Sermons

Change of Heart

Judy E. Pidcock                                Third Presbyterian Church  June 20, 2004                                  Luke 8:26-39

Change is difficult. A few years ago an acquaintance of mine served as one of the chaplains at a large university, where she preached frequently to large congregations. She had been living and working there for several years and one day she went to get her hair cut. The same place she had been going to for some time. The same hairdresser. She went through all of the cautions that many of us go through at the hairdresser – “don’t take too much off. Maybe just a quarter of an inch. Not too short. Easy on the back. Cut it the way you’ve been cutting it.” Then, with a heavy sigh, she says “You know, I really liked it the way it was.”

Meanwhile, her hairdresser had other ideas. “What about something short? How about something a little layered back here? Let’s do something completely different: take off a few inches. Maybe a little color.” “No. No. No way” my friend replied. “Huh-uh. I’ve got to get up in front of hundreds of people each Sunday. I can’t try something new. Nothing dramatic. Let’s stick to the old way.” The hairdresser’s curiosity and insight got the better of her. She looked her client square in the face, scissors poised. “You know, I just don’t get it. You stand up there. In that pulpit – week after week – asking people to change their lives, and you can’t even change your hair style?”

It’s true. Change is difficult. Some of us have a hard enough time changing our hairstyle or the route we drive to work or the brand of cereal we buy. I am sure that the foundations of our house will crack if we ever give up oatmeal for breakfast. So when we think about major changes – hairdressing aside – you and I feel a small jolt of adrenalin coursing through our veins. It’s as if we have an imaginary air bag that inflates in our minds and holds us back. In place. Securing us safely in our seats for the rest of the trip. Changing our lives – our habits – our point of view is a monumental task.

And yet, changing our lives is the single most important invitation of the gospel. All over the New Testament we read dramatic stories of fishermen abandoning their nets – the only life they know – to follow Christ. Women walk out of their homes, toss away the key and fall in step with the disciples. The rich give away all that they own. Bad guys become good guys. The blind see. The lame walk. The dead come back to life. These are not tall tales or the stuff of legends shared around some campfire. These are Bible stories. Gospel truths. Changes. Everywhere. Change is everywhere.

In this morning’s story of the Gerasene demoniac we see all kinds of responses to the gospel’s call to a new life. One man seeks out change. Some in the story have change thrust upon them. Others run from change or slowly learn to live with change. The one thing they all have in common is fear. Jesus brings change. Each of the characters receives Jesus with fear. Heart-stopping, pit-in-your-stomach kind of fear.

“What have you to do with me, Jesus, Son of the Most High God? What have YOU to do with ME?” That’s the question of the hour or the question for today, posed to Jesus by a man who has been stark raving mad for years. His life is mental torment. His days are an endless pattern of struggling to get his bearings. His home is the tombs: a maze of caves and death and solitude on the outskirts of town. Luke paints a picture of living death. We don’t know his real name, but the man gives himself a name: Legion. Legion – referring to his demons – that’s all I am, a bundle of craziness. Legion - because the torments and troubles within us have a way of taking over and describing us. They seem large and definitive – the only true thing about us.

“What have YOU to do with ME?” Legion sees Jesus coming across the sea in a boat, approaching dry land, and he rushes out to meet him. His cry betrays some of the conflict that we feel. We know that the gospel can change us - just as Legion knew the power of Jesus to change him – but we’re fearful of the change. It is the great “What if?” What if I really turned the other cheek? What if I gave the shirt off my back? Surely he didn’t mean sell all I have and give it to the poor? What if we truly prayed for our enemies or stopped to help someone by the side of the road, regardless of the neighborhood? What would it feel like to have the peace that passes understanding? Where is that peace? He must be crazy. He’s out of his mind.

“I beg you. Do not torment me.” says Legion. While he knows in his head that Jesus is the way out of the tombs, the path from a living death to a life worth living, his fears hold him back. After all, Legion has adjusted to the torments he battles each day. They are a way of life.

You and I have a way of avoiding change. We accommodate our mental and emotional demons. We let them move in and make a home with us. So the bad relationship becomes a bad – but familiar – relationship. The drinking spouse or the abusive spouse or the emotionally distant spouse is a bad – but familiar situation. Maybe we hate our job so much that our vocational gifts and our spirit are dying on the vine, but it’s a job and it’s familiar and it’s too difficult to change. Or we can’t get out of the familiar tomb of ancient grief or ancient guilt, even though God and loved ones have long ago forgiven us. Self-destructive habits are familiar companions. Soon enough we get comfortable with our demons and we are too fearful to change. The tomb starts to look cozy compared to the unknown life on the other side.

“What have You to do with Me?” cries the maniac. The gospel will always shift our perspective. The gospel will always call us away from the tombs to see a different landscape – a broader horizon – one capable of growth and possibility. Yet something within holds us back. We prefer the old lens.

Annie Dillard writes of cataract patients who receive their sight through surgery after being blind since birth. Some of these patients who have never seen before become overwhelmed. The view is too startling – too much to take in. She speaks of a 21-year old woman with new sight whose doctor writes, “The patient’s unfortunate father, who had hoped for so much from this operation, wrote that his daughter carefully shuts her eyes whenever she wishes to go about the house, especially when she comes to a staircase, and that she is never happier or more at ease than when, by closing her eyelids, she relapses into her former state of total blindness.” (Pilgrim At Tinker Creek, p. 28)

The longer we spend in this gospel lesson, the crazier everything looks. A naked lunatic shrieks at Jesus from the shore. Pigs possessed by demons rush into a lake and are drowned. Townspeople and swineherds watch a sick man get healed and run for their lives. Jesus’ power is an assault on their routine. What have you to do with me? Jesus asks the Gerasenes. Absolutely nothing is their reply. Change is foisted upon them and they want nothing to do with it. Everything was so safe when the people in town knew that the crazy man lived out in the tombs. He had the demons and we did not. But now he’s here and we’ve got to deal with him and the fact that the man just off the boat from Galilee healed him. We’ve got to change what we think and the way we act and – wonderful as it is to have Legion back – we’d really just as soon have things the old way. The swineherd is indignant. He wants his pigs back. So what if a man is healed and for the first time in his life finds some sense of peace? Those pigs cost me money! They were my pigs!

Dramatic change in one life has a way of rippling through all the layers of our lives. It happens when the alcoholic gets sober or the child we’ve coddled for years declares independence. The nest becomes empty or the employee gets terminated. When an aging parent we’ve nursed for years dies, or when we begin to parent our parents. Someone has described the grief after the death of a spouse as “being out of your mind for two years.” Our life together is so like a kaleidoscope that shifting one piece creates a whole new design. Families, friends, colleagues all feel the effect of one changed life. It can be disorienting. It throws our relationships off-kilter. Yet standing on the end of all of the changes is Christ, waiting to be invited into the chaos. Present, but not forcing. Offering order and healing, but not imposing. “More things are wrought by prayer than this world dreams of,” writes Alfred Lord Tennyson. More things are wrought by prayer than this world dreams of….” Legion’s cry to Christ is, at once, a prayer and plea from the ruins of his life. Sooner or later, you and I find ourselves in Legion’s company.

Change can be a friend or an enemy. Some change is thrust upon us. Some changes we seek with hungry hearts. But our tradition and our experience claim that God can and will make all change fruitful, so that the desert will bloom and rejoice, as Isaiah tells it. So that all things will work for the good, as the apostle Paul describes it. In fact, I believe that when we resist changes set before us, we deny the power of the Holy Spirit to renew and transform. This church is changing in many ways. In these next months your staff will change. We have baptized and welcomed new members this morning and through their God-given gifts the kaleidoscope that is Third Church will shift again. Your own rich congregational history will attest to the fact that with these changes new patterns and new lights will dazzle and shine.

“God is not through with us yet,” writes Barbara Brown Taylor. “At our worst moments…we act as if that were so. We act as if creation had all been finished a long, long time ago and encased in glass. Nothing could be farther from the truth. The Holy Spirit still moves over the face of the waters, God still breathes life into piles of dust, Jesus still shouts us from our tombs.” (The Preaching Life)

We can only imagine the desolate world that was Legion’s home. Shackled and chained, he strained for a view of another life. I don’t know which parts of your life seem too difficult to change and I don’t know the fears or torments that make you feel stranded or alone. But I do believe – and I have felt in my own life – Christ hovering at the edge of our tombs, waiting to be invited into the chaos and calling us to a more peaceful place. In the rough, raw wilderness of our days, we plead with Legion in some desperate blend of hope and fear: “What have You to do with Me, Jesus, Son of God, Most High?” Everything, comes his sure and certain reply. Absolutely everything. Amen.