Facing Evil
Pastor David Hansen
Time after Pentecost – Lectionary 12 (June 24), 2007
Luke 8:26-39
Grace and peace to you in the name of our Lord and Savior, Jesus the Christ.
There is much about the life of Jesus that makes us uncomfortable as modern men and women.
There were the people he hung out with – all the wrong people, the people everyone knew he should avoid. There were his strong words against the religious and political establishment. There were his parables which seemed to hard for even his disciples to understand.
And then there is this story from this morning, which makes us very uncomfortable.
Jesus and his disciples are once again among the wrong type of people – among the Gentiles on the far side of the Sea of Galilee. There, Jesus meets a man who does not live in a house in the city, but in the tombs among the dead.
Now, for a Jew who lived according to Torah, nothing could be more repulsive than a Gentile who lived where he regularly touched dead bodies. But that is not the part that gives us the heebee-jeebees.
No, the part that we have a hang up about is that this man was chained and guarded because he was possessed by the devil – actually, by so many devils that his name was Legion, or “many.”
Now, in my line of work I see a lot of things – there is much about my job that prepares me for the reality of the Gospels. But I have never seen anything like what is described here.
In fact, I’ve noticed that modern people, especially modern churches, never seem to take the idea of the devil seriously. One the on hand you have the churches where the pastor can say “The out-dated idea of Satan has been gone from this church for decades”; and on the other hand you have the churches where members seem to spend every other moment “rebuking Satan.”
One group denies the reality of the devil, and the other sees Satan under every rock and around every corner. But neither group takes seriously the idea of the devil.
Which reminds me, One beautiful Sunday morning the tiny town of Smithvale wakes up and goes to church. Before the service starts most of the congregation have seated themselves. They're all chatting to their neighbors when - shazam - Satan himself appears at the altar in flames.
Naturally, the townspeople erupt in chaos, with people fleeing the church, left, right and centre...except for Bill Scroggs, who remains calmly sitting in his pew. God's ultimate nemesis seems confused. He walks up to Bill and asks, “Don't you know who I am?”
Bill replies, “Of course I do.”
Bewildered, Satan asks, “So, you aren't afraid of me then?”
“Of course I’m not,” replies Bill calmly.
By now, Satan's face is twisted beyond all recognition, “Why not?” the dark Overlord enquires, to which Bill replies, “Because I've been married to your sister for 25 years, why should I be afraid of you?”
Now for most of us, when we talk about the devil at all, it is likely to be a story like this – a joke. After all, no one can take the idea of the Devil seriously, can they?
Well, I have some bad news folks. We may not call it the Devil or Satan, but we have all seen the face of evil, and it does not come all in red with horn and a pitchfork.
You have seen it yourself:
In the faces of people like Charlie Manson and Timothy McVeigh
In the destruction caused on September 11
In the struggles of loved ones who are truly and completely addicted
In actions of the CEOs who steal their employees pensions
In those pictures of the Holocaust, of Rwanda, of Darfur
In the faces of those who preach hatred and bigotry
You've seen it whenever you encountered wrong or injustice or evil and thought to yourself something like,"This is evil and then some!."
As in Luther's hymn, "A Mighty Fortress," you can sense, "For still our ancient foe, doth seek to work us woe; his craft and power are great, and armed with cruel hate..." Hatred is the tip-off. As the love of God for we human beings is beyond comprehension, so too the hatred lurking behind evil action cannot be fathomed. It is a dark and dangerous thing!
That is what Jesus encountered that day. Not some silly devil, with his horns, pitchfork and tail. Not the punchline to a joke. But real evil, the same evil that you and I still encounter today.
The townsfolk in today’s Gospel had tried to close their eyes to the evil that lived next door to them. They shut him up, chained him up, and guarded him, so that they would not have to look on this man and the evil that possessed him. There is a great statement by Jesus in the Gospel of John, that”"...all who do evil hate the light and do not come to the light, so that their deeds may not be exposed.”
Evil loves darkness, it loves to stay hidden. Still today, it is no different. Think about how much deceit there is in our daily lives. Whether it is the lies of advertising and marketers, the political promises we all fall for, the promises of a better life that all seem to fall short.
That’s the bad news. We live in a world that still has the same evil, and it is still covered by the same darkness and deceit as it was then. And if that were the end of the story, it would be cause enough to give up hope.
But it is not, there is good news as well.
If we return to the Gospel lesson, we hear how Jesus confronts the evil, calls it by name, and casts it out of the man.
The Good News is that our God is more powerful than any evil we might encounter in this life. In fact, we have already been set free from such evil; here in the waters of baptism.
Sure, we will still have bad things happen in our lives, and we will still encounter evil. All of that is true. But, as a people who belong to Christ, it cannot own us – it cannot overtake us, as it did the man in the Gospel.
We must first name the evil – honestly and completely.
It is addiction not, "A few too many!"
It is lying not, "Shading the truth!"
It is cheating not, "Everybody's doing it!"
It is stealing not, "One of the benefits of working here!"
When temptations pop up in our lives, we must look them in the face and name them.
We must then make sure that we are a part of the Body of Christ, we must continue to take part in the life of a community of faith – a church family. Family is there to build you up when you are weakest, to pick you up when you fall, to give you courage when yours falters. We do not attend church because it is fun (although hopefully it is), but because we need the support of family.
The bad news is, the evil described in this lesson is real. The Good News is that, like the man named Legion, we have been set free from, as our order of baptism states, the devil, all the powers of evil, and the power of sin – and there is no greater gift than that.
And so, the Gerasene man named Legion “went away, proclaiming throughout the city how much Jesus had done for him.”
Having been given your freedom, Go, and do likewise.
