Fifth Sunday after Pentecost (7C), June 19, 2016; The Rev. Pamela L. Werntz

O God of love, grant us the strength, the wisdom and the courage to seek always and everywhere after truth, come when it may, and cost what it will.

It has been a hard and sad week around here.  We’ve mourned the tragic deaths in Orlando and Boston has buried Raekwon Brown, 17 year old high school junior who saved the life of a 67 year old woman before he was shot during a fire drill at school.  What do we say to our children – what do we say to ourselves about God in a week like this?  I’m reminded that just a few weeks ago after a Sunday service, a little boy, nearly five years old approached me with his dad, who said that his son had a question for me.  I knelt down to hear his question.  “Where is God?” he asked.  Borrowing the words of one of my rabbinic teachers, I said, “God is in the beginning…God is in the endings, and all around us.”  He squinted at me suspiciously.  “God is inside of you and all around you.  God is in your baby sister’s tiny hands and God is in your grandfather’s eyes.  God is in the cookies fresh from the oven and in the first day of a new season.  God is in the end of the day and in the last kiss goodnight. God is always near.” [1]

The other day I read a story about a sad little boy who wanted to meet God.  He knew it was a long trip to where God lived, so he packed his back pack with a sandwich and a couple of cans of root beer and started his journey. When he had gone about three blocks, he saw an old woman.  She was sitting in the park – I imagine her on a bench like one in the Public Garden.  She was just staring at some squirrels.  The boy sat down next to her and opened his backpack.  He was about to take a drink of his soda when he noticed that the old lady looked hungry, so he offered her a half of his sandwich.  She gratefully accepted and smiled at him.  Her smile was so pretty that the boy wanted to see it again, so he offered her a root beer. Once again she smiled at him.  The boy was delighted!  They sat there eating and smiling, but they never said a word. They sat together quietly for a long time. As it started getting late, the boy realized how tired he was, and he got up to leave but before he had gone more than a few steps, he turned around, ran back to the old woman and gave her a hug. She gave him her biggest smile ever.  When the boy opened the door to his own house a short time later, his mother was surprised by the look of joy on his face. She asked him, “What did you do this afternoon that made you so happy?” He replied, “I had lunch with God.” Before his mother could respond, he added, “She’s got the most beautiful smile I’ve ever seen!” Meanwhile, the old woman, also radiant with joy, returned to her home. Her son was stunned by the look of peace on her face and he asked, “Mother, what did you do today that made you so happy?” She replied, “I ate a sandwich in the park with God.”  She added, “You know, God is so much younger than I expected.” [2]

That story made me think about how we so often imagine that we are nearing the end – that universal time is mostly behind us and not mostly ahead of us.  What if that is not true at all?  What if God is so much younger than we expect, and the future is so much longer than we expect?  What if the future is so much longer than the past?  What if, instead of this being the beginning of the end, it’s just the end of the beginning?< [3]

I hear our Bible readings differently when I think of them as being about the future, more so than about the past.  In the story of Elijah – whose name literally translated is “my god is [the Holy One]” Eliyahu in Hebrew, is running from the law.  Israel’s much-maligned Queen Jezebel, working with foreign allies for peace and prosperity for her people, had had enough of the insurgent Elijah and she sent a messenger to tell him that his days were numbered. Her fury had to do with the large public demonstration Elijah staged to show the power over nature of the god whose Name is too holy to pronounce. Elijah’s god produced much needed rain to end a deadly drought and famine. But then in a hideous display of aggression, Elijah had all 450 of the prophets of the losing god Baal seized and killed.

He took off into the wilderness, afraid and alone, exhausted and wishing to die. But twice, messengers brought him bread and water and told him to get up and eat something. He journeyed to Mount Horeb, (also known as Sinai), the Holy Mountain of Moses’ encounters with the Divine. He found shelter in a crevice in the rocks, and heard the Divine voice ask him, “What are you doing here Elijah?”  I always hear it as a kind of “what the heck, Elijah?” Elijah’s answer was defensive and angry – zealous and jealous and furious are all translations of the same word. He was fearful, despairing and self-righteous – always a toxic cocktail! His response didn’t mention all the killing he’d just done. The word of the Holy One instructed Elijah to come out – come out of the darkness of the cave and experience the presence of the Divine. But before he came out, there were the usual signs of the revelation of the Divine – a rock-splitting windstorm, an earthquake, and a fire, but somehow Elijah knew that the presence of the Divine was not in any of those cataclysmic events. For Elijah, the voice of the Divine in the stillness that followed.

And then Elijah heard the question a second time in the voice of a small girl, the daughter of a voice, or an echo. “What are you doing here, Elijah?” And in a response to that divine question that I find oddly reassuring, Elijah gave the same self-indulgent litany of complaint. Even a great prophet who was experiencing the presence of the Divine, could not let go of his own well-scripted story.  I imagine a smiling, loving Holy One Who said, “return on your way, get back to work.”  Stop running away, come out of hiding, and get back out there. You have work to do.  “The way” was the road to Damascus – a place that anticipates deliverance and redemption, then and still. Elijah’s future, it turned out, has been much, much longer than his past.

In the Apostle Paul’s letter to the Galatians, the Magna Carta of the Christian Testament, we have the powerful argument that one may but doesn’t have to become Jewish before one can become Christian.  The reason is that, in the reconciling love of God that we call Christ, there is no difference between Jew or Greek, slave or free, male and female, queer and straight, trans and cis.  Love is love is love.  And I just have to say that I don’t believe that Paul ever imagined that faith or love were intellectual mental exercises divorced from behavior.  In the reconciling love of God, the differences between us mean nothing at all — a scandalous idea then, and it still is.

Our Gospel story from Luke is a political satire. To get the joke you have to imagine that this was not a story that was trying to be realistic or factual or even fair.  This is a tall tale that gets at the truth of how impossibly oppressive the Roman occupation of Palestine was. To get the joke, you have to know that Gerasa was a city sacked by the Jews in the revolt against Rome between 66 and 70 CE, and then it was brutally recaptured by Rome shortly after that. (The Gospel of Luke was probably written about fifteen years later.) You have to know that a legion is a unit of the Roman army comprising 6,000 soldiers. You have to know that pigs are unsafe because they carry disease. Eating them is dangerous and against the law. Jesus is negotiating solo with the spirits of a whole legion about to be stopped from tormenting a poor man to the point of insanity, and Jesus agrees to the demons’ request to be put into a herd of swine and off the cliff they go. This is a story is meant to produce belly laughter. It’s highly subversive and thoroughly entertaining to Luke’s audience, offering respite from taking themselves and their problems and even their oppressors so seriously. Belly laughter is good medicine and good exercise especially for a community bound together by fear and grief and despair. [4] Once the Gerasene man has been freed from the legion of demons, Jesus’ instruction is, “Go back home and declare how much God has done for you.” In other words, “Go back home and get to work.” It’s the same message that the Divine had for Elijah.  It’s the same message the Divine had for Paul while he was on his own road to Damascus, having been freed from the demon that was causing him to persecute people.

This story in Luke is about the lengths to which Jesus will go to do the impossible – to rid a community of demons and restore health – to foreign territory, to the tombs, to a person who has come completely untethered.  It seems to me that some of the demons in our society have names like misogyny, racism, Islamaphobia, homophobia, addiction – to alcohol, to drugs, to guns.  There are others, but these are the ones in the news this week, and we can get bound by fear and despair at what seems impossible to change. What will be said about us a thousand or two thousand years from now?

One reason some of us are here today is that we believe that nothing is impossible.  And maybe others of us are here because we desperately want to believe that nothing is impossible. And we need to be around other people who can make the impossible come true.  Mother Teresa famously said, “If we have no peace, it is because we have forgotten that we belong to each other.” One of the things that touched me very deeply this past week was the number of bouquets that were left on the steps of Emmanuel Church under our rainbow flag. Those bouquets were beautiful gestures from people passing by who know that we belong to one another.

In the Mishnah, Pirke Avot (Ethics of the Parents), Rabbi Tarfon taught: “It is not your responsibility to finish the work of perfecting the world, but you are not free to desist from it either” (2:16).  When you leave here today, return on your way, get back to work on the road that anticipates deliverance and redemption for all.  Say to the children and each other that God is Love.  God is very near.  God is younger than you expected.  And we belong to each other.

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