June 22, 2006
Asleep
Pent 3/7B [Mk 4.35-41;5.1-20]
All through the unfolding New Covenant story, it’s the daemons who are on to Jesus all along and before anybody else. Jesus is aware of this. To watch his timing, he admonishes them here and there and now and then to cool it when he’s not ready for others to know.
In this story about the possessed Gerasene, Jesus asks the daemons’ name. They are Legion. That’s a lot. They can see he’s not impressed. They know they can’t exist in a vacuum. So they plead for a new and different venue. There’s a herd of swine handily nearby, so he simply drives them out of the demoniac and into the pigs. Dorothy Sayers, the writer of note, once said of this incident that it seemed to her that Jesus took quite a casual disregard for other people’s livestock.
It’s a busy gospel this Sunday. There’s this daemon tale, and there’s, as well, the remarkable story of Jesus calming a monster storm with a mere word or two . “Peace! Be still!”
We’ve a storm, a monster storm. Like the disciples, we’re in a boat ourselves and without much of a paddle. We are all rock and roll in a world and a church thrown about by massive geopolitical tsunamis and by a spiritual ozone polluted and burned away, alien to the breath by which God created us. It’s choking us to death.
Like the Gerasene, the daemons have got a death grip. But Jesus is here with us as he was with them. He sees our fear. Our fear to change. Our fear to risk the new. Our lack of courage and wisdom to make significant choices. Jesus knows that our fear, as was theirs, is the product of little or no faith. Perhaps it’s a comforting thought for us to know that — when and if we remember it. Jesus is handy. But of course, we never seem to realize that there’s always a chance he will not only be asleep but stay asleep when we need him or at best, just be indifferent to our needs.
One of our biggest opportunities to awaken him comes every three years when we pull ourselves together and make our choices in our generally conventional way. We’ve just now had another such opportunity. Indeed, on the last day of this Convention up in Columbus, Ohio, we, too, were in more than just a metaphoric storm. We were in a literal and massive storm — thunder, lightening, the works. Jesus slept as Jesus is wont to do, unimpressed with the things that frighten us. But for neither storm did we wake Jesus up. We passed a pandering resolution, instead.
It’s surely a sign of our paucity of faith that we’re not going to take any chances. So we resolved to “exercise restraint” by not choosing, by not choosing any leaders “whose manner of life presents a challenge to the wider church and will lead to further strains on communion.” In other words, we’re not in to challenging. Don’t nobody dare to wake Jesus up. Don’t you dare.
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