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Good
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 Sermon
06/27/10
Deliver My Soul from the Sword ~ by
Reverend Thomas Cary Kinder
June 27, 2010 Fifth Sunday after Pentecost
First Congregational Church in Thetford, Vermont, UCC
Psalm 22; Luke 8:26-39; 9:51-62
My
God, my God, why have you forsaken me?
Deliver
my soul from the sword. (from Psalm 22)
Like the 22nd Psalm, this sermon begins
in anguish but ends in hope.
It begins with the anguish caused by the American culture of
violence around us today, but ends with the culture of nonviolence
Christ wants to help us create, and the power of God that can make
miracles happen if we learn to allow it to flow through us. As Jesus showed in today’s
gospel lesson, we have to name demons in order to exorcise them, we have to confront them in order to have
peace from them. So we begin
crying,
My God, my God, why have you
forsaken me?
Deliver my soul from the
sword.
Imagine
those words being cried out by villagers in Afghanistan who have seen
neighboring villages hit by American bombs. Imagine those words spoken by
people whose unemployment benefits are being stopped, people to whom
Congress is saying we have no more to give you to help you avoid the
violence of poverty, yet we have hundreds of billions of dollars to
spend on weapons and war, while over in the Supreme Court corrupt
corporate and government officials whose greed has broken all bounds
are being set free to enjoy the money they have stolen.
My
God, my God, why have you forsaken me?
Deliver
my soul from the sword.
Imagine
this one prolonged cry rising from millions of voices around the Gulf
of Mexico. It is the cry of
all of us who feel sickened by the world in which we live, the world
that for the sake of money and comfort and ease will destroy the
earth and enslave its people and wage war.
I am
poured out like water,
and
all my bones are out of joint;
my
heart is like wax; it is melted within my breast….
Deliver my soul from the
sword!
The sword that threatens our soul is the
physical destruction of our planet, but it is also the psychological
and spiritual damage of living in a way we see is harmful and feeling
unable to do anything about it, in part because we are addicted to
this way of life, and in part because we are held captive in it by
the most powerful forces the world has ever seen that are determined
to keep things the way they are.
The
22nd Psalm was written by someone whose people had been
held as slaves in exile for four hundred years, and whose nation had
been ransacked and taken captive repeatedly. The Psalmist’s experience is
not that different from our American situation, although it is not as
easy for us to see, because there is no one government or army or
race that holds us captive.
There is a vast, all-pervasive culture of violence, driven by
the basest of human instincts, greed and lust and pride,
that permeates not only massive corporations and the
governments they control, but our towns and homes and even the way we
each think and talk and act.
Institutions driven by greed and by the lust for power and
privilege spend fortunes every year on advertising to promote the
myth that this violent way of life is desirable. They brainwash us to ignore what
our souls are crying out. This
creates a conflict within us that is a form of collective
insanity.
In
the Gospel passage today a demon named Legion was making a man
insane. The word Legion had
only one meaning in New Testament times. It meant the army of the Roman
Empire that occupied Palestine.
There are clues in the story that the man’s demon
actually is the oppression of the Roman Empire.
For
instance, the man is called a Gerasene,
even though the location is a stretch to fit in with the geography of
Luke’s story. That town
had been part of a Jewish Revolt that had tried to overthrow the
Roman occupation, and the Emperor Vespasian
had sent his army in and killed a thousand young men and taken all
their families captive and plundered their property and then burned
the entire town to the ground.
Also,
the word used to describe the herd of swine that the demons went into
was technically inaccurate for pigs, but was a word used to refer to
military recruits. The image
of those Roman military pigs drowning in the Sea of Galilee echoes
the Egyptian army being drowned as they tried to capture back into
slavery the children of Israel as they escaped through the Red Sea.
If
we see all this in the story of Jesus exorcising the demon named
Legion, we can understand it as being about the liberation of the
Hebrew people from the “colonization of the mind,” as one
commentator puts it (Frantz Fanon).
It is about the healing of the collective anxiety generated by
the oppression of the Roman Empire.
Mental illness and self-destructive behavior have always been
common among the victims of such oppression. (Binding the Strong Man, Ched
Myers, p 192)
We
can read ourselves into this story.
We can hear echoes of our culture’s insanity and each
soul’s anguish, caused by the oppressive culture of violence
and all its harm that we feel unable to escape. God seems to have forsaken us. Swords surround us. We are living in a tomb. Our heart has melted to wax within
us. We are driven out of our
right minds.
It
would take a miracle for the demons of violence to be exorcised and
purified from our society.
But
miracles are exactly what the scriptures say will happen if we turn
to God. Both the 22nd
Psalm and the Gospel contain good news that completely overcomes the
bad. They promise peace and
justice and mercy that no demon or force of greed can destroy. The Psalm says,
You
did not despise or abhor the affliction of the afflicted;
you did
not hide your face from me, but heard when I cried to you.
The
poor shall eat and be satisfied;
those who
seek you shall praise you.
The
wisdom of the Hebrew people after all their suffering of occupations
and enslavement and captivity was that God has mercy on the
affliction of the afflicted, that God hears when we cry, that God
favors the poor and delivers the oppressed. The wisdom is that those who seek
God shall in the end praise God.
We may cry out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken
me?” But even that cry
is acknowledging God as the source of power to change our
circumstances.
This
is the first thing we need to do to bring about the miracle we
seek. We need to stay
completely focused on the Spirit as the source of our guidance and
power.
Today’s
gospel readings give us more specific guidelines. The story of the driving out of the
demon named Legion tells us that the people who witnessed the way of
Christ firsthand saw in it the force needed to liberate society from
the most powerful empire the world had ever seen. They saw in Christ the ability to
restore people to sanity and peace, to heal them and free them from
the violent culture around them.
The
gospels imply that just a few people who are filled with the truth
and love of Christ can be the leaven that makes the whole loaf rise,
until the nation lives by the rule of God instead of the rule of
greed. (We will look more at
this hope for America next Sunday).
As St. Seraphim of Sarov said,
“Have peace in yourself, and thousands will find salvation
around you.”
The
Mahatma Gandhi saw this, too.
He said, “My optimism rests on my belief in the infinite
possibilities of the individual to develop nonviolence. The more you develop it in your own
being, the more infectious it becomes till it overwhelms your
surroundings and by-and-by might over-sweep the world.”
The
second gospel passage from Luke today shows that Christ rejected the
way of violence when his disciples wanted to call down the fire of
heaven to destroy a village.
Unlike the Roman or American Empire, Jesus would not use
violence to drive out violence.
He would use only means consistent with the end he sought.
Jesus
also taught that the key to following him was the complete turning
over of our lives, the letting go of everything. The book of First Timothy says that
greed is the root of all evil.
The fifth-century Christian teacher, St. Mark the Ascetic saw
that greed has its roots within our lust for comfort and pleasure,
and in our pride that greedily seeks to be seen as worthy of
esteem. In other words, greed,
lust and pride are bound up together as one, and all three need to be exorcised from us if we want to be
delivered from evil and free to follow Christ. (Christ the Eternal Tao p 500)
Jesus
said, “Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests; but
the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.” He says, to follow me, you need to
let go of your desire for comfort and pleasure and take a different
way through life, a path that is not directed by those desires, but
directed instead by the desire to love and serve.
Jesus
said, “Let the dead bury their own dead; but as for you, go and
proclaim the realm of God.”
Jesus is not being cold-hearted, he
is making a point about orientation.
It was a matter of tradition and esteem to perform the rituals
for the dead in that culture, and a matter of shame not to do the
right thing. Jesus is telling
the man to let go of his pride, to let go of his allegiance to the
values of the materialistic realm, which is the realm of death, and
to follow instead the spiritual values of the realm of God—at
the risk of being shamed or ridiculed for it. The values of the realm of God will
lead us to treat the material world as sacred and to care for the
living and the dead far better than we would by following the values
of materialism.
Jesus
said, “No one who puts a hand to the plow and looks back is fit
for the realm of God.”
We cannot live half in and half out of Christ’s way if
we want to be the agents of miraculous change that our world needs.
Gandhi
called this non-cooperation with evil. According to Eknath
Easwaran in the book Gandhi the Man, Gandhi believed that “Without our
cooperation…injustice cannot continue. This is the great spiritual teaching
behind nonviolent non-cooperation.
As long as a people accepts exploitation, both exploiter and
exploited will be entangled in injustice. But once the exploited refuse to
accept the relationship, refuse to cooperate with it, they are
already free.” (pp 48-49)
This
was hard even where the exploiter was easy to identify as the British
Empire, but in our world, it is even harder, because the exploiter is
our whole culture of violence and the greed, lust and pride that
permeate everything around us and even our own souls. Gandhi’s nonviolent movement
depended on a spiritual practice of humble self-emptying and relying
completely on God as the foundation of non-cooperation with evil. The movement in our day needs that
spiritual practice even more.
12 Step groups are designed to help
people break addictions to old patterns. They have wisdom that we need to
break our addiction to oil and to violence and to the desire within
us that keeps us addicted to our way of life. The 12 Step groups say of
non-cooperation with evil, “It’s easy. All you have to change is
everything.”
What
today’s Psalm and gospel passages ask of us is exactly what the
first three of the 12 steps describe: first, that we name what the
demon is, and that we admit we are powerless over what we are
addicted and captive to, and admit that our lives have become
unmanageable; second, that we come to believe that a Power greater
than ourselves can restore us to sanity; and third, that we make a
decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God. If we can do this, the change in us
can let a power flow through us that will change the world around us.
Most
people have to hit rock bottom before they are ready to make that
complete change. Are you
ready? Have you had enough of
the culture of violence that makes you fearful and angry and
depressed, that drives your life into over-busyness, that keeps you
dependent on the oil industry and the military industrial complex and
that colonizes even your thoughts and desires and makes you addicted
to things that you know are harmful to the earth and to you and to
our children?
If
so, if you are willing to place your faith in God’s power to
work miracles through you, you can take a step toward sanity right
now. That step is to pray in
silence, letting go of everything, handing over your will and your
life to God’s care, emptying out so the Spirit can fill you and
change you and work through you to change the world.
Let
us pray in silence…
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