Sermons

I am called Legion

Preached by The Reverend Paul Burrows on (Sunday, June 20, 2010)

Sunday, June 20, 2010
Proper 7, year C
Advent of Christ the King

Jesus asked him, “What is your name?” He said, “I am called Legion, for we are many.”

Luke 8:30

What is it that is causing our whole world to go mad? There seem to be so many things that are going wrong everywhere that it is hard to imagine that there is not some malevolent force manipulating us. Proving that it is not our fault that there are so many problems in the world. It is almost as if there were someone who has taken a dislike to humanity in general and to us in particular who is controlling things to undermine and destroy us. And since we have turned this force into something personal we look for a person, or group of people, to blame. For the National Socialist in Germany in the last century it was the Jews, for many ‘fundamentalist’ Christians today it is ‘homosexuals’, for people everywhere down the centuries it has always been the other, those different from us.

This, of course, is a very handy way of avoiding looking closely at our own complicity with the destructive forces that we so often embrace and that bring about our own downfall. For like the deamons in this story “I am called Legion for we are many.”

Those external forces are real and do take on personalities but they come from us. It is no good our trying to pretend we are not responsible and that ‘the Devil made me do it’ because there would be no Devil if we had not made one. The thoughts and feelings that arise in us as we face challenging situations are the raw materials that give form and substance to the deamons that come back at us to control us. Elsewhere in the Gospel Jesus tells of the one delivered from a deamon who ends up in a worse state when the deamon returns and brings others worse than he to inhabit the person. As we struggle with our anger, disappointment, and pride, we are in danger not just from them but from the spitefulness, avarice, and cruelty, that are waiting to drive us on to fulfill our goals. “I am called Legion for we are many.”

How then do we overcome the evils that beset us? Prevention is better than cure and we need to be mindful of how we are reacting to things around us and not invite in all that negative energy. If it does slip past our vigilance then we must fight – fight to retain our humility, fight to place ourselves alongside those we are at enmity with rather than in confrontation with them, fight most especially to retain our sense of humor about ourselves and our reactions for then we can see the evil for the pathetic thing it really is. The author, J.K. Rowling, recognized this when in her “Harry Potter” books she created the ‘Boggart’ a creature that assumes the form of the thing we most fear. The spell to deal with this type of creature is the Latin word for ridiculous and lots of healthy laughter. For an observant Jewish teacher to send these deamons into a herd of swine is one of the most ridiculous tales in the whole of scripture, but as we see it works and while it inspires fear in those who observe it the man is put into his right mind. Let us too pray to be in our right mind and freed from the passions that drive us into evil.