What Does That Have to Do with the Price of Pork? A Sermon in Tryptich

What Does That Have to Do with the Price of Pork? A Sermon in Tryptich

Luke 8.26-39

Calallen Baptist Church

June 19, 2016

Collect

Loving Father, with a single word of power Your Son sent the demons of Hell scurrying to destruction, never counting the cost for the salvation of a single soul. Grant us grace today to declare that the redemption of even one sinner outweighs any price we must pay to see it come to pass. This we pray in the name of Your Son, Jesus Christ our deliverer, Amen.

Right Panel: The Text in the World

On Saturday afternoon, May 31, a four year-old boy fell into the gorilla enclosure at the Cincinnati Zoo. When a 420-pound male gorilla named Harambe began to manhandle the child, zoo workers shot the ape dead, saving the boy’s life.

Then things got interesting.

Protesters swarmed the zoo. 180,000 people signed a petition calling for an investigation of the boy’s mother. Twitter exploded with righteous indignation.

It seemed that we grieved the lost life of a gorilla more than we rejoiced over the saved life of a child.

Central Panel: Christ in the Text

Welcome to the Gerasene demoniac, one of only two destructive miracles Jesus performs.

Elsewhere Jesus takes a little food and makes a lot of food; he takes sickness and turns it to wholeness; he takes death and turns it to life. Here, his actions directly result in the death of an entire herd of presumably innocent swine. The villagers charge into the field brandishing placards that proclaim, “Exorcism is murder!”

Don’t be too quick to take this lightly, or to condemn these villagers. Jesus just wiped out a considerable portion of their shared economy, and they probably weren’t rich folks to begin with. And this is a respectable business: Jesus is on the Gentile side of the Sea of Galilee where bacon and pulled pork are completely legit. It’s not like the Lord busted up a moonshine still or a meth lab. Imagine if this demoniac haunted the Veteran’s Cemetery out on I-37, and the demons asked to be cast into the nearby refineries. Jesus gives them permission, they swarm into Citgo, Flint Hills, Valero and freak out all the gauges until those things blow sky high and the wreckage rains down into the ship channel.

How many jobs did Jesus just cost us? Would a single soul be worth it?

Jesus required these people to pay the price for a debt they didn’t think they deserved, and they decided they were better off without him around. They learned that Christ is the only cure. But Christ is the cure that costs.

Why did the Lord do this? He cast out lots of demons over the course of his ministry and we never read of any collateral damage elsewhere. Yes, he withered the fig tree outside of Jerusalem but that was apparently a volunteer sprung up by the roadside and nobody missed it much. The water at the wedding feast in Cana could have come with a disclaimer: “No animals were harmed in the making of this wine.” Why this? Why now?

Something in the way Luke recounts this story tells me that community is the key here. Luke identifies the territory as the country of the Gerasenes, associating it with its occupants. He identifies this guy as “a man from the city,” linking him to the community. And of course after the pigs die, the whole populace enters the picture, everyone in the city and in the country. At the end, Jesus refuses the man’s desire to become a disciple and instead commands him to return to your home in order to share the gospel there.

We don’t how this man came to host a legion of demons; the New Testament does little to satisfy our morbid curiosity about such matters. The text, however, hints that whatever happened to him came about in the midst of his society. Luke implies that something in the way they treated him contributed to his condition. And while we don’t know what he or they did to create this crisis, we do know how they tried to respond: they chained him up and kicked him out.

At first, they chained him up. He was kept under guard and bound with chains and shackles, but he would break the bonds. In other words, they tried to keep him quiet, to make him behave himself. This probably goes along with the thing about him running around naked. It’s one thing to host an infestation of unclean spirits but at least pull your pants up, put your baseball cap on straight, take those piercings out of your nose and cover up those tattoos! But it didn’t work; he was too far gone. So they said, “If you’re going to act like that, we’ll warehouse you in a prison. We’ll chain you up, lock you down, kick you out and fence you in.”

When that didn’t work, they drove him out. He did not live in a house but in the tombs. When they couldn’t clean him up, they put him out of sight. They gave him the graveyard, land nobody really wanted, comfortably removed from their own neighborhoods. If they ever needed that land again - say, to build a bridge on - they could just declare eminent domain and drive him somewhere else. They said to him, “We can’t stand to look at you. We’ll see to it that you have your own neighborhood, your own schools, your own nightclubs, even your own churches. We can live with your situation as long as we don’t have to live with you.”

I’m not saying they were wicked people; they were just out of options. They had no idea how this guy got this way or what to do with him now. So they chained him up and then they drove him out. I don’t blame them for that; I do blame them because, when Jesus arrived with the solution, they balked at the size of the bill! Then all the people of the surrounding country of the Gerasenes asked Jesus to leave them. It didn’t work to chain him up; it didn’t work to drive him out; but it cost too much to make him whole. Christ was the only cure, but Christ was the cure that cost!

Left Panel: Bearing Witness

We like to say that Jesus is the answer, and he is - but while salvation is free, the delivery system can be expensive. Christ is the only cure, but Christ is the cure that costs! What price would we pay to see the demons depart?

Is the life of a forty pound boy worth the death of a four-hundred pound gorilla? Is the life of one man worth the death of a large herd of swine? Is the redemption of those in the prisons and on the peripheries of our own society worth it when the cost comes down to blood and treasure?

Today is Juneteenth, a very specific Texas holiday. It marks the day in 1865 that the Emancipation Proclamation finally became effective in Texas. It should remind us that much of our nation’s wealth, much of our state’s wealth, was stolen in the form of the lives and the labor of African Americans. Slave labor built the White House. Whether we wanted it or not, white Americans today profit from the exploitation of African Americans. If there are ghettos in our city, we helped create them.

In 1915 the Texas Rangers killed, by some estimates, 5,000 Texans of Mexican descent, supposedly because they were revolutionaries but probably because the Anglos wanted their land in the valley. In ways that are difficult to define but easy enough to imagine, we benefit from those actions. If there are barrios in our city, we helped create them.

The United States has five percent of the world’s population and twenty-five percent of the world’s prisoners. Blacks and Hispanics make up twenty-five percent of the population of the United States but roughly half of its prison population. Five times as many white people use drugs as black people; ten times as many black people go to prison on drug charges as white people. We lock them up. We drive them out. It doesn’t work.

One in three women worldwide will experience physical or sexual violence during their lifetime, and these women are twice as likely to seek an abortion as other women. Sex trafficking of women and girls is soaring in America, and it is pornography that drives the demand. Nearly half of trafficked women say customers show up with porn images to demonstrate the acts they want these women to commit, and an equal percentage say their pimps forced them to perform in pornographic videos against their will. Fifty-five percent of trafficked women report having at least one abortion, with thirty-three percent of these reporting multiple abortions. Violence against women and trafficking of women stems from a culture that sees women as objects and property rather than people. If there are abortion clinics in our society, we helped create them.

Lesbians, gay men, bisexual, and transgender  persons are  twice as likely as African Americans to be the victims of a hate crime. In fact, they suffer the highest incidence of hate crimes of any group in America. Much of this stems less from a view of homosexuality as morally wrong than from a view of homosexuals as evil people. If there are Orlandos, we helped create them.

What price are we willing to pay to set these injustices right? Or will we shut up and lock up the victims and fall back on the rhetorical question as old as Cain, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” In fact I am either my brother’s or sister’s keeper or I am my brother or sister’s killer.

What might it cost Calallen Baptist Church to see Jesus drive out the demons? What precious pigs, what sacred cows, might wind up in Corpus Christi Bay? Might we have to give more money because we start reaching people with no money? Might we have to put up with differences so radical that we think we cannot endure them, and wait for Christ to change them? Might we have to do some uncomfortable re-reading of the Bible, not because the Bible is wrong, but because we got the wrong things out of it? Christ is the only cure, but Christ is the cure that costs.

Conclusion

Christ is the only cure, but Christ is the cure that costs. In his second inaugural address, Abraham Lincoln spoke these immortal words regarding the Civil War that still raged in the American south:

Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said "the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.”

Christ went to the cross for us, but Christ calls us to take up our own crosses. Christ’s blood pays the price of redemption, but it may be that our own blood must pay the price of restoration and reconciliation.

Christ is the only cure, but Christ is the cure that costs. I wonder if we’re willing to pay the price. Amen.

Benediction

May the Lord release our world from legions,

For the Enemy has many soldiers.

May the Lord redeem our world and restore it

Unto a right mind and right heart.

May the Lord prepare us to pay any price

That the captives of this world might go free.

In the name at which the demons tremble,

The name of the God who is

Father,

Son,

And Holy Spirit,

One God now and forever,

Amen.

"The Round Table," by Rashaan Armand and Tyran T. Laws

The Round Table
Rashaan Armand & Tyran T. Laws
Xulan Press, 2016

This book was deeply disturbing to me, but probably not for the reasons the authors intended.

Aarmand and Laws write to challenge the Black Evangelical church in America to develop a robust theological response to various competing religious perspectives currently on the rise among African American millennials. Using a clever literary device, they present their subject in a series of interlocking narratives, each a vignette built around a single character, all of whom share a common background as disaffected members of the fictional Bright Hope Baptist Church and its pastor, the elderly Reverend Jenkins. The authors use this framework to present the theologies of Baha'ism, Truth and Practical Knowledge (a major group of the Hebrew Israelite movement), EMOJA, a Kemetic, or "Egyptian" faith, atheism, Eastern mysticism, and paganism. Armand and Laws site their own research to argue that  "the most vociferous and active members" of such groups "are African Americans, who show an insurmountable level of indifference towards Christianity and black religious experience." Each chapter begins with a narrative to which the writers then respond in an analytical segment.

I say the authors intended the book to disturb. Their immediate goal, I believe, is to disturb African American pastors and congregations by bringing to their attention not only these various challenges to Christian faith, but also the deep changes Black churches will need to make to counter them. Aarmand and Laws believe that a well-educated clergy must offer deep theological instruction to the laity to prepare them to meet and overcome the attacks these various movements level at the faith of black church members. "The church," they write, "needs to respond by doing its homework and giving better - more informed and more thoughtful answers, right from God's Word."

Aarmand and Laws are well qualified for this task. Rashaan Armand holds a Doctorate of Ministry from Trinity International University and Laws a Master of Arts in Religion from Wheaton College. They buttress their arguments with copious footnotes which point the reader to additional sources.
But the book did not disturb me as an African-American pastor or church member, because I am neither. It disturbed me as a white pastor and seminary professor because, perhaps inadvertently, it challenged me to confront the systemic racism in my own Christian contexts which now contribute to the attrition of young blacks from their faith and their churches. Most of the movements the book treats arise from African American frustrations with what continues to be the dominant and pervasive white privilege in our society. The various fictitious spokespersons in the book find purchase in the minds and hearts of their converts by pointing out the absence of a true depiction of the contributions of and injustices against blacks in our common American expression of Christianity. It strikes me, for instance, that certain groups can call Christianity a "white man's religion," not because it is or ever has been, but because we ourselves fail to acknowledge, let alone emphasize, our roots in a culture of color.

One character, "Abiyda," the former Deacon Smalls, cites dubious biblical evidence to prove that Jesus, Job, and the female lead in the Song of Solomon were all black. Probably they were not and certainly the verses this character cites, taken in context, do not indicate that. However, these three, along with virtually all the other actors on the pages of Scripture, looked a lot more like my Black brothers than they do like me. This is what Dr. Stephen B. Reed of Truett Seminary labels, "displacement." Pictures, sermons, and other depictions of biblical characters tend to assume a white background for our Middle Eastern faith, displacing people of color from their own story in their own book. In a similar way, we too seldom call attention to the fact that such early church greats as Augustine, St. Antony, and Athanasius were African. Of course, when we fight for history textbooks in our public schools which downplay or deny slavery and fail to include African American contributions to our nation's greatness, we simply extend the same kind of thinking.

Now here's my point, and my problem: Most White evangelical churches in America are no longer, at least no longer officially, segregated. My sense of the matter is that the members of most Anglo congregations truly mean it when they say that people of color are welcome to attend, join, and serve in their churches. However, what we mean - without meaning to - is that people of color are welcome to be white Christians right along with us! And reaching African Americans will me more painful than simply changing up our musical selections, worship style, or approach to preaching. It will mean that we take pains to see, and then to show, the presence of people of color in the narrative of salvation. Until, like Gentile Christians in the first century, we can come to see ourselves, not blacks, as the wild vines grafted onto a vine to which we are not native, we will give aid and comfort to these attacks on the Christian faith of young African Americans. We sin against our black brothers and sisters, not by attacking or excluding them, but by creating a fertile ground for theological weeds that grow particularly well in African American soil! In fact, "reaching African Americans" might mean that we do a lot of difficult work in order to contribute to the faith of people who will not join our congregations, but who will be more likely to remain in their own.

As a seminary professor, I need to make an additional point: Prior to reading "The Round Table," I was unaware of any of these movements. In teaching my students to counter cultish theologies, I would never have included these. This means that my African American students (and our seminary is blessed with many), while they would benefit from learning about the kinds of heresies that afflict the Anglo church, would remain unprepared to deal pastorally with the specific needs of their own ministry settings. This would happen, not because I think ill of the Black church, but because I do not think of it at all!

The Round Table does contain some regrettable stylistic flaws. The authors leave the story unfinished and promise subsequent books in the series; one hopes they will be able to correct these matters as their writing continues. The narrative sections reveal that the writers are theologians, not novelists, yet the characters, dialogue, and story lines ring true and are intriguing. I found myself wanting to talk to the fictional people in the book. By the end, which leaves the plot unresolved, I felt like a man binge-watching a television series on Netflix and suddenly discovering that future seasons have not yet been made available.

I highly recommend this book to all pastors and the professors and administrators of Christian colleges and seminaries. Aarmand and Laws have offered us the gift of genuine engagement with our end of the racial divide in American Christianity, if only we dare to receive it.