Mark 5:1-20
June 18, 2017
This sermon had hoped to tie together the gospel reading Mark 5:1-20 with the witness of a ministry at the heart of our congregation and community’s mission: Mental Health Connect. I wanted to challenge the way we think about mental health as the responsibility of the individual by focusing on the community’s opportunity for healing and restoration.
But our beloved senior pastor was actively dying while we gathered for worship on this particular day. In between the third and fourth service, the other pastors went to be with him and his family while he died. When it was time for the evening service, some showed up a second time in their grief. Others received word during the worship announcements that he had died that afternoon.
The life and death of Rev. Christopher P. Nelson are laced into my memory of this sermon and into the pastoral care I tried to provide that day. It is one of my favorite gospel stories and he was one of my favorite pastors, so I return to it often.
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This could be a sermon about the audacity of a man who gets in Jesus face before he’s got two feet on solid ground. You see, in Mark’s gospel, only the demons are bold enough to call Jesus the Son of God – Son of the Most High God! – unsolicited and in public.
This could be a sermon about that one man, chained and abandoned. We could zero in on the drama of his moans and howls, his wild grief, and his uncontrollable pain this town worked so hard to un-see and un-hear.
Or this could be a sermon about swine: about pigs herded in front of the disciples who don’t eat pork, about whether or not pigs can swim, about how angry the swineherds would have been when thousands of pigs ran off a cliff.
Maybe you’ve heard these sermons already. I know I’ve preached them. There are too many tantalizing details about this far away land, these Galileans who have crossed to the other side only to find Legions battling inside a tormented man, and demons who know Jesus by name, demons who can negotiate their way into pigs.
But maybe Jesus didn’t come for the man. Or the demons. Or pigs. Maybe he crossed that stormy sea looking for this very town – these very people who think they have everything figured out, who are doing their best to keep things under control. Maybe Jesus came for the whole community. For us.
Jesus comes for us whenever
we have silenced the conversation
we are threatened by the unknown
we have banished those we fear to the dead places
we have resigned ourselves to misunderstand each other.
If he had come for that one man, he would have handed him a life jacket and made space for him in the boat, inviting him away from home and into a life of wandering discipleship.
And he could have! He’s done it before. Jesus could have scooped him up and away from the fear and shame he endures on the margins of community, in the cold stench of the tombs.
But if the man called Legion leaves, the people won’t experience resurrection from the dead. If he leaves, the people might only remember him as a vague liability they once bound and hid because it made them terribly uncomfortable. If he leaves, they will only recall him with their heads instead of knowing him with their hearts.
So Jesus tells him to stay.
Go home, he says.
Go back into a community that needs to
hear your story
face your pain
learn to love you and
be changed by death and resurrection in their midst.
This is the gift of Mental Health Connect, a ministry born and growing for the sake of educating communities and preparing congregations to
have brave conversations
support their loved ones
navigate a broken system
because the body of Christ is called to show up
when people are banished to the dead places
when some try to control what is unfamiliar about another
when one bears the sin of others giving up all hope.
Mental Health Connect is meeting our congregation’s members and neighbors in traumatic and lonely moments, breaking through stereotypes and barriers with the audacity of holy presence.
I have watched this happen. Some of you know that before joining you at Bethlehem, I was the pastor at Zion, just 13 blocks northeast of here. Kristina and Liz, staff from Mental Health Connect, started attending the community dinner at Zion on Wednesday evenings a few years ago. Through gentle conversation and curiosity, they began building relationships.
Kristina has a gift for plain speak, helping a vulnerable adult or a worried parent better understand a complex system or feel safe sharing personal challenges for the sake of healing and support.
When Liz listens to your story, you feel worthy of belonging. In fact, a few months ago she gathered several regulars to design a menu for dinner and together they made a healthy, creative meal for more than 60 neighbors. One of the cooks pulled me into the kitchen and exclaimed, “I’ve spent hundreds of Wednesdays here, but now I feel like I’m part of something important, like if I can feed people like this and feel this much love, God must have plans to make me useful again tomorrow. I knew I belonged out there in the dining room, but now I know I belong in here, too.” He’s still cooking and pulling others into the process so they can know this joy, too.
Christ shows up on the shores of our great divides, where our secrets howl, where our shackled shame runs ahead of us to meet him at the boat.
Today I do not hear one man skeptically checking, “What do you have to do with me?” No, I hear a Legion of our laments and fears and sorrows and the ache of deep and holy hope hungering:
Have you come for me? Can you see and hear me? I beg you, Jesus, Son of the Most High God, to deal with me - all of me! - and the way I am a body broken, a mind tormented, a spirit crushed, a community divided from itself.
Are you willing to deal with me?
Jesus confronts this pain and evil without compromise.
This is not about a man or a magic trick or a herd of swine.
This is about a promise: that God’s mercy and justice will sew us back together - not without hard loss and pain, not without tension and time - but an enduring promise that our ignored and oppressed members will be gathered from the forgotten places back into life as one body, once dead and now alive because God loves to cross stormy seas for us.
God shows up because God can hear our body’s howls and moans from the tombs of the Gerasenes:
For the stigma and weight of mental illness.
How Long, O Lord?
For chaos and bloodshed at a Congressional baseball practice.
How Long, O Lord?
For trials and verdicts that leave us confounded and divided.
How Long, O Lord?
For victims named – Philando! - and unnamed, blamed or silenced.
How Long, O Lord?
For unjust systems and those oppressed by war.
How Long, O Lord?
For Pride this week while remembering Orlando.
How Long, O Lord?
For children home for the summer, some safer than others.
How Long, O Lord?
For the grief we share knowing that Pastor Chris has fought cancer well and is now done fighting.
How Long, O Lord?
Lord, have mercy.
Have you come for us? Can you see and hear us? We beg you, Jesus, Son of the Most High God, to deal with all of who we are and the way we are a body broken, a mind tormented, a spirit crushed, a community divided from itself.
Do you want to deal with us?
And then Jesus steps out of the boat. He speaks directly to our demons, our divisions, our Legions of pain.
I have come for you.
I see you. I hear you.
I live and I die and I rise because
I want nothing more than to deal with you!
And I will sew you back together
because you belong to each other.
The man in this Bible story and the man in Zion’s kitchen know that being returned to community from the outside is complicated and uncomfortable and messy and dangerous if the community does not know and trust:
We belong to each other. And so, Sisters and Brothers, because Jesus steps off the boat, we make room in the kitchen for a new menu, we listen carefully for the howls and moans of this world, and our shame will not be chained into submission. We are in this together. And this is the land of the grieving and the living!
We are Christ’s own body and he has come for all of us.
Alleluia! Amen.