Sheep Among Wolves

 

Naaman is one of those biblical characters with whom I can truly identify. I’m not a powerful general, but like many of us here, I’m a person of relative privilege, a person used to nurturing the illusion of control over my life. I’m used to having my aches and pains treated by top-notch doctors; I’m used to managing capably the bumps on my journey. I’m used to having things mostly turn out fine in the end. Attempting to maintain control, I google my illnesses before heading to the doctor’s office. Then I drive the professionals crazy with my self-diagnosis. And it’s not just on medical matters. In three languages, I read all –and I mean all—the baby books before my children were born. Just like I now read all the books and articles on church issues that worry me. Just ask the vestry, who gets inundated with my “free research advice.”

          So I understand Naaman. Here he is, a person of wealth, success, knowledge and importance, and he gets leprosy, a death-sentence in his day. Suddenly, he has the dreaded disease that turns kings into outcasts. It turns beloved family members into shunned figures on the margins of society, their very flesh rotting on their bones. Naaman expects top-notch treatment from the best healers that money can buy. Instead, he gets advice from his wife’s Hebrew slave girl. He seeks healing in the backwater country he has recently defeated in battle. Despite Naaman’s chariot-load of riches, the King of Israel doesn’t receive him. Instead, he gets shuttled off to see some unknown prophet, and the prophet won’t even bother to come out and meet with him. Elisha sends out one of his servants, who tells the great general to go wash in the muddy waters of a second-class river. Oh, how I can feel Naaman’s desperate indignation! It’s like seeking help from a renowned specialist, yet only being seen by the nurse practitioner. Then, she ignores your brilliant Internet research and tells you to take a few Tylenol and rest for a week!

          Of course, the lesson here for us privileged worriers is that God doesn’t need our wealth, our power, or our knowledge in order to heal us. God can work through slave girls, obscure prophets, and muddy little rivers. God can work through poor, unwed Mary, shepherds, and babies born in stables. God can work through ordinary bread, wine, and a broken body. We need only to grab the hands of the people God sends us, no matter who they are. We need only to lower the barriers that we hide behind and allow ourselves to feel vulnerable. It’s a lesson that Jesus wants to teach us, too, in today’s Gospel reading.

          Jesus strips his followers bare of all illusions of control as he sends them out on his mission of healing. With only the support of a travel companion, each Jesus-follower must head out barefooted and penniless. They must go into a world that will not necessarily welcome them or their message. Surrounded by hostility, they are completely dependent upon the hospitality of those who welcome them. They can’t demand or expect success. If they accomplish amazing things, they’re not to take the credit. There is no promise of glory, no promise of nice church buildings, or a pension fund, or pews full of families with young children, or accolades from the neighborhood. There’s merely the command to show up and to heal the sick and broken in Jesus’ name.

          I still remember having disdainful thoughts on the first day of clinical pastoral education in seminary. The hospital chaplain was lecturing us newbies on the importance of simply showing up in a crisis. We didn’t need the answers, he said. We just needed to be present. “What?!” I thought, “How dumb. Just stand there while people are suffering?! What good does that do? That’s way too simple. Who wants to see a strange pastor-type they don’t even know lurking around in times of grief?” As I found out, that’s exactly what people want. Loving presence. Standing with. Nadia Bolz Weber says it best: “Of course just showing up is not as sexy as yoga, or praying the daily office or doing the Master Cleanse or a 10-day silent retreat. But showing up means being vulnerable in that empty-handed-sent-out-by-Jesus-without-sandals sort of way. It’s the vulnerability of having nothing to offer but what we have been given by Christ… the vulnerability of receiving hospitality. The vulnerability of having difficult truths spoken to you.”[1]

          The lessons of today’s readings spoke to my heart more than most. So much so that I really didn’t want to have to preach on them. Like many of you, I imagine, I’ve been feeling wronged, angry, and helpless following the tsunami of Supreme Court rulings that just seem to keep on coming. It has felt like getting hit every day with a two-by-four of dread. My beloved privilege feels like it’s slipping. My certainty that everything will work out is deeply shaken. I feel as if I need to do something as an American, as a woman, and certainly as a priest. I want to be healed of our collective leprosy. I want to fix things for our country. I want to fix things for those who are truly suffering. I want to fix things for the Christians who just want to share the good news of love and healing. I want to lift the pain from your faces. But everything that I can come up with sounds too weak and common, like trying to cure a deadly disease by bathing in a foreign stream.

          Even prayer. The “thoughts and prayers” of those who utter pious statements but refuse to act when children are shot at school have tainted our common recourse to prayer. I posted prayers last week on YouTube in an attempt to offer comfort after the overturning of Roe v. Wade. They were great prayers, I thought, fitting prayers, composed by a long list of Episcopal leaders from around the country. I felt good praying them online… until a YouTube viewer commented that my prayers were of no help to her whatsoever. She added that prayer would never help. And then several people agreed with her. A few days later, the Court upheld the rights of a football coach to pray a Christian prayer out loud with his public-school team on the field. “Oh brother,” I moaned. “Is that how people saw my prayers, too?” What then are we Christians supposed to do?

          What the Holy Spirit showed me in today’s readings is that Jesus is asking us to show up, vulnerable and open, like sheep among wolves. The “wolves” of the Hebrew scriptures are symbols for corrupt and greedy politicians and religious leaders who devour the poor and marginalized. Jesus-followers enter their presence unprotected, vulnerable, dependent only upon God and the hospitality of others. We don’t need loud and public manifestations of faith—no hocus pocus, no difficult feats to build up our own egos, no grabbing of the microphone at football games. We just eat with those in need of good news, live among them, stay with them, live regular lives together, don’t waste time in places we aren’t wanted, and let God’s healing happen. It’s not very flashy. But such is the Kingdom of God. May we find, like Naaman, true healing there, in spite of ourselves.

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[1] Nadia Bolz Weber, “Sermon on Naaman the Leper and How the Common Can Heal Us.” In Sarcastic Lutheran. Patheos, July 7, 2016. Found at https://www.patheos.com/blogs/nadiabolzweber/2016/07/sermon-on-naaman-the-leper-and-how-the-common-can-heal-us/

Pig Farmers

 

Before I offer a few thoughts, I’d like to introduce my friend Sophia.

Continuing as Sophia: We raise pigs for Rome. Nice, juicy sucklings; crunchy dried pork … all sent off regularly to provide meat for the Great City. My name is Sophia, and I live in Gerasa, a small village on the Sea of Galilee. On the other side of the lake from Palestine. I’m no Jew, mind you. My ancestors were Greeks, the greatest of all peoples, and I’m proud of my heritage. But these days, we’re just pig farmers. We’re trying to hold our own under the yoke of Roman rule, just like the Jews, just like everyone else, I guess.

Life is hard. We raise pigs, but we rarely get to eat them. Pork is the food of the gods. Pig blood is the highest sacrifice you can offer in our Temple. Now, though, pork is for the wealthy Romans. I hear that our pork a favorite for their extravagant banquets. They roast it, boil it, stuff it, carve it into fantastical shapes. My sons, who have to take the pigs up in the hills to scrounge for food, ask me why the Romans don’t raise their own pigs. Ha, I know why! Pigs are good to eat, but raising them stinks. They eat garbage, rotting corpses, refuse, all kinds of nastiness. The Romans don’t want pigs eating all the grass off of their hillsides and wallowing in the remaining dust. They don’t want them rooting around their latrines and garbage dumps. “Not in my backyard,” they say. “That’s what the provinces are for.”

 And yet they name their powerful armed legions after our pigs. Yes indeed. The Tenth Legion, the one that subdued the land of the Judeans across the lake, that legion has a big picture of a boar on its shield. That’s right—a pig—right in the place of honor. Pigs and powerful Roman soldiers, one and the same.[1]

          Speaking of the land of the Judeans …. Don’t get me started. They lorded it over us here in the Decapolis far too long, trying to get us to follow their religion and their laws.[2] The elders say that we didn’t get a moment’s peace from their critical, fanatical ways until the Romans took over. At least under the Romans we have a little autonomy. Everyone knows that Jews won’t go near pigs, let alone eat them. The Romans make jokes about it. I heard that the Emperor Augustus once said that he would rather be King Herod’s pig than one of his sons. Good one! That crazy Judean king was so paranoid and power-hungry that he murdered his own sons![3] The Judeans don’t have any right to look down their noses at us, but they do…

          I almost forgot: I’m here to tell you what happened here last week. You won’t believe it. My sons told me the story, though, so I know that it’s true. My boys were up in the hills overlooking the lake, watching the village pigs with all the other young boys. I don’t like them going up there, though, because of Erastus. Have you heard of him? He calls himself Legion now (shudder), but he used to be just little Erastus. His poor, wayward mother named him that—It means "Beloved.” She died when he was only six. Erastus never did fit in with the rest of us. Everyone whispers that his father was a Roman soldier who forced himself on his mother. (I think that’s why he started calling himself Legion.) When his mother died, Erastus made his own way in the world—a loner. Always rejected, always alone, stealing what he could to survive. I think he used to slop the pigs for a while. At fifteen, he was attacked and beaten by some other men for sport, and it was all too much for him. He lost his mind, and the demons came in. What a frightening thing he was. Dangerous! Biting and clawing like an animal, tearing off his clothes, living among the dead. We tried to keep him chained, thinking that containment would work, but the Evil inside him was too strong.

          As I was saying, last week, my boys said that a boatload of Judeans pulled onto the shore. Fishermen, probably. Legion saw them and charged at their leader in a fury, ready for battle. My boys thought the Judeans were goners. But this man wasn’t afraid of Legion. He paused and gently asked him his name. Then, do you know what this gentle man did? Unfazed, he sent those demons straight out of Erastus … and into our pigs! Yes, our pigs! The pigs went crazy then. They went charging off the cliff and drowned in the sea, squealing as they fell. All of them! All our livelihood—gone in the blink of an eye. Our debt to Rome—now one hundred-fold greater. When the boys came running home to tell me, I was furious. I charged up the hill to give this healer a piece of my mind, to take a piece of his flesh in return. Everyone in the whole village was doing the same thing.

          When I got there, huffing and puffing, I noticed the healer’s disciples laughing quietly among themselves. I wondered what could possibly be so funny about such a disaster.

“Ha!” I heard them say, slapping their sides, with big smiles on their faces. “Did you see those pigs? There went Caesar’s legions charging into the sea, just like the horses and chariots of Pharoah into the Red Sea. Who is like our Lord?”

They started to sway, full of joy. “Majestic in holiness, awesome in glory. He stretches out his right hand, and the earth swallows our enemies. May all Romans follow suit! It’s the dawning of God’s Kingdom! Freedom from Rome is coming—just wait and see!” Oh, how they grinned.

I didn’t understand them. How could there ever be freedom from Rome? I’m not sure I want freedom, anyway, whatever that means. I don’t want their god. I just want my pigs back. My eyes full of tears, I scanned the hillside looking for that healer. What I found made me stop in my tracks. That poor, demented Legion was gone. In his place was Erastus, the Beloved, sitting at the teacher’s feet, filled with peace, whole again. And the craziest part of this whole thing? Since then, Erastus stands tall at the gates of the village every day and talks about this Jewish teacher, this Jesus from Nazareth. He talks about healing. Erastus holds out his hand to all the people who shunned him before. He helps those who once beat and mocked him. And they are so amazed that they reach out in kind. How could such a thing be?

Rev. Anne back: When we read this Gospel at Bible Study this week, almost all of us—including me--said that we identified with the Gerasenes, with those losing their livelihood from Jesus’ action. None of us identified with Legion. Only one of us identified with the disciples, wondering at the power of God. Like my imagined Sophia, we are—more or less willingly—implicated in the powers that rule this world. Part of our despair these days, I think, is that we’re finally beginning to see the web in which we are caught. We see with our own eyes and in our own lives the death-dealing effects that modern carbon-based industry has on the environment. We see the death and terror that unbridled greed has brought to the gun industry, to the insurance industry. We watch our beloved democracy teeter on the edge of the cliff, ready to fall into the sea.

Episcopalian Diana Butler Bass writes of our Gospel story: “The naked man [Legion] leaps from the story, a shocking mirror showing the true condition of the oppression we all share under imperial power. He may be the immediate scapegoat for colonial domination, we may try to cast him out, but he runs from the graveyard and makes us see both him and ourselves.” Butler Bass wonders, too, what living under empire has done to us and to others. “Have we, suffering under today’s pyramid of wealth and power, been consigned to living among the dead … stripped of our humanity, wrought with madness? Watching the news, [she muses] it seems a fairly apt description of life in America today.”[4]

Perhaps God wants us to see Legion, to feel a connection to his pain—and to his healing. What today’s Gospel shows us and all the Sophia’s of our world, is that Jesus comes to restore our integrity, to make us whole once more. All of us. But he doesn’t start with the influential folks, or with the people who have it all figured out, or with those who lead orderly lives. He reaches out first to the least among us, to the most broken and tormented, and he calls them by their God-given name, “Beloved.” Clothing them in love, he hopes that we will see ourselves in their eyes. And that we will finally decide to take up our heavy crosses. That we will live out our baptismal covenant to renounce “the evil powers of this world which corrupt and destroy the creatures of God.” That we will follow him on the path of healing and wholeness, the path out of the tombs.

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[1] Nelson Kraybill, “To Hell with the Pigs,” Holy Lands Peace Pilgrim, March 9, 2015. Found at https://peace-pilgrim.com/2015/03/09/to-hell-with-the-pigs/

[2] Ray Vander Laan, “A Far Country Decapolis,” That the World May Know. Found at https://www.thattheworldmayknow.com/a-far-country-decapolis.

[3] Mark Essig, “I Would Rather Be Herod’s Pig,” Longreads, October 14, 2015. Found at https://longreads.com/2015/10/14/i-would-rather-be-herods-pig-the-history-of-a-taboo/

[4] Diana Butler Bass, “Sunday Musings: The Demons of Empire.” Found at https://dianabutlerbass.substack.com/p/sunday-musings-834?utm_source=email.