Sunday, June 28, 2015

Chains of Fear

June 28, 2015
Mark 5:1-20 (Off Lectionary)

The Holy Gospel according to St. Mark. [Glory to you O Lord]
They came to the other side of the sea, to the country of the Gerasenes. 2And when [Jesus] had stepped out of the boat, immediately a man out of the tombs with an unclean spirit met him. 3He lived among the tombs; and no one could restrain him any more, even with a chain; 4for he had often been restrained with shackles and chains, but the chains he wrenched apart, and the shackles he broke in pieces; and no one had the strength to subdue him. 5Night and day among the tombs and on the mountains he was always howling and bruising himself with stones. 6When he saw Jesus from a distance, he ran and bowed down before him; 7and he shouted at the top of his voice, “What have you to do with me, Jesus, Son of the Most High God? I adjure you by God, do not torment me.” 8For [Jesus] had said to him, “Come out of the man, you unclean spirit!” 9Then Jesus asked him, “What is your name?” He replied, “My name is Legion; for we are many.” 10He begged him earnestly not to send them out of the country. 11Now there on the hillside a great herd of swine was feeding; 12and the unclean spirits begged him, “Send us into the swine; let us enter them.” 13So he gave them permission. And the unclean spirits came out and entered the swine; and the herd, numbering about two thousand, rushed down the steep bank into the sea, and were drowned in the sea.
14The swineherds ran off and told it in the city and in the country. Then people came to see what it was that had happened. 15They came to Jesus and saw the demoniac sitting there, clothed and in his right mind, the very man who had had the legion; and they were afraid. 16Those who had seen what had happened to the demoniac and to the swine reported it.17Then they began to beg Jesus to leave their neighborhood. 18As he was getting into the boat, the man who had been possessed by demons begged him that he might be with him. 19But Jesus refused, and said to him, “Go home to your friends, and tell them how much the Lord has done for you, and what mercy he has shown you.” 20And he went away and began to proclaim in the Decapolis how much Jesus had done for him; and everyone was amazed.
The Gospel of the Lord [Praise to you O Christ].

Grace to you and Peace from our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.
I read for you this gospel story – the story about Jesus landing on the beach he was headed to last week, rather than skip ahead as the lectionary would have me do.  Because I want you to know what happens.  What happened after Jesus rebuked the squall of the wind and the disciples in that boat.

Jesus takes this nervous, confused, fearful group of men out of the boat, the ones who just got to see God in full glory, master of the very elements of creation… But before Jesus could even pick them up by the scruffs of their necks like a mother cat and say, ok, guys, let’s do this.  The demons show up.   

Up rushes a man possessed with a legion of demons! The wild-eyes, the self-inflicted bruises, the inhuman strength, there is no question what we would do today if we encountered this man.  Exactly what the Garasenes have tried to do: lock him up.  Though our drugs might be more effective in subduing him than their chains, our intent is the same – remove this dis-ease we do not understand from our community.  It’s the way we know how to handle things – on our own.

But this legion of demons rushes to bow before Jesus, recognizing the power that the disciples have just completely missed out on that boat.  The demons bow down before the God most high, knowing their heyday is about to end.  Jesus commands them out of the man, and at their request, sends them into the pigs who, in the demons continued pattern of destruction, drown in the sea.

Those demons.  They know who Jesus is.  Their only fear is what will happen to them now that Jesus knows the rucous they’ve been causing.
You might think the people would be happy to be rid of them, once and for all. 

But that’s not how the story goes.  The people of that village, rather than be elated at the reuniting of the man with the community and overwhelmed with joy at the power Jesus uses for good – instead they are afraid.  Just like those disciples were on that boat. 

We might understand if they were just mad at Jesus for killing their pigs. But notice. It’s not anger over their pigs, it’s fear that drives them.  They just want Jesus back on that boat heading back home to Galilee.  

Now remember, the Garasenes were not a group of people that Jews generally associated with.  It wasn’t the disicples’ idea to cross over to the other side.  Jesus and his followers were in a culture and with a people that were not their own.  But as it turns out, the Garasenes aren’t all that different than the 12.  Regardless of ethnicity or cultural, we are all human – every single one of us would have eaten that fruit in the garden of Eden.  We all want to grab for control, to pretend we can better orchestrate the world than the God who made it.  And we all are prone to react the same way when God’s true power is revealed – we run scared.  The Garasenes react just like Jesus hometown did a few verses ago – Please leave, Jesus!  You are disturbing our comfortable, settled, ignorant, demonic peace. 

When Jesus frees the possessed man, he lets loose the demons of fear.  Instead of the people, being able to segregate their fear.  Instead of being able to confine it to the graveyard like a bad halloween movie.  Instead of being able to try to lock up the fear far away from their consciences and daily lives, now, they are scared.  Because now they don’t have a place to point to, a place to shove-off anything different from themselves.  The fear might be anywhere.  They don’t have a place to contain it anymore. 

Whether it is the disciples on the boat, or the Garasenes on the shore, that’s it, it’s Fear.  It is fear that makes us want to push out the hope and new life, because it is just too unfamiliar.  It’s fear that urges us to try to have as much power over others as we can.  It’s fear that decides we are better off away from people who scare us, whether because they are mentally ill, because they are GLBTQ, or because they have a different color of skin.  (The headlines have brought us many opportunities to think about who we fear in America today.)

When we are doing the tough work that we started last week, the tough work of listening to other voices, seeing other faces, hearing other stories and grieving with those who are “other” to us.  We are doing the tough work of “Seeing All People and Perspectives” – one of Bethlehem’s four core values (1)The illuminating Word of God, 2)Seeing All Peoples and Perspectives, 3)Serving our Communities with Delight, 4)Opening the Eyes of Faith at Every Age).  Last week and this week, we are beginning this hard work to examine our white privilege and systemic racism. 

We are ready to face our fears.

Will you speak them with me, Church?  What are you afraid of?

Me?  I’m afraid.

I don’t know what to say or how to say it.  I don’t know if someone who we all label as “non-white” is going to perceive me as a friend or as someone who will wield the power of how I look to get what I want.  So I am afraid at times to even try to build a friendship.  Why should they trust me?  It’s been generations and generations of white people doing just what they suspect. 

I know I have received benefits that cannot be measured just because of the color of my skin.  Other white people are more comfortable with me than they would be with brown or black people, and so I have an “in” with them.  I have access to conversations about everything from job possibilities to grant funding for my favorite charities that many people of color do not have access to.  I smile at me on the sidewalk, usually, if I smile first.  People lend me an extra few cents if I can’t find the right change in my purse.   

And yet, I am afraid.  I am afraid that this system that privileges me means that people who do not benefit from those privileges will see me as demonic.

And that’s how racial privilege works.  It’s all about the fear.  And keeping it in place. 

If we stay afraid, if we let fear stop us.  If we let fear hold us to our normal habits and what comes easy, then we are locked inside ourselves, in our privileged world, dragging around these chains.  We get so tightly locked in on ourselves that we forget there are people who are not experiencing the world the way we are.  There are people, less than a mile from us in any direction, who are followed when shopping in a store, who aren’t given the benefit of the doubt when the police officer pulls them over, or who have to give a wide berth to white people on the sidewalk, lest someone’s forgotten handbag become an accusation of theft. 

And this, my friends, is the shame of the racial system in America.  That our fear of changing it is continuing to solidify it day by day, our fear of reaching out to people who are not in our comfort zone.  Our fear of having a real conversation about the tough issues of race, is perpetuating the very things that God wants to change.  Fear is the opposite of Faith.

God wants change, God’s will is to eradicate racism.  We believe God’s kingdom is coming.  We have seen Jesus calming storms and casting out demons over and over again as God steps into our world and uses every gift God has at God’s disposal.  We pray, at least weekly, as Jesus taught us,Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.  Our eyes have been opened God, by the events of this past year, these past 50 years, these past 300 years!  God is giving us eyes to “See All People and Perspectives” in ways that we never imagined. Our eyes have been opened to the ways that God condemns racism and how it imprisons us all.

And we have seen freedom.  We have seen grace.  We see forgiveness.  We saw people studying scripture extend a hand of welcome to the Garasene in their midst.  We see people who are mourning extending a hand of forgiveness.  We see people who history tells us should be the most afraid, as they are the most likely to end up imprisoned or killed, yet, they are the most free!  Allowing God’s light to shine through them to us!!
Today Jesus says, God is in control, not us.  And that is a wonderful freedom.  We don’t have to fix all racism everywhere, that’s God’s job.  But, we get to do our part!  We get to be a part of this beautiful coming kingdom!  And God will be with us, just like Jesus in the midst of the storm and in the strange new place, never leaving his disciples. Like the man in our story today tells us, God’s freedom is better than our fear.  God is offering us freedom today.  WHAT DOES THAT FREEDOM LOOK LIKE? 

Like a man, possessed by a legion of demons, who were tormenting him and making it impossible for him to live a reconciled life with his neighbors, impossible for him to experience the fullness of love.  Freedom looks like that man experiencing what was thought to be impossible: having new life, human connection, love in community, the love of God. 

God offers us that same freedom today.

Please pray with me…
We pray for your way, Lord, we pray that everyone in our beloved church may know the good news that you have freed us from this fear.  This fear that is holding us in captivity, the fear that drives us to care more about keeping the status quo than entering into a new life of freedom. 
We pray that your light may come into the darkness of racism in the United States of America  and shine so brightly as to expose it, that we might be freed, together with our black and brown brothers and sisters, from the insanity that binds us.
Amen.

Sunday, June 21, 2015

In the Boat.

June 21, 2015
Preached by Kirsten Nelson Roenfeldt
For Bethlehem Lutheran Church in Sturbridge
B Pentecost3 2015
Mark 4:35-41
Jesus Rebukes the Disciples

Prayer of the Day:
O God of creation, eternal majesty,
you preside over land and sea, sunshine and storm.
By your strength pilot us, by your power preserve us,
by your wisdom instruct us, and by your hand protect us,
through Jesus Christ, our Savior and Lord.

The Gospel according to St. Mark. [Glory to you O Lord]
35On that day, when evening had come, he said to them, "Let us go across to the other side." 36And leaving the crowd behind, they took him with them in the boat, just as he was. Other boats were with him. 37A great windstorm arose, and the waves beat into the boat, so that the boat was already being swamped. 38But he was in the stern, asleep on the cushion; and they woke him up and said to him, "Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?" 39He woke up and rebuked the wind, and said to the sea, "Peace! Be still!" Then the wind ceased, and there was a dead calm. 40He said to them, "Why are you afraid? Have you still no faith?" 41And they were filled with great awe and said to one another, "Who then is this, that even the wind and the sea obey him?"
The Gospel of the Lord [Praise to you O Christ].

+          +          +

Grace to you and Peace from our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.

Did you know that the The Rev. Clementa Pinckney, Senior Pastor of “Mother Emmanuel” AME church in South Carolina was a graduate of one of our ELCA Lutheran seminaries?  So was The Rev. Daniel Simmons, another one of the congregation’s pastors who were in that Bible study Wednesday night.

Pastor Pinckney went to seminary my colleagues, specifically my friend Mark Petersen, a pastor here in Massachusetts. 

It is easy to think racial problems are all below the Mason-Dixon line. But with these victims, we are connected as believers – somehow that hits home more because we walked in the same institutions – of our same beloved church. 

But the fact remains that, if I so chose, I could quickly delete every email or pass by every Facebook link offering a conversation or voice about this event.  That’s my privilege.  And for any of you that share society’s perception of you as white, that’s our privilege.  White privilege. 

African American men and women hearing this story cannot sweep it under the rug as a random act of isolated violence by one insane man; it is too easily connected to every roughed up young man or woman or teenager by a white person in authority.

What does it mean to be privileged? 

It means that when a storm is raging outside, we can choose to stay inside.  I’d like to say we “get off the boat” because that fits so well with our parable for today, but the truth is that we rarely get ON the boat in the first place.

We decide to choose a different form of transportation.

We ignore, or maybe acknowledge, but never GREIVE this loss.

The loss of human life.  The loss of black lives.

Today we grieve.  Today we get real.  Today we get scared.  With our black brothers and sisters.

We are on the boat with the disciples of Jesus of every color.  We are scared out of our minds.  We are grabbing Jesus by the shoulders and saying “Wake UP!  Don’t you know we are perishing!  Help bail us out!”

And Jesus gets up—and does something.  He does something amazing. 

But we aren’t ready for an awake Jesus until we are awake. Awake to the very real storm of racism and violence raging around us.  The storm that has taken petty criminals and innocent lives, and parishioners in Bible study.  

Did you know that the suspected shooter at that Bible Study that night was a member of an ELCA Lutheran congregation? 

He almost changed his mind.  Because they were so nice.  But his heart was too hard.  There were 12 people in that study, 9 of them died.

We need to deal with this; it is our problem.  Have people in our Lutheran pews heard the good news?  That we are all liberated from the slavery of sin: those with skin of black and brown and white? We are liberated, when we are together?  Have people in our Lutheran pews heard the good news?  Guns are not trustworthy.  God is trustworthy.  He alone will deliver us from evil.

We have ties to both sides of this event, through our expression of our denomination, and more importantly, the one Body of Christ.

In our Gospel lesson today, Jesus rebukes more than the wind; he rebukes the disciples—Don’t you trust me? Don’t you get it? 

Jesus reminds them again of the good news: I can stop the wind and rain!  I am the source for every tiny atom of the creation.  I am the strength of love in every interaction.  Because of who I am, you can do scary things.  I make you who you are, People of God.  So you can and will live through storms. 

We who have let evil make this storm—we can weather it.  We – black and brown and white together- can live through storms.   “Just trust me,” Jesus says. 

We trust Jesus.  For our God who creates, redeems and sustains; God who is LOVE will be with us in the storm.  Until we come through the other side united together in love.

We trust Jesus to bring us together to knit us into one Body of Christ—and that is no small feat.

Did you watch the video of the bond hearing?  The family members of those who were killed that night forgave him.  They spoke words of truth about what happened, about what he did.  They named the sin.  And then, the very people who have the most license to be outraged and retaliatory, they began forgiving the murderer. 

We start with love.  We start by reaching beyond ourselves—reading the stories and knowing the faces, feeling the pain of this tragedy, yes, of Baltimore and Ferguson and Walter Scott and Trayvon Martin and all the others we must name…. Yes all that—the deep historical ongoing tragedy of racism.  To listen and learn and talk with the people experience it every day because we are IN THIS TOGETHER.
In this life.
In this Body.
In this world.

So when shall we have this conversation, church?  This conversation about race.  And maybe a whole separate conversation about gun violence?
This matters.

In Pub Theology last night we talked about it.  We scratched the surface on all the various social issues we are addressing and how racism is a product of our culture, and our fallen humanity. 

But we need to go beyond grand philosophy and scratching the surface.  We need to seriously examine the white privilege and most of us here benefit from.  And if we have any willing partners, we need to be in real relationship with people who experience the world from the underside of that privilege.  These are complicated issues, and they deserve our time and attention.  For though we may not change the world on our own, we can join God in what is already being done – we can see where God is breaking in, over and over again to reconcile and redeem that which has been broken and lost.  We can see the act of forgiveness breaking in through the broken voices to a broken man.  We can see through the cracks of our brokenness God’s light shining through to us.

Jesus has gotten into the boat.  He has invited us to join him.  Jesus is crossing over.  Crossing into alien territory where people of different religions and roots are.  To be with them.  To be as one body.

When we are in the boat, we will get to see the storm stilled.  We will get to see God’s power change the pain and hatred we thought was impossible to stop. 

Jesus gets up and says, “Peace, be still.” 

And the raging storm stops.

When peace is put into action. Not immediately, we have to live through the storm together first.

But peace, precious peace, is our hope.

Please pray with me:
Almighty God, look with mercy upon this fallen world, again the subject of violence. 

Be with us in our grief, that we may know your consolation. Be with us in our anger, that we may receive your peace. Be with us in our confusion, that we may be led to your truth. And be with us in our fear, that we may delivered into your surpassing love.

We pray this day for the victims of violence in Charleston, South Carolina
We pray for the families of Cynthia Hurd, Rev. Sharonda Singleton, Ethel Lance, Tywanza Sanders, Rev. Clementa Pinckney, Myra Thompson, Rev. DePayne Middleton-Doctor, Rev. Daniel Simmons, and Susie Jackson.
We also pray for Dylann Roof, that he may come to repentance, and for his family.

We pray for all those touched by racism and violence in so many other places. Strengthen us as your people to be with those in need, in their grief and the tough conversation to dismantle racism. Lead us to forgiveness and help us to make our churches safe haven, that your grace may be our sustaining Word, through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

(Prayer adapted: Paul Bellan-Boyer, St. Matthew Lutheran Church)

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