what (not) to do with demons

The Rev. Alissa Newton

The Fifth Sunday After Pentecost

text: Luke 8:26-39

They didn’t know what to do with their demons. It wasn’t a big city, and the demons were loud. They were dangerous. They looked like one man, raving, and mad, and maybe even violent. The people didn’t know what to do, and they had to protect themselves. So they chained him – or them – up, outside of town, in the graveyard, with the dead. He was dead to them anyway, this shell of a man who held all their demons. At first it seemed to work okay. But the chains never held. The demons were strong. They would break free and come howling out of the graveyard. Their anger, fear, and violence was impossible to ignore. He did damage, every time, the man with the demons. And the chains never held him quite long enough for the people to rest.

Then the healer came. The demons went straight for him, and the people could only watch. Maybe this man would know how to control the demons for good, maybe the demons would overwhelm him. But the healer didn’t chain up the demon man. He didn’t contain him or control him. He touched the man, and spoke with the demons. The healer chose to let the demons out, so the man could be free. The people watched in horror. They begged the healer to leave, and he did. But man who used to hold their demons stayed – whole, healthy, alive an awkward reminder that they had to find a new way to live. Who would hold their demons, now?

If it were another week, I would tell you that our gospel lesson this morning can be read lots of ways. I might talk about metaphor, or literary analysis. I might even start with some historical background, noting that Jesus lived in a time when the spiritual and physical were seen together and not apart. I might tell you that we have other names, now, for the things they used to call demonic. If it were a different week, I might start by talking about some of these things.

But it is this week. And this week we live in a country where once again, our very real demons have broken loose from their chains and done unspeakable damage. 49 lives lost to hate, to violence, to guns. Orlando was a bad one, the worst we have seen in modern times. But we’ve been here before, haven’t we? One year ago we were here, when hate, and violence, and guns destroyed nine lives in a Charleston church. And one year before that we were here, when hate, and violence, and guns killed and maimed students on the campus of our own Seattle Pacific University. And just six months before that, when hate, violence, and guns stole our children from us in Newtown, Connecticut. And there are more, more big events we have attended together, like these, and smaller more ordinary visitations of this evil – when hate, violence, or guns take just one life here, and another there. Those add up, too. So this morning I am not going to try to explain away the legion of demons we hear about, because this week we all know that evil is real, and this week we are all broken and wondering what to do about it. This week we are the country of the Geresene demoniac, and the demons have just broken their chains again and we are wondering how to contain them, and who to blame them for, and how we can chain them up one more time, and get some rest.

So what can we learn from this story, what good news can the Geresenes and their demons offer us? The first part of the good news is this: we don’t have to demonize anyone. Like the citizens of Geresene we are tempted to isolate and reject the people, or groups of people, who we force to symbolize that which we fear. But our gospel this morning frees us from this illusion of control. The people wanted the man to be the only problem they had - they knew where he was, and had some feeling that they could control the evil he held. Except they couldn’t, could they? And when they were forced to see the one that had been literally demonized, healed and whole, it shook them to their core.

So we, too, can be freed from the impulse to demonize one person – the Muslim shooter or the white supremacist shooter or the mentally ill shooter. There are voices in our cities telling us to do just that, that to be safe we must get rid of one person or group of people. If only we could drive them out of town, chain them up in the graveyard, then we could rest from the evils of violence and hatred that haunt us. But it doesn’t work. This is not our way, as Christian people, as God’s hands and feet in the world. And it doesn’t work. Demonizing, chains, exclusion of one person or group is evil. Our scripture tells us today that hatred and fear can’t control or kill demons. These things only make them stronger.

But the good news doesn’t stop here. There’s more, and here it is: there is no country so depraved, no scene so desolate, no demons so strong, that God will not come to heal and make whole. Jesus comes all the way across the lake to find and heal this place of their demons. The text tells us Geresene is on the opposite side of the lake, and the implication is that the opposite-ness of this country wasn’t just about geography. This is a foreign country to God’s only son, and everything in it is, for an observant Jew, impure and unclean. Gentiles, graveyards, and even pigs – Jesus should have been revolted by all these things. And yet he comes, and heads straight for the least clean person in this unclean place and works to make that person whole. Jesus faces the demons. He listens to them. He is willing to upset the entire countryside to heal the man who has held their demons for so long.

So what would be different for us, church, if we took this good news to heart? What would change, if we truly believed that God would not abandon us to the evil that we struggle with? What would it do to us, if we believed that wherever the demons are, God is also right there, working for wholeness, healing, and light? What if we were also willing to face the demons of hate, violence, and guns, and to really listen to what these evil things have to say to us, or about us? How disturbed would we be, if we were to recognize the humanity in the people we prefer to demonize and cast out, if we recognized them as whole, and clean, also children of God who should sit calmly at Jesus’ feet?

I won’t lie to you – this good news is upsetting. We, like the townspeople, are probably more comfortable with the way things are. We have become used to the cycle of shock, mourning, lament, and numbness that we experience when our demons get loose. But our gospel tells us this morning that we are more than this, and that God longs for better than this, for us. There is no place so depraved, not even this place, that God cannot find a way to heal it. There is no truth, not even ours, so awful that God cannot hear it and use it for the sake of freedom and love. There is no country, not even this one, so addicted to its demons that God cannot upset it, love it, and call us instead to health, wholeness, and justice.