Reverend Ian Doescher

The Fifth Sunday of Pentecost

There’s been a hurricane, and a man is stuck up on his roof.  Everything around him is flooded.  The man prays aloud and says to God, “Okay God, I’m trusting in you to save me.  I have total faith that you’ll save me.”  Then a boat comes by.  The boat has some of the man’s neighbors and a dog in it.  It’s actually the canoe that one of his neighbors has always had in her garage.  The neighbors call up to the man, “Hey, come on down!  We’ll get you out of here!”  And the guy calls back and says, “No, that’s okay.  God’s going to save me.”  So the people row off.  The guy prays again to God and he says, “God, I know you are going to save me.  I have complete faith in you.”  And a little while later, a helicopter flies right over the man’s house.  A trooper is hanging down from a ladder and he holds out his hand to the man and he says, “Give me your hand.  We’ll get you out of here.”  And the man says to him, “No, thanks.  God is going to save me.”  And the guy on the ladder says, “That may be, but we’re the last people out here tonight.  Why don’t you come up this ladder?”  And the man says, “Naw, I have faith in God.  God’s never failed me yet.  Thanks all the same.”  And the helicopter flies off.  And an hour later, the floodwaters rise.  And it gets dark.  And the waters rise higher.  And no one else comes by that place.  And the waters rise higher.  And eventually that night, the man is washed away by the waters and he dies.  When he comes face to face with God, the man cries, “God, what happened?  I trusted in you!  I was so faithful!  I believed you would save me and I did not stray from that belief!  How could you let me die?”  And God says to the man, “You trusted me to save you.  And I sent a boat full of your neighbors to save you.  And I sent a helicopter with state troopers to save you.  And you let them both go by.  What exactly were you expecting?”

You’ve undoubtedly heard this story or some version of it before.  Here’s a version of it that actually happened, so I like to tell it, too.  In the church my spouse Jennifer worked at when we lived in Millbrook, New York, there was a 13-year old girl named Grace.  I heard this story from Grace’s dad, who also happened to Jennifer’s boss, the Rector of the church in Millbrook.  Anyway, when Grace was in 7th grade, a new girl joined her class.  At lunch on the first day, Grace watched this new girl sit alone at a table across the cafeteria.  Grace was with a group of her friends.  She said a little prayer at the beginning of lunch.  She said, “God, please send someone to sit with that girl so she doesn’t have to be alone.”  And she ate her lunch.  She looked over at the girl again, and she was still sitting alone.  “God,” she prayed, “please send someone over there to keep her company!”  Finally, a few minutes later, the girl was still alone and Grace was getting peeved.  So she got up and said, “Fine, God, if you won’t send someone over there, I guess I’ll go.”

How do you encounter God in your day-to-day life?  Where do you find God?  Where do you hear God’s voice?  What does God look like in your everyday existence?  These aren’t necessarily questions we ask ourselves a lot, and yet my hunch is that we would be surprised by each other’s answers.  How do you encounter God in your day-to-day life?

Two stories from scripture today talk about meeting God in completely different ways.  The first is the famous story from 1 Kings.  Elijah has been hounded by the sinful people of Israel, who are under the reign of the evil King Ahab and Queen Jezebel, and Elijah complains to God about them: “I have been very zealous for the Lord God Almighty.  The Israelites have rejected your covenant, broken down your altars, and put your prophets to death with the sword.  I,” Elijah concludes, “am the only one left, and now they are trying to kill me too.”  Whenever I have a bad day at the office, I think about Elijah, and suddenly things don’t seem quite so bad.  He has it really rough.  But God decides that the place Elijah is in isn’t the best place for this conversation.  Not just Elijah’s physical location, but his mental space.  So God takes Elijah away for a little R&R, a little break.  “Go out and stand on the mountain in the presence of the Lord, for the Lord is about to pass by,” God says.  This reminds me of a communication tool that might exist between a married couple.  It is God’s way of saying, “Let’s have this conversation when we’re both in a better space.”  Elijah ascends the mountain, and then one of the most well-known and frankly one of the most beautiful scenes of the Bible happens: “Then a great and powerful wind tore the mountains apart and shattered the rocks before the Lord, but the Lord was not in the wind. After the wind there was an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake.  After the earthquake came a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire.  And after the fire came a gentle whisper.  When Elijah heard it, he pulled his cloak over his face and went out and stood at the mouth of the cave.”  Elijah recognizes this “gentle whisper” as God.  “Gentle whisper” is the New International Version’s rendering of those words.  The King James Version calls it “a still small voice.”  The New Revised Standard Version calls it “a sound of sheer silence,” from which we might imagine Simon and Garfunkel’s lyrics: “Hello darkness my old friend/I’ve come to talk to you again/because a vision softly speaking/left its seeds while I was sleeping/and the vision that was planted in my brain/still remains/within the sound of silence.”  Biblical commentator Carrie Mitchell writes, “Simon and Garfunkel had it right—we need to listen to those sounds of silence ([for example] the plight of the oppressed, the vacant faces of the homeless, the inarticulate cries of undernourished children), because in them God is encouraging us to persevere.”  Elijah has experienced the still small voice of God calling, and then God starts the conversation over.  It seems like it is God’s way of calming Elijah down, saying, “Look, Elijah, look at who I—your God—look at who I really am.  Now speak to me.”  Elijah repeats his complaint, and God tells him what to do next.  But only after revealing to Elijah what the true face of God looks like—not the wind, not the earthquake, not the fire, but the gentle whisper.

So that is Elijah’s experience of God, the God of the still small voice.  But when we turn over to today’s gospel lesson, we can say along with Monty Python, “And now for something completely different.”  A few nights ago, I was listening to some music by Philip Glass, a modern classical composer known for a style of music called minimalism, which relies on a lot of patterns and repetitions.  I had just listened to the second movement of “Glasspieces,” a three-part piece that Philip Glass wrote to be performed with the New York City Ballet.  The second movement, called “Façades,” is a lovely and slow ethereal movement, something that suggests the God of 1 Kings.  But the third movement, which came on after I left the room, is called “Funeral.”  This third movement is wild and frenetic, dissonant and loud. Jennifer heard the third movement playing in the kitchen, walked in to me in the bedroom and said, “I’m trying to find a nice way to say this, and I’m having a hard time doing it.  So here goes: how can you like music like this?”  The frenetic energy of the third movement is what we get in today’s gospel reading.  Jesus has just sailed across a lake back to Galilee, to the region of the Gerasenes.  As an amateur songwriter, I appreciate that in English, Gerasene rhymes with kerosene, because this situation Jesus is about to walk into is highly flammable.  The instant Jesus steps off the boat he encounters a man who has been possessed by a demon.  No, that’s wrong, not possessed by a demon, but possessed by so many demons that they call themselves Legion.  This man is so out of control that the chains he has been bound with are unable to keep him under wraps, as it were.  He is constantly falling down in fits because of the demons that have seized him.  This is frenzy—I can hear Philip Glass’ third movement in the background.

For a moment, though, let’s take a little step back from this man and imagine what it looks like, on a more metaphorical level, to be possessed by a multitude of demons.  I know a family that is in trouble.  There’s no other way to say it, they are in trouble.  There are four children, ages 12, 10, 8 and 4, being looked after not by their parents, not by their grandparents, but by their great-grandparents, who are in their 80s.  The great-grandparents do not have the energy to take care of the children appropriately.  The oldest children are often visibly dirty.  The youngest child has brain damage from his mother’s drug use during her pregnancy, so though he is physically huge for his age he isn’t as mentally developed as he should be for age four.  The second-youngest child, the 8-year-old, has been dealing with gender identity issues, so although he is a boy his great-grandmother has been dressing him as a girl and calling him by his chosen female name.  On top of all of this, money is extremely tight for the family, and the great-grandfather—who has struggled with alcohol addiction—has started drinking again.  This isn’t a made-up situation.  I wish it were.  This is a family I know well, and whenever I see them or hear about what is going on with them, I think to myself, “How can this situation possibly be held together?”  Maybe you know people whose lives are similarly troubled, people you look at and wonder how their situation will ever be okay.  These are the people I think of when I think of this man beset by a multitude of demons, a man so troubled that things are coming apart at the seams.

So here we are, Jesus just off a boat, a man troubled by demons, and pigs feeding not too far away.  Jesus sees this man in this frenetic scene, and the demons—the Legion—know they are in trouble.  They are encountering Jesus, whom they recognize as “the Son of the Most High God.”  But this isn’t a peaceful encounter—there is nothing like a still small voice of calm here, nothing like the intimate encounter between Elijah and God.  Instead, the demons beg to be sent into the herd of pigs, and when Jesus allows them to do so the pigs go running down the bank of the lake, straight into the water, and drown like lemmings off a cliff.  You can imagine the violent and foul race of pigs rushing to their death—it’s not a pretty scene, and it gives a whole new meaning to the phrase “when pigs fly.”  But they do, they rush to their death.  And the wild, loud, frenetic and dissonant movement finally comes to an end.

This scene just raises so many questions, doesn’t it?  Why did Jesus let the demons kill the pigs?  Sure, they were unclean animals according to Jewish law, but does that mean they deserved an en masse death by suicide?  (Technically, this is actually porcucide.)  Why did the demons prefer that particular demise rather than, as the NIV says, being sent back to “the Abyss”?  We don’t get answers to these questions.  Instead, this frenzied scene ends with a man finally back in his senses, and some angry and scared pig farmers.  The encounter with God that this man has had—his healing by Jesus—could not be farther in mood from Elijah’s encounter with God’s gentle whisper.

But back to my original questions: how do you encounter God in your day-to-day life?  Where do you find God?  Where do you hear God’s voice?  The one thing these two stories—of Elijah and God and the demon-possessed man and Jesus—the one thing these stories have in common is the zeal with which Elijah and the healed man come before God.  In 1 Kings, Elijah says twice to God, “I have been very zealous for the Lord God Almighty.”  In the gospel of Luke, the man who has been healed comes before Jesus and begs to travel on with Jesus, begs to follow Jesus.  When Jesus suggests that God is better served by the man returning to his home and telling the good news about what Jesus did, the man does that: “the man went away and told all over town how much Jesus had done for him.”  Both Elijah and this healed man are full of zeal for God, full of the fervor we heard in psalm 42 today: “As the deer panteth for the water, so my soul longeth after thee.”

Here is what I think we can take away from this, friends.  I am a big fan of the phrase “Bidden or unbidden, God is present.”  “Bidden or unbidden, God is present.”  This phrase means that even if we don’t ask for God to be present in a situation, God is there nevertheless.  But this week’s passages give us a different twist on that theme, which might go something like this: “when we yearn for God, God will be known.”  “When we yearn for God, God will be known.”  Elijah was zealous for God, even as he feared for his own life, and God came to Elijah and encountered him not in the wind, not in the earthquake, not in the fire, but in a gentle whisper, a still small voice.  The healed man was zealous for Jesus and encountered Jesus in a frenetic scene filled with demons, pigs and death.  The psalmist speaks of his longing for God, the same longing a thirsty deer has for a stream, and then writes of how he encounters God: “By day the Lord directs his love, at night his song is with me—a prayer to the God of my life.”  “When we yearn for God, God will be known.”  It was true for Elijah, it was true for the man with a legion of spirits from Gerasene, it was true for the psalmist, it is true for us.  Thanks be to God, the same God who encounters us in many, many ways.  Amen.