Tuesday, June 25, 2013

Luke 8:26-39


            His name wasn’t really John, but I’ll call him that any way.  John was in his 60’s, and he’d had a hard life.  He was in and out of prison when he was younger, but had managed to stay out for the past 20 years straight.  He had been in gangs, and it was kind of nebulous if he still had some connection to one or not.  But now, he really wanted to turn his life around.  He had found a nice woman.  He wanted to settle down, and leave the rougher parts of his past behind him.  What he was struggling with now was drug addiction.  The details aren’t important, but John was using some large amounts of some very powerful, dangerous, and illegal stuff.  He’d been going to NA- narcotics anonymous, for those of you who aren’t familiar- and he’d had some success staying clean for short periods of time. 

            But there was a problem.  John could give up his drug of choice when it was just him and his significant other.  But not when his family or friends were around.  His family and friends were used to John the addict.  They had crafted their whole lives and relationships around him being a certain way.  They knew how he acted when he was getting the drug.  They knew how he acted when he was high on the drug.  They knew how he acted after he’d come down.  And they knew just how they were supposed to act in all these situations.  They were comfortable with it, and they didn’t want to have to change because he suddenly felt like changing. Instead of being excited for him, his friends and family were angry, confused, and afraid.  And, because of their fear of change, they ended up either pushing him away, or pushing him right back to that drug he wanted to badly to quit.  They preferred the chains of addiction to the discomfort of change.

            His name wasn’t really James, but I’ll call him that anyway.  I don’t know how old he was, and I don’t know much about his past.  But he was possessed by demons, and they’d been torturing him for long enough that everyone knew it.  He was living among the tombs now, if you could call what he had a life.  He was kept chained up, and there was even someone there to guard him.  But, even those precautions weren’t enough.  The demons still got to him.  He would break free of his chains sometimes, and the demons would get him to run even further away from the people who used to be his family or friends.

            And then this man showed up.  Jesus showed up.  Jesus was different, and the man we’re calling “James” knew it right away.  He knew who Jesus was.  First of all, Jesus was a Jewish man, and Jewish people weren’t supposed to be anywhere near him.  They weren’t supposed to be around dead bodies, and he lived surrounded by dead bodies.  Jewish people weren’t supposed to be around pigs, and he was surrounded by a herd of pigs as well.  Second, Jesus wasn’t just any Jewish man.  He was, as the demons knew, the son of God.  Certainly, the son of God wouldn’t want anything to do with a demon possessed man.  Demons and God aren’t exactly best friends.  And, regular people didn’t want anything to do with James anyway.  Why would this Jewish man, the son of God, have anything to do with him?  Jesus must be there to torture him, James and his demons decided.

            But this isn’t what Jesus did.  Instead, Jesus set the man free from his demons.  This was big news.  So people started to come back to see James.  His family, and his former friends, maybe.  But, instead of being happy that he was newly free of what had been torturing him for so long, we read that they were afraid.  Like John’s family and friends were used to his drug addiction, the people who knew James were used to his demon possession.  They knew how he acted when he was under the influence of his demons.  And, they knew how to act around him.  They were comfortable with things the way they were.  They didn’t want to have to change just because James had suddenly been changed. The chains were better than the change.  So they ended up pushing Jesus away.

            It’s pretty easy to think that the people of the Gerasenes were awful, weak, or cowards doe pushing Jesus away.  But while they aren’t exactly exemplars of the faithful life, I don’t want to demonize them.  They’re humans, dealing with a difficult part of human life.  They’re humans dealing with difficult change, and there’s a lot of change going in this scripture passage. 

            In this passage, we first encounter personal change.  This is what happens to the man who was possessed by demons.  And personal change can certainly be difficult.  Going back to John and his struggle to stay clean, it wasn’t easy for John to stop using his drug of choice.  It was really, really hard.  He was going to NA and counseling, he really wanted the change, and still, he struggled.  The man we’re calling James, the Gerasene man who was possessed by demons, compared getting rid of them to torture.  I’m sure every one of us has a story, too, of making a change in our lives and how much we struggled to succeed.  Because change is hard.  Change takes away our familiar comfort and makes our lives difficult as we re-learn how to be ourselves in the world.

            And it isn’t just personal change that is so difficult.  There is also the kind of change that other people bring into our lives.  That’s the kind of change John’s family and friends fought when he stopped getting high.  It’s the kind of change the people of the Gerasenes fought when the man was freed from the demons that possessed him.  It’s pretty easy to get angry at John’s family and friends for pushing him back into the cycle of drug addiction.  It’s pretty easy to laugh or be incredulous that the people of the Gerasenes were so afraid of that they pushed Jesus away. 

            But here’s the honest truth.   It really is incredibly difficult when we have to change our lives because of someone else.  Maybe you’ve had a loved one become ill, and you’ve had to rearrange your life to care for them  Or, for those of you with children or younger siblings, remember the huge transformation of your life when they were born.  Maybe you’ve made a friend or had an encounter with someone and your life wasn’t the same afterwards.  This kind of change, the kind that comes from others, can be even harder than changing ourselves.  And, when others change our lives in this really difficult way, we tend to resist. 

            We like the way we are.  We worked hard to be who we are and we don’t want anyone else to change us!  Change is hard and we like to be comfortable instead.  But comfortable isn’t always good.  It’s a desire for comfort that got John’s family to push him back to his drug addiction and their dysfunctional family dynamics.  It’s a desire for comfort that got the people of the Gerasenes to push Jesus away.  And, it’s a desire for comfort that keeps us, today, from embracing the kind of radical change that Jesus still offers us.  And sadly, there are times we prefer the chains of the way things were to the change that can be.   

            There are so many examples of this around us.  We’d rather leave transgendered people chained among the tombs than have to change restroom signs.  We’d rather leave republicans or democrats, liberals or conservatives—whichever we’re not—chained among the tombs than actually get to know them.  Because then have to change our idea of who the “other” really is, and it’s hard to get into a shouting match with a real person.  We’d rather leave the homeless, single parents, teenagers with strange hairstyles, people of other races, anyone who is different than we are chained to the tombs.  We do this because it’s so hard when others being change to our lives.  But, when we leave people chained among the tombs, we become John’s family refusing to accept him back.  We become the people of the Gerasenes asking Jesus to leave.  All because change is so uncomfortable, that it scares us to our cores.

            I’m sure you get this by now-- The comfortable and familiar aren’t necessarily good.  Jesus didn’t show up, see the man with the demons, say “Well this looks pretty good,” and leave.  Jesus frees him from his demons and then sends him back into the very same community that would rather have him chained among the tombs.  Because as hard as it was, both the man and the community needed that change.

            And we too, need to make room for change.  I’m willing to bet that none of us wants to become John’s family, pushing him back into drug addiction and clinging to an unhealthy family dynamic.  So, the question is, who do we want to be?  How do we want our story to end. 

            I don’t know how John’s story ends.  I don’t know if he ever was successful staying off his drug and settling down with the woman he loved.  And we don’t know how the man we’re calling James’ story ends.  We don’t know if he was accepted back into the community and one day found a place to belong and happiness.  But, we do get to write the ends of our story.  We get to pick.  Chains or change? 

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