PENTECOST 4C
June 24, 2007
SCRIPTURES
Jesus said, "You did not choose me, but I chose you."
-The law, as Paul sees it, is a human effort to get into God's good graces...to get right with God. (But God already loves you)
-You can't baptize yourself! It is something done to you and for you rather than something done by you.
-This is the great good news of faith: we are all home. We are all adopted. We all belong.
-Like going to church for some...they joined but never belonged.
-Common denominators.. there's only one...(You figure it out) Lindy
-Faith is the "plugged in " part....needed to complete circuit to God.
- Faith is located under the left nipple. Martin Luther
-"There is no longer gay or straight..." Borg
-St. Paul’s words about law and faith give us an opportunity to think of restrictions and freedom
-God treats us the way he treated Abraham (who lived without biblical law) and expects from us only what he expected from Abraham. (Faith!)
-Isn’t Paul giving us a Christianity-made-easy? (If we don't need to obey the law)
- Current events: gay/straight; Southern Baptist refuse to ordain women; all Muslims are terrorist;
- Divine law: "If you love me, keep my commandments
World law: "If you fear me, keep my commandments
- Too much of religion is spiritual calisthenics
-We are made to run well on the commandments. You could put channel #5 in your car but it wouldn't run well on "smell #5". F.Sheen We are made to run well on faith.
-Jesus asked the spirit's name, and the man answered, "My name is Legion! For we are many." A legion of soldiers was numbered a couple of thousand, so this passage is often translated, "My name is Mob."
-When love is the law, we police ourselves.
-Let us be temples and not court houses. Ed. Hays
-Laws are necessary when there is a lack of mature love. Ed. Hays
-Though the name of the place is also given as "Gadara," and "Gergasa," this makes no difference in understanding the reading.
- Sometimes Jesus commands us to venture out...to travel with him to some far place. And sometimes he commands us to undertake an even more difficult assignment
to go home and tell those closest to us what God has done for us. Willimon
-"Legion" is not a name, but a number. "A Roman legio numbered six thousand soldiers."
-Why are there so many pigs, when Jews would have no use for pigs? Because pigs
had one purpose only -- to feed the bands of Roman recruits.
-The cured demoniac is left as a
witness to the power that was present among the Gerasenes and was refused. This
is our task, too. To proclaim how much Jesus has done for us, even among those
who would rather not hear.
-A Roman military legion consisted of thousands of
men, so this sick man had thousands of demons in his mind.
-The people gathered from the surrounding country side weren’t afraid of the grubby guy- they were scared of Jesus! Come to think of it, that is pretty scary. If Jesus put too many people back in our right minds, some frightening things could happen. Legislation might pass to give every worker a living wage in this country, and CEOs might lose some of their salary. Gay and lesbian people might be included in the full life of the church, and church leaders might have to admit we were wrong. Parents might take off work earlier to spend more time at home, and all Americans night have to rethink our work ethic. etc, etc, So they ran Jesus off. Will you and I be scared of Jesus too?Rev. Dawn Darwin Weaks
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We assume that most demoniacs have been locked away but not so they live among us, perhaps within our own skin..- God is not found in synagogue, church, or worship. God is not found in the words of Holy Scripture. God is not found in prayer or meditation. God is not found in earthquake, wind, or fire. God is not found in creeds, doctrines, or formularies. Kubicek (God is found within each of us)
-In short there is no handholding and Kumbaya singing going on here.U. Nembach, J. Neukirch
- The clothing of the possessed may indeed be extra layers rather than nudity. (masks, etc.)
- The tragedy is that others find such persons untouchable.
-This man did not need to stay in the physical presence of Jesus to retain his sanity
-Abyss, Abyss-mal, abysmal
-Demons used to be thought as something within us. It would be better to think of demons as the lack of something within us. Lindy
-Demon
possession is a first century equivalent of serious mental illness, especially
when the Bible says that person has legion of demons inside his or her mind.
-Edward Schillebeeckx, the great modern Dutch theologian, wrote: "Jesus' light burns in this world only with the oil of our lives........" It is up to us.
-William Loader The liberation which Jesus brings is a liberation for as well as a liberation from. The man retains his wholeness as he goes out and lives the liberation where he is, in his own household and among his own people
-Culpepper writes: "When it gets its way, evil is always destructive and ultimately self-destructive."
-Herbert Anderson in The Family and Pastoral Care, : "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." (They wanted Jesus to leave)
-Mickey Anders, Jesus may have healed this schizophrenic by symbolically sending his "demons" into a herd of swine, but today he would take Zyprexa.
- Jesus is both demon chaser and disturbing healer
-The town's people were upset. Two thousand pigs -- that's a significant economic loss. They ask Jesus to leave. The townspeople don't care about the man healed; they care about the 2,000 pigs that just went over the cliff into the sea.
- What if we could find our center, our one unfragmented self.
-Culpepper (Luke, New Interpreter's Bible) makes about this situation. In our day, we have become far more accustomed to attributing calamities and disorders to the forces of nature or to internal mental or emotional problems. The remedy is not exorcism but counseling or medication. The story of the Gerasene demoniac should now be interpreted so that it speaks a word of assurance and hope to those for whom every day is a battle with depression, fear, anxiety, or compulsive behavior. They will understand what would lead a person to say that his name is "mob" (GNB). With such a response, the man had acknowledged that he no longer had any individual identity. He had lost his name. He had lost his individuality. All that was left was a boiling struggle of conflicting forces. It was as though a Roman legion was at war within him. [p. 188]
-It is a common theme in folklore that knowing a demon's name gave one power over the evil force. There is also some truth to this in our day. When we can put a "name" on a disease or disorder, we are on the way to curing it.
-How do we talk about "demons" to our contemporary folks? One approach, suggested earlier is to consider it a way that the ancient people talked about mental illnesses. Another approach is to talk about "evil or destructive powers" -- those people, situations, etc. that dehumanize and destroy people.
- Reasons the people sent Jesus away: he disrupted the status quo.
- Demons: drugs, alcohol, gambling, sex crimes, genocide rampant in China, Russia, Central Africa, Timothy McVeigh. Columbine killings and at Virginia Tech, etc.
QUOTES
-"When it gets its way, evil is always destructive and ultimately self-destructive." Culpepper
- 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
-the good thing about a rut is that you know where you're going
HUMOR
--Those hogs ran down the side of a cliff and committed “suey-side”
--Although both Mark (5:1-20) and Matthew (8:28-34) have parallels to this text, they are not assigned in the Revised Common Lectionary. So this is the one shot the lectionary preacher has of saying, "This is the first reported case of deviled ham."
- - Laws are kept better than men's lawns
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ILLUSTRATIONS
-In spite of what they say, 90 percent of the chronic patients who see today's physicians have one common symptom. Their trouble did not start with coughing or chest pain or hyperacidity. In 90 percent of the cases, the first symptom was fear. This is the opinion of a well-known American internist as expressed in a roundtable discussion on psychosomatic medicine. This is also the consensus of a growing body of specialists. Fear of losing a job, of old age, of being exposed—sooner or later such fear manifests itself as "a clinical symptom." Sometimes the fear is nothing more than a superficial anxiety; sometimes it is so deep-rooted that the patient denies its existence and makes the round of doctor to doctor, taking injections, hormones, tranquilizers, and tonics in an endless search for relief.
-An old friend, a former pastor
who’s been working the Alcoholics Anonymous program since 1981, used to say to
me, “Most of the demons are inside.” Memories of parental neglect or abuse of
some sort are inside. Memories of childhood taunts and humiliations are inside.
Living with the road not taken whether career choices, romantic choices, or some
other what-ifs are inside. Knowledge of one’s failures and imperfections are
inside. Stinking thinking (toxic thinking) is inside. All of these things (not
an exclusive list) can become demons that possess and even destroy.
Zumwalt
-When C.S. Lewis was on the road of conversion to Christ, the Spirit of God
convicted him by showing him the awful truth about himself. He thought he was a
happy, reasonably good pagan, but now this is what he saw: "For the first time I
examined myself with a seriously practical purpose. And there I found what
appalled me: a zoo of lusts, a bedlam of ambitions, a nursery of fears, a harem
of fondled hatreds. My name was Legion."
- The man who sat at Jesus' feet and who learned from him wants to go with them. Look at his options! He is standing on the beach with Jesus, with the disciples in the boat in front of him and the townsfolk who banished him to the graveyard at his back. He wants to go with the one who healed him, the one who wasn't afraid to come near him, who didn't walk on the other side of the street. He wants to go with his new teacher and Lord and learn more about the kingdom of God. He's ready to follow Jesus. There's room in the boat, and he'll leave without looking back -- there's no one to say good-bye to. But Jesus says no. To others along the way Jesus issues the invitation, "Come, follow me," but to this one he says, "Return to your home, and declare how much God has done for you." At the very end, we see what kind of story this really is. It isn't simply a story of one man's healing, but a story of one man's calling. Jesus does bid the man to follow, but in this case the following, the call to ministry, involves staying rather than leaving. Jesus does not reject the man's application for discipleship, but accepts it fully. I even have a first appointment all lined up for you, Jesus says from the boat. Your congregation is standing right behind you. No, go and tell....Part of Article from Christian Century about the last part of Luke scripture. by Mary W. Anderson:
CHILDREN
I couldn't find any new children sermons for the Luke scripture. I'm pulpit supplying next Sunday and am thinking of talking about demons. Talk about the different "demons" with in us as mentioned above. Then talk about saviors. Teachers, parents, nurses, doctors, ministers, neighbors, friends, etc. etc. etc. Then end by talking about God's spirit that is in us...that we can pray to and trust in when there are those times we can't do anything ourselves.
2. Just found this one. On leading an All age service some years ago on this passage, I gave everyone a piece of knotted string, before the Gospel was read I bound a child up with rope, as the story unfolded so we released the knots and let the child go free. We talked about the things that tie us up in knots, inwardly and outwardly. During our prayers of intercession, as we prayed we undid the knots in our strings and then offered our strings as part of the offertory of thanksgiving for what God has done for us. Clare Sanders Grundisburgh Suffolk UK
3.Children's Sermons from Sermons 4 Kids | Object Lessons
PRAYER PHRASES
Free us from all that binds and enslaves us. All that consterns us from freely following you. Free us from merely respectable, polite religion so that we may more boldly, courageously, and exuberantly be the disciples you deserve. Free us to step over our boundaries...to go where you are in the world of human need. Free us that we might be bound only to you. Willimon