the end.  Even the soldiers mock Jesus as he hangs helplessly approaching death.

Jesus’ death on the cross is a grave enough sin to mourn today.  But when that sin is preceded by failure after failure after failure of the people to right their relationship with God, we see more clearly the deep recesses of human depravity.  The staggeringly long list of sins would be easy enough for us to dismiss as “those peoples’ sin.”  But that is part of the reason that we participate so tangibly in the liturgy today: waving palms, reading parts of the passion narrative, shouting “crucify him!”  We play an active role in the liturgy today so that we can understand how active our role is in the same sin of “those people.”  Listening to the story is heartbreaking – not just because watching others sin is hard to do, but also because we see ourselves in their sinfulness.  We know their failures because we fail too. We fail to honor Christ in our own day, we deny our Lord, we betray our God, we fail to be faithful disciples.[i]  Though there is a part of us that wants to claim we would never have been bystanders or participants in Jesus’ death, the scary reality is that we know we would have.[ii]  Their failure is our failure.

Acknowledging our utter depravity is important today.  We have spent the last six weeks pondering our sinfulness and working on amendment of life.  But perhaps we can never truly amend our lives without recognizing how deeply our sinfulness goes.  Our Lenten disciplines are meant to help us focus on one specific area of life that needs amendment, and in that way, our disciplines are effective means of bringing us closer to God.  But today, the Church reminds us that we have so much further to go.  Even if we managed to see amendment of life this Lent, today we are reminded of how our very nature is one of repetitious sinfulness that knows no bounds.

So why does the Church have us wallow so deeply in our sin today?  The primary reason we journey through the dark tunnel of our sinfulness and failures is so that we can more fully appreciate the enormity of next week.  Next week, our tone and content is almost the opposite – total joy and jubilation that our Lord is risen from the dead.  But in case we were tempted to become jaded by Easter – to be distracted by our new suits and dresses, the festive songs and flowers, or the bountiful meals – the Church wants us to remember how profoundly full of blessing Easter is.  The profound depth of our sinfulness is matched by the profound depth of love and forgiveness offered in Christ’s resurrection next week.  So although the depravity of this day may feel like overkill, that overkill is necessary for us to understand the shocking gift of Christ’s resurrection.  Although today’s sense of failure may feel overwhelming, I invite you to absorb the sobering reality of this day.  Carry that weight with you this week as we journey through the Holy Days.  If you are able to do that, the release of that burden on Easter Day may be more profound than any of the surface trappings of Easter.  And your cries of rejoicing will be born out of a place of deep gratitude and appreciation for the Lord our God, who loves us despite our failings.  As a people who know how little we deserve our Lord, we will rejoice with newfound appreciation of the God of love – the God who gave his only begotten Son, so that all that believe in him might have eternal life:  a tremendous gift indeed!  Amen.

[i] William G. Carter, “Pastoral Perspective,” Feasting on the Word, Year C, Vol. 2 (Louisville:  Westminster John Knox Press, 2009), 182.

[ii] H. Stephen Shoemaker, “Homiletical Perspective,” Feasting on the Word, Year C, Vol. 2 (Louisville:  Westminster John Knox Press, 2009), 181.