sermons
Advent | inspire us | The Spirit Stirs
The Healing of Nations
Steve Watson
Dec 15, 2024
On the morning of December 4th, just before sunrise, a man was shot and killed outside a Hilton hotel in New York City. Over 10,000 people are killed in gun homicides every year in this country, and we don’t hear about most of them. But when we do, the reaction is predictable. In places like our city, people raise concerns about gun control, and in other places in the country, people offer thoughts and prayers.
So it was odd after this shooting that very different things happened. In the first days after this murder, lots of people were talking and posting on social media about how angry they are about their health insurance and their medical costs. Because the man who was murdered was the CEO of the largest health insurance company in the United States, a business that decides what healthcare will cost for tens of millions of Americans. And almost none of those people want to murder the executives that run their insurance company. But I guess a lot of people at least didn’t feel bad about what happened, because there were a lot of jokes and a lot more anger this time about healthcare costs than about gun violence.
This story has continued with a lot of drama. The manhunt for the shooter had reality TV kinds of sensationalism attached to it, as I’m guessing the trial of the young man arrested and everything else to do with this case will too.
So this was just the weirdest of events in our holiday season. It has combined gun violence, class inequality, broken for-profit health care systems, murder, mass media coverage, 3D-printed lethal weapons, and our titillation with true crime stories all in one set of sad and tragic events.
My only takeaway friends, from all this, is this is another sign that we are sick. Our country is sick. Many of our country’s largest systems this story touches – our economy, our healthcare, our media, our gun policies, our criminal justice – these systems are sick.
Friends, we are sick people in a sick nation, and we all need so much healing.
Many of us have been very focused on the national election and the incoming presidency and for good reasons, but we don’t need to just look at national politics to see that our nation is sick.
I read some polling done by Pew Research about how Americans feel about this country’s future, and the short version is that we don’t feel good. Just 19% of Americans said we’re satisfied with how things are going in this country. Only 12% of Americans said we have a lot of confidence in the nation’s future.
There is one thing that unites us. It’s a sense that we are not in great shape. That our nation is sick.
The Christian Bible ends with this beautiful image of a great big city on earth, renewed by God, with a river running through the middle of it. And on each side of that river is a magical tree that produces 12 kinds of fruit, a different fruit for each month of the year. And the leaves of that tree, we’re told, these leaves are for the healing of nations.
When we pray, when we go to the doctor, when we give our kids some medicine or try a recovery group or therapy, we dare to hope for the healing of a person.
But what would it look like for there to be healing of our nations?
This week in our Advent guide, we look at an inspired week in the life of Jesus. And one take on this week, one take on Jesus’ whole life, is that he was a kind of sandal-wearing, bearded superman, working unimaginable miracles left and right.
But this week, and in this sermon too, let’s imagine that Jesus was a real human being, as he was. But that he was a human being who was profoundly and entirely inspired by the Spirit of God, and so he was living at the outer limits of how god and powerful and beautiful a human life can be.
We’ll read one story in this one week in the life of Jesus, so we can learn a little more about how God shows up in very hard situations, and we might learn a little bit about how we can show up in very hard situations too. So we can have a sense of what we all need and where we might rest our hopes for the healing of our nations.
Mark 5:1-8 (Common English Bible)
1 Jesus and his disciples came to the other side of the lake, to the region of the Gerasenes.
2 As soon as Jesus got out of the boat, a man possessed by an evil spirit came out of the tombs.
3 This man lived among the tombs, and no one was ever strong enough to restrain him, even with a chain.
4 He had been secured many times with leg irons and chains, but he broke the chains and smashed the leg irons. No one was tough enough to control him.
5 Night and day in the tombs and the hills, he would howl and cut himself with stones.
6 When he saw Jesus from far away, he ran and knelt before him,
7 shouting, “What have you to do with me, Jesus, Son of the Most High God? Swear to God that you won’t torture me!”
8 He said this because Jesus had already commanded him, “Unclean spirit, come out of the man!”
Where are we, and what in the world is happening?
There are at least three different places on the east side of the massive lake of Galilee that claim their town are where these events occurred. The name and description here in Mark kind of lends toward that confusion. It’s almost like when this crew of Jewish guys crossed over into unfamiliar territory, they had no idea where they were, so it was hard to get their direction straight.
What they stumble upon though is frightening.
Demon-possession is kind of a problematic subject. Some people and cultures – both then and now – take this topic literally, believing that evil spiritual beings torment particular places and people. Other people and cultures see this as a way to speak about physical and emotional ailments we don’t understand. We do know that religious people have used the idea of the demonic to stigmatize and neglect and abuse women they can’t control, or people who suffer from ailments others don’t understand. So we should tread carefully here.
What gets me these days are the chains. This man has been chained many times, like a dog. When you go into a high security prison or a courtroom and you see a human being fettered, chained, it’s hard to shake the memory. It’s dehumanizing. And it makes me want to weep for this man and for his whole community.
Whatever the demons were or weren’t, though, I think we have signs of something else going on. We have some signs of significant internalized trauma in this man’s life and in this community. We see the need for the healing of nations here. Let’s read a little bit more and I’ll tell you what I see.
Mark 5:9-13 (Common English Bible)
9 Jesus asked him, “What is your name?”
He responded, “Legion is my name, because we are many.”
10 They pleaded with Jesus not to send them out of that region.
11 A large herd of pigs was feeding on the hillside.
12 “Send us into the pigs!” they begged. “Let us go into the pigs!”
13 Jesus gave them permission, so the unclean spirits left the man and went into the pigs. Then the herd of about two thousand pigs rushed down the cliff into the lake and drowned.
I think we’ve got three signs that this isn’t just a horror flick come to life. Three signs that this is a story about trauma and about the healing of a human and the healing of a nation.
One, the region. We’re somewhere on the Eastern side of Galilee, in the places Rome called Syria and Palestine. When Jesus was born, it had been just two generations since the Roman colonization of the region. Rome had used extensive violence as part of their occupation. Jesus’ grandparents and the elders of this Gerasene community would have witnessed or heard about many crucifixions, land thefts, sexual assaults, and all the other traumas of war and colonization.
Two, the name. This man says his name is Legion. That is not a proper name. A legion was a Roman army of thousands of soldiers. Soldiers who when they colonized a new area like they had here not long before, assaulted and crucified people to assert their rule. This man may have witnessed these things or experienced them as a child. If he hadn’t, he’d been raised on the stories of his elders who had, as had the rest of the town. This man carries profound trauma that his whole community has experienced.
Third sign, the pigs. Later theologians and bishops, in the fifth and sixth centuries, read this story and were like: this shows that Christians have no moral obligation to animals. Weird take, since that’s not what the story is about at all. But they were tone deaf to issues of trauma, empire, colonization, and the impact of oppression.
The language here for the demons going into the pigs, scholars say, is sexualized language. It’s a metaphor for the assaults of the legion that this man remembers. Honestly, I’m not sure that this whole mass death of 2,000 pigs literally happened. It seems like a little bit of an exaggerated, symbolic touch in this story. But whatever it was that happened, it validates the trauma, the violence, the evil this man carried in his body still.
So Jesus walks into a town of immense trauma, but unlike most of us who confront trauma, he doesn’t ignore it, he doesn’t adapt to it like it’s normal, like this is the way the world is supposed to be. He gets curious about it, he wants to know its name, and he wants things to be different in this community.
So again, I think it’s a story about the healing of people and the healing of nations.
Friends, every single day I pray for the healing of people. Some of those people are you, my friends, who I’m so grateful to know as a pastor.
I pray for people plagued with suffering, struggle, and trauma. Everyday. One way or another, praying that we will find our peace, that we’ll know our true names, that we’ll be able to go back home or find a new home, and to know that God has been so good to us.
And every day I mostly fail to pray with any imaging for all that plagues our nations. I think about the three nations outside my own where I’ve spent the most time – Russia, India, China. Three very different nations, the very old and large and powerful nations, but each of which carries some immense large-scale traumas, each of which is ruled by governments that are causing massive trauma in people’s lives as well. And I mostly don’t know how to pray about that.
And then there is my own nation, the United States of America, a beautiful and powerful and rich nation that I actually love to call my home, but also a nation with many, many old and unresolved traumas and sins and problems that are still playing out in colorful and awful ways. Where the disciples asked Jesus –
is this the time when you will redeem our country,
where the crowds long for Jesus to do great things for their nation, I have mostly given up on asking God for the healing of this nation, because it’s hard for me to find the faith or the hope for that.
I wonder, though, if this is a story about the healing of people and the healing of nations, if it gives us grounds for our prayers and our hope and even our actions in this season.
Let’s read the end of our story, notice what Jesus did and didn’t do, and ask what this means for how we might put our hope in God and what we might be called to do as well.
Mark 5:14-20 (Common English Bible)
14 Those who tended the pigs ran away and told the story in the city and in the countryside. People came to see what had happened.
15 They came to Jesus and saw the man who used to be demon-possessed. They saw the very man who had been filled with many demons sitting there fully dressed and completely sane, and they were filled with awe.
16 Those who had actually seen what had happened to the demon-possessed man told the others about the pigs.
17 Then they pleaded with Jesus to leave their region.
18 While he was climbing into the boat, the one who had been demon-possessed pleaded with Jesus to let him come along as one of his disciples.
19 But Jesus wouldn’t allow it. “Go home to your own people,” Jesus said, “and tell them what the Lord has done for you and how he has shown you mercy.”
20 The man went away and began to proclaim in the Ten Cities all that Jesus had done for him, and everyone was amazed.
There’s something about this encounter, the naming and resolving of this trauma, that leaves an isolated, scapegoated, outcast, frankly scary individual at peace, in his right mind, ready to go back home again. And ready to be Jesus’ first ever sales rep to a non-Jewish region of the world.
It makes people uncomfortable. It’s costly. Jesus and his friends are asked to leave the region. But still it’s good news worth sharing, throughout ten cities.
I want to explore before we end two things Jesus does here. Because in this story, Jesus drives out trouble and gives permission to heal. And he sends someone back home again. But before he does those things, he crosses the water and he asks someone his name. And I think this crossing of waters and asking of names is still something the spirit of God is doing for people and nations, and that the spirit of God is in fact asking us to do as well.
So, the crossing of the water.
Healing begins with going places we don’t want to go. Confronting bad habits and bad traumas in ourselves. Admitting our addictions or dysfunctions or whatever way our lives have become unmanageable.
Healing begins with someone’s willingness to sit with those parts of someone else and to listen and care.
And healing in nations begins with people going places they don’t want to go, and going there with intention. Sticking in with families that annoy or trouble us. Staying in relationships with neighbors or coworkers we wouldn’t choose as our friends. And wondering what love looks like.
Jesus crosses the water to a community in trauma, a community that dealt with a broken man by incarcerating him instead of befriending him. And Jesus crosses the water to a community that might have been hostile to his very presence as a religious and ethnic minority.
He didn’t go by himself, he didn’t put himself in that kind of jeopardy. Jesus went with twelve friends. But still, he went.
Friends, who are people in your sphere of influence who you’d maybe rather not interact with but who when you do, there’s a chance you might be part of something good? For me, one of those groups is other clergy. I don’t always like other clergy – they can be too religious, too serious, too judgy, too full of themselves. All things I’ve been before, for what it’s worth.
But I feel like being a pastor of an amazing place like Reservoir gives me a few things to offer, and now and then something good comes of it. I took a call last week from a pastor I’d never met or heard of who serves a church in a small working class city in another state — a church from what I heard I probably wouldn’t go to myself, but I felt like the call did us both some good, and we’re going to stay in touch. I think I’ve got a new friend. And we could all use at least a couple friends from outside our comfort zones, couldn’t we? Wouldn’t our country do better if we all had a little bit of this in our lives?
I have no idea what this looks like in our whole nation, this crossing of what divides us. I tried it in another setting earlier this fall and it went badly. But I know that writing off whole states or regions or types of people as deplorable or garbage or – pardon this horrible word – libtards or Trumpy or anything else we say that dismisses and disrespects people, that will not get us anywhere good. We may not know how to cross the water, like Jesus does, but we can at least get curious about it, or at least not spit at people across the water. In a sick nation where so many of us are dehumanizing one another, we need more people going about the holy work of re-humanizing.
Here’s how Jesus does that. He asks us our names.
I wonder if our nation could say our true name, what would we be called? The patriots among us would say things like: our name is Liberty, our name is Freedom, Opportunity and all that.
Fine.
But from the perspective of the trauma we bear and the trauma we inflict, and the stories we can’t stop living out, I wonder if we might tell the truth about ourselves and say things like: our name is plunder. Our name is violence.
What changes would we make as a nation if we could tell the truth about ourselves?
I’m a mostly optimistic person, and I also learned as a kid to stuff my problems down, like tuck them away somewhere and maybe you won’t have to think about them anymore.
But whenever we bury stuff like this we only ever bury it alive. And it comes back at us sideways. Anyway, my life’s pretty great in a lot of ways, but the past five years, I’ve had a higher rate of hard things happen in my world than most five year stretches of my life. And a couple weeks back, the troubles were all unburying themselves. I found myself tearing up as I said out loud to my wife:
you know, Grace, I think I’m pretty sad these days.
And she listened to me, with a lot of care.
And the next couple of days, in my prayers, with this passage in mind, I imagined what it was like for the spirit of Jesus to ask me:
brother, what’s your name?
And for me to say:
my name is sadness.
And in my spiritual imagination, there weren’t demons or pigs involved or anything like that, but I felt permission to be right where I was and to know that God could join me in this. And that these things are a season, not a lifetime, and they’re not all that’s true about my life, but it’s ok for sadness to be one of the things I feel.
And there was freeing about that.
That’s what the truth does,
Jesus says. It sets us free. It makes room for compassion, it makes room for action. You can’t deal with the truth if you don’t name it.
It’s such a humanizing thing that Jesus does – to look into the eyes of a troubled man and want to know his name. Someone who other people ignore, or run away from, or just get used to as broken, Jesus touches and asks:
what’s your name?
Friends, wherever you are this Advent season, you don’t have to be anywhere else, just like God’s not wanting you to be anyone else. God doesn’t want you to be other than you are or less than you are. God just wants you to be more of your truest self. As Baldwin says,
a concept of God that has validity is one that wants you to be larger, freer, more loving.
Be exactly where you are, and know that right there God is looking for you and asking you your name.
And be among the people you’re going to be among and part of the nation you belong to, like it or not.
And if you want to be inspired again in this Christmas season, maybe you can even cross the water a little. Start by having kind and humane interactions with people you might otherwise neglect, resent, or fear. And see over time, what God does with that.
Or if that’s too much for us, we can at least start again by learning someone else’s name, asking about their story, and wishing them peace.