Sermon: "The View from the Ditch"

Rev. Maureen Frescott

Congregational Church of Amherst, UCC

 July 7, 2013

Luke 10:25-37

 “The View from the Ditch”

The morning sun had just appeared over the horizon, when the man regained consciousness.

The smell of wet grass and rotting vegetation quickly overcame him.

It was then that he realized that he was face down on the ground,

…lying in a drainage ditch on the road down from Jerusalem to Jericho.

The man used what little strength he had left to roll himself over.

And when he did he screamed out in pain.

It felt like a thousand knives were tearing through his body as the pain shot through his back, his chest, and the hip that he must have landed on when he fell.  He tried to open his eyes but they were swollen shut.

His head was pounding, and as he reached up to touch his face he could feel the dried blood caked around his nose and mouth.

“How did I get here?” the man wondered aloud.

Did he trip and fall? Was he hit from behind by a runaway cart, or animal?

Then it all came flooding back.

It was approaching dusk the night before when he came around a bend in the road and there they were. Men with cloaks concealing their faces.

First one, then two, then three more, leaping out at him from behind a large rock.

The men descended upon him and began pounding on him with their fists.

He instinctively covered his face and turned to get away, but one of his attackers pushed him to the ground and soon they were all kicking him as hard as they could. What happened next was a blur.

The last thing the man remembered was being stripped of his clothing and his belongings.

The coat that his mother had insisted he take to guard against the chill of the dessert nights.

The sandals his wife had woven for him with loving care.

The lucky pendent that his youngest child had slipped into his belt pouch the night before he left home.

But worst of all, his attackers took the money purse he had hidden beneath his cloak.

Six months worth of wages that he had earned working in Jerusalem.

Money that was earmarked as the final payment on a fishing boat that he desperately needed to support his family back in Jericho.

And now it was gone.

His friends had warned him about the road down to Jericho.

The twisting, desolate mountain road that descends for 17 miles from the hills of Jerusalem to the valleys below was prime territory for ambushers. The locals called it the “The Bloody Pass.”

Now he knew why. He had ignored the warnings, and here he was, lying motionless and left for dead in a ditch.

The rising sun burned on his face, and it was hours before he heard the footsteps of an approaching traveler on the road.

Finally, help had arrived.

The man turned his head and with shear will forced one of his swollen eyes to open, just in time to see a man wearing the cloak of a priest cross over to the opposite side of the road.

Perhaps the Priest didn’t see him because he was too far down in the ditch.

The man weakly called out for help, but the Priest continued on, never once looking back.

The sun continued to beat down upon the man.

Another hour had passed before he heard footsteps on the road once again.

He recognized the approaching figure of a Levite, a member of the caste who assisted the Priests in the Temple.

This time the man did not have the strength to make a sound, but again he pried open one eye and to his relief he saw the Levite looking right at him.

But that relief quickly turned to horror as the Levite too crossed over to the other side and hurried off leaving the injured man alone once again.

The man could not believe what was happening.

It was possible that Levite and the Priest had feared that touching his beaten and bloodied body would render them unclean for the Temple rites, but they were both heading away from the Temple in Jerusalem towards Jericho. They had no reason not to stop and help an injured man, and a fellow Jew at that!

It was then that the man realized that it was NOT obvious that he was a fellow Jew.  All of his clothing had been taken; including the prayer shawl he had draped across his shoulders under his cloak.

The Priest and the Levite must have thought he was a God-less gentile, or a clumsy drunkard, or worse, a Samaritan - One of those blasphemers from up north who dared to claim that they too are descendents of Abraham, even though their blood is not pure, and they deny the writings of the prophets. These Samaritans even made the heretical claim that God resides not in Jerusalem, but in the Temple that THEY built on top of Mount Gerizim. As if the noble God of Israel would ever enter the filthy land of Samaria.

Now the man understood why the Levite and the Priest had passed him by.

He could have been anyone. 

Perhaps they were afraid that the robbers were still in the area.

Or they feared he was one of the robbers, posing as bait and just waiting for some unsuspecting fool to stop and offer help. 

“You can never be too careful on a road like this,” the man thought.

Wouldn’t he do the same if he was passing through a bad neighborhood and saw someone in need? Only a fool would let down his guard and risk his life to help a stranger on the road to Jericho.

With a heavy heart, the man resigned himself to his fate.

He would die anonymously in this ditch, with his family left to wonder what ever became of him.

It was late afternoon, when something, someone, caused him to stir once again.

He felt a hand cradling the back of his head while another hand tended to his injuries - First washing the blood off his face and then bandaging the wounds on his body.

He could feel himself being lifted up and gently, he was draped across the back of a donkey, with a blanket laid across him to protect him from the sun.

The man drifted in and out of consciousness for what seemed like hours before the gentle rocking motion of the animal ceased.

Strong arms lifted him off the animal’s back, and the air cooled around him as he was carried indoors. 

The chatter of voices and the scent of a simmering pot of stew filled the air. The man was carried up a set of stairs and placed on a soft bed, where he promptly fell into a deep sleep.

 In the morning as he awoke, he heard a stranger’s voice summon an innkeeper. The next sound he heard was the tinkling of silver coins, and the stranger’s voice saying, “Here are two denari, take care of this man; and when I come back, I will repay you whatever more you spend.”

With the voices receding into the distance, a young boy entered the room to leave water by the man’s bedside.

“Who was it that saved me?” the man whispered through his parched lips.

“Was it the Levite? Or the Priest? Did they summon help?

Did one of them return to dress my wounds and bring me here?”

“No,” said the boy.

“The man who saved you was not a Levite or a Priest, in fact he was not a member of any local sect by the looks of his dress.”

“But you can ask him yourself,” the boy said. “The stranger said he would be passing through here again…on his way home to Samaria.”

*****

We don’t know how the man reacted to this news.

To the realization that his most hated enemy was the one who saved him.

The end of the story is left to our imagination.

But then again, many of the details in this version of the Good Samaritan tale that you just heard are the product of imagination.

The author of the Gospel of Luke does not tell us who the beaten man is.

He doesn’t tell us how the man reacted when the Priest and Levite passed him by, or how he came to accept the help of the Samaritan.

We’re left to imagine how we might feel if we were in his place…but the view from the ditch is one that we don’t often envision for ourselves.

When we hear the tale of the Good Samaritan, we typically enter the story from one of three familiar perspectives:

We put ourselves in the place of the hypocritical Levite and Priest who give into busyness or fear and walk away from someone in need;

We put ourselves in the place of the traveling Samaritan, who puts his prejudices aside and shows compassion for a stranger;

And we put ourselves in the place of the conniving lawyer in the story’s introduction, who prompts the tale by asking Jesus, “Who is my neighbor?” when what he is really wants to ask is: “Who is NOT my neighbor. Who can I continue to fear and distrust AND STILL inherit eternal life?

Through the parable of the Good Samaritan, Jesus teaches us that we should not let our fears or prejudices get in the way of honoring God’s greatest commandment:

To love God with all our heart, mind, soul, and strength, AND to love our neighbor as we love ourselves.

The message that we typically derive from this parable is that we are to be like the Good Samaritan and show mercy to all. And we are NOT to be like the Levite, the Priest, or the lawyer, who failed to do so.

But what about the man who was left to die in the ditch?

How might we be more like him?

What if Jesus told this story because he intended for us to put ourselves in the ditch most of all?

Perhaps we’re less inclined to take on this perspective because the parable of the Good Samaritan has lost its sting over the last 2000 years.

Most modern day Christians have only a vague awareness that the Samaritans and the Jews did not particularly like each other….and we don’t fully comprehend how shocking it was for Jesus’ followers to hear a story that cast a Samaritan in the role as the righteous and merciful rescuer.

A first century Jew would be repulsed to hear that they were called to accept help from, or imitate the behavior of a Samaritan.

This story forced them to recognize and confront life-long patterns of learned hatred and fear.

In our time, however, the phrase “Good Samaritan” has taken on a completely different meaning. The phrase has worked its way into our secular vernacular and has come to describe anyone who stops to help a stranger.

In fact, we no longer need to use the word “Good” as a qualifying adjective because the name “Samaritan” itself has come to describe someone who is “merciful,” “compassionate,” and “selfless.”

If a first century Jew heard us using the word Samaritan in this manner, he or she would cringe.

For us it would be like redefining the word “Nazi” or “Terrorist” to mean a person of good intentions and good will.

As in, “My car broke down on the highway last night, but thankfully a Good Terrorist stopped to help me.”

If this comparison sounds overly harsh to our ears you can imagine what the people of Judea heard when Jesus descried their hated enemy as “good”.

To garner the full effect of the parable as Jesus intended it, we need to turn it upside down. Instead of putting ourselves in the place of the Levite, the Priest, or the Samaritan and imagining whom WE would be reluctant to help, we might instead see the story unfold from the perspective of the person needing the help.

If we were the one lying in the ditch who would be our Samaritan?   

Who do we imagine would NOT stop to help us?

Who do we imagine would be indifferent to our pain or delight in our misfortune?

And can we picture that person being the one whom we most need to come to our rescue?

We may fully believe that we as faithful Christians are capable of extending love and mercy to our enemy, but do we also believe that our enemy is capable of extending love and mercy to us?

Just as it was healing for the people of Judea listening to Jesus’ parable to see their enemy as being capable of feeling love and mercy for a stranger, it is healing for us to see our enemy in the same way. Our enemy is our neighbor.

By reversing the perspective of the parable of the Good Samaritan, we begin to see that our only hope for healing is to open our hearts to the people we most fear and distrust.

Martin Luther King Jr. lifted up the parable of the Good Samaritan in his famous “I’ve been to the Mountaintop” speech, given the day before he was assassinated, in April 1963.

King noted that the first question that the Levite and the Priest asked was,

"If I stop to help this man, what will happen to me?"

But when the Good Samaritan came along, he reversed the question and asked, "If I do not stop to help this man, what will happen to him?"

We might extend King’s reversal of perspective by asking yet another question, “If we do not stop to help each other, or accept help from each other, what will happen to us?”

The Kingdom of God, the reign of God, the building of God’s inclusive and loving world here on earth is fully dependent upon our willingness to open our hearts to one another.

So we must ask ourselves, who are the people in our time that we most fear and distrust?

And how might they be the source of our healing?

If we look up from the ditch and see the face of our enemy – whoever that enemy is to us – Jew or gentile, male or female, gay or straight, Christian or Muslim, Conservative or Liberal, native or immigrant, black, white, brown, yellow, or red - this is the person whom Jesus calls to love as our neighbor.

This is the person who holds the key to our salvation.

Because as long as our relationships with each other remain broken and wounded our world will remain broken and wounded.

Healing comes only through love.

Compassion and mercy comes only through love.

Understanding and forgiveness comes only through love.

The lawyer said to Jesus, “Who is my neighbor?”

And Jesus pointed to the ditch and said,

“Which of these three, do you think, was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers?”

The man answered, “The one who showed him mercy.”

And Jesus said to him, “Yes. Now go and do likewise.”

Amen.

Sermon: "Follow the Yellow Brick Road"

Rev. Maureen Frescott

The Congregational Church of Amherst, UCC

June 30, 2013

Luke 9:51-62

“Follow the Yellow Brick Road”

Have any of you ever tried to bargain with God?

Have you ever lifted up a prayer and promised God that you would become a more faithful servant in exchange for an answer to your prayer?

Have you ever said, “If you do this one thing for me, God, I promise I’ll go to church every Sunday” or “I promise I’ll pray every day and give more of my time and money to those in need.”

Some of us may even take it to the extreme and say, “God, if you get me out of this bind, I promise I’ll become a priest or a nun or a missionary and dedicate my life in service to you!”

I sometimes wonder if people look at us in the clergy and think, “Dang, I wonder what kind of trouble she got into to make that deal.”

In our gospel story today, one of Jesus’ prospective disciples makes the promise that we all make as Christians. The man sees Jesus walking along the road and he calls out to him,  “I will follow you wherever you go!”

But just as with us, Jesus knows this is a promise that the man is unlikely to keep.

We make a lot of promises like this in our lives, not just to God but also to each other.

We make those in-the-moment commitments that we swear we’ll live up to from this day forward - Assurances spoken in earnest with a genuine belief that we will never fall back on our word.

It starts when we’re young.

“Mom, if you let me get a puppy I swear that I’ll walk him and feed him every day!”

 “Dad, if you let me borrow the car I swear I’ll never ask for anything else ever again.”

As adults the promises we make to each other may not be explicitly contingent on what we expect to receive in return, but the expectation is there all the same….even if we don’t say it at the time.

I promise I will love you forever….(unless you fail me in some way, or stop loving me).

I promise that I will always be there for you….(unless I’m distracted by what’s going on in my own life, or if it’s too painful for me to be present with what you’re going through).

I promise that I will never hurt you or let you down in any way……(but you know I will, because as human beings this is an impossible standard for us to live up to).

We break our promises to each other because rarely is life as simple as “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”

Human relationships are messy, complicated undertakings, as we drag all the baggage of our upbringings, expectations, and past hurts into every encounter that we have.

If we have so much difficulty honoring our commitments to each other, how much more difficult is it for us to honor our commitments to God?

In our gospel reading this morning, we encounter three newly minted disciples who shout out to Jesus, “I will follow you wherever you go!” and one by one Jesus turns to them and says, “Are you absolutely sure that’s what you really want to do?”

Jesus has turned his face towards Jerusalem.

Which means he is preparing to journey to his death.

He knows that what he has done up until this point and what he is about to do in the holy city of Jerusalem will ultimately get him killed.

And here he has three fresh-faced disciples in front him ready to sign on without truly understanding the cost.

We too are eager to walk in the ways of Jesus and yet most of us have no idea what it is we’re getting ourselves into.

We’re like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz, who joins the Tin Man, the Scarecrow and the Cowardly Lion on an adventurous search for love, wisdom, and courage.

All we need to do is follow the Yellow Brick Road to find the One who will give us everything that we seek.

But while some may view Christianity as a roadmap to happiness, Jesus is quick to point out that following in his footsteps is a dangerous undertaking. The road to Jerusalem is chock full of roadblocks and landmines, and there is no marked path of golden bricks to keep us from wandering astray.

As with the novice disciples in our gospel story, before we even leave the comfort of our homes to step onto the road to Jerusalem, Jesus issues us three warnings about the conditions that we will face along the way….and the level of commitment that is necessary to see it through to the end.

Warning #1:

“Although the birds have nests, and the foxes have holes, the son of man has nowhere to lay his head.” On this journey don’t expect to stay in four-star hotels, or even one-star dives in the sketchy part of town, because like Jesus, the message we have to share about God’s inclusive love and grace is not one that many people are willing to hear.  We will have plenty of doors slammed in our faces, and we will spend many a night sleeping on the side of the road. This is not a life of power and comfort that we are committing to, but rather one of destitution and rejection.

Warning #2:

“Let the dead bury the dead”… because as disciples of Jesus we have been resurrected and given new life. There is no time to waste. There will always be one more thing that we need to do before committing to the road of discipleship.  One more bill to pay, one more loose end to tie up. Let those who remain attached to their old lives stay behind and tend to the dead.

We are called to preach the coming of the Kingdom of God, to ensure that one day death itself will be no more.

Warning #3:

“Do not put your hand to the plow and then look back”… for those who turn away from their work end up plowing a crooked furrow.

We must keep our eyes ahead and watch where we’re going. We must detach ourselves from whatever it is that we’ve left behind, as these things only serve to distract us: Our home, our family, the responsibilities that have kept us rooted in place. We must let go of all of them to be a true disciple of Christ.

Now after hearing these harsh warnings many of us may be inclined to respond like the three hopeful disciples by saying, “Thanks, but no thanks.”

Instead, we’ll return to our homes, our families, and our obligations, while doing our best to be observant Christians in our every day lives.

After all, the requests that these potential disciples made of Jesus were not unreasonable. Didn’t Jesus preach about love and compassion?

Shouldn’t he understand why one should be allowed to bury one’s father?

Or say goodbye to one’s family?

Isn’t it selfish to walk away from those who love us to go on a religious quest? What kind of person does such a thing?

In the mid 1980’s, American journalist Steven Newman left his life and family behind and became the first person to travel by foot around the world.

In his book, titled World Walk, he documented what turned out to be a four-year journey across the United States, Europe, northern Africa, southern Asia, and Australia.

Newman felt called to embark on this journey because he had a desire to learn more about the world and its people, but he also viewed his walk as a spiritual pilgrimage. 

Newman’s decision to strike out on this journey was not an easy one.

His father was seriously ill at the time and was not expected to live the 3 to 4 years that the journey would take. 

And yet, on a cold April morning in 1983, Steven Newman strapped on his backpack, said goodbye to his family and friends, and walked away from his home. He looked back only once, to notice the frail form of his father in his upstairs bedroom window, wiping away tears as he watched his only son leave home.

Newman spoke of the pain and sadness that turned his stomach as he walked away.  He knew that it was most likely the last time that he would see his father alive, and that his mother would be left to deal with her grief on her own. But he walked away all the same.

We may think that Newman’s decision to leave his family and walk around the world on a spiritual pilgrimage was selfish and unwise.

If he was leaving home to follow some controversial religious guru we might judge him all the more harshly.

So what would be running through our minds if we were living in first century Palestine, standing with one foot on our family’s property, and the other on the road to Jerusalem? 

Before us stands a man named Jesus, a religious guru touting controversial beliefs - beliefs that will most likely get him killed - and he’s looking us straight in the eye and saying, “Follow me.”

What would we do?

We’ve already watched him rebuke three men simply because they had other ideas about was expected of them as disciples.

Would he do the same to us if we wished to say goodbye to our families? Or bury a loved one? If we hesitated to respond because we didn’t like the idea of not having a warm bed to sleep in every night?

The cost of discipleship is something we hear a lot about in our churches.

But how many of us know what that means in modern day terms?

If it was hard for those in 1^st century Palestine to walk away from what little they had, how much harder is it for those of us living in 21^st century America?

Are we expected to give up our homes, our families, and all of our worldly possessions to be true followers of Christ?

Are we all supposed to live like Francis of Assisi or Mother Theresa?

It may reassure us to know that many scholars believe that Jesus did not intend for his words to be taken literally in this text.

He was most likely using hyperbole to make his point, as he did many times before. Jesus was not averse to employing exaggerations to get peoples attention - to break them out of their rutted way of thinking, to help them to imagine a new way of living in the world.

Perhaps Jesus’ objective in this text is not to tear his disciples away from their homes and families, but rather to stress the importance of getting the word out about the all inclusive Kingdom of God, and the role that we’re expected to play in bringing it about.

If Jesus could get some of his more casual followers to make the same commitment that his 12 disciples had then he could get the word out that much faster.

But before accepting any new disciples into his fold he had to determine whether they were up for the challenge.

Jesus’ words may seem harsh, but if we were about to set out on a journey that would take us far from home through potentially hostile territory, wouldn’t we want to know ahead of time what we were getting ourselves into?

Admittedly, committing oneself to following Jesus in 21^st century America is much less fraught with danger then making the same commitment in 1^st century Palestine.  

Or is it?

Would you feel safe walking into a war zone, unarmed, carrying only a sign that read, “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you?”

Would you risk arrest and interrupt a state sanctioned execution by standing up and saying, “You have heard it said, an eye for an eye, but I tell you, we are called to turn the other cheek – to practice forgiveness, not revenge?”

Would you be willing to not just serve up meals at a soup kitchen or volunteer at Anne Marie house, but to take it a step further by inviting a homeless person to live in your home? Or provide sanctuary to an undocumented immigrant? Or publically witness as a person of faith who stands up against racism, sexism, classism, homophobia, and discrimination and injustice in any form?

These are hard questions, and truthfully, most of us would struggle to answer “yes” to any of them. But when we consider Jesus’ teachings, this is what the cost of discipleship looks like in our time, or any time.

Whether we stand in 1^st century Palestine or 21^st century America, with one foot in our front yard and the other on the road to Jerusalem, the commitment that Jesus asks of us is the same.

Perhaps you’ve seen the bumper sticker that reads: “If you were on trial for being a Christian, would there be enough evidence to convict you?”

Discipleship means living in ways we might not otherwise live.

When we make a commitment to follow Jesus we should be prepared for him to step right up to us and ask, “Do you know what it is you’re committing to?”

Because what we’re promising to do is hard, hard, stuff.

And it’s not just about participating in a church community and giving generously to those in need.

And it’s not just about standing up and publically speaking out for peace, equality, and justice.

Following Jesus is primarily about opening our hearts and treating every person we encounter with compassion, understanding, and grace.

It’s about swallowing our pride, not getting lost in our sorrow or anger when others have let us down, and being able to say to others, “I’m sorry I hurt you…what can WE do to move towards healing.”

To speak and act as Christians in our personal relationships is possibly the hardest requirement of discipleship.

Because it’s something we’re called to do every day of our lives.

We may be in search of a yellow brick road to follow, but Jesus has led us onto a road that will bring us to a much greater reward:

The healing of our human relationships.

The healing of our relationship with God.

The healing of our world.

The Good News is that all we need to do to get there is to answer Jesus’ call…

 by saying, “I WILL follow you… WHEREVER you may go.”

Amen

Sermon: "I Am Legion"

Rev. Maureen Frescott

The Congregational Church of Amherst, UCC

June 23, 2013

Psalm 22:19-22; Luke 8:26-39

“I Am Legion”

Before I begin the sermon I want to address one question that I suspect popped into many of your heads as we heard this gospel story today – and if you’ve read or heard this story of Legion before it’s likely that you’ve had this question lingering in the back of your mind ever since.

In fact, a friend of mine asked me this question just the other day after I told her what the gospel text was for this Sunday.  She said, “I get that this story of Legion is about demonic possession and Jesus healing a very troubled man…but tell me Reverend, why did Jesus have to kill the pigs?”

We can’t seem to get past the pigs.

It’s hard enough to sift out a meaningful, modern-day message from a story about demonic possession, but if we’re picturing Wilbur and Babe leaping off a cliff to their deaths, it can really get in the way.

Yes, the pigs are innocent bystanders in this story.

There they are grazing on the hillside minding their own business when suddenly they become a convenient home to a legion of demons.

The pigs are so troubled by this development that they choose to run down the hillside and drown themselves in the lake – effectively sending the demons into the very abyss they were trying to avoid.  And what we end up with is a lot of dead pigs and a group of angry pig herders who have just watched their livelihood destroyed right in front of their eyes.

So before we talk about the man named Legion, or Jesus’ extraordinary healing abilities, or the extensive reach of God’s love….

let’s talk about the pigs.

The traditional explanation is that in first century Jewish culture the pig was considered to be an unclean animal. They were not to be eaten or touched. There were no pig farms in Judea.

Jesus and his disciples encountered these pig herders in Gentile country.

So it stands to reason if you have a hoard of evil demons on your hands, why not send them into the nearest unclean and therefore expendable animal that you see?

Middle Eastern mythology also held that demons could not survive in water. So the frightened and stampeding pigs offered a convenient vehicle to get the demons into the watery abyss where they would ultimately reach their demise.

While the death of the pigs in this story may ruffle the feathers of our 21^st century, animal loving sensibilities, I assure it was not Jesus’ intention to anger the folks at PETA.

(I promise you, no animals were harmed in the telling of this gospel story)

What may be more troubling to some about this story, is that Jesus seemed to have no regard for the pig herders - who most likely had families to feed, and who were now left without a source of food and income. 

The possibly unsatisfactory answer to this objection is that when we live out the radically inclusive message of the gospel in the world, the results are sometimes painful.

Systems of power and commerce are overturned and we as a people have to make sacrifices and painful adjustments to ensure that everyone is included at the table.

Jesus asked many of his followers to make difficult choices and to give up their livelihoods to spread the hopeful word of the gospel.

But some, like the pig herders, end up as unwilling participants in the destruction of systems of imbalance.  Unfortunately, in order to raise some up, others must be willing to take a step down.

I said that this answer might be unsatisfactory to us because we don’t like the idea of having to suffer a loss to allow others to gain, even if we all stand to gain so much more in the long run.

But what is it that we gain from the healing of Legion?

Now that we’ve set the pigs aside, it’s time to tackle our demons.

When Jesus steps out of the boat in the land of the Gerasenes he is immediately smacked in the face with the stench of overwhelming evil and fear.

And all of it is contained in the form of one man -

a naked, screaming, wild-eyed man who hides in the shadows of the tombs on the outskirts of this Gentile city.

We’re told that many times he has escaped the chains and shackles of those who’ve tried to tame him, as his internal demons drove him over and over again into the wild.

His name is Legion.

But Legion is not the name of the man who cowers at Jesus’ feet.

It is the name of what possesses him.

The version of the story that appears in the gospel of Matthew says it best:

Jesus asks the man, “What is your name.” and the demons respond,

“I am Legion: for we are many.”

In the Roman army, a Legion consisted of up to 6,000 men, and it believed the gospel story invokes this name to drive home the point that this is no ordinary demon possession that we’re talking about.

This is not about one man wrestling with one demon – which today we might define as an addiction, or a physical or mental illness that causes one to behave erratically and disruptively.

This about all of the demons that we encounter when we step into the world.

This story is a foretelling of what the disciples can expect to encounter when they take their message of the gospel to a world that is for the most part unprepared and unwilling to endure the changes and the sacrifices that must be made to build the kingdom of God – a kingdom where oppression, poverty, and systems built upon fear and control are no more.

These are the systems that permeate our world.

We don’t know how to function without them.

We live in a world where some are leaders and others are followers, and this inevitably creates imbalances of power that lead to oppression and tyranny.

We live in a world where individualism and personal achievement are rewarded, which leads us to lift up those who succeed and cast blame and judgment on those who are struggling – telling ourselves that they fail because they lack ambition, discipline, or have become too reliant on the support of others.

We live in a world where our differences are alternatively celebrated and feared; where we pride ourselves on our tolerance for diversity while at the same time remain suspicious of those from other cultures, countries, races, and religious traditions.

The evils of this world are inevitable.

They are a product of human fear, free will, and brokenness.

These are the demons that possess us all.

We each have our personal demons as well. Our addictions. Our traumas. Our physical, emotional, and spiritual scars that influence how we treat one another and how we treat ourselves.

These are the demons that we wrestle with on a daily basis.

And like Legion, we resist God’s efforts to drive them out of us.

When Jesus encounters the cowering Legion, the demons within him say, “What have you to do with me?” “I beg you, do not torment me!”

These are the voices of the demons speaking, for they of course fear their own demise, but we can imagine we also hear the faint voice of the man trapped within. This is the only life he has known. As much as the demons have forced him to the edges of society – to be bound up in chains and feared and mocked – to be free of the devil he knows and be left to wander in a world he does not know and has few skills to navigate, is much more frightening than being chained for life.

Many of us have been there or have loved one who have been there.

Some of us are there right now.

We feel at home amongst the tombs, hiding in the shadows, resisting those who reach out to help, because we’re so deathly afraid of letting go of what has become comforting and familiar, even it’s slowly killing us and we know it.

Drugs. Alcohol. Depression. Abusive and unhealthy relationships.

Impossibly high standards that drive us to work more, earn more, buy more, and achieve more while our health, families, and sanity crumble around us.

What the gospel gives us is hope.

In this story of Legion, this poor withering soul of a man weighted down by the force of thousands of demons, comes alive at Jesus’ command.

He did not cast the demons out. Jesus did.

But in their absence it would have been easy and expected for him to continue to cower in the shadows in fear of a world that he barely knew.

Like an ex-con just released from prison, an addict transitioning into sobriety, or a woman living on her own for the first time after a lifetime of dependence on abusive men, taking that first step into the glaring light of the free world is both exhilarating and terrifying.

Which is why this man healed by Jesus does not leap up and run into town shouting in joy and amazement – a small detail that makes this story ring truer than many others.

Instead the man sits at Jesus’ feet, now in his right mind, but silent.

Until Jesus moves to leave and the man begs Jesus to take him with him.

His instinct is to cling to Jesus, just as many of us who find healing wish to cling to the people or place that helped transform us.

But Jesus tells the man to return to his community, to serve as a living testimony to the power of God’s love and healing.

Return to the people who knew and loved you before you started spiraling downward. Your story is inspiring to strangers, but it is all the more powerful when told to people who know the battles you’ve faced, who see themselves in you, who look at you and think, “He overcame his demons with God’s help, maybe I can, too.”

At the end of this gospel story, Jesus gets back in the boat with the disciples and returns home.  He traveled all the way to the land of the Gerasenes and never made it past the shoreline.

It’s as if the entire trip across the sea of Galilee was done to meet this one man. The calming of the stormy sea, the casting out of a legion of demons, one man’s life is changed for the better, a new disciple has been set loose in the land of the Gentiles, and the stage has been set for the building of the Kingdom of God.

Jesus’ disciples are witnesses to all of this, as are we.

There’s a reason why the gospel writers felt this story was worthy of inclusion in their accounts of Jesus’ life.

I’d like to imagine that they hoped their Gentile readers and their future readers from other cultures and other lands would see their way past the drowning pigs and the fleeing demons and see the joy of the gospel message contained within.

This is a story of transformation.

The kind that only be found in the power of faith.

If we’re going to work together to transform this world – to cast out the demons of systemic poverty, oppression, and inequality, then we need the power of God and the belief that God is willing us to do this to get it done.

If we’re going to transform ourselves, to seek help to cast out our personal demons and to ultimately help others to do the same - then we need the power of God and the belief that God is willing us to do this to get it done.

The only way to achieve transformation is to stand toe to toe with the Legions that possess us and our world and lean on the strength of God to pull us out of the abyss.

As writer Suzanne Guthrie puts it, “Healing requires Confrontation - and bold truth telling. If you can't name the disease, how can you find the proper cure? Perhaps it takes a radical withdrawal into the desert, or living naked among the tombs to isolate a problem so enmeshed with everything else in life and culture. Here, evil finds its name revealed, and, shouting and protesting in fear, it trembles in the presence of Holiness.”

The people who witnessed the healing of Legion reacted with fear.

They asked Jesus to leave because they were afraid that he might do the same to them.

How do we respond when confronted with the gospel truth that we have something possessing us that needs to be released?

That there’s something inside of us in our heart, our something outside of us in our common culture that has us bound and chained in fear?

How willing are we to let Jesus reach into our lives and turn them upside down so that we all might be healed?

We are Legion, for we are Many.

The good news is that God is much bigger than the fears that we hold onto.

The good news is that love conquers fear.

Always. Always.

Thanks be to God, and Amen.

Sermon - "Acts of God"

Rev. Maureen Frescott

Congregational Church of Amherst, UCC

May 26, 2013 – Trinity Sunday

Psalm 8; Proverbs 8:1-4, 22-31

“Acts of God”

By a show of hands, how many of you knew before coming here this morning that today is Trinity Sunday?  That’s what I thought.

To be honest, outside of theologians, church staff, and whichever deacons are on duty today, very few people know or care that today is Trinity Sunday.

I doubt if any of you woke up this morning, roused the kids out of bed and hurried out the door shouting, “We can’t miss church today, it’s Trinity Sunday!”

Admittedly, Trinity Sunday is a pretty low-key celebration on our Christian calendar.  We don’t spend weeks preparing for it and we don’t have any rituals associated with it.

We don’t have a Trinity Pageant where we dress our children up as the three aspects of God and reenact the workings of the Holy Spirit.

But maybe we should…

because Trinity Sunday is a celebration of a pretty amazing thing:

It’s a celebration of the many ways that we live in relationship with God.

It’s a celebration of the sheer awe that we feel when we encounter God in the form of our transcendent Creator; It’s a celebration of the brotherly bond we feel when we encounter God in the human form of Jesus; and it’s a celebration of the sustaining energy we feel when we encounter God moving through us in the form of the Holy Spirit.

Yet because this celebration is about a feeling or an experience rather than an event, like Pentecost, or the birth, death, or resurrection of Jesus, we often don’t know what to do with it.

It’s too vague and ethereal for us to wrap our minds around.

For many of us the mere mention of the word Trinity causes our eyes to glaze over. 

I knew I was in trouble in seminary, when my theology Professor, Mark Heim, ended a 3-hour lecture on the Triune nature of God by saying,

“If you find that you are thoroughly confused by all of this - Good! Now you understand the Trinity!”

But truth be told, we really don’t have to fully comprehend how God can be three in one or one in three to understand that the Trinity is all about relationships.

God is by nature a relational God.

God relates to us through Creation - through nature and through other created beings;

God relates to us through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, who showed us how to live, love, and transform ourselves anew; and God is relates TO us and THROUGH us in the movements of the Holy Spirit, who in keeping with the tradition of Wisdom and Sophia, guides and inspires us to act creatively, compassionately and justly in our world.

These are the three faces, or three relational experiences that we have with God - as Creator, Redeemer, and Sustainer.

Now theologically, we can say much more about the doctrine of the Trinity then this.

But I’m not going to.

Believe me I could.  Three years ago while in seminary I wrote what I thought was a pretty decent sermon on the Trinity, but when I re-read it this past week I put myself to sleep.

So I will spare you a lengthy explanation of the doctrine of the Trinity, partly because I don’t want your eyes to glaze over to the point where you start thinking about your grocery lists, but mainly because the mystery of God is not something that we can capture in doctrines, creeds, or statements of belief.

I believe the mystery of God is best encountered in experience and in story.

So allow me, if you will, to shift gears here for a few minutes and tell you a story.

It’s a story about how I encountered the mystery of God through the experiences of my father.

My father was a veteran of World War II.

He served in the Navy on a Tank Landing Ship that moved artillery, heavy equipment, and large groups of marines and infantryman across the ocean, depositing them on the shores of foreign lands in Europe and the South Pacific.

The Tank Landing Ships were called LSTs.

My dad used to say that LST stood for “Large Slow Target.”

When I was growing up, my father would tell us stories of his experiences during the war, but because we were children he tended to focus on the adventure and the humor of his exploits, without revealing the harsher realities of war.

I suspect he did this for his own well-being as much as he did it for ours.

There was one particular story that he loved to tell.

The story began with my father and several of his shipmates wandering around aimlessly on a beach on the island of Sicily.

It was April 1943, and they were in the midst of unloading a battalion of marines on shore.

When this wayward group of 18 and 19 year-old sailors began to get in the way of maneuvers, a Marine commander ordered them off the beach.

My father and his buddies piled into an unattended Jeep and headed up the road to see what was on the other side of the dunes.

 Not five minutes later they came careening back onto the same beach they had just left.

At this point in telling the story my father would start waving his arms around as he imitated the red-faced Marine Commander running toward their speeding jeep and yelling at the top of his lungs, “I thought I told you Navy guys to get off this beach!”

This was right before the commander stopped dead in his tracks as he noticed the convoy of enemy tanks coming up the road just behind my father’s jeep.

With no time to think, my father and his shipmates abandoned the jeep, dove into the water and swam back to their ship, which was anchored less than a mile off shore.  Reaching the anchor ropes, they climbed up and landed soaking wet on the top deck. 

My father went below to change into a dry uniform and 10 minutes later arrived at his newly assigned gunnery post back up top…. just as a passing plane dropped a bomb out of the sky and right through the center of the ship.

The force of the explosion blew my father overboard and into the water. 

Acting on instinct he clawed his way back up the anchor rope and onto the deck of the now burning ship.

As the heat beneath the deck burned through the soles of his shoes, the official call came out to abandon ship and my father found himself jumping back in the water he had already come out of twice before, this time with his uniform in shreds.

After treading water for nearly an hour he was picked up by another ship.

His LST sank off the coast of Sicily and he was sent back to the States to await a new assignment.

After several days of traveling, my father finally arrived back on Long Island on a crowded troop train wearing a borrowed uniform that consisted of navy dress pants, an army infantry shirt and boots that were two sizes too big.

As the train pulled into his hometown he stumbled out of the station and unknowingly right into a neighboring barbershop where he collapsed with exhaustion into the first chair he saw. 

The barber approached him, placed a cape around his neck and broke into small talk as he began to cut my father’s hair.

“So, home from the war are ya?” he said,

“Did you see much action over there?” 

 I heard this story many times when I was growing up, and I suspect over time there was some conflation or exaggeration of the actual events both in the telling and the hearing.

But as I got older, my father began to add details to the story that he hadn’t included before.

He revealed that when the bomb hit his ship there were more than 500 men still on board, and he was one of only 68 to survive. He watched his friends disappear from sight within feet from where he was standing.

If he had been assigned to his regular post in the engine room he would have been lost as well. 

He told us that there were Marines who were thrown into the water with him after the blast. Marines who were each weighted down with over 70 pounds of equipment, and try as he may my father could do nothing to help them stay afloat. In desperation, he had to let go of their grasping hands, or be dragged below himself.

At the tender age of 19 my father was a first-hand witness to suffering that I cannot even comprehend.

Suffering that he was powerless to prevent or alleviate in any way.

Suffering that he carried within himself, hidden behind his wartime adventure stories and pushed aside by the everyday demands and routines of life.

My father came home from the war, married my mother, had a houseful of children, and lived a long and happy life until he passed away a few years ago at the age of 79.

But for most of his life, his experiences in the war left him with a question he could not answer:  “Why?” – Why did he survive when so many did not?

Listening to my father story’s evolve over the years mirrored my evolving experience of God.   

At first I delighted in the adventure and mystery – not knowing what was going to happen next but feeling certain that all would be well in the end.

God, like the image I had of my father as a child, was all powerful, all knowing, and in control at all times.

No matter how many times my father got blown off that ship, he’d always land on his feet and live to see another day.

And no matter how many bad things happened in the world, God would always keep me and the people I loved safe and away from harm.

It doesn’t take long for most of us to question this experience of God; to let go of this feeling of certainty.

Someone close to us dies, a parent loses a job, a natural disaster hits too close to home, or some other tragedy rushes into our life and suddenly we’re left questioning whether God is as all powerful and as in control as we once thought.

When my father began to reveal the gritty details of his war experiences, this time as an elderly man reduced to tears because of what he had seen, he no longer seemed as invincible as I once thought.

My experience of God was shifting as well.

“There but for the grace of God, go I,” is what we say when others experience a loss.

Was my father blessed for having survived when others died?

Or was he just lucky?

Was God rolling the dice with our lives? Was our suffering somehow part of God’s plan?

Or worse, was God powerless to stand in death’s way?

We hear these questions raised every time a natural disaster strikes, as we did early this week when tornados flattened entire neighborhoods in Oklahoma and Texas.

Insurance companies call these disasters “Acts of God” because there is no apparent human cause to blame.

While some Christians believe that God sends such disasters as punishment for humanity’s sins, there are plenty of us who believe that a loving and compassionate God would never be the cause of such suffering.

When children are pulled alive from piles of rubble we praise God for saving their lives, but we don’t dare take the next logical step and question God’s goodness for allowing other children to die.

In the bleak wake of war, tragedy, and disaster, it is evitable that our experience of God is questioned, if not found lacking entirely.

In the aftermath of the 2004 Tsunami in Indonesia, where 200,000 people were lost to the power of the sea, a group of refugees approached a Jesuit priest in one of the many camps that sprang up after the disaster.

The refugees told the priest that they were interested in converting from Hinduism to Christianity.

“Our God has failed us,” they said. “Maybe yours will do better.”

These Acts of God are a far cry from the Acts of God that Lady Wisdom speaks of in our text from Proverbs, where she stood beside God at the beginning of time like a master worker, rejoicing in the beauty of the world that God created and delighting in the human race.

Likewise, Psalm 8 speaks of God’s power over heaven and earth, and the glory and honor we received for being created in God’s image.

Creation is glorious. We are glorious.

We hear these themes repeated in scripture over and over again.

So why doesn’t creation or humanity seem so glorious when tragedy strikes and our lives come crashing down around us?

Perhaps because both God and God’s Creation contain a much deeper vein of mystery than we’re comfortable accepting.

We can’t explain why bad things happen in this world.

We can’t explain why some people die while others live.

We can’t explain why my father was pulled from the sea off the coast of Sicily, while someone else’s father never came home.

We can’t explain why God created a world in which Creation itself seems to possess Free Will as much as we do, and randomness and chaos seem to be built into the natural design of our universe.

For many of us, our first images of God were formed in our childhood –

in Sunday School, through Bible stories, and in the stories heard at our parents knee. God was a doting Father who watched over us from above.

Ideally, as we grow into adults we come to expand our childhood understanding of God as the ‘Great Protector in the Sky’ to include an image of God that is more ambiguous and complex. To accept a God who created a world in which bad things happen to good people.

To ask questions knowing that they can’t always be answered. To tell our own story in its entirety, without leaving out the details of our pain and our not so wondrous experiences of this world, because we know that God is with us throughout it all.

God is a mystery, and much, much bigger than the God shaped box we’ve constructed to contain our image of the divine.

The Holy Spirit wasn’t designed to fit in that box either.

Neither is Jesus.

All three are much more than we can ever imagine.

The Trinity by definition is described as a “mystery of the Christian faith.”

Thus anyone who says they fully comprehend the Trinity is missing the point.

But that doesn’t mean we can’t celebrate the Trinity in ways that we can comprehend.  

God is love. God is hope. God is light. God is good.

Whenever we experience any of these acts of God - through Creation, through Jesus, through the movement of the Spirit -we are experiencing God.

In contrast, when we experience hate, injustice, tyranny, evil, or brokenness of any kind we can say that these things are not of God, but instead grow out of our own fears -

Our fear of losing control, losing power, losing face, losing our identity or our faith.

God is the force that pulls us away from those fears, away from our brokenness, and towards healing and wholeness.

God is that which we cannot even begin to define or comprehend yet God lives in relationship with us through our world, our experiences, and our stories.

 If you are still thoroughly confused by all of this - Good!

Now you understand the Trinity.

Thanks be to God, and Amen.