On the subway you see men like him, women too. You step into the car and the stench assaults you, from that silent mound of filthy rags and bulky bags in which there lives a human being. Going nowhere, no home but there, alone, unloved, dehumanized by a legion of demons or mental illnesses or both.
If he were naked like the man in the tombs they’d arrest him, but as long as he’s covered we tolerate his misery. We have somewhere to get to, things to do, money to make, a herd of swine to manage. Some social worker maybe could help him out, as long as that does not delay my train!
The Lord Jesus steps on shore and the man opposes him. His demons sense the power of Jesus and they are scared. These demons are not from hell (our English translation is misleading), they’ve never been there and they don’t want to go there. These are the natural spirits of the landscape (the natural spirituality to which we moderns are now insensitive), but natural spirits corrupted, spirits diseased, terrified, vicious like mad dogs, violent, destructive. And not smart. It was their own very bad idea to be released into the herd of swine. Self-destructive spirituality.
After that the opposition to Jesus moves to the local population. He’s delayed their train. Their pigs are gone. The misery of that man was tolerable but now what about them? Jesus, mind your own business. We have to live with chaos every day and keep it at bay—what little we can control. We live so close to disaster, an accident, a fall, we miss a payment. We know that our attempts at order keep some people out, but we’d rather you’d leave us alone to manage our own business.
How much do you want the Savior in your life? How much do you want the Kingdom of God to come into your space? It might upset things. What about business as usual? But yes, you do want what Jesus offers in this story, the healing and humanizing of the man, clothed, and in his right mind.
You wish you could do it for the lost soul on the subway. You want this kind of Jesus in your life, you want his kind of healing and humanizing in the world. Forgiving sins, reconciling lost souls back among their homes and families—why can’t it be more frequent, more constant, more familiar, why so rare? Jesus, where are you? We want you, we do believe in you—where are you?
Psalm 42: All day long my enemies mock me and say to me, “Where now is your God?” Why are you so full of heaviness, O my soul, and why are you so disquieted within me? This heaviness of soul, you know what that is, that’s depression. It’s more than that, but at least it’s that. It’s what you see in Elijah in our first lesson. He’s depressed, and depression usually means a combination of anger and grief.
He sees the Kingdom of God as a lost cause, as hopeless, despite his recent triumph over the prophets of Baal. The Baals were the same kind of corrupted natural spirits of the landscape that Jesus would face eight hundred years later. But after Elijah’s great win, one word from Jezebel casts him down. He’s got that notorious let-down after a triumph, the slump after success. He runs away, he mopes, he says he might as well be dead. Kill me now.
When I was in my second parish, in Ontario, Canada, I suffered four years of insomnia. I could not sleep. I was high-strung and hyper-vigilant, and productive, so I did not think I was depressed. My doctor put me on Ambien to get me through it. One day my doctor said to me, “Pardon me for saying this, but isn’t your real problem that you’re mad at God?” A wise woman. I was mad at God. I was aggrieved at God. For all kinds of reasons. And it was making me unhealthy, although not mentally ill or demon possessed. But this why I say that Elijah here is mad at God.
He’s a mighty prophet. He’s been jealous for God. But here he’s jealous of God, of God’s prerogatives. “I’m knocking myself out for you, God, and what are you doing? Where are you God?” Absent? Inactive? He doesn’t criticize God directly, but you can read between the lines.
The story is marvelously strange and it passes into paranormal. The prophet is like a wizard here, sustained by just those morsels of angelic food for his forty-day hike into the desert. He leaves the world of ordinary life for the wild world where humans die and spirits haunt, to the barren peak where God spoke to Moses. Whose idea was this? Does God even want him here? It is ambiguous. What else should we expect in this strange Marvel-Comics-world that Elijah has put himself into?
When he climbs Mount Sinai God questions him, “What are you doing here, Elijah?” How do you hear that—as an open question or a challenge to a guy God knows is mad at him? Twice the question, and twice Elijah’s answer of despair. But God doesn’t comfort him. Prophets don’t get that kind of indulgence. God just commissions him again. “Go return on your way to the wilderness of Damascus.” And then in the next verses, unfortunately cut off by the lectionary: “Get going, I’ve got a job for you there. And by the way, you’re not the only one left. I’ve got 7,000 loyal Israelites whose quiet service has been unnoticed by you in all your jealousy for me.”
So Elijah makes the long journey back and I wonder what he ate. Is he muttering, “Jeez, you don’t get much appreciation around here!” He’s got the lesson of the mountain, that God was not in the storm nor the earthquake nor the fire but the still, small voice. He has to learn God’s strategy.
Yes, we like the mighty acts of God, the mighty power of God, that God can do great miracles of vindication and liberation, but the way God chooses to assert the Kingdom of God is by means of the small and quiet voices who give their witness. Like the man that Jesus healed. Jesus commissioned him: “Go tell how much God has done for you.” That’s the power of God—your witness; not the wind or earthquake or fire but your quiet testimony, by what you tell and how you do what you do. In your witness comes the Kingdom of God. What you say about God and why you live your life.
In a few minutes you’re going to hear such a testimony, from our own Joanna Franchini. She will tell you of her still, small deeds of service to refugee mothers and children opposed by the hostility and intentional chaos of our current government. And she will ask for your support. Let her encourage you to endorse this strategy of God. It may delay your train. But here’s a take-home for today: your own testimony is everything, no matter how small and weak your voice may be.
Do you see the world as positive or negative, or even hostile and chaotic? Does your worldview run Marvel-Comics or mystical-spiritual or rationalist-scientific? (Mine runs Calvinist and Tolkien and I try to hold them together.) No matter what, in the middle is humanity, and the common trend of our two stories today is humanization: the Kingdom of God in small, quiet human voices and typically unnoticed service, and also the humanization of the man called Legion, now quietly sitting at the feet of Jesus, clothed, and in his right mind. A proper human being, a member of that new humanity that St. Luke has made a theme in both his Gospel and The Acts, the new humanity that is brought into the world by the Lordship of Jesus Christ. Look at the change. It might upset our business, but is this not what you want to see and to hope for?
Not Humanism as independent of God, but humanization because of the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, human beings as the image of God and object of God’s love, humanizing those who are dehumanized because they are sacred to the Lord. Whenever we encounter dehumanization we are judged with a judgment against idolatry, a judgment against demonization. You are not judged as an individual when you can do nothing for that person on the train, but is not our system judged and our way of life, that we tolerate such misery, and children in cages, and families cut apart?
What God does for us doesn’t always feel like love. God was hard with Elijah, and the Lord Jesus refused the begging of the liberated man to stay with him. God challenges us when God commissions us, and often when we’d rather be just held. But in the challenge is the larger love. You know how it works. In the challenge is the larger love. Your commission is to declare how much the love of God has done for you.
Copyright © 2019, by Daniel James Meeter, all rights reserved.
No comments:
Post a Comment