First Sunday after Trinity – morning
Sunday 23rd June 2019
Trinity 1 – Proper 7 – morning
Galatians 3. 23-29
Luke 8. 26-39
Revd Preb Maureen Hobbs
This seems as good a Sunday as any to speak about Mental Health. In recent years we have begun to chip away at the stigma that often attaches itself to this subject. We have become much more aware of how Mental Health can affect all of us. It is quite likely that here this morning there will be several people experiencing some difficulty in this area… I hope my discussing it does not add to your pain, and please be assured that I only want to help you to know that you are not alone and that we are here to support each other and walk alongside each other.
Anxiety, Stress and Depression are perhaps the most common manifestation of Mental Health problems for us today – but there are many others and it is not something that affects only ‘other people’. We are all on a Mental Health spectrum and move up and down it through life.
Today’s Gospel shows us someone perhaps at the extreme end of that spectrum –suffering with ‘dissociative personality disorder’ as it would today be called – in which two or more distinct identities, or personality states, are present in – and alternately take control of – an individual.
Now this is a very extreme example where this poor man seems to be the plaything of not just two, but a whole cohort of personalities. He has been driven literally ‘out of his mind’; out of civilised society – such that he can only exist on the extreme fringes of his community, wandering around the graveyard dressed only in rags and rattling the chains with which others had sought in vain to restrain him. He both frightens us and intrigues us.
Well, lots of us have come across individuals who are one person at work or in public, and a very different person at home!
And being a follower of Jesus Christ does not automatically spare us from suffering Mental Health issues, but it can help us to begin the process of integrating those parts of our lives that seem permanently to be at war – pulling us in different directions, threatening our wellbeing – or even our sanity.
And notice what Jesus does. He asks the man his name. He recognises that this man – like all of us – has a precious identity; he is ‘named’ by Jesus as a fellow human being. He himself responds with a kind of dark wit – he is Legion – his multiple personalities are the size of a Roman Legion. And it is no accident that it is the Romans who have possessed the sacred land of Israel. No other words are spoken, but in that encounter with Jesus the man’s innermost, raging, tumultuous self is brought to stillness and peace. We may imagine the sense of relief that caused.
This passage in Luke’s Gospel comes just after Jesus has also demonstrated his divine power by calming the raging storm on the Lake. That story is profoundly connected to this one. Jesus is the one who brings peace, who – like God at the moment of Creation – brings order out of chaos. And if Jesus has this power over the storms of nature and the storms of the human psyche, just who is he? What are we to make of him?
For the townspeople it is all too much. They are not ready to face up to such radical power being demonstrated among them. Ironically, where his authority is recognised by the once deranged and now healed man, the townspeople cannot live with it. It is too much of a threat to their entire understanding of the world. Better to remain in a safe binary system in which the obviously mad are banished to the edge, than a world where the previously deranged are restored to their right mind and given back to the community.
But the story does not end quite yet, because Jesus – while apparently rejecting the man as a disciple, nevertheless commissions him to be a kind of Gentile evangelist – to proclaim to his friends and neighbours all that God has done for him. And although the first reaction of the Gerasenes is to resist salvation in the person of Jesus, there is still the hope that the testimony of the healed demoniac will turn hearts and minds.
Throughout the Bible human beings have to choose whether to embrace the costly disruption of God’s liberating work. It was true of the Hebrew slaves who looked back with nostalgia to the certainties of life in Egypt as they wandered through the desert. It is true here – would you have trusted that this man was truly healed and allowed him back to live among ‘decent, ordinary folk’?
And how do we view those who appear to have had difficult lives turned around by God’s healing touch. Are we prepared to accept the power that God demonstrates to calm the storms we see around us? To calm the storms that may rage inside us?
This is also the Sunday when we give special thanks to God for the reality of the Eucharist – for Holy Communion, the Mass – the feast of Corpus Christi. Many people feel that in that moment of receiving bread and wine they gain a special kind of peace. May you feel your equilibrium restored as you come to God’s table today. Amen.