Sermon Notes on Demons and silence Lk. 8 I kings 19

June 23 Lk. 8, I  Kings 19

I like the idea this morning about talking with you about: silence, When people are in sync, silence speaks of easy comfort and no pressures.. Silence can be also a deadening sign of a relationship going south. We cherish the silence of a cold winter morning, but are chilled by the silence of the grave.

In a region of the north Jesus encounters a demon-possessed person. I would like to highlight a few points. If you read this as a man afflicted by some sort of evil force,so be it. I have certainly seen the toll addiction takes when it overtakes a person’s will and reason.I assume that a demon-possessed person would be what we would call mentally ill. In our time, we are not much better than the people of the Gerasenes as we have made a decision to let the mentally ill  not receive the help they need for a generation since we closed the major large facilities. So many of the homeless are also mentally ill.In terms of our gospel reading, it is a living death, or a deadly life.

Notice that he lives in the tombs. The evil that has possessed him has robbed him of life.

When I was starting to work on this, I received a letter from a mother whose son committed suicide at 17 as he was in solitary confinement. I am not arguing prison policy but want to use him as an example that he was doubly imprisoned by his mental illness and the bars of solitary confinement. In family systems approaches, we refer to a member of the family as the identified patient. it is as if a lot of the troubles fall on that person, and the family continues to go on, with the understanding that the IP is the troubled one.My sense is that this demon-possessed man was the identified patient for an entire community. All of thier fears and problems were foisted on this man as a symbol as he lived in the silent tombs.

I love the political sarcasm of the name of the demon, Legion. OK the poor guy is beset with many (around 5,000 soldiers in a legion), just as Israel is beset by human demons called the Roman Legion.(they lived with Legion, but they want Jesus to leave). Unable to speak about their political plight, the raving man is left to live among the dead. The early readers of the gospel must have gotten a kick of demons asking to go into unclean poigs and go tumbling into the sea.

Let‘s pay attention that the people want Jesus to leave. My guess is that they had projected a lot of their own troubles on to the demon-possessed man. Scapegoats have been with us for millennia. (Girard) (Lovejoy grave here is a monument to a martyr, and its looming disrepair is a symbol of decline as well)

In our time we seek God in natural beauty, and many seek God in the energy and bombast of the visual and the aural of a contemporary worship service.I am pleased for that, but we have other options. Elijah was looking for God in the theophany of the mountain of the 10 Commandments. Instead, the God who defeated the priests of Baal just a chapter before is present in a still, small voice, or perhaps more accurately, sheer silence.What did Elijah find in that silence: a presence, a sense of security, of hope, of an enveloping love and warmth? In our spiritual lives, we do well to learn to quiet the demons of our unquiet souls. we do well to find some peace and quiet to give the divine whispers a chance to enter our awareness.