20th June 2010 - "Reclothe us in our rightful minds"

Usha Hull - All Saints', Datchworth and St Michael's
Luke 8 26-39

It’s a beautiful day in early summer, with clouds that scud across a blue sky and spells of sunlight that come and go. A young farmer is helping his uncle to trim hedges. A devoted father to two boys, a loving husband to his adoring wife, possibly the last thing on his mind is death in that morning filled with sun and shade. Yet minutes later he lies dead, shot in a massacre that shocks the world.

Weeks later, the questions remain. Why did a Cumbria taxi driver by the name of Derrick Bird take up a gun and massacre twelve innocent people? What causes a seemingly ordinary man to become a mass murderer? What happened to cause the streets of one of the world’s most beautiful regions to run with blood on that lovely summer’s day? Possibly the questions will never be answered in this life.

Nor are the Bird massacres isolated, bringing back, as they do, horrific memories of Hungerford and Dunblane. Yet that is the nature of evil. It can strike suddenly, out of nowhere. It is ever present in the world, watching and waiting. Martin Luther King was to say: ‘There is hardly anything more obvious than the fact that evil is present in the universe. It projects its nagging, prehensile tentacles into every level of human existence... Evil is with us as a stark, grim and colossal reality.

And he goes on to say, ‘The Bible affirms the reality of evil in glaring terms. It symbolically shows it in the work of a serpent which comes to inject a discord into the beautiful, harmonious symphony of life in a garden. It sees it in nagging tares disrupting the orderly growth of stately wheat. It sees it in a ruthless mob hanging the world’s most precious character on a cross between two thieves. The Bible is crystal clear in its perception of evil.’

Today’s Bible story from Luke is one of a series of stories showing the power of the Lord. He has shown his power over creation in the previous chapter in the stilling of the storm. In the following chapters he will show his power over the sicknesses that beset us by healing the woman with a haemorrhage, and finally he will show his power over death by raising the daughter of Jairus from the dead. In today’s reading, he shows his power over evil and dark forces.

Today’s story about the Gerasene man takes place in a predominantly gentile environment, which could explain why a herd of pigs were kept since according to Jewish custom, pigs were unclean. There is also a great deal of scholarly debate as to the exact location where today’s event takes place. We do know it took place by the sea shore, possibly south east of the sea of Galilee, in the region known as Decapolis, or ten towns, a self governing region. And the demon, when asked its name replied that it was legion. In the time of our Lord, the Romans were the bad guys, the occupying force, and a Roman Legion consisted of up to 6,000 men, or a great many bad guys, you might say. So we might conclude that the poor man whom Jesus met was possessed by thousands of invading forces, in the grip of which he was helpless, cast out, shunned by society.

The Gospel of Luke speaks out powerfully for the downtrodden, the oppressed, the marginalised people of the world we live in. And you can’t get any more downtrodden than the Gerasene man. His predicament literally was the pits. People ran away when they saw him. They were afraid of him, after all mental illness often frightens us far more than physical illness does. They tried to restrain him with chains, but such was his strength that he broke even these. He was totally isolated, living among the dead in the tombs. He was abandoned by all. And I wouldn’t be surprised if the invading forces within him drove him to self harm.

I suppose that for most of us, an encounter with a man who roams naked and who is possessed by demons is not an everyday occurrence. You might ask, what has such a person to do with us? This is a story about a possessed man in a far away time and place and how does this affect our lives? And the answer must be that in different guises, evil remains a reality in our own lives too.

Many years ago, while living in India as a student, in one of the poorest cities of the world, I came across people, who if not demon-possessed were at least of unsound mind and allowed to roam freely. One such person was frequently found living rough in the graveyard attached to my local church, and we students nicknamed him Mad Moses on account of his long grey beard. He was practically naked, his hair was matted and unkempt, his eyes were staring, he smelt bad, he muttered in an unknown language with frequent bursts of wild laughter and, not unusually, we girl students avoided him.

Who he was, I have no idea. At the time, to me he was just one of the many unfortunates in a country of poverty, whose names are legion, cast out into a cruel world where the realities of life can be merciless and can literally drive you mad. And many years hence, in reading the passage by Luke about the man possessed by demons I remembered Mad Moses. What was his former life like, I wondered. He must have been an ordinary human being at some point, so what were the circumstances that brought about this grim change in him, that made him live a less than human life?

And these questions made me look at today’s Bible story from another angle. What must it be like not to be in possession of one’s own right mind, to lose one’s identity, to forfeit the familiar things on which we depend and which we so often take for granted? What must it be like to be deprived of one’s dignity? What must it be like to live in a dark world, a world of the dead among the tombs, devoid of hope, deprived of life, laughter and beauty? If you think, ‘let’s not go there’, I wouldn’t blame you.

After all, most of us like to live lives, that are steady, ordinary, everyday, familiar and comforting, and rightly so. Demonic possession is an uncomfortable subject and there is a tendency today to label it as symptomatic of mental disorder. But whether you believe in demons or not, there can be no denying the reality of evil in the world. So when people like ourselves turn away from the ugly realities of life, when we prefer to turn a blind eye to the injustices and evils of this world or prefer to pretend they do not exist, when we cease to care about the suffering of others, we not only do the world a wrong, we do ourselves a huge injustice too.

And this is because when we are in our right minds, we are the people God intended us to be. We not only begin to recognise the presence of evil where it exists, but we realise that we are the people upon whom God depends to carry on His fight against it. To be in our right minds means to recognise where God is in our lives, to recognise that without the goodness, the love, the sanity, the common sense of Godly living, there really is no other way, there is only the abyss and darkness, there is only emptiness.

Restored to our right minds we become more responsible and caring and compassionate, We recognise that we ourselves owe those who are suffering our support, our courage, our love and good will, our ability to speak out and fight on their behalf, and that we owe this not because we ourselves are strong but because we are utterly dependent on the love and strength of the most sane person in all creation, our Lord Himself. There is no saner way to live than that taught by our Lord, there is no saner person than the true Christian, even though to the world the way of the cross may often seem like folly, like madness.

In his beautiful hymn ‘Dear Lord and Father of mankind’, the Quaker poet John Greenleaf Whittier prays that the Lord will reclothe us in our rightful minds. When the Gerasene man met Jesus he regained more than his clothes. Jesus gave him back his dignity, his life. He gave him back his ability to experience the everyday world with all its beauty, its cares, its sorrows, its joys. He gave him back all those things which you and I often take for granted and yet which today millions across the world are deprived of, such things as freedom, the ability to make our own decisions, the sweetness of enjoying the simple things of life without fetters and without fear.

Yes, evil does exist in the world in a massive way, at every level of human experience as Martin Luther King has said. But so does good. Make no mistake, God is at work in the world. At every level of human experience, in every time and place, there is a battle being fought. And God ever extends to us the invitation to join Him in this battle.

And I end with a three very short verses from that great poet John Greenleaf Whittier:

‘The paths of pain are thine. Go forth
With patience, trust, and hope;
The sufferings of a sin-sick earth
Shall give thee ample scope.

So shalt thou be with power endued
From Him who went about
The Syrian hillsides doing good,
And casting demons out.

That Good Physician liveth yet
Thy friend and guide to be;
The Healer by Gennesaret
Shall walk the rounds with thee.’

Amen