4 Pentecost 2007
1 Kings 19:1-4, 8-15a
Psalm 42
Gal 3:23-29
Luke 8:26-39
Crossing Boundaries
Jesus according to the gospel of Luke crossed over the sea into foreign Gentile territory. It was his first and last trip into foreign lands according to Luke. While in the region, he healed the Gerasene demoniac who subsequently wanted to follow Jesus but was sent back to his home town to share what God had done for him. Gentiles have come to Jesus before in Galilee but this time Jesus goes into Gentile territory. The crossing of boundaries in Jesus’ mission is the hallmark of our understanding of mission and missionaries.
As a child I read too many missionary stories – about Albert Switzer, Tom Dooley, and thought they were not only brave but the model of Christian discipleship because they gave up the comforts of home to go into strange and sometimes dangerous places for the sake of the Gospel. In time I began to see that there are many opportunities both at home and abroad to spread the Gospel and the more zealous we are about social justice the more dangerous our message becomes. That realization was surprising when I first encountered it among Christians who wanted things to stay just as they were in terms of racial separation in the deep south of my childhood. Traveling to foreign countries has not been as problematic as I imagined as a child – there were no savages hiding in the bushes in Kenya or Thailand or China or Russia – just people struggling to live, to have enough to eat, jobs to earn a living, families to nurture and communities to build. It is more often the case that I find the greatest resistance at home among my own people when the call of the gospel rings too loudly. By this I simply mean that I find people resistant to aiding people in Kenya or Thailand or Haiti with HIV/AIDS even though we have the drugs to turn the fatal infection into a chronic disease. It is not “cost effective” they say (whoever they are) and we have to defend our intellectual property rights which when used abusively means we value our profit lines more than liberating the poor.
One of the themes of Luke’s gospel is liberation. In the opening sermon in the hometown synagogue Jesus read from Isaiah: defining his mission from the beginning: to liberate those who are oppressed to set the captive free. The man possessed of demons was in torment and had been confined to the graveyard to ensure the safety of the people living in the community. Jesus was not afraid of his illness but saw the “demons, tombs, unclean spirits, and swine” all the things that made him “other.” Today we would send the fellow for a psychiatric evaluation and he would likely be diagnosed with one or more psychoses, he would be treated with drugs, confined to prevent harm to himself and others. In time medicine would liberate him from the “demons” which in the ancient world covered a number of unknown maladies. Every day that we and/or our neighbors battle depression, fear, anxiety and compulsive behavior we ought to identify with the man who had no name and his encounter with Jesus. The healing testifies to the power of God to liberate us from the forces that oppress us and others, that separates us from neighbors near and far, that inhibit us from seeing the global community as our human family. The man named his oppressor legion and we ought to be able to do the same. We too suffer the legion power of evil and destructive forces in our world that dehumanize and destroy people. Evil is always destructive, taking the form of genocide, political oppression, trafficking of women and children, unfair wages, and unjust social systems that trap people in poverty and despair. Who will set the captives free?
The village people were seized with fear when Jesus healed the demonic possessed man and they had a parking lot meeting to ask him to leave. Disrupting the status quo was not more welcome then than today. If Jesus is rejected for liberating the poor and the oppressed, what do you and I expect society or even our fellow Christians to do when we proclaim the gospel in word and deed? We might hope, even expect, the people in his hometown to rejoice that he is set free from the demons and to welcome him home and praise Jesus for such a heroic act of mercy, but no! Fear seized them and they drove Jesus from their town.
Change in community, church, or world is an opportunity that can liberate us from the bonds that bind us to the status quo or induce fear of change and resistance to God’s world. “We are willing to trade the freedom to grow and change for the security of knowing that things will be like they have always been” (Herbert Anderson in The Family and Pastoral Care). If you will take this gospel story to heart today, you should reflect on how willing you are to accept change, in this parish, in the larger church, and in the world.
The man who was healed wanted to go with Jesus as he and the disciples got into the boat to return to the other side of the lake, but Jesus said no: “Return to your home and declare how much God has done for you”. The healing liberated the man to serve, to respond to a new calling for mission and ministry. Jesus did not reject his request but sent him to the place he least expected to go. That is one of the strange things about discipleship and God’s plan of salvation. We are often called to share the good news of God in Christ with those we least expect to serve. The man is restored to his community and given a commission!
Paul Farmer is an example of a person who from humble beginnings has taken the liberation theology as a preferential option for the poor seriously. While still in medical school at Harvard, Farmer worked in Haiti, among peasants who were living in severe poverty exaggerated by political upheaval and US foreign policy. In time, Farmer founded the Partners in Health which has in the past two decades built a clinic in rural Haiti, then in Peru, and many other places where the “cost-effective” argument meant that poor people in these places did not receive “standard of care” treatment for TB or AIDS. Using cost effective reasoning, to save resources, and saving the most people for the lowest cost was in Farmers view unjust, inhumane, and simply wrong. Farmer said he was not impressed with the catholicity of his childhood but he was impressed with the liberation theology that argued for more social justice, the preferential option for the poor, and seeing the dignity in every human being. Farmer believed that if Canada, England, or Italy were in the same position as Haiti with rising poverty, poor health care infrastructure, and inability to provide adequate care for simple diseases much less buy expensive patented drugs to combat HIV and TB, we would have intervened long ago. I view Paul Farmer as a modern missionary – liberating and healing one patient at a time, one place at a time, never stopping, continuing to fight the good fight – understanding that we are all one global family.
That we fail to act when the diseases ravish countries distant and different may call to our conscious awareness what it would mean to cross the lake into Gentile territory, or be healed of fear to act on behalf of the oppressed, or to be sent to carry the good news of liberation in Christ to the world!