Proper 7, Year C--Going to the Opposite Shore

A Sermon Preached at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark

Proper 7, Year C

The Very Reverend Tyler B. Doherty, Dean & Rector

Reading Galatians this week, I was struck by Paul’s immortal lines, “There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.” We’ve heard this before, and the risk is to piously nod our collective heads and miss the real import of message, and the radical transformation that has taken place in Paul’s life that gives birth to such a pronouncement. I was thinking back to Paul’s self-description of his life before his encounter with the living Christ on the road to Damascus. In his Letter to the Philippians he writes, “If anyone else has reason to be confident in the flesh, I have more:  circumcised on the eighth day, a member of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew born of Hebrews; as to the law, a Pharisee;  as to zeal, a persecutor of the church; as to righteousness under the law, blameless.”

Before his conversion, Paul’s has checked all the assigned boxes. His membership is paid up. He’s well-versed fin all the rules, and was born into the right family. He displays appropriate violence and condemnation to those who aren’t like him—namely Christians. In fact, if you remember, it’s Saul/Paul who checks coats and hands out stones at the martyrdom of Stephen. Paul is literally like one of those folks who set up lemonade stands at lynchings in the South.

How does someone like Saul, with such an ingrained and deeply entrenched sense of us and them, insider and outsider, clean and unclean, find himself suddenly proclaiming—at great risk to his personal safety, “There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus”? What kind of transformation has taken place that Paul suddenly realizes that all the ways that he previously sought to secure his identity are “rubbish”? How is it that Paul suddenly saw that his whole of seeing and being was actually a project of misguided violence towards a God whose deepest desire is to free us from the cycle of violence? How is it that Paul came to see that the person he was persecuting in the name of God was actually God Himself?

However we construe what happened to Saul on the road to Damascus, it’s clear that he has undergone a profound spiritual transformation. His understanding of himself, his place in society, and of God has shifted from an us vs. them way of seeing and being to a new mode of perception that sees without boundary, without diving lines, without categories. Saul saw according to class, sex and gender, language and nation. Paul now sees with the eye of Christ, the eye of unity and oneness, the eye of boundaryless love, radical welcome, and indiscriminate hospitality. Paul’s identity is no longer secured according to the former checklists of who’s in and who’s out that turned him into a threat-breathing murderer (Acts 9). Instead, Paul now knows that he is in Christ and Christ is in him—“And it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me.”

Of course, Paul’s transformation that we read about in our epistle for today, is meant to be our transformation as individuals and as a community. Paul’s journey is our journey, and it’s the job of the church—through daily prayer, dwelling on God’s word in scripture, worshiping together in community on a weekly basis, sacrificial living and giving—to facilitate this same movement into deeper and deeper relationship with the Risen Christ, the one who removes those scales from our eyes and sends us out to be the love we’ve received to all those whom we encounter.

When we come to the story of Gerasene demoniac, it’s important to note that little throw-away detail about Jesus and the disciples arriving in the country of the Gerasenes, “which is opposite Galilee.” Opposite is the operative word here. This is only place in the Gospel according to Luke where Jesus goes into gentile territory. Jesus goes towards all that is opposite, and away from the familiar, known, settled, and comfortable and demonstrates that no one is beyond the reach of God’s redeeming, reconciling, healing and restoring love. God’s love is a boundary-crossing love that hops in a rickety fishing boat, seeks out, and embraces the stranger, all that is opposite (socially, politically, religiously, ethnically, economically).

One of the things we notice about the demoniac and the Gersaenes that they know who they are and what the settled order should look like. The townsfolk know that if they chain up the demoniac on the outskirts of town—if they expel what they deem crazy, unclean, unkempt, or uncouth—they can continue with their version of business as usual. They know who they are because of who they are not. They’re not crazy, not demon-possessed, not ________, and that’s where they derive their sense of identity. Who they are is defined by who they are not.

I remember when I was growing up in Canada in the early 80s we had a class on “Canadian Identity” in grade seven. We spent an entire year talking about how Canadians weren’t French, weren’t English, and mostly certainly weren’t American. As winter gave way to spring, and the tantalizing prospect of summer vacation approached, I started to get a little antsy. One day, near the end of the school year I shot up my hand, “We’ve talked about how we aren’t, but we haven’t discussed who we are. Who are we?” My teacher took a swig of the cough syrup that was always conspicuously on his desk cough or not, mumbled something about his tarnished brass ear trumpet and ignored the question.

We were operating just like the Gerasenes in retrospect. We defined ourselves over and against others, but all that did was tell us who we weren’t. It didn’t equip with us a vision of who we were called to be. Interestingly, I think we can see this demonstrated in the demoniac’s behavior as well. There is a certain ritual repetitiveness to his breaking the chains, running into the wilds, and then being caught again. The town certainly thinks the demoniac is possessed, but the demoniac himself has also come to believe that story about himself as well. The town and the demoniac are trapped in a cycle of expulsion, imprisonment, escape, and capture. It’s a dead-end arrangement where everything is known, predictable, and settled, but ultimately unfruitful. The demoniac is possessed with the idea that who he is is predicated on his status as the outcast. But the town is possessed by the fact that they are not the demoniac. The whole mess is in dire need of exorcism.

And that’s what Jesus comes to do. He heals the demoniac of the crippling story that he is somehow the source of the problem, that his primary identity resides in his demoniac status. The demoniac is restored to his original and true identity as a beloved child of God, created in God’s image and after his likeness, precious in God’s sight. And that’s what boundary crossing love does, isn’t it? It sees beloved children of God and not afflictions, or illnesses. I wonder if the demoniac’s healing is in some deeper sense, more than a skin-deep cure. I wonder whether what is truly restorative is the integration back into the community, and reestablishment of relationship with those who were never previously able to see beyond his condition to his true personhood, the belovedness at the core of his being.

But Jesus also heals the community of its need to define itself over-against some expelled other. It’s telling that the community’s reaction to the healing is not joy and celebration, but fear. The healing of the demoniac throws a wrench into their whole idea of who’s in and who’s out, and how their neat little social arrangement functions. Just as Saul’s identity shifted, and the demoniac’s identity shifted, so does the community’s identity shift in the presence of Jesus’ healing, boundary-crossing love.

That’s why, I think, Jesus doesn’t let the demoniac follow him on the way, but orders him to stay put as the first missionary to the gentiles. The presence of the healed demoniac in the midst of the community, is a sacramental sign of a new way for them to see and be. It’s a way of seeing that sees people and not afflictions, that cares and caresses beyond category. It’s a way of being that stands in solidarity with those who have been shoved to the margins. It’s a way of being in communion that’s been liberated from having to define itself over and against those dirty scapegoated others and lives instead from that breath-takingly terrifying place of radical welcome and indiscriminate hospitality that is Paul’s proclamation, “There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.”

Paul’s transformation, the demoniac’s transformation, the Gerasenes’ transformation—all are the result of life lived in closeness to the love of Jesus. Our call, as God’s gathered people in this place is to look to him, to stand where he stands, in solidarity with those with whom Jesus breaks bread, to breath the air he breathes, to become a little more like Him, a little more like how love looks when it comes into the world. How that looks in the life of each of is blessedly diverse and different for each of us. How that “no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me” is not a melting pot of love, but a transformation that honors each of our unique gifts—a mosaic of love, welcome, healing, and reconciliation. How it looks is different. But who it looks like is the same yesterday, today and forever. Maranatha. Come, Lord Jesus.