Change is Hard!

Well, here we are together on the day after the big celebration of new ministry – the day with the Bishop, the music, the visitors, the luncheon, all the celebration of our public launch together. Today’s a quieter day, and for some of us, a day when we’re maybe a little tired. And here we are, facing the news that we are at war. I’ll admit I don’t feel I have much to say about that beyond the first reaction of a colleague: Lord, have mercy.

There’s not much refuge in today’s readings, either, and an awfully dramatic story we were just subjected to, to boot. A naked, raving man, talking demons, a stampeding herd of pigs. I’m not entirely sure I feel up to this, this morning. But it’s a compelling story. Healing happens, and it changes everything. And maybe that’s what we need to hold onto today.

Jesus and his disciples have traveled to the country of the Gerasenes – a Gentile Greco-Roman area on the other side of the Sea of Galilee. A man comes out of the tombs, a frightening, dangerous place, raving and demon-possessed. Jesus heals him and restores him to his right mind, restores him to life. Understandably, the man then wants to stay with Jesus. But Jesus sends him off, to go and preach to his people about what God has done for him. It’s a powerful healing story, a story of joy and life. Except the Gerasene villagers don’t seem to see it that way at all. Instead of embracing the healed man joyfully, they rally together and say, Please go away, Jesus. We liked it better the way it was.

I suppose you can’t really blame them. Those pigs were maybe their livelihood, and they’d all spooked and thundered down to drown in the sea. Maybe they were scared at how these demons self-identified as Legion, the term for the Roman occupying force – Jesus coming in and performing this exorcism could start up a lot of trouble. Or maybe it was just the trauma of the whole experience: raving violence sent to drown in the chaos and tumult of the sea. Just because at the end of all of it the man is sitting there calmly and clothed, birds singing all around, didn’t mean that it all couldn’t erupt again. Of course the locals wanted the whole scene forgotten. One can imagine Dame Maggie Smith as their spokesperson, in her role as the Dowager Countess from Downton Abbey. What on earth was that all about? Let’s pour some tea and put all that behind us.

Jesus complies with their request, and leaves with his disciples. But first, he tells the healed man to go back to those very people and preach the word. A tough assignment indeed. I wonder what it was like for him, ‘proclaiming throughout the city what Jesus had done for him.’ And yet he went.

I came across a commentary where the author makes the case that this demoniac has been a scapegoat for the whole community. He’s not just possessed by demons himself, he’s carrying in himself the legion of demons for the whole town. In that role he has been very useful, maintaining the villagers’ calm and rational social order by containing within himself the horror and suffering they do not want to face. But his healing disrupts that order. The demons are banished into the abyss of the sea, the man is well, but the system around him can’t adapt to this new reality. Just as a dysfunctional family sometimes can’t allow an addict to heal, the villagers can’t let this man be made whole. Too much change, too much disruption. They don’t want this healing. Jesus, please leave, they say. So Jesus does. But he sends the guy to preach for him instead.

The thing is, this isn’t the only time that Jesus’ healings stir up trouble. Wherever Jesus goes, he heals people. Sometimes without even intending to, he heals people. God is healing, and Jesus is so transparent to God that healing flows out of him all the time. But that healing isn’t always welcome. People want the beggar to stay the beggar, for the dead to stay in the tomb, for clear rules about whose fault it is that sickness happens in the first place. But God’s order doesn’t look like our order. God has a better way for us to live. Yet sometimes we get so settled in dysfunction that we don’t really welcome that healing when it comes.

It's sort of like the old joke: how many Episcopalians does it take to change a lightbulb? Four – one to change the bulb, and three to say they liked it better the way it was.

I don’t think Episcopalians are the only ones who might fit that joke. But there’s a reason for it, isn’t there? Church is often a place apart from the rest of our lives. So we come in, and we might think, thank God. Life is hard, our week is exhausting, our kids have us worn down, we’re lonely and isolated and restless. The news is relentless and frightening. This community can be a respite from all that. A place to rest, to heal, to recharge, here in a place of prayer, where God is present.

But of course church isn’t a full escape from the rest of the world. Some of that world comes along with us, and some of that is more than a little dysfunctional. And we don’t just get to hide out here. We have to leave and go back to the rest of life. Just as Jesus sends the healed man back to his people to tell them all that God has done for him, that’s our charge, too: to be apostles as well as disciples, people who don’t just come to receive but who go out to give. We are here to experience healing and then bring it to others.

But that means that first of all, here, in Christian community, we have to allow ourselves to be changed. Here we might find our careful cups of tea overturned, and our assumptions broken apart. Some of that might feel fun. Some of it probably doesn’t. But we don’t just get to come in and go back out the door without being challenged. God wants to heal us here, and then to send us out to heal others. It’s no small thing.

Because we might be healed from all kinds of things. From what keeps us from real relationship, from the careful shells we build around ourselves, the ways we keep ourselves safe. And then we might be sent back to our families and neighbors to reconsider how we live, to re-find together the joy of really talking and being with each other. Or we might be set free from our preoccupation with money, our worry or our overspending – and then we might be sent back to see more clearly the poverty and the wealth that ensnare different people here in our very community. Or we find that here God wants to clear away our tendency to self-righteousness – and then to send us out to really listen to people and understand them.

All different kinds of demons – isolation and worry, consumerism, judging others – I know all of these demons personally. I’m sure you do too. And there are many more. They are legion.

Our world is desperate for healing on every level – from international to personal. But that doesn’t mean we welcome it. Like the family healing from addiction, the system tries to find the equilibrium it had before the disruptive change, even when that is a life among the tombs, the path of death. Our world keeps tilting back, and we keep tilting back with it. We have work to do – and there is work to be done on us.

Going to church, we might forget, is a countercultural act. And it’s not always so easy to do. The old adage says that the church’s role is to comfort the afflicted, and to afflict the comfortable. But maybe sometimes we need a little afflicting ourselves – noticing dysfunctions we’re perpetuating here in our community, noticing healing that God might be working on us, welcome or not. Noticing and hearing, above all, the message we hear God telling us to share with the world.

Hard work when we’re weary. But as challenging as it might seem, I don’t think we’d want to ask Jesus to leave and go back to how things were. Healing is something we claim and desire, even if it means change. Even if it demands us to be part of that healing work. The Spirit never does sit still, and we must follow where she leads. So Lord, have mercy. And send us where you would have us go. Amen.