Hope and Healing (Luke 8:26-39)
Written by Pastor Fausel   
 Grace, mercy and peace be to you …

One of the problems I’ve discovered, as one of my generation, is that our children are learning things and trying out things that we of my era never imagined possible.

Some years ago when I was serving another congregation, a number of the clergy in town put together a committee that had the goal of doing what we could to keep our kids safe.

One objective was to afford businesses the right to display a “SAFE” sign in their windows, given that our committee had seen that what went on there was indeed safe.

Sounds a little big-brotherish, perhaps.  But this was a town of 6,000 and one that was running a much higher than normal teen suicide rate.  

A couple of us had the assignment to talk to the manager of the local Pizza, play-place and video arcade.   

What we were looking at in that establishment were video games that were a bit edgy, if you know what I mean.  But when we did, the manger got honest with us … and then came the eye-opener.  

The manager introduced us to what are known as the programmer’s codes.  

Say the game is a combat game … and as you usually play it, it’s fairly tame, the violence is what you might call PG.
 
But enter the right programmer’s codes at the right time in the game sequence and oh, boy! … it’s an entirely different game.   You can take the violence index from PG to well over X, if you know how.  

How do you know how?   Well, once someone learns how, they become the owner of special secret information… and their popularity skyrockets.  So is it word of mouth, or cell phone?  

No, the manger told us to just go to the local Kroger and pick up one of three of four gameing magazines and we’d not only find the programmer codes in them but also reviews of the results.

AARGH!   So, we asked, was it possible to defeat or turn off the programmer codes?  Yes, but we were told the store owner probably wouldn’t want to do so, because the paying clientele, the kids, would probably go elsewhere if he shut down their fun.

Moral of the story … you can’t keep people from indulging their sinful human nature by just taking away their toys.  The world will find a way to give them what they want.   The only way to change people is from the inside.  And that’s the work of the Holy Spirit.

Chains could not curb the violent nature of the man who had the demons in our Gospel text for today.   But the Word of Christ could, and did, change Him… from the inside out.

‘But pastor… in the gospel we’re talking about ridding the man of actual demons… They were so real that they actually caused the loss of a whole herd of pigs.’   Yes, they did.

So, let’s talk about our demons this morning. And for now, let’s not get hung up about whether they’re actual demonic spirits or ungodly impulses in ourselves.

Like we asked last week, what’s a constant, what’s the same for us today that we see in this account we have from Luke’s Gospel this morning??   Well, here’s one thing… the man plagued by the demons was isolated from everyone else.

There is the real problem.  What caused the isolation in his case was the fact that the demons kept him doing anti-social behavior.  So much so that the people chained him up to protect him from himself and others.

But the end result was that he was isolated from others and lonely.

The rock group, “The Beatles” did a bit of a number on the church in regards to loneliness in their song, “Eleanor Rigby.”  In the song, Eleanor and her Priest, Father McKenzie, are isolated from each other by their stations in life.  

The possible inference in the song is, what if those stations in life didn’t exist … then perhaps those two could have actually found each other, in a romantic sense … and then, wouldn’t the world be a better place?

“All the lonely people … where DO they all come from?”  Inferred… the church is not the answer, more, it’s the problem.

And yet …our Gospel reading presents us with just the opposite conclusion.  The problem the “Beatles” were addressing was about how we adhere to the strictures of religion.   But practicing religion and what Jesus is doing here… are two different things.  And actually what Jesus is doing here is what the church does today.

So let’s flesh this out a bit.  What isolates us from God and from one another?  Sin.    Chains were used to physically keep this man in our reading from sinning … from doing harm to himself or others.  That’s the best the people could do … they could only try to physically control his behavior … they couldn’t deal with what was causing the behavior which was understood to be his demons.

Today we do similar things by isolating people behind bars.   It physically keeps them from sinning.  But at the same time it isolates them from many of the things that would be wholesome for their well-being … social and spiritual interaction with others.

We human beings were NOT designed to be hermits.  God declared that even in the days of His perfect creation when everything was declared good… God declared it “not good… for man to be alone.”   

Think about that.  Man had God.  No wall of sin dividing them.  Perfect fellowship.   But that, by itself, was not good.   And so a helpmeet was brought into being: “flesh of my flesh and bone of my bones” … so that man would not be in isolation.

Yet, that was the state of the man in the Gerasenes, Isolated and alone.  

Now let’s pass one more time on the nature of demons themselves and look at what healing looks like as the creator-in-the-flesh, Jesus Christ, comes upon this situation.

Jesus drives out the demons.  Now our account tells us that Jesus gives the demons permission to go into a herd of pigs which then drown themselves.  

Now, at that time Jewish people were not to herd pigs… pigs were an unclean animal, not to be eaten, and much less to be kept.  And the fact that the herd is destroyed as Jesus comes to this place may have looked like God’s judgment on that forbidden practice … which is why the people, instead of rejoicing over the healing of this man, bid Jesus leave their land in fear.

But that’s really a side bar.  What does the man who has been delivered do?  He is so grateful to Jesus; he wants to join Jesus in what He is doing, by going with Him.

But Jesus bids him to be His ambassador to those from whom he had been isolated from in the past, the people of his own town and country.   To what other people could this man be such a powerful witness to the power of the love of God in Christ?  And we read that that’s exactly what he does.

So … let’s again look at the constants.   What is the same here for us?   We already noted loneliness.   And what causes it?  Sin…
Do we have a “demon,” a secret sin, an impasse from our past that keeps us from having the relationships with others we wish we had?

We talked about this at some length about a year ago.  About reconciliation.  That comes about through mutual confession and absolution.   Acknowledging and asking forgiveness for our part of the problem which … encourages the other party to do the same.

But before we go there, we need to address what there may be between God and ourselves, our “demon,” that is leading us into behaviors that may not be as loving as we want.

Here’s a possible clue to addressing that.  Where there are real demons involved … and there ARE such things, even today… the appearance of that phenomenon is always accompanied by what is termed as “grounds.”

Or… in other words … sin usually precedes what we would call a demon.  The grounds for that demon being that someone is knowingly persisting in a sin.  That sinning against conscience is the fastest way to lose one’s faith.  And the fastest way to get caught up in unholy behavior and an unholy life style … as in our reading for today.

Now, there are some who are innocent victims who have their lives “demonized.”  We see some of those even in Scripture.  But the cure is the power of God’s Word and the Gospel of Jesus Christ.  Particularly, the use of confession and forgiveness.

Fighting the demonic is God’s territory.  Our job in those cases is to pray for God to do what He has promised in that regard, to protect us from evil.

Our job, though, is not to trifle or play around with what we know is evil.  One thing being sin itself … taking it lightly … or intentionally pursuing it.

The other thing is going where evil is.  I tell every one of our confirmation classes not to play with Ouija boards.  Sometimes I feel it’s like telling children not to play with matches… it seems the more you say “Don’t”, the more they want to.   But, as St. Paul says, “I would not have known sin if the Law hadn’t made it sin for me.”

Resist the morbid curiosity and don’t mess with those things.  They do tap into the evil we have been told we shouldn’t mess with, like trying to see into or predict our future.

An expert in this field once advised that even that seemingly innocuous 8-Ball answer-giver is something not to be touched.

God would have us have life, and have it to the full.  Isolation due to sin and sin’s ramifications was not part of His plan for us in Christ Jesus.   He forgave us our sins for Jesus’ sake that we might stand in peace with Him and be able to make peace with one another.

God in Christ has given us victory … over you remember what??  Sin … death and the devil.  We need not live caught in the devil’s snare.

But we may well find, like the man at the center of our story today, that the way out is a way we might not find on our own.  Which is why loneliness and healing mean breaking the bonds of isolation.  God does come to us in and through others.

This is why we have Stephen Ministers.  This is why we have ChristCare … this is why we gather around God’s Word in Bible study.  And here in Word and Sacrament.

Honestly, God, in His Word, drives out the demons … and in their place, puts His Spirit.  Where Jesus is… there is healing.  “Come unto Me”, He says this morning, “and I will give you rest!” 

In Him.

Amen.
 

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