Luke 8:26-39; Mark 5:1-10

So, one day Jesus decided to take his disciples on a little trip across the lake.  Why?  Because that’s where the Gentiles and Hellenized Jews lived—you know, those “other” people—and Jesus wanted them to know about the kingdom of God, too.  He wanted his disciples to understand that the Commonwealth of God’s justice and kindness is not just for Judeans and Galileans.  It’s for everyone.  So they set out across the lake. But no sooner had their boat touched the shore than they were accosted by a naked demon-possessed man who apparently already knew who Jesus was.  “When he saw Jesus, he cried out and fell down before him, shouting, ‘What do you want with me, Jesus, Son of the Most High God?  I beg you, do not torment me.’”  

Just to be clear, there is no record of Jesus ever tormenting anyone, although he has been known to make people uncomfortable with very pointed questions—the kind of questions that can make your soul itch.  So maybe that’s what the demoniac was afraid of.

Jesus paused the exorcism and asked the demon his name.  “Legion,” said the man, “for many demons had entered him.”

Legion.    In a Jewish story that was written in Greek, that Latin word sticks out like a bowling ball on a tennis court.  Legion.  It had only one meaning in their world at that time—a  division of Roman soldiers.  And that gives us a clue that, while this is an exorcism story and a miracle story, it is also a political story—a story about how the oppressive practices of the Roman occupation drove this poor man insane and caused his community to live under a cloud of fear.  

Living under a system where the Romans and the local nobility and the wealthy got the first and the best and the most of everything and got richer on the backs of the poor people who did all the work and took all the risks was more than this poor soul could take.  He didn’t dare to speak out against the multiple injustices that shadowed their daily life because doing so would bring swift and brutal punishment from the soldiers who patrolled the streets, punishment that would be directed not only at him but also at his neighbors.  With no safe outlet for his rage and his pain, he turned them inward on himself.

The late Paul Hollenbach put it this way: “The tension between his hatred for his oppressors and the necessity to repress this hatred in order to avoid dire recrimination drove him mad. He retreated to an inner world where he could symbolically resist Roman domination.”  By casting out the demon, said Hollenbach, Jesus “brought the man’s and the neighborhood’s hatred of the Romans out into the open, where the result could be disaster for the community.”^[1]

This is not just a story about how Jesus brought peace to a tormented man in ancient times, it is also very much a story for us in our time.   In an editorial remembrance of Minnesota State Representative Melissa Hortman and her husband Mark who were killed last week in a political assassination, ELCA pastor and author Angela Decker wrote, “American democracy, borne in slavery, enriched in colonialism and genocide, tested in ill-advised overseas wars, is now writhing and twisting, beset by internal illness and self-inflicted wounds.”^[2]

If that assessment seems too harsh, consider these events from just this month:

• On June 8, disregarding the authority and advice of Governor Newsome and Mayor Bass, President Trump deployed 2,000 National Guard troops to Los Angeles to quell “riots” which were, in reality, mostly peaceful protests against the administration’s continuing raids on undocumented immigrants by Immigration and Customs officers. On June 10, the president deployed 700 U.S. Marines to Los Angeles in violation of the 10^th Amendment to the Constitution and the Posse Comitatus Act which forbids the use of the military for domestic law enforcement.  On June 17, he deployed an additional 2,000 National Guard troops.  According to The Guardian, these troops “have told friends and family members they are deeply unhappy about the assignment and worry their only meaningful role will be as pawns in a political battle they do not want to join.”^[3]

• On June 10, New Jersey Congresswoman LaMonica McIver was arrested and indicted for interfering with ICE officers who were arresting Newark Mayor Ras Baraka outside a federal immigration detention facility in her state.  Both Congresswoman McIver and Mayor Baraka were there as part of to their official duties.

• On June 13, United States Senator Alex Padilla was wrestled to the floor and handcuffed by security officers when he tried to ask Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem a question at her press conference.

• On June 17, New York City Comptroller Brad Lander, who is also a candidate for mayor, was arrested by ICE agents at a Manhattan immigration court while escorting a defendant out of the courtroom.  He had come to the court in an effort to observe hearings and promote legal services for immigrants.

• On June 14, Flag Day, Minnesota State Representative Melissa Hortman and her husband Mark were shot and killed by a man posing as a police officer.  Their assailant then drove to the home of State Senator John Hoffman and shot him and his wife, Yvette.  Fortunately, they survived.  Later that same day, the president would watch a poorly attended military parade while more than five million people attended No Kings protests all across the country to protest the policies of his administration.

• June 12 marked the 9^th anniversary of the Pulse Nightclub mass shooting in Orlando, Florida in which 49 people were killed and another 68 were injured.

• June 17 was the 10^th anniversary of the racially motivated killing of 9 people who were attending a Bible study at Mother Emmanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina.  

• In a related note, as of June 20, there have been 37 mass shootings in the US this month alone, bringing the total to 199 so far for the year.

Now add on to all of that the rising international tensions which threaten to involve us, the ongoing war between Russia and Ukraine and the increasingly violent conflict between Israel and Iran—which as of yesterday afternoon with the bombing of Iran ordered by President Trump now actually does involve us—and  it’s no wonder that politics is having a profoundly negative effect on our collective sense of well-being and our understanding of who we are as a people. 

According to the American Psychological Association, political polarization and a seemingly endless series of national crises have become a significant source of stress for the American people and that stress is taking its toll.  Seventy-seven percent, nearly 8 in 10 adults, report that worrying about the future of our country has become a serious source of anxiety causing symptoms that range from insomnia to depression.  Forty-one percent, nearly 2 in 5 adults, have considered moving to a different country.   

As I read the Gospel for this week with all these things echoing in my heart, I couldn’t help but think that we, the good old US of A, we are the demon-possessed man. We are the man made crazy by fears and anxieties and bigotry and scapegoating.  We are the man howling among the tombs and battering ourselves with blind rage and unreasoned hatreds.

We are the man with a hopelessly divided mind, made bipolar and schizophrenic by a cacophony of opposing inner voices—entrenched political parties with no common ground—conservatives vs. liberals and ne’er the twain shall meet even in the cause of common sense, putting our party identity and our ideology ahead of everything else that’s supposed to define us, making even our faith subservient to our chosen place on the ideological spectrum. 

We are so blinded by the ideological lenses we wear that we see only what we want to see. And since our biases rarely completely align with or truly resonate with the Gospel, our cognitive dissonance creates the first and most stubborn degree of our madness.

Oh, we have our moments of clarity.  But then the rage wells up in us and we explode in violence.

For most of us the violence doesn’t go beyond rhetoric and posturing, but words and attitude can open the door for those who would turn it into horribly tangible violence, death and destruction.

Even among the most enlightened among us, our suppressed  racism, or our discomfort with sexualities that are different from our own, or our anxieties about other religions—all these things creep out in unguarded words or microaggressions, or, most often, simply in awkward silence—a failure to speak, a silence which gives permission to the violence that is always waiting to happen.  We breed the craziness.

We cloak our prejudices in our religions or our patriotism. We project our own disquiet, our own fears and anxieties and hatred onto the most vulnerable and marginalized, scapegoating them with some reasonable sounding rationale to support our bigotry and give us permission to treat them horribly.  We are so blinded by our own warped and fearful reasoning that we can’t see children of God standing right in front of us—especially if the color of their skin or their language or their religion or their sexuality isn’t the same as ours.

We are caught in an epic struggle between love and hate, a struggle that is almost entirely of our own making.

Can you see that if you’re not actively and passionately on the side of love then you are at least passively on the side of hate? 

Can you see that if you are not actively generating the transformational light of cultural metanoia—a radical change of heart and mind—then you are passively brooding in a moonless night of cultural assumptions?

And can you see that we are not just the bedeviled man raving among the tombs?  We are also the craven townspeople afraid of our own shadows, afraid to stand against the madness even as we recognize the insanity of our own inconsistencies.   We penalize the voices that cry out against injustice.  We lock them up and bind them with chains, both real and metaphorical, even though we know, deep down, that silencing them will not bring us peace.

And even when God works a miracle and restores one of us to our senses we respond with more anxiety because that is just so different from our usual experience, and because anxiety has become our go-to reaction for almost everything.

Can we find a way out of all this madness?

Can we learn how to put aside our politics, our ideologies, our biases and prejudices?  Can we learn how to silence the less savory internal voices of our childhood, our inclination for self-protection, our fear of the “other,” our anxiety about a constantly changing world—can we put aside our own demons long enough to see the person in front of us as someone who God deeply loves and cares for?

Can we learn to see each other the way Jesus sees us? 

Instead of a woman with an unsavory reputation, can we learn to see a daughter of God who has been beaten down by the world and had to make desperate choices in order to survive?  Instead of an unhoused nutjob venting his rage on the corner or among the tombs can we learn to see a son of God bedeviled and enslaved by the legion insanity and heartlessness of the world around him?

Can we learn to see that in Christ we are all children of God, that in Christ there is no Jew or Greek, slave or free, male or female, gay or straight or trans or bi—no documented or undocumented?   No us or them?

Can you see that we are all going to have to learn to see differently?

No, we can’t afford to be stupid. No we can’t afford to be blind to real threats.  But can you see that first we are going to have to learn to recognize and deal with the real threats that arise from our own hearts and minds and souls?

Can we learn how to stop listening to all the voices that divide us and pit us against each other? Can we find the heart to switch off the news channels and radio voices and web feeds and political voices that want to tell us how awful or dangerous those other people are, who want to tell us that “they” are not the real “us”?

Can all of us, each of us, muster enough humility to have at least one “come to Jesus” moment so he can remove the lenses of our preconceptions and cast our demons into the sea of God’s love?

Can you see that the only way out of our madness is for us to learn to love our neighbors with the love of Christ?  Can you see that the love exemplified and perpetually renewed by Jesus—whether you know that’s where it comes from or not—is our only hope of ever being able to sit down with each other calmly and in our right minds?

If we can learn to see each other the way Jesus sees us, then maybe we can live to see the promise of Isaiah 32 fulfilled:

Then everyone who has eyes will be able to see the truth,

                  and everyone who has ears will be able to hear it.

         Even the hotheads will be full of sense and understanding.

                  Those who stammer will speak out plainly.

         In that day ungodly fools will not be heroes.

                  Scoundrels will not be respected.^[4]

Hasten the Day, Lord Jesus.

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^[1] Hollenbach, P.; Jesus, Demoniacs, and Public Authorities; 1981, JAAR, p. 573; quoted in Meyers, Ched; Binding the Strong Man, p. 192

^[2] Minnesota Star Tribune, June 19, 2025

^[3] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jun/12/los-angeles-national-guard-troops-marines-morale

^[4] Isaiah 32:3-5, Contemporary English Version