In Memory of Her

We call Jesus “Messiah,” “Christ,” what do those words mean?  They mean “the anointed one.”  And who anointed Jesus?  The Holy Spirit, no doubt, at his baptism.  But the only human who ever anointed Jesus was this woman in Mark's gospel. She did it exactly the way a priest or a prophet should anoint a king in ancient Israel, by pouring oil over his head. And we don’t even know her name. Her story has been hidden behind the forgiven woman with the provocative hair in Luke's gospel.  Maybe her story was not told because mostly men told the stories, men who could not picture a woman as a priest or a prophet. 

Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza is a feminist theologian at Harvard Divinity School.  She wrote a book called In Memory of Her. In it, she lifted up the untold stories of women in the New Testament who were apostles, prophets, preachers and teachers, leaders of churches. It’s one of those annoyingly technical seminary books, but it had to be, to be taken seriously by the people who control and interpret our sacred stories. I needed to hear those stories of women who followed Jesus.  In the church of my childhood, there was no place for a woman preacher. I needed to know I was not alone. 

Savor the irony in the title of that book, In Memory of Her. After nineteen centuries, what Jesus said would happen, finally started to happen.  Truly I tell you, wherever the good news is proclaimed in the whole world, what she has done will be told in memory of her.

This anointing woman saw what others did not see, did not want to see.  That’s why I call her a prophet. What she did was not understood; she was criticized.  These things I saw as soon as she was lifted to my attention.  But in 2018, I find myself identifying with a different facet of her story.  Knowing that she was powerless to stop the ugly events to come, this anointing woman did not hide in fear or denial.  She did not rant in anger.  She did a beautiful thing, a loving and respectful thing, if misunderstood. I need that reminder to face the world we live in now, and to find ways to act with beauty, love and respect.

Brea Congregational United Church of Christ

March 25, 2018

Untold Stories

Mark 14:1-10   It was two days before the Passover and the festival of Unleavened Bread. The chief priests and the scribes were looking for a way to arrest Jesus by stealth and kill him;  2 for they said, “Not during the festival, or there may be a riot among the people.”

            3   While he was at Bethany in the house of Simon the leper, as he sat at the table, a woman came with an alabaster jar of very costly ointment of nard, and she broke open the jar and poured the ointment on his head.  4 But some were there who said to one another in anger, “Why was the ointment wasted in this way?  5 For this ointment could have been sold for more than three hundred denarii, and the money given to the poor.” And they scolded her.  6 But Jesus said, “Let her alone; why do you trouble her? She has performed a good service for me.  7 For you always have the poor with you, and you can show kindness to them whenever you wish; but you will not always have me.  8 She has done what she could; she has anointed my body beforehand for its burial.  9 Truly I tell you, wherever the good news is proclaimed in the whole world, what she has done will be told in memory of her.”

            10   Then Judas Iscariot, who was one of the twelve, went to the chief priests in order to betray him to them.

It’s Palm Sunday, and we didn’t read the bible story for Palm Sunday.  Some of us have heard it almost every year since infancy. On Palm Sunday Jesus rides into Jerusalem on a donkey, with the crowd waving palms.  The fickle crowd, who on Good Friday will be shouting for his crucifixion. Other stories seldom told: the people who don’t fit so easily into the standard narrative. This morning, a woman prophet crashing a dinner party. Do you know her story?  I didn’t.

When I was in my late twenties, living in Minnesota and working as a chemist at 3M, I did a year-long cover-to-cover bible study (well, almost cover-to-cover). I took my science brain, and my hungry heart, and I dived in. A vast collection of stories. Stories of peoples’ encounters with the sacred, and peoples’ efforts to live in a way that honors the sacred. Hundreds of stories and vignettes. Some of these bible stories are windows to God, and some of them are mirrors of human failings. 

With my science brain, full of curiosity, checking vigilantly for inconsistencies, I collected all kinds of juicy tidbits.  What I learned made it clear I hadn’t been getting the whole story on Sunday morning.  (You’re not getting the whole story either.  There just isn’t time.  But I do try to provide some juicy tidbits.). The apostle Peter was married. That was a big deal to a Catholic. None of the New Testament writers ever calls Jesus God. The less Jewish they are, the closer they come, though. And women were apostles, led churches, and paid the bills for Jesus’ ministry. So many other details that got my mind spinning.

With my hungry heart, wanting to connect with the sacred and to follow Jesus, I found myself in some of those stories.  I identified with Doubting Thomas, and the Samaritan woman at the well, and Balaam (do you know Balaam? He did not make the assigned readings of the lectionary.  We’ll talk about him this summer.) I identified with prophets who see things other people don’t want to see.

During that transformative year of bible study, I started seeing a spiritual director, Priscilla Braun. When we sat down together for the first time, I told her how I had been studying the bible in depth, and didn’t want to lose this connections I was making to the sacred.  Hearing my experience, she said something that stuck with me. “Your story is sacred scripture.”  Seriously? I thought, how can that be? “There is the scripture from long ago, gathered into this book we call the Bible, and there is the scripture that you and God are writing today, in your life.” Whoa.

God is still speaking, and one of the ways God is speaking is to you, and through you.  Your story is sacred scripture. Can you believe that? Do you have the nerve to tell your story that way? Courage might be required. Humility might be required. A good listener might be required. What is your sacred story? I’d love to have that conversation with you.

Tucked into our official scriptures are countless characters whose sacred stories are largely untold; ignored or misunderstood by interpreters, sometimes even by the writers of scripture.  The anointing woman of today’s reading is one of these. What do you usually remember about the anointing woman?  Was she a sinner at Jesus’ feet, wiping them with her hair?  That’s memorable.  But that’s Luke’s story, and it came after Mark’s.  Mark’s anointing woman only gets noticed for wasting expensive perfume. 

I’ll begin by refreshing your memory about this anointing woman, because otherwise we will be thinking of the other three anointing women– there’s one in each of the four gospel.  First, the setting.  It’s already past Palm Sunday. Jesus has been in Jerusalem during the day, causing trouble, so it is not safe for him to sleep there.  He goes each night to the small town of Bethany, and that is where we find him at a dinner party. The Last Supper is only a day or two away. Things are getting intense. And what do we know about this woman?  Next to nothing. We don’t know her name. We know she crashed a dinner party, and she broke open an expensive bottle of fragrant oil, and she poured it over Jesus’ head.  That is a really strange thing to do.  In the etiquette of first century dinner parties, it is normal to wash someone’s feet.  In a well-off home, at the beginning of the party a servant would wash your feet and anoint them with oil because they got dry and dusty from the road.  Admittedly, wiping a person’s feet with your hair, as Luke tells the story, is over the top, but anointing someone’s feet is normal.  Anointing someone’s head is not normal. The dinner guests are outraged by this.  They want to know: why is this expensive oil being wasted?  They don’t understand what the heck she’s doing.  But Jesus defends her action, and he says an amazing thing.  He says “Wherever the Gospel is preached, throughout the world, what she has done will also be told in memory of her.” Which clearly did not happen. So it was a big deal what she did, and it was forgotten.  We never told her story.

Jesus tells us what her action means.  He says, “She has done a beautiful thing.  She has anointed my body beforehand for burial.”  That’s heavy.  Jesus had been trying to tell his disciples what was coming: that he was going to Jerusalem, and he was going to do some really dangerous things, and he probably was going to get killed.  But in Mark’s Gospel, his disciples never understood what he was telling them. It was too hard.  It was not how they thought the story should be told. This woman somehow was in the inner circle.  She heard Jesus talking about his impending death and she got this hard truth: she understood that he was going to die.

We don’t know the circumstances in which she heard that, or anything that leads up to this little vignette, but here’s how I imagine it.  When it finally dawns on her what is going to happen, she is torn up by all kinds of emotions.  She takes them to God in prayer, and she pours out her heart, and she says, “I can’t change this. I can’t change his choice.  I can’t go with him either. What can I do to let him know that I understand his choice, the price he is paying, and to let him know how much I love him, how much I care for him?” And then she got an idea.

Time was short, so she crashed a dinner party.  She took that expensive oil and she poured it over Jesus’ head.  Jesus understood exactly what she was doing.  And I imagine that there was brief moment where for them, that dinner party didn’t exist.  It was just Jesus and a woman disciple, their shared understanding, and the hard, hard road ahead. And tears.  I’m pretty sure she had tears.

We call Jesus “Messiah,” “Christ,” what do those words mean?  They mean “the anointed one.”  And who anointed Jesus?  The Holy Spirit, no doubt, at his baptism.  But the only human who ever anointed Jesus was this woman. She did it exactly the way a priest or a prophet should anoint a king in ancient Israel, by pouring oil over his head. And we don’t even know her name. Her story has been hidden behind the forgiven woman with the provocative hair in Luke.  Maybe her story was not told because mostly men told the stories, men who could not picture a woman as a priest or a prophet.

Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza is a feminist theologian at Harvard Divinity School.  She wrote a book called In Memory of Her. In it, she lifted up the untold stories of women in the New Testament who were apostles, prophets, preachers and teachers, leaders of churches. It’s one of those annoyingly technical seminary books, but it had to be, to be taken seriously by the people who control and interpret our sacred stories. I needed to hear those stories of women who followed Jesus.  In the church of my childhood, there was no place for a woman preacher. I needed to know I was not alone.

Savor the irony in the title of that book, In Memory of Her. After nineteen centuries, what Jesus said would happen, finally started to happen.  Truly I tell you, wherever the good news is proclaimed in the whole world, what she has done will be told in memory of her.

This anointing woman saw what others did not see, did not want to see.  That’s why I call her a prophet. What she did was not understood; she was criticized.  These things I saw as soon as she was lifted to my attention.  But in 2018, I find myself identifying with a different facet of her story.  Knowing that she was powerless to stop the ugly events to come, this anointing woman did not hide in fear or denial.  She did not rant in anger.  She did a beautiful thing, a loving and respectful thing, if misunderstood. I need that reminder to face the world we live in now, and to find ways to act with beauty, love and respect.

We all need sacred stories. Stories of real people who love and serve God, people of all descriptions and conditions, so we know we are not alone. And we hear the stories differently at different times in our lives, because our stories are still unfolding.

I have been telling my story, one on one, to a trusted person, since I was twenty-nine.  Often I don’t even know what my story is until I start talking.  Together we figure out where God might be in it.  We can’t prove it. But I can try to live by it.  Sometimes we laugh together and sometimes we cry together.  And I am not alone, when I tell my story.

What is your sacred story?

If the religion that you received failed you, and you have had to do the heart-wrenching work of letting go of that story and finding Good News you could trust, you are not alone.  Tell your story.

If life handed you a challenge you did not expect, and you have struggled to face that challenge faithfully instead of live the life you thought you would have, you are not alone.  Tell your story.

If you were not loved, not accepted, and you have struggled to believe that you are lovable and acceptable, you are not alone. Tell your story.

If you made a really big mess of things, and you have faced up to the mess you made, and are figuring out how to put your life back together, you are not alone.  Tell your story.

If the current chapter of your life is confusing and terrifying, you are not alone.  Tell your story. 

If you have just received the most wonderful gift in your life, or if you are celebrating an enduring blessing, you are not alone.  Tell your story.  We all need to hear those stories!

In the coming week we will be telling the Good Friday and Easter stories.  Let yourself enter into those stories.  God meets us in sacred story.  And your story is a sacred story.  Amen.  

Widening the Circle

Widening the circle of care means letting go of our expectations that others act and think like us. Because we naturally believe that the way we think and act is right, and some other way is weird, and maybe just plain wrong.  That person we don’t relate to? Their experience is not our experience. Their rules for acceptable behavior may be a little different from our rules. Their story about how the world works is different from ours. Does that threaten us? Diminish us? Only if we think we need to be right, and our perspective of reality is reality. 

(Photo: "Eyes of the Dreamer" by JR, painted on a giant picnic table bridging the U.S.-Mexico border.)

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Brea Congregational United Church of Christ                                       

March 18, 2018

Widening the Circle

Mark 7:24-29   From there he set out and went away to the region of Tyre. He entered a house and did not want anyone to know he was there. Yet he could not escape notice, 25 but a woman whose little daughter had an unclean spirit immediately heard about him, and she came and bowed down at his feet.  26 Now the woman was a Gentile, of Syrophoenician origin. She begged him to cast the demon out of her daughter.  27 He said to her, “Let the children be fed first, for it is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.”  28 But she answered him, “Sir, even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs.”  29 Then he said to her, “For saying that, you may go—the demon has left your daughter.”

In the Gospel of Mark, Jesus doesn’t preach much.  He only tells a couple of parables.  Instead, he shows us the gospel by his actions. This brief story of a foreign woman asking Jesus to heal her daughter is Mark’s parable of the Good Samaritan, his answer to the question, “Who is my neighbor?”

Jesus entered a house and didn’t want anyone to know he was there.  He needed rest. Peace and quiet.  In the gospel of Mark, Jesus has divine power, and he has human limitations. So imagine his dismay when a foreign woman tracks him down, and asks him to do one more healing. In Mark’s gospel, healing is real work for Jesus. It tires him out. But what he says to that woman is outrageous.  It’s not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs. This was long before fur children and dog bakeries and dog spas. This was one ugly insult. No dog whistles here. Jesus called this woman a dog, a nonperson. 

I suspect that like most people, Jesus had learned as he grew up which kinds of people were to be respected– and which kinds of people were outside his circle of care.  Those who raised us never had to say these things out loud for us to learn them. We may not even realize our biases.  The news we read, the entertainment we choose, how we treat the people who serve us, where we give our money…these things show who is deserving of respect and who is not. Sometimes it’s overt bigotry, and sometimes we just don’t see people.

And then Jesus sees her, really sees her. Because he is good at that. And so he widens his circle of care in the most practical of ways.  He heals her daughter. According to Mark, this was when Jesus learned to love his neighbor– that neighbor that he had been taught to not see as fully human. We can all be thankful for that, because this is the first time that Jesus widened his circle beyond his fellow Jews, and here we are, not Jewish and relying on Jesus to guide us in relationship with God. 

If you need your Jesus to be perfect, you will tell this story a different way.  You will explain away or minimize this awful slur, dog– the commentaries are embarrassing that way. I’m telling the story this morning, and I see Jesus being human. Perhaps this was the first non-Jew who had ever asked him for help.  Perhaps he felt the wrongness of the word he had grown up hearing as soon as it left his mouth. That’s happened to me before.  And then he really looked at this woman, and in her eyes realized the limits of his thinking. Jesus was able to learn, and to make amends by his actions. Now that’s divine.

Who are we not seeing? The photo on the front of your bulletin is a bit eerie, but it seemed to fit.  It’s entitled, “Eyes of the Dreamer.” It is a giant table painted by an artist named JR, that was set up for a picnic that spanned a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border. This was how they widened their circle of care, and invited us to see our immigrant neighbor.

The eyes are Mayra’s.  Mayra arrived in California at age seven. She has a master’s degree from San Francisco State, and works in public health. She has no route to citizenship. She relies on the DACA program, deferred action for childhood arrivals, to live in California, and she and people like her are living in fear right now that they may be imprisoned or deported. 

And there are so many other neighbors who, if they were truly seen by the powers that be, would be treated differently.  When I thought of which neighbors to tell you about this morning, I got confused.  So many are being demonized, or stigmatized, or just not seen.  And because of our guest Elizabeth Hansburg, I have to add another category of neighbor: our neighbors who are priced out, or impoverished, by the insanely expensive real estate and rental markets of Orange County.

But maybe as we get in the habit of widening our circle, neighbors will see each other and work together for common causes. I know Elizabeth is working to bring together climate activists, and fair wage advocates, into the conversation for more housing, to work together for the good of all. 

Our hearts are not big enough to love all God’s children.  But we can show basic respect to all. And we can stretch our hearts a little wider.  That means not only feelings, but actions. Your action in supporting this church allows thousands of neighbors each day to drive down Imperial Highway and see a message of inclusion or inspiration or ethical challenge on our signboard. An alternative voice to the churches that exclude.  Just this week our church office received a message on the phone, and one on social media, telling us with great passion, how much our messages mean to them.

What we can do for our neighbor is limited.  And if you feel guilty about that, welcome to the club.   If Jesus had limitations, it’s no surprise that we do too.  But when we look into the eyes of our neighbor, really see across the walls that divide us, that connection will empower us to make a difference.

I’ve heard from some of you how much you enjoyed meeting the Ahmadiyya Muslims from the Chino Mosque. I have met them as well. They think and do some things that I’m not comfortable with. Still, their amazing hospitality and food makes it hard to take offense. Isn’t it wonderful when you find such gracious and interesting neighbors, who start to become real people instead of stereotypes? I thank God for their ministry to us.

Widening the circle of care means letting go of our expectations that others act and think like us. Because we naturally believe that the way we think and act is right, and some other way is weird, and maybe just plain wrong.  That person we don’t relate to? Their experience is not our experience. Their rules for acceptable behavior may be a little different from our rules. Their story about how the world works is different from ours.   Does that threaten us?  Diminish us?  Only if we think we need to be right, and our perspective of reality is reality.  “It’s not so bad.  What are you complaining about?” (In some settings that could be a working definition of “white fragility,” but the attitude is universal.)

How do you get over needing to be right?  The best way I know to do that is to really listen to somebody who sees things very differently from you. Learn from them what life is like from a different perspective, with a different set of rules. Maybe our perspective will change.  Maybe that’s what learning is.

And then comes the hard part.  Can we widen the circle to include people who exclude? Is that even possible?  I think it is, and it’s worth the attempt, if you’ve got the stomach for it.  Where did that foreign woman find the wisdom and forbearance to speak the way she did to Jesus? Clearly God’s wisdom and compassion were at work in her before Jesus ever met her.

If we want to be skilled at inviting someone else to widen their circle of care, we are probably going to have to show them that same kind of gentleness and respect she showed Jesus. Which is hard when someone is not showing us respect. But it is gospel. No guarantee we’ll be heard. “Love your enemies.” Which does not mean feel kind and warm feelings toward them.  It means treat them the way we want to be treated!

Stay tuned for Compassionate Communication classes later this Spring.  This is one way I have learned to put Jesus’ teaching on loving neighbor into practice.

God is ever creating, the world is ever-changing, and if we are not willing to learn, we are going to be wrong.  If we’re sure we’re right, we’re probably wrong.  Thankfully, God’s circle is very wide indeed.  There’s room for everyone, even us.  Thank you, God.

Sacred Identity

God offers us one bedrock, unshakable identity: you are born a child of God; beautiful, unique, loved, cherished.  Nobody can take that sacred identity away from you. Everybody else has that identity too. God is big enough.  This identity may seem buried pretty deep in some people, but it cannot be extinguished in anybody.

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Brea Congregational United Church of Christ   

March 11, 2018

Identity and Freedom

Scripture: Luke 8:26-39.

[After crossing the Sea of Galilee] They landed in the country of the Gerasenes, which is opposite Galilee. As Jesus stepped ashore he was met by a man from the town who was possessed by demons. For a long time he had neither worn clothes nor lived in a house, but stayed among the tombs. When he saw Jesus he cried out, and fell at his feet.  ‘What do you want with me, Jesus, Son of the Most High God?’ he shouted.  ‘I implore you, do not torment me.’ For Jesus was already ordering the unclean spirit to come out of the man. Many a time it had seized him, and then, for safety’s sake, they would secure him with chains and fetters; but each time he broke loose and was driven by the demon out into the wilds.

Jesus asked him,  ‘What is your name?’  ‘Legion,’ he replied. This was because so many demons had taken possession of him. And they begged him not to banish them to the abyss.

There was a large herd of pigs nearby, feeding on the hillside; and the demons begged him to let them go into these pigs. He gave them leave; the demons came out of the man and went into the pigs, and the herd rushed over the edge into the lake and were drowned.

When the men in charge of them saw what had happened, they took to their heels and carried the news to the town and countryside; and the people came out to see what had happened. When they came to Jesus, and found the man from whom the demons had gone out sitting at his feet clothed and in his right mind, they were afraid. Eyewitnesses told them how the madman had been cured. Then the whole population of the Gerasene district was overcome by fear and asked Jesus to go away. So he got into the boat and went away. The man from whom the demons had gone out begged to go with him; but Jesus sent him away:  “Go back home,” he said,  “and tell them what God has done for you.” The man went all over the town proclaiming what Jesus had done for him.

Buried in this Gospel story is a Jewish joke. I know, the Bible is not allowed to have jokes in it. But it does; we just don’t usually get them. Jesus makes a deal with some unclean demons to leave a suffering man; they can possess some unclean pigs instead.  Those unclean demons terrify the unclean pigs and they stampede off a cliff into the Sea of Galilee. The unclean things destroy each other, voila, and the man is saved.  And this is the only recorded instance of Jesus making deviled ham.

Seriously, this is a story about a man who had lost his identity, and the power of God to free him to take on a new identity as a follower of Jesus, but at a cost.  This story tells us that God’s power gives us the freedom to choose a life-affirming identity, but it won’t always win us popularity contests.

Identity. Who are you? Some of us identify by our jobs.  Some of us get our identity from our family relationships.  Student.  Caretaker.  Unicycle rider (that’s how my husband is known around UC Irvine.) Or we identify with our sports teams, or our political affiliation. Sometimes a label gets put on us.  A diagnosis, or a disability, or an ethnicity or a sexual identity. These labels can empower us, or they can oppress us. 

We live in an era of identity politics.  Slap a label on somebody, so you can dismiss them as the other side, just plain wrong. And all I see when I think of “those people” is their label, not a three-dimensional person, who is that neighbor Jesus told me to love.

Yet we need an identity.  We can’t function without it.  When our identity shifts, as it does throughout our lives, we can get very disoriented.  From the age of four, I was an avid reader. I often didn’t know how to fit in with other kids, so I read instead.  That was my identity: bookworm. I read all the time. A book a day sometimes. I was proud of that identity, because my dad was proud of me.  But it didn’t make me many friends. I did acquire some friends and people skills by high school, but I remained a voracious reader.  That identity served me well through a lot of years of college. Then at age thirty-two I had a baby, and I thought, great, I’ll be home from work for a while, I can catch up on my reading while Mark nurses. Only I couldn’t read, for months. I couldn’t concentrate. I could not make it through a book. This was not me. Who am I, if I’m not a devourer of books? It was comical, but it was also a little scary. Well, it was lactation hormones, and it was temporary. But it made me realize that that identity was at the whim of my body chemistry. 

Adolescence is a time when identity shifts, and that can be hard on the whole family. Challenging events challenge identity: unemployment, serious illness, loss of a loved one. Even joyful life events like marriage change our identity.  My brother got married at age forty-one, and my mom became a great-grandmother.  Whoa.  Life keeps changing, and our identity doesn’t always know how to keep up.

God offers us one bedrock, unshakable identity: you are born a child of God; beautiful, unique, loved, cherished.  Nobody can take that sacred identity away from you. Everybody else has that identity too. God is big enough.  This identity may seem buried pretty deep in some people, but it cannot be extinguished in anybody.

You may have a second sacred identity: you can choose to be a follower of Jesus: join his great adventure of celebrating and learning and loving and being a part of the Kingdom of God. These two identities, child of God and follower of Jesus, have sustained me through a roller coaster of job changes and unemployment in my adult life.

Who are you?  How do you identify yourself? Ponder that for a minute. Does beloved, precious child of God come first? Is it even on the radar?  Does follower of Jesus make the list?  I didn’t say perfect!  There are no perfect followers of Jesus. But does that relationship make a difference in your life?

I hope you will claim these sacred identities, because they give you great freedom from all the other labels our society would put on you that might be helpful for a time, or never were helpful at all. Nobody can take your sacred identity away from you.

I hope you also claim your identity as a member or a friend of Brea Congregational United Church of Christ. Please mark you calendars for Heritage Sunday, April 8. The church is taking stock of its own identity after 32 years with the same pastor.  That is, by the way, an unusually long run. Our personal identities shift, so it sure would be nice if the church identity could just be fixed and assured.  A rock in the storm. That rock is God, not the church.

People come and go, even pastors. So the church too changes. Yet we still carry God’s message of inclusive love, but with new voices, in new ways, to a community whose identity is also changing. Brea is now officially multiracial; white European-Americans are not the majority. Tech changes our relationships, and not always for the worse. People keep moving to Southern California; the suburban gets more and more urban. Cultures clash and blend.

As our community changes, Brea Congregational does have an identity that is sacred and enduring. We declare this place holy ground, sanctuary, safe space for each of us to claim our unique identities as children of God.  This church is the body of Christ, the gathered followers of Jesus who seek to make his message of inclusive love real in our own lives and for those around us, whatever their identities.

If our identity is sacred and deep, we don’t need to be right every time.  We can find common ground. We can respectfully disagree about politics and policy, but be willing to hear each other.  We can welcome somebody who doesn’t fit into our boxes, doesn’t wear our labels. I remember when Rozlyn became a part of my church in Irvine. She is transgender, and she didn’t pass very well. And we didn’t know how to let go of our labels and let Roz be Roz.  It was confusing. But we learned, and I am grateful for her courage.

We are called to be a welcoming church. To make room for the stranger. You voted on it, right?  It says so on the back of the bulletin. So we need to trust our church’s sacred identity that is not based on a certain style of worship, or a set of friends, or a program of the church. Those things can change. Our church’s identity is rooted in the values that Jesus teaches us.

Having a clear, deep, values-based identity is like having a good immune system.  We can welcome that which is life-giving, and recognize and set boundaries around that which is not life-giving.  We can make changes in our surface identity, and be safe in a core identity that can weather any storm.

Back to the Gospel of Mark, where we left Jesus and his disciples weathering a big storm on Lake Galilee.  Reading the Gospel of Mark, we just can’t get away from this demon possession business, which doesn’t sit well with our modern views. We don’t need to diagnose this man. He doesn’t need another label.  His God-given identity has already been overcome by some force that controls him, wants to destroy him, drives him from his home into the land of the dead.  People tried to help him by chaining him up.  Hmm.  I am a little skeptical about that.

This man has identity issues so severe he cannot even give his own name.  When Jesus asks the man his name, he says, “Legion.” Legion was not a Greek word. It was a Roman military unit, numbering five or six thousand soldiers. Palestine was occupied by a Roman legion at that time.  There was a legion roaming the countryside, and a legion in the man’s head. I wonder what an occupying Roman army might have done to this man to so thoroughly warp his identity.

Jesus, after stilling the storm and getting a bad night’s sleep, has just landed on the eastern shore of lake Galilee.  That’s the territory of non-Jews and their unclean pigs. If you feel sorry for the pigs who drowned in this story, consider the context.  Jews had no respect for pigs. 

Barely has Jesus set his foot on land when this afflicted man somehow finds him. Everybody else has given up on this guy.  His identity was “Danger to self and others. Hopeless case.”  But Jesus wastes no time in healing him, saving him, rescuing him; it’s all the same Greek word.  Soon the man is clothed and in his right mind, and sitting at Jesus’ feet.  Sitting at Jesus’ feet means he has taken on a new identity: follower of Jesus. When you remove an old identity, you need to replace it with a new identity. Unless you’re a Buddhist.

This healing seems so easy. Until the aftermath. What did it really cost to free this man? A herd of pigs off a cliff; some wealthy man’s fortune.  Maybe that was economic disruption, or maybe it was political allegory: doing away of the Roman legion. Either way, the cost was too high.  “Go away, Jesus. Please get back in your boat and leave us with our pigs and our hopeless cases and our fixed identities and stop causing us trouble.” Because our identities are all interconnected, and when you one person’s identity changes, everyone else feels it. 

Jesus does get back in the boat and go away, but he leaves one man, with his new identity as a follower of Jesus. He gives the man instructions to go back home, and tell people that hopeless cases are not hopeless to God, and that a soul-crushing identity can be transformed by God.  Good news for people needing freedom from an identity that oppresses them. Troubling news for the Powers that Be, who too often have profited from cultivating identities that convince people that it’s hopeless, they’re worthless, they’re powerless.  But God’s power is available to every child of God.  Can you begin to hear how revolutionary that identity, child of God, is?

People will keep trying to put the freed man into back into his box, “Danger to self and others. Hopeless case.” The owner of the pigs may never forgive him. If this man is counting on his home town affirming his identity, he will be out of luck. Jesus must know he has some fellow followers in the neighborhood to support him, because very few people can pull this kind of identity shift off alone.  In order to hang on to our sacred identity, we need friends, a community, a church, to remind us who we are, and whose we are. So somewhere on the eastern shore of Galilee there was already a community of Jesus followers, helping free each other from oppressive identities.

My sister Denise suffers from a condition that produces effects much like this man’s: alcohol addiction. When she is drinking, my sister is lost; the alcohol robs her of her identity, and she comes near killing herself. I believe in God’s power: I will not label her a hopeless case. But I want my sister back.

Twelve or thirteen times a week, people gather in our hall. They are recovering from this affliction that at its worst can be like this man endured, sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly. Miracles happen in those meetings, when people do the footwork. God is restoring peoples’ sacred identities.  Alcoholics Anonymous requires no creeds, just an open mind and a willingness to practice the steps and tools that worked for the people before them.  And they support each other.  Some people go to seven meetings a week, to remember their identity as recovering alcoholics, and to help others recover. Their work is sacred, and we are blessed to have them.

When we see somebody’s identity crushing them, maybe we can offer them a message of hope.  They can be free of the label that harms them.  They can claim their God-given identity. The best way to share this message is to live it.  Claim your identity.  Child of God, sacred, valued, loved. There are no hopeless cases, for God. There are only children of God.  Amen.