Fifth Sunday after Pentecost: "Being" and "Doing" are One in Christ

Isaiah 65.1-9

Psalm 22.18-27

Galatians 3.23-29

Luke 8.26-39

This story of the healing of the Gerasene demoniac is a rich one; rich in detail and rich in depth of meaning.  There is something here about identity, both the identity of Jesus and of the demoniac; and  linked to the idea of identity is that of vocation, purpose and mission: again, of Jesus and of the demoniac.  But, more subtly, is the  underlying motif of crossing boundaries, of bridging divisions, which have been considering for some weeks now.  The Gerasenes lived across from Galilee and were Gentiles and foreigners to the Jews.  The demoniac was one of them.  Jesus and his disciples cross geographical and cultural boundaries to encounter him.  Identity, mission and boundaries, these motifs weave themselves around the basic miracle-story.

From the start, the question of identity is at the centre of this episode.  Immediately on encountering Jesus, the demoniac – crazy though he may be – recognizes him for who he is, the “Son of the Most High God?” (Luke 8.28)  This poor man who has lost his own identity and place in the world – “for a long time he had worn no clothes, and he did not live in a house but in tombs” (Luke 8.27) – knows who Jesus is.  This utter outcast, a foreigner to the Jews and now to his own people, a person alienated even from himself is able to acknowledge who Jesus is and to recognise Jesus’ power; something Jesus’ own followers were rarely able to do.  Yet, he is so lost himself that when Jesus asks his name he can give no better answer than by revealing how torn apart he is:  “My name is legion.” And Jesus crosses the boundary between our world and the world of demons, between madness and sanity, between Jew and Gentile, between neighbour and foreigner and releases this poor man from his torment.  In one fell swoop the true nature of both Jesus’ identity and of his mission is revealed, and the possessed man in acknowledging Jesus’ identity regains his own.

In Jesus, his true nature is intimately connected to his purposes, to the things he is about in the world.  In Jesus, identity and purpose are entwined and interconnected in perfect union.  Jesus does what he does because he is the Son of God, and his identity as Son of God is established because he does what he does.  The philosophical and existential division between “being” and “doing” in human life is gulfed in Jesus, and in Jesus we have the ability to do the same.  That is certainly what happens in the story of the Gerasene demoniac, for the story does not end with his deliverance from his demons.  His healing is completed in the discovering of his purpose and of his vocation.  Recall that the man begs Jesus that he might join him, that he might follow him.  But Jesus sends him away, dismisses him; quite literally sends him on a mission:  “Return to your home, and declare how much God has done for you.” (Luke 8.39)  Jesus is not just sending him off, he is sending him with a purpose: as a Gentile to proclaim to the Gentiles the goodness of the God of Israel.  His total healing, his wholeness, happens when his identity is joined to a purpose, a vocation.  And if you think of it, his vocation arises out of his identity: only a Gentile could carry the Good News to the Gentiles, speaking their language and understanding their ways and customs because they were his own.  In his healing, he has begun to be more like Jesus where identity and purpose flow one out of the other, and from and to the other; where “being” and “doing” are not at odds, but where there is a total unity of identity and purpose.

We often live our lives in a divided place, where who we are (or know ourselves to be) is at odds with want we want or do, or indeed, what we are doing.  Paul hints at this condition when he writes to the Romans: “For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do.” (Romans 7.19)  We see it also in Mark’s version of the healing of the Gerasene demoniac when the writer tells us that the tormented man “was always howling and bruising himself with stones.” (Mark 5.5)  Like Paul, he is at war with himself.  Yet, in Jesus there is no separation or conflict between identity and purpose, between “being” and “doing”; and in Jesus we too can come to that unity.  God did not in the beginning create us to be divided creatures, our natures and our wills fighting against each other; but instead created us whole.  If, as I mentoned some weeks ago, God was “in Christ God was reconciling the world to [God’s self]” (2 Corinthians 2.19), then also – by extension – in Christ God was reconciling and continues to reconcile us to ourselves.  Salvation means wholeness.  And wholeness is about bridging divisions – within ourselves (in the first instance), but from there between ourselves and others, between nations and cultures; ultimately between God and all of creation.  The Incarnation is a sign of this desire on God’s part.  Jesus is so perfectly human that he manifests for us the Creator’s initial and ultimate intention for human beings, and is so perfectly God that he bridges the division between human beings and God.

What Jesus does for the demoniac in the land of the Gerasenes, he does also for us.  In his power we are given the strength to bring wholeness – salvation – out of our divided and fragmented selves.   Identity and purpose, “being” and “doing” are not opposed to each other, and in Jesus we are recreated into the people God has called us to be, as these two aspects of ourselves dialogue with each other, and to the extent that we are willing to grow more deeply into who we are in God, into our own perfect humanity and perfect divinity.  The demoniac’s encounter with Jesus makes him like Jesus in wholeness of identity and purpose.  Our own encounter with Jesus must do the same for us as individuals and as communities.  Simply recognising Jesus as the “the Son of the Most High God” is not enough, as we see from the demoniac’s confession.  Instead, we are called to recognise our own identity in him as we move away from places of inner divisions, and discern our place in the world, our mission.  And ultimately, it is all about mission, so that we can live out more effectively and honestly what we profess, to bring into union who we say we are and what we do.  Shortly after my arrival in this diocese, I attended a Strength for the Journey Conference in which one of the speakers quoted the Rev’d Ian Douglas, saying “If we have a sense of who we are…then we can be more fully who God has called us to be.”  He also quoted Bishop Dick Chang: “If you don’t have an identity, you don’t have a mission”.  In short, only when we find ourselves, do we find what we ought to be about.  When we discover our true nature, we discover also our true vocation, but the second cannot happen without the first.  Yet, when they do, we can span the divide of being and doing which was God’s purpose for us from the beginning.

Herein lies the challenge for the Church too – locally, nationally and globally.  Our identity – our “being” – as the body of Christ is what ought to define and direct our mission, our “doing”.  When we find a dis-connect and become at odds with ourselves, only our reflection on Christ’s perfect union of identity and purpose can bridge our own gulf between the two.  As the demoniac comes to Jesus in his disconnected distraction, so must the Church constantly and intentionally come to Christ, seeking renewal and reconciliation between the claims she makes as to her identity and the living out of her mission, seeking a to resolve that internal conflict.  And yet,, when she in Christ does resolve that internal conflict between being and doing, she finds that the she faces conflict in the world and we see how in the Gospel, the people turn on Jesus the minute he resolves the conflict in the young man: “Then all the people of the surrounding country of the Gerasenes asked Jesus to leave them; for they were seized with great fear.” (Luke 8:37)  In large part, that is some of what the Episcopal Church is experiencing, and why she is in some circles vilified and feared – she is daring to make live out realistically the meaning and ramifications of the baptismal covenant.  Nevertheless, we can rejoice that our encounter with Christ has brought our identity in closer union with our purposes and actions in real and concrete ways.

Our fallen state will always keep at odds our “being” from our “doing”, but in the life and health held out to us in Christ these can be reconciled in such a way that we can as individuals and a Church can declare with joy how much God has done for us. (cf. Luke 8:39) and be living and active agents of God’s kingdom.

            

Third Sunday after Pentecost: Meeting on a Common Ground

1 Kings 17:17-24

Psalm 30

Galatians 1:11-24

Luke 7:11-17

In the second letter to the Corinthians, Paul writes: “…if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new!  All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ, and has given us the ministry of reconciliation; that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself…and entrusting the message of reconciliation to us.” (2 Corinthians 5:17-19)  The word “reconcile” means literally to bring together again.  The English is rendered from the Greek word, katallasso, which at its most basic means “to change, [or] exchange, [for example], as coins for others of equivalent value”.  The Greek also has the sense of bringing together “those who are at variance.”  Reconciliation, is not only about crossing a divide, but also about bringing those things divided into a relationship of mutuality, creating a sort of common meeting ground, in which we recognize in the other one of “equivalent value”, someone like us; in which we come to stand with the other on a common footing. 

Jesus’ world was a world full of divisions, full of boundaries, full of ‘no-go” areas.  Society was deeply stratified;  your class and/or gender signified all manner of things – jobs you could do, people you could talk to in public, people you could talk down to with impunity, people that could talk down to you.  The boundaried, complicated dynamics of table fellowship was a good example – with whom you did or did not eat was an indicator of your standing in society, as well as where you were sat once the meal began.  To cross these boundaries was more than simply poor taste; it could cause you your reputation; and without social standing or connections, normal life was quite literally impossible.  Equally, there were in contemporary religion all manner of boundaries and markers which one could not transgress, and still remain within the prescribed understanding of what it meant to be odedient or faithful.  So, for example, Gentiles were admitted only to one part of the Temple – the aptly named, Court of the Gentiles. Beyond it they could not go.  Only Jews could pass into the next court, and beyond that was another space which only Jewish men could enter, and so on, until only the high priest could enter into the holy of holies, and that but once a year.  The boundary between clean and unclean had varied and complex markers too – touching a leper, let’s say, would make one ritually unclean, and hence unable to participate in Temple worship at all.  So did coming in contact with a menstruating woman or with the dead.  It’s no accident that women were usually left to tend the dead, as they spent so much time in an unclean state already. 

Coming to awareness of all this, one can begin to understand why Jesus was so unpopular.  Notice the gospel reading today.  This alone would have put Jesus beyond the bounds of society and religion.  He crosses the boundary between joy and mourning and speaks to a stranger in her grief; in so doing, he crosses the social and religious divide of gender, directing his gaze and words of compassionate hope to a woman.  But more than that, he places his hand on the bier; he breaches the division between the living and dead by coming into contact with a corpse.  In short, he reconciles.  Here, for a moment, think not so much in terms of bringing together those at variance with each other, but think in terms of that older sense of the Greek word in which the reconciler brings about a kind of equality, in which he or she creates a bridge on which people can stand on equal footing.  The joy and comfort he has in his Father, he brings to the woman and both are joyful, comforted.  The life he has in his Father, he brings to the dead young man, and both stand alive.  Throughout the Gospels Jesus does this over and over again, by reaching across and bridging the social and religious divisions of his world, he brings people into the Father’s will for health and wholeness, into the Father’s joy, into the Father’s freedom, into the Father’s love.  People saw – we see – how in Jesus, God the Father is reconciling the world to himself, to his ways.  Jesus is the bridge – in one sense – on which people can meet with each other and with God on something like a common ground.

Yet, as someone once observed, when you make yourself a bridge people walk all over you.  How very true.  For the most part we do not like those who seek to bridge the safe and tidy divisions that keep things humming along; and of course Jesus’ contemporaries were no exception.  At best, they ignored him; and just a few verses after he raises the young man to life, we hear Jesus bemoaning this very thing: “To what then will I compare the people of this generation, and what are they like?  They are like children sitting in the marketplace and calling to one another,  ‘We played the flute for you, and you did not dance;  we wailed, and you did not weep.’ ”(Luke 7:30-31)  Yet, when they could no longer ignore him, the authorities turned on him, because the cost of reconciliation was too great for those in power, for those with the upper hand, for those – as we learned last week – at the center.  Nevertheless, even at his death Jesus is still revealing the Father’s reconciliation.  Last week, we reflected on the thief whom Jesus welcomed into paradise; but Jesus also brings into a new mutual depedence his mother and the beloved disciple: “Here is your son….Here is your mother.” (John 19:26, 27)  And more astonishingly still we learn how his death effected a completely unexpected reconciliation.  In Luke we find Pilate and Herod sending Jesus back and forth between themselves at his trial, but in the end the writer reveals how this frighteningly bonded the men together: “That same day Herod and Pilate became friends with each other; before this they had been enemies.” (Luke 23:12)  Here too Jesus breaks down the divisions of his world – the divisions between law-breaker and law-abider, between stranger and familiy, between occupied and occupier.  His form of reconciliation allows people to cast each other in a different light.  His reconciliation allows strangers to stand together face to face, and see each other as equal, mutually connected.  As Jesus reconciles us with God, we are not just brought into a new relationship with God, but we glimpse something of ourselves in the divine countenance; and as we are reconciled to another in Christ, we see something of the divine countenance in their own. 

“All this is from God,” Paul tells us, “who reconciled us to himself through Christ, and has given us the ministry of reconciliation.”  This is, of course, the difficult part –  that in taking up the name of Christ, we are made like him in this regard (as in so many others) and his mission becomes are own.  “So we are,” Paul continues, “ambassadors for Christ, since God is making his appeal through us.” (2 Corinthians 5:20a)  Like Jesus, one of the things we quickly learn if we seriously take up the ministry of reconciliation entrusted to us, is how tightly people want to hold on to the divisions which define their lives.  We quickly learn the no-go areas in our world – physical, social, emotional and, most certainly religious; and we are challenged, challenged as we seek to bring to light these divisions, and as we seek to bridge the disparities in our world.  We are challenged also by the nature of what we are doing.   Reconciliation is not about making everyone friends, jollying people into making nice.  It is much harder than that.  People don’t tend to attack or villify you if you are simply trying to bring them together in friendship.  Reconciliation is about bridging the divide between people in order that God’s love, forgiveness, grace and glory may be revealed and glimpsed, while at that same time breaking down anything which stands in the way of that revelation.  Again think of reconciliation as God’s reaching across the divine/human rift and in Jesus coming to meet us on a common footing, and revealing all the good he desires for us, and for the world.  How do we go about making known that reality, unless we take the sort of risk God did in Jesus, unless we become bridges conveying God’s presence in some of the darkest and toughest places in our world, unless we ourselves – as individuals and as communities – become the common ground on which people can meet and see the divine revealed?  Certainly, this comes with the possibility that people will walk all over us, but after all, isn’t that what bridges are for?    

Second Sunday after Pentecost: The Danger of the Center

1 Kings 8:22-23, 41-43

Psalm 96:1-9

Galatians 1:1-12

Luke 7:1-10

The writer of Luke seems particularly interested in the theme of the outsider; the ones who do not quite fit into the system of their time and place; those on the margin, for whom the structures of society were not created, and who hence live on its edges.  This motif of the outsider is there from the very beginning of the Gospel of Luke.  At a time and place when a woman unable to conceive was not only pitied but slightly suspect, the writer begins the story with a barren woman, Elizabeth, the cousin of our Lady.  The angels carry the message of the Messiah’s birth first to shepherds, the lowest of the low in the ancient near-east. They lived as wanderers; both literally and metaphorically at the edges of society.  Only in Luke do we have the story of the Prodigal Son, who goes beyond the pale of what is considered proper parental love and respect, and who is nevertheless ultimately welcomed in from the cold.  Also, only in Luke, is there the story of Good Samaritan.  The Samaritans were a people hated, mis-trusted and vilified for their religious beliefs by Jesus’ contemporaries, yet it is only a Samaritan in the parable who exemplifies Jesus’ definition of neighbor.  Even at Jesus’ death, Luke depicts him as embracing the outcast, as he reassures the thief crucified with him, “Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in Paradise.” (Luke 23:44)  And at the resurrection, it is the women to whom is entrusted its message and who bear witness to it in the midst of the other disciples.  All this in a world in which women’s testimony was not generally admissible as evidence in court.  In each instance, a deeper knowledge of God, or of God’s Good News, is made clear due to an encounter with, or the action of, an outsider.  The message is clear: it is the outsider – the maginalized, the stranger, the foreigner – who may very well have a better grasp on that to which God actually calls us.

The story of the centurion is perhaps the story in Luke which most powerfully exemplifies this theme.  The centurion represents the hated Romans.  He is not only a foreigner, but instrumental in the foreign occupation of Judea.  Indeed his sole purpose there is to maintain the occupation peacefully, and to punish by any means available whoever would seek to disrupt it.  Moreover, if recent biblical research reads the story correctly, the servant for whom he pleads and who was very dear to him, is actually his lover.  And while certainly – as Luke tells the story – this man had gained the respect of some of the Jewish elders, his personal life represents a practice and way of life abhorrent to mainstream, contemporary Jewish sensibilities.  Still, Jesus commends his faith over that of those at the religious center of his world:  “I tell you, not even in Israel have I found such faith.” (Luke 7:11) Jesus doesn’t judge him for being a foreigner or a fornicator, but rather praises him and raises him up as a model for those around him.

But why this concern – even obsession – in Luke (and I would argue in the Scriptures over-all) with the outsider?  The theologian Jane Kopas describes it like this, “[outsiders] see the world differently…[t]hey learn to think from two perspectives and  to speak two languages….Insiders, on the other hand, do not need any language other than their own because it gets them all they need.”  This is basic sociology, even anthropology, but it is also profoundly theological, because when live at the center of our society by virtue of our color, gender, sexual orientation, status or wealth we are all too often blinded when it comes to seeing the larger picture.  At the center, we are inclined to define God and God’s will in terms only of our world view, and because theology is wriiten by the dominant culture, we usally get away with it.  The voices and experiences of the outsider may at best be forgotten, at worst persecuted and condemned; and even a cursory review of history, including church history, is a dismal witness to both.  Yet, what the Gospel of Jesus – who was himself an outsider – tells us is that the voice of the outsider, may actually be the voice of God calling us to a more faithful living of the Good News.  Moreover, that when we live at the center of things – socially, economically, or in any other way – we miss something of God’s voice, we miss something of God’s vision, because – if we can trust Scripture in this regard – God seems to be almost consistently working out his purposes in and through the outsider.  Let’s face it, if one lives at the center of things, if one is, say, affluent, white, male, straight, life is made for you.  This doesn’t mean that it won’t have its difficulties, but at the center one has the financial, social and even political wherewhithal to meet those difficulties more-or-less effectively; for the most part, one has the power to effect the change deemed necesarry in order to return conditions to the status quo.  On the other hand, for those on the margins of society, for those who are outsiders by virtue of any number of circumstances, for those without resources or power to effect a change – well, they must abandon themselves to providence more immediately, and depend on God’s goodness more directly.  Remember the story of the widow’s mite (which not coincidentally appears only in Luke as well)?  She offers to God all that she has trusting solely in his providence, while the rich – those as the center – make their offering simply out of their abundance. (cf. luke 21:1-4) 

Still, the ironic aspect of at-the-center living, is that the center for all its seeming safety is a rather precarious place.  We can go from being at the center in any number of ways to finding ourselves very easily and quickly in a situation from which our cenralized position cannot save us.  We can go from being at the center in terms of our health, for example, to finding ourselves at the margins of life in hospital.  We can go all too quickly from the center of family life surrounded by friends and loved ones, to mourning a death at the emotional boundaries of existence.  The last few years have showed us this situation over and again.  How many went from sitting safely at the center of financial security, to grappling at edge with unemployment and economic chaos?  More recently, we have seen this dynamic poignantly and graphically displayed in the natural disasters in our country.  How many were just weeks ago living at the center of things socially and geographically but have since then been violently transported to the edges among the debris of what was once their security?  In these cases, the cry almost instinctively rises to God, because a situation has arisen which the safety and self-satisfaction of the center cannot fix.  Now, they must learn to live on the edge and abandon themselves to providence, because the systems of center-life are non-existent.  Yet, at the edge we find God’s goodness revealed in a myriad of ways – in the people who offer help, in the survival of our loved ones even when the rest our world seems to have perished, in the knowledge of being loved by friend when we feel most unlovable and a failure.  At the edges we can learn how nonsensical and ridiculous were the things we valued at the center, and we can readjust our priorities.  The edge opens our eyes to see things from a wider perspective, with keener insght, to discern who we are and who others are, stripped of social markers; that is, who we are, who they are, in God.

Perhaps, in the end it’s not that God lives on the edges, but that those on the edges are simply more attentive to his presence, more keen for the saving knowledge of his Good News.  They are more aware of their absolute need for him.  It is important that those of us at the center, pay close attention to this, because no matter where we are now at some point we will find ourselves at the edges; and even if we never do, looking at the world from an edge-perspective – as best we can – will grant to us a wider of field of vision as well as a more compassionate heart.  The fact is that we can stay at the center, but that position may very well shield us from the very thing as Christians we say we want – to grow closer to God and closer to our neighbor.  And let this be a gentle warning to us all, it was those at the center in Jesus’ day who were least likely to be transformed by his message of love, forgiveness and compassion.  After all they had – socially, politically, economically – the most to lose.