June 24, 2007
4th after Pentecost
Luke 8: 26 -39, Galatians 3:23 - 29
The Rev. Dr. George Hermanson
As this is anniversary Sunday it is good to ask who are we? If you watch CSI there is a little tune that floats through your brain - a song from the Who which raises the question of identity - who are you?. After hearing it you can’t get it out of your mind. One of the hopes of worship is that the Spirit of God is so present in us that it is like that tune, or any tune, you just cannot get it out of your head. It makes a permanent place in our souls so that our life is framed around what we affirm about God and our care of the world. We go out singing the resurrection and we live it.
Sometimes when we reflect on where we have been, what has formed us we get a better fix on what is asked of us. We are fortunate because not only do we have the whole history of Christianity to inform us, we have the experience of this church and its history, which is a history embedded within the particularity of the United Church of Canada.
I like the image on the web site, the little church on the move. In one sense the image reminds us that while the building is important, it is not the location of faith. It sends us out. It moves us out into new places and new issues. It is on the move. So that is an important image to form us. My friend James Murray said this: “The building is an easy focal point, a sacred space where many significant experiences take place. Yet it is those memories, those sacred moments which are to be treasured, not the place they happened in. Jesus didn't want a monument built after his transfiguration on the mountain top, and that moment is still recalled.”
Our passages this morning give us a clue about who we are. The Luke passage is a dramatic telling of that the power of creating well being turns a community upside down.
The first question one asks is why is the man alone? It is clear that he had been abandoned. The community was not happy about his situation but did nothing. The story tells us that the man was possessed and the clue is in the name Legion.
This is a community that is occupied by the Roman Empire. The man is the symbol of how occupation destroys. For when we read carefully we note the presences of pigs. Who are these people? Because we know that pigs are unclean we know that the whole community is occupied and needs liberation.
They had become collaborators with the Empire. Their values had been corrupted and thus the man is a symbol of their own possession of ill will. They had become what was wrong with their society, so much so that they did not even know how captive they were to those values that destroy community. They were happy in their being possessed. They had sold out to consumerism.
I was tempted to call this sermon “What about the Pigs?” For in the context of the religious values the last concern should be been what about the pigs. Yet rather than celebrating that the man had been cured, had been liberated, they worried about their loss which in the metaphorical telling is worthless. Pigs are of no value and unclean and the story tells us they had sold themselves to the Empire, lived out of the values of oppression. They had fear.
When I lived in Chicago I heard a powerful sermon in the Black Church we sometimes attended. He spoke of why in his Pentecostal tradition they handled snakes - it was because it gave them courage to handle the snakes of racism and political oppression. Rather than been fearful they resisted. This created a community that worked hard to address the issues of poverty and racism and to overcome. It was a center of resistance.
When Jesus offered the identity of resistance the people became afraid. Now for once Luke gives us an outcome with the man who is healed. He wants to join the disciples. However, Jesus sends him in new directions - he is on the move. He could have located sacred space in Jesus and Jesus says it is not him but in the world. This is a crucial image of who we are... it is the mission of well-being we are called to, not to the maintenance of some icon.
Paul gives us a strong image of the meaning of who are we? It is that great passage of neither Jew or Gentile, free or slave. The Christian identity breaks down barriers of class and ethnic segregation. The standard of inclusion is broadened to all who seek well-being. Now within our total history we have not always lived this well. But it keeps surfacing and at our best we have been those who seek a society of inclusion rather than exclusion. At our best we have been those who work for justice and well being of those who society by its values have pushed to the margins. Paul’s summation of the gospel has moved people to be those who move society towards a world where healing happens. The church at its best is the group that has resisted powers of domination and oppression. We are those who celebrate the liberation from the legions of negativity.
Those who begin our witness here in the community had a vision of who we are - those who will be informed by the freedom that Jesus brings. There will be a witness. Our image of the church on the move is an attempt to continue this witness. In the moving we do discover some of our history that affirms a worldly spirituality. Reminds us to be on the move. There was the Baptist history which affirmed that one makes commitments that grounds ones adult reality. Adult baptism is a reaffirmation of adult responsibility - that who we are those who work for the well being of life. In infant baptism we are reminded this identity formation begins at birth. Then we have our Methodist roots. While we don’t have the concrete image of the communion rail, we do practice coming to the front for communion as the Methodists still do today. This is to remind us that like adult baptism we must respond to God’s Grace by action, the getting up and responding -being on the move. Then we have the Presbyterian and Congregational images when we take communion in the pew. It is the act of serving one another that the Presbyterians emphasized. And the congregationalists ate together to remind them of the fact they were a community in Christ. We are fortunate that we have all these symbols that remind us of the Grace of God which calls us to service. In the practicing of them it forms an identity of being on the move - serving our world.
John Main offers this image of who we are:
"The Christian congregation must always be aware of its ultimate meaning which is beyond itself. The social, cultural or ceremonial form of the group must never become something to be preserved, or above all, something to be possessed. Our tendency is to opt for the static security of an established order, what we know and what we feel safe with. We go into decline because we have opted to evade the only real security there is- the rock of Christ, the dynamic activity of God, the glorious liberty of the children of God."
"Our contemporaries will only come to our churches only when they are convinced that this is the primary reason for our existence-that we do truly seek God as our very first responsibility."
Taken from John Main-Essential Writings, edited by Laurence Freeman.
So we celebrate who are we. We have been claimed by Christ, to heal one another and to heal our bruised world.
George Hermanson
