Changing Words, Changless Word

4th Sunday after Pentecost

Ruskin Heights Lutheran Church

June 21, 2010

St. Luke 8:26-39

Imagine you are in the second century around the year 210 AD gathering to hear today's Gospel, the story of Legion and the pigs.

Someone recites the Gospel story.

Then the preacher says what it means, and what he says is:.

It is certainly a promise from God.

Luke tells us that the demon's name is Legion, and this is a clear promise that Jesus will triumph over the legions of Rome now persecuting the Church of God.

The story is a word of prophetic comfort.

Jump forward 250 years.

The lector reads the gospel and then the bishop stands up. He says this story refutes heretics.

Christ's mastery of the demons shows him to be the Son of God in power and in name. He is divine, and not created as that heretic Arius is teaching.

The story has become doctrinal.

It has moved from prophetic to doctrine.

Now we will take a big jump, to the - Middle Ages around 1300.

It is a time when theologians and preachers loved impossible metaphysical questions . . . how many angels could dance on the head of a pin kinds of things.

So the question now is how 6,000 demons (the number of soldiers in a legion) could fit into 2,000 pigs (that’s the number of pigs St. Mark uses when he tells the story in his Gospel).

It was three demons per pig and this, clearly, is evidence that the number three reveals to us the Holy Trinity, present in all things.

The story is now a metaphysical puzzle, especially puzzling for some as the sermon was most likely in Latin.

We’ll move now to the 1700’s.

The preacher has the luxury of an hour or more to expound his thoughts.

This is the Age of Reason, of Rational Deism. Faith is nothing than the laws of nature and reason applied to God, proving the “reasonableness” of Christianity.

It was in this time that Thomas Jefferson produced Jefferson’s Bible. Jefferson left this story out of his bible. It was unreasonable. He also left out the Resurrection; same reason.

What would the preacher do?

Well, he wouldn’t do a dumb thing and preach about demons in pigs.

He’d do the smart thing and maybe switch to the Letter of the Galatians.

This story of the swine has now become little more than an embarrassment.

Now we jump to England in the 1880’s, the Late Victorian period.

The well-off people come to set an example for the poor. The poor are brought to church to improve their morals. Sunday Schools – to teach good behavior to poor children - are beginning to catch on.

Biblical commentators of this period are troubled by the wanton destruction of property, the death of the pigs.

They are concerned to show that Jesus was just the sort of fellow to be in your civic club, a good neighbor next door.

He is not the sort of fellow to go around killing pigs that belong to someone else.

They conclude either that the drowning of the swine must have been an accident, later confused with an authentic healing, or that the owners were Jews, for whom keeping swine was against the Law of Moses and thus it is a just punishment for breaking the law.

In neither case could Jesus be blamed for the destruction of the pigs.

For them, this story was a moral warning to the poor – respect each other’s property rights.

Today we have a spiritualized or psychological interpretation, something about how Jesus can make people whole.

We speak these days how Christ can bring people – like the fellow in the story living in the tombs - out of isolation into new relationships.

I have four modern commentaries on Luke. Not one seriously considers that demons really exist.

What the story here has become is myth, a story that is true, but not in any sense literal.

In the time we’ve covered this account has gone from prophecy, to doctrine, to an obscure question of metaphysics, to an embarrassment, to a moral application on property rights, and finally myth.

The best minds the Church has ever produced have in their time grappled with this Gospel story of demons, pigs, and a crazy man. They have extracted some Good News for their people, but the march of history has rendered their sermons void, or quaint, or stupid, or all three.

That surprisingly is itself Good News.

When we forget history – including the history of biblical interpretation – we end up taking ourselves all too seriously.

To hear again this story of Legion and pigs, and see how thoughts about it rise and fall over the course of time.

There is a happy truth: We don’t have to get the Bible right to be saved. Our salvation depends on what Christ thinks about us, and not on what we think about Christ.

At minimum what we see here among the Gerasenes is the work of God through Christ in charity, goodness, forgiveness - and the summons to declare how much God has done for us.

How that gets said changes.

What never changes is the unchanging weight of God’s regard for us.

That is a more enduring lesson than anything centuries of preaching have pulled out of this story.

That exorcises a lot of demons for me.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.