Throughout June, we have been exploring what to do in response to hate.
June 1, Apostle Philip and the eunuch, Mayday USA
We affirm our own beliefs.
We stand in that affirmation publicly, even when it’s not convenient or safe.
We welcome all genders and sexual identities because we understand that God loves all of us—our whole selves, just as we are.
June 8, Pentecost
Wage Pax Christi, the fearless peace that loves and includes everyone
June 22
Feel the feelings of shock, injustice, anger, etc., but do not let them morph into hate.
Channel your feelings into loving action: Healing, building community, standing up for rights, defending those under attack
June 29
Dance! Make a joyful noise! Not in denial of all the abuse and terrible things, but in spite of them. Live not in fear but in joy.
Today, for the final sermon in this series, we will focus on how to deal with hate that is turned inward.
“Othering” is one way to emphasize difference and encourage hate. In this reading, Jesus is in a Gentile community, not Jewish. The townspeople have removed the man with demons from their midst—he is other, and they don’t want to deal with him. When he is healed, he still knows he is “other”; he doesn’t want to stay with them but asks to go with Jesus. Jesus, however, points him back to his own community and asks him to bear witness to all that God has done for him. The town doesn’t particularly want the demoniac, and after Jesus’ healing involves killing all their meat supply and, in the process, likely tainting their water supply because it’s now full of 2,000 pig carcasses, they don’t want Jesus around either. He is other; they ask him to leave. I can imagine them saying, “I think you’ve done enough here. Just go.”
The wonderful thing about this story is that there are so many entry points, so many people with whom we can identify. Do you identify with Jesus, the one who can heal a man that no one else can control? Jesus is the hero, the savior (of course). We like heroes and saviors.
Or maybe you identify with the swineherds, who see their whole herd pitch itself into the water and drown. Maybe there was a time in your life when you watched everything that mattered to you fall off a cliff.
Perhaps you identify with the townspeople, who have been trying for some time to straightjacket this raving maniac and drive him out of their midst. Now they are confronted with this guy that they don’t even like sitting there in his right mind, and all their pigs are dead. And Jesus expects thanks??? Get out of here!
Maybe some part of you identifies with the man possessed by a legion of demons. He is traumatized. His life is out of control and full of rage. No one loves him or even wants to know his name.
I’ve heard that in dream interpretation, every character in your dream represents some part of you. That could be true in this reading as well: We might be part savior, part townsperson, part swineherd, part demoniac—maybe even part pig.
Let’s zoom in on what it might feel like to think of the demoniac as our way into this story. We know this man is not having a happy life. He is possessed by rage. He can’t control it, and neither can anyone else, although they have tried plenty of times by chaining him. Imagine that you are filled with righteous anger, and instead of listening to you or trying to address the source of your rage, people just wrap you in a straightjacket and toss you out of town. No listening, no valuing your suffering as legitimate, just “get out of here.” The man lives in the mountains or among the tombs, out in the wilderness and among the unclean dead. No one loves him. No one tries to help him. He is abandoned and alone in his rage and misery. The people want to forget that he even exists.
Can you relate? Have you ever felt abandoned and alone in your woes and rage? Have you ever inflicted self-harm, as this man has done by hitting himself with stones? Maybe your self-harm wasn’t physical like that but was more self-sabotage to make sure you didn’t succeed. We all have tapes that play in our heads, messages we heard from parents, grandparents, teachers, or others saying we’re stupid, or we always mess up, or why were we even born, or whatever. We turn those hateful messages in on ourselves, replay them whenever we’re feeling a little too good, or whenever things aren’t going well.
Women may internalize the message that their bodies are too fat, too round, too … something. Men may get the message that they’re not “man” enough. If we’re dealing with an addiction, we’ve got the voices in our heads saying we’re failures if we give into that addiction again, and we’ve also got the siren call of the addiction saying, “Come on, just one won’t hurt. Nobody will know….”
The demon voices are powerful. I mentioned a few weeks ago seeing a protest sign that read, “Religion is the #1 risk factor for queer suicide!” Imagine being a teen and figuring out that you don’t fit the heterosexual norms. If you’re in a supportive setting, that may be okay. But especially if teens have heard messages condemning homosexuality, their demon voices are telling them that they are unlovable, they are failures, they are freaks, God hates them, they’re going to hell. Some teens can’t live with that, and they commit suicide.
Perhaps you remember a few years back hearing about a young man, a freshman in college, who had a sexual encounter with another young man in the dorm room. Unbeknownst to them, a roommate filmed the whole thing and then posted it on social media. The freshman was so mortified that he threw himself off a tall building and died. He couldn’t live with that demon voice, that shame. I imagine that his roommate then had his own demons to live with as a result of his actions.
Which brings up another point: a demon voice might be reminding us of mistakes we made that had real consequences for others. So the young man who filmed this encounter and posted it, and his roommate committed suicide—he has to live with that now. Soldiers returning from war are often haunted by the violence in which they had to participate—killing people, seeing comrades die. They have been part of inflicting this violence in life and death situations.
Another example: a nurse at Children’s Hospital some years ago was caring for a baby that was very sick. She gave the baby its medication, but I think she misread where the decimal point was on the prescription and gave the baby a dose that was 10 times too much. The baby died. The nurse was so undone by her mistake that she committed suicide. Living with that demon voice telling her she was a failure and had killed this baby was too much.
Whatever the demon voice is saying, we all have them to some degree. We may all have something we’re ashamed of, some addiction we’re trying to recover from, some mistake we have made, some trauma that has left us reeling.
In today’s scripture reading, the townspeople have responded to this man’s trauma by pushing him out. They would like to forget he even exists. They’re trying to suppress him, not heal him.
That’s a part of us, too. Rather than admit our mistake or addiction or whatever it is, we try to stuff it down, pretend it’s not there, everything’s fine, nothing to see here, make it go away by ignoring it. Maybe that works for some of us some of the time, but the thing about demons is that they tend to break their chains and come roaring back.
How is Jesus’ approach different? Jesus starts by asking the man’s name. Jesus sees him as a human being who is suffering.
And the man responds not with his own name but with a description of his demons: Legion, a Roman military term suggesting many in number. But now the demons are named and recognized. Only when we admit to the demons, name them out loud, can we then say, “Now what?” That’s the purpose of interventions, when loved ones gather around a person and say, “We love you too much to go on ignoring the fact that you are an alcoholic.” They name the problem that did not want to be named, so that everyone can move to the “now what” step.
Naming the demons reduces their power. It doesn’t make them go away, but they no longer can hold the threat of revealing themselves over our heads, because we’ve gone ahead and revealed them. You can’t threaten someone who says, “Publish and be damned!”
The “now what” phase—how do we cast out these demons—might look like a 12-step program, or some time in a healing facility, or therapy. It may involve making amends to those we have harmed. It definitely involves humility and acknowledgment that we need help from a higher power as well as from a supportive community—the kind of supportive community that is the opposite of what this man is finding.
What happens when we don’t seek that healing, when we remain stuck in that place of demons? I once worked for a brilliant, creative, inspiring woman who was plagued by a demon of insecurity. She definitely had those inner tapes playing telling her that she wasn’t good enough. As a result, she had to keep everyone around her knocked off balance so that she could feel like she was in control, that she was the only one who was making progress toward the goal posts—because she was the only one who knew where the goal posts had shifted to. It was crazy-making for her team and very frustrating. Instead of all of us being encouraged and set up to thrive in our common goals, there had to be the winner and all of the rest of us. Not good for morale. This is one way that demons can wreak havoc in a community.
It feels to me as though there is this kind of dysfunction on steroids in today’s politics. Each party has to be right, and everyone else has to be losers. This is not the way to run a democracy. We want to demonize the other side, push them away, instead of asking their names, hearing their traumas, and seeking a common healing.
The thing about facing the demons is that then healing is possible. We find out what those are about, why they’re keeping us stuck or sabotaging our success. When we face the reality, name the demons, grieve the grief, make amends, move through it, we come out the other side clothed and in our right minds. The demons are no longer in control. This is the healing power of love. May we all experience such healing love, such grace to begin again, and, like the healed man in the reading, may we go through the community proclaiming all the good things that God has done for us.
Amen.