Balkanization: June 23, 2019

Luke 8:26-39
Psalm 42
Galatians 3:23-29

We humans, bipedal thinking animals that we are, operate in one particular time and space, and while we may know that things are often more complex than they seem, we tend toward a mental Occam’s Razor, choosing the easiest and simplest construct whenever possible. So it is that we eat Italian food, take vacations in Italy, maybe brush up on our Italian on the plane, all while thinking that Italian is a thing. But Italy as we have understood it in our lifetimes, is fairly new, emerging during the Risorgimento, the consolidation of many small states, that was not completed until 1871. Even the language we think of as Italian is a construct of that era, drawn from a form of Tuscan that was primarily literary and spoken by the upper class. Neapolitan and Sicilian are not dialects of Italian but instead distinct languages, distant cousins evolved from the same street Latin root. Spain, France, Germany, each was formed as a nation, as an identity, as a language, by distinctly human forces. God forbid I should say it, but the same is true for the United States, what is in and what is out.

If nations can be brought together by force of will, so too can they fall apart. Today, the word used for the dissolution of a nation into small and competing tribes is thought of as Balkanization, something we tend to associate with the collapse of the former Yugoslavia, with horrific war, with genocide, and with the Dayton Accords. In fact, the term first referred to the break-up of portions of the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires a century earlier.

The modern nation-state of Israel is a construct. Some of you were even alive when it happened. The ancient state that shapes our thinking and comes to mind isn’t quite what real either We tend to conflate Israel and Judah, to assume the contours of the Holy Land where Jesus taught and healed were roughly analogous to the contours of the Kingdom of David and Solomon. But that kingdom existed for a mere hundred years. Conquest, exile, and immigration made for no clear borders, for cosmopolitanism in some places and for segregation in others.

Our first reading, Jesus and the man possessed, appears in all three synoptic gospels. In Matthew, it takes place in Gadara, a town six miles southeast of the Sea of Galilee in what we think should be Jewish territory. In fact, the town was part of the Decapolis, a set of ten prominent Gentile cities in the region, and had been given to Herod by Augustus. Mark, the source of the story, and Luke, who follows Mark, places it in Gerasa, also part of the Decapolis and a further 27 miles southeast. Gerasa was larger, more grand, and though founded by Alexander the Great, by the time Jesus got there, it was thoroughly Roman.

Of course, we might have known that it was not a Jewish town, whichever town it was, because… well, you know… pigs.

Today, we would say the demoniac was mentally ill, though they said he was possessed by demons. But some also said that Jesus was possessed by a demon when he called out the stench of corruption in the Temple, for there were plenty of wretchedly religious. But this is not an accusation of possession or mental illness used as a weapon to damage a reputation, this is legitimately homeless and naked, a danger to himself and others, often in shackles, straight-up mental illness.

We have a couple of familiar tropes playing out in Luke’s version. While his own followers don’t quite realize who Jesus really is, demonic forces always do. “What have you to do with me, Jesus, Son of the Most High God?” We also have the gospel message that healing, and indeed God, are available to Gentiles, a message Luke will continue in his Acts of the Apostles. But most of all, we have Jesus changing a life, for that is what Jesus does, he changes things.

Jesus offered the man possessed freedom from what had been destroying him. We can get wrapped up in a post-modern debate about demons and mental illness, or we can go to the takeaway: “they found the man from whom the demons had gone sitting at the feet of Jesus, clothed and in his right mind.”

The demoniac is no longer the demoniac. The old label was meaningless. He is free not only from his illness, but also from the way he was defined by the people of the city. In the same way, Paul’s famous passage from Galatians would liberate those who would follow Christ from the rigid boxes and labels of the Greco-Roman world: “No longer Jew or Greek, no longer slave or free, no longer male and female.” Of course there were still Jews and Greeks, some were still slaves while others were free, men were still men and women were still women, at least mostly. But that wasn’t the point. In Christ, all were one. Labels no longer mattered, humans boxes and limitations no longer mattered. You could be a Gentile in a Roman city and experience healing and wholeness. You could be a woman and lead a local church.

Try telling that to our friends in the Roman and Southern Baptist traditions.

Months before the Nazis would take power in Germany, the young Rev. Dr. Dietrich Bonhoeffer would deliver a summer sermon in which he said “To be free does not mean to be great in the world, to be free against our brothers and sisters, to be free against God; it means to be free from ourselves, from our untruth…”

A legion of demons, mental illness, boxes that try to define and control us, the lies we tell to ourselves and others. “The truth will set you free,” declares John the Evangelist in the eighth chapter.

And boy, do we need freedom.

But again, more to the story… the legion of demons, now in the herd of pigs, commit an act of self-destruction. They don’t know how to be in this new way, how to live in the presence of the sort of love and healing and hope that Jesus brought. The mob chooses self-destruction rather than live in this new reality.

As if this tale is not already loaded with meaning, with warnings for us, there is yet one more act.

“Those who had seen it told them how the one who had been possessed by demons had been healed. Then all the people of the surrounding country of the Gerasenes asked Jesus to leave them; for they were seized with great fear.”

Now, we might be inclined to chalk this up to economics. In fact, Luke gives us a similar story in the Acts of the Apostles, when Paul exorcises a demon that had possessed a slave. The slave in turn produced revenue by telling fortunes. Paul’s act of healing deprived the owner of income. The slave was worth more possessed than freed. And here, this large herd of swine, a tangible asset, is destroyed.

We might chalk their request that Jesus leave up to fear of any human powerful enough to effect this kind of change. Certainly, we can be afraid of power we don’t understand.

But I’d like to suggest that something else is going on.

Scripture tells us that the demoniac had been possessed, naked amid the tombstones, for a long time.

The people of Gerasa and the demoniac had a system. The demoniac out there in the cemetery could be a placeholder for all that was scary and uncontrolled in the world. He was part of who they were, with routines and patterns. They had learned to live with this sickness, this danger, in their midst. They had made accommodations, adjusted, knew to take the long route around the cemetery when they were journeying to the next town, knew to bring out the chains when he was too close, too threatening, too much of a reminder of their own vulnerability. They wanted him close enough to give them a place to attach their anxiety, but far enough away that they could never see themselves in him.

The English theologian James Alison, in his 2001 text “Faith Without Resentment,” writes:

Before the arrival of Jesus, whether you are a townsperson, or the demoniac, you are all fundamentally yet tacitly agreed on what holds the whole of your order together. You are a participant in a closed system. And of course participants in a closed system do not know that they are in a closed system.

And what was the rule that bound that system together? Alison says:

…there is one thing you cannot do: whether you are a townsperson or the demoniac, you cannot imagine the innocence of the demoniac.

So what do they do when Jesus disrupts this system and brings healing? When Jesus frees this man from illness or demons? When the demons, faced with wholeness and love, choose self-destruction?

They ask Jesus to leave. Of course. They need someone to blame.

How often do we learn to accommodate what is sick and sinful? How often do we simply learn to live with what is diseased, walking the long way around? How often do we leave alcoholism unnamed when the beloved member of our community has a drinking problem? How often do we pretend not to see the elder abuse we have been seeing for years? How often does an entire community tacitly agree to a closed system order that has no room for Jesus, for healing, but instead defines itself by its woundedness, by what is sick and festering, preferring the disease over the cure?

We think what we think is what is, Italy, or Gerasa with the madman in the cemetery. And then Jesus or some prophet or some Millennial shows up and offers us a new way of being or of seeing, and we ask them to leave.

Remember, a shocking number of African-Americans opposed the civil rights work of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. They had learned to live in the closed system in which they lived, of whites-only spaces, of menial labor and lynchings. They knew the rules. Freedom was scary. They asked him to stop.

Bonhoeffer, in his 1932 sermon, would continue to speak of truth, of freedom, of the terrible cost.

…the knight of truth and love is not the hero whom people worship and honor, who is free of enemies, but the one whom they cast out, whom they want to get rid of, whom they declare and outlaw, whom they kill.

Driven out of Gerasa or Athens, called demonic, stoned in the street like Stephen or hung from a Cross like our Savior. But those are the things of the world, the closed system of a world filled with fear.

Those who know freedom, who have been set free from the boxes of society, from the sickness to which we have so perversely grown accustomed can do as Jesus advised the former demoniac.

“Return to your home, and declare how much God has done for you.”

Amen.