- Sermon - Mickey Anders

Text: Luke 8:26-39

Listen to this news report from an Arkansas newspaper, "At 94, for reasons known only to herself, Carrie Miller, of Wynne, Arkansas, decided it was time to die.

"She planned her passing in the meticulous, unflinching fashion for which she was known, even taking the time to leave a short note for her longtime housekeeper, Mabel. Her explanation was brief and to the point: You'll find me in my car, in the same place my husband was killed. Raymond Miller died in 1938. Carrie Miller never remarried.

"When she finished writing the note, sometime during the afternoon of March 15, 2000 Miller left it on her kitchen table. She knew Mabel would find it there.

"Then the elderly woman climbed into her 1999 Buick Century and headed down U.S. 64 toward the St. Francis Bay Bridge. She stopped briefly to ask a Highway and Transportation Department employee how to get to a specific boat ramp. She then

drove her Buick directly and deliberately off that ramp and into a tributary of the St. Francis River.

"As the current swept her car several hundred yards down the river's offshoot, Miller shut off the engine. She put her car in park. And then, with the windows rolled firmly shut and her seat belt still fastened, Miller calmly waited to die.

"As planned, she was in nearly the same spot her husband died more than 60 years before, when his car slid off an old, icy, wooden bridge" (Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, March 25, 2000).

I've had that news clipping about Carrie Miller in my files for several years now, and the story still haunts me. Here was a sweet little old lady who gave up on life, and took matters into her own hands.

In our text for today, we have the equally gripping and haunting story of a man who gave up on life. This is one of the Bible stories that sticks with you and grips you. Rather than take his own life, he retreated into the world of insanity. He could not cope with normal life so his mind forced him to escape into a world with demons and unclean spirits. He was a prisoner in his own body.

Verse 27 describes him as "a man of the city who had demon…. For a long time he had worn no clothes, and he did not live in a house but in the tombs."

Some have speculated that his living among the tombs was a key to his psychological disorder. The psychologist Myron Madden suggested that he suffered from unresolved grief and, therefore, sought relief among the dead. Dr. Karl Menninger said this man is a classic representation of "man against himself." He was filled with self-hatred, a self-hatred that had taken the form of self-abuse and self-destructive behavior.

He was trying to destroy himself just as surely as Carrie Miller was when she drove her Buick into the St. Francis River. Mark's version of the story (Mark 5:5) includes this note, "Night and day among the tombs and on the mountains he was always howling and bruising himself with stones."

It is a disturbing picture, and more a picture of our lives than we'd want to admit, even to ourselves. We, too, are sometimes filled with a kind of self-hatred that leads us to self-destructive behavior. We, like this man, are unclean and alone, living in the isolation of a graveyard.

Today, we don't have very many people with the calm determination of Carrie Miller. And we don't have many people howling in the graveyards. But we do have many people addicted to Oxycotin, crack, cocaine, alcohol, prescription drugs, and perhaps hundreds of other substances that enslave us in self-destructive behaviors. Every week the newspapers are filled with stories of young people dying from a drug overdose or causing fatal accidents while under the influence of drugs. We are bent on destroying ourselves just as surely as the demon-possessed man.

And others of us are equally self-destructive in less obvious ways. We insist on continuing those old patterns of behavior that have brought us nothing but misery for years. We keep doing the same self-defeating actions over and over and expecting different results. Someone has said that is the very definition of insanity.

We read about this poor, demon-possessed man living among the tombstones and feel sorry for him, but he represents a dramatic picture of our own behavior. He is only different in degree from the rest of us. We find ourselves living in dark burial caves, slashing ourselves with one kind of stone or another.

This passage is good news for those of us struggling with our own self-defeating behaviors. The first bit of good news is that Jesus goes out of his way for people like us. If you read the text carefully, you will discover that Jesus made his way across the Sea of Galilee, healed this demon-possessed man, and immediately returned. It appears that Jesus' only purpose for crossing the lake was to help this one self-defeating individual. If Jesus cared so much for this man, we can be assured that he wants to help us just as much.

Our text shows us how difficult it is for a needy person to receive help. Verse 28 says, "When he saw Jesus, he fell down before him and shouted at the top of his voice, 'What have you to do with me, Jesus, Son of the Most High God? I beg you, do not torment me.'"

The only thing he can imagine God doing to him is punishing him. He doesn't fall down before Jesus asking for healing, rather he expects punishment and begs to be spared. Do we also come before God expecting punishment? Do we live our lives that way?

He thought Jesus was going to be like all the other "good citizens" of his city. All of them tormented him. Verse 29 says, "(For many times (the demon) had seized him; he was kept under guard and bound with chains and shackles, but he would break the bonds and be driven by the demon into the wilds.)"

The tragedy is that most of us do find such persons untouchable. These people are avoided because they need so much, they give such confusing signals, and they stir up the demons in other people. In our best selves, we know that troubles and confusion are not contagious, yet there is something within us that fears that we might catch it too.

No one else would come near the man, but Jesus did. Jesus did not have those fears of contact with the diseased. Jesus came to the man with deliverance and with healing. He ordered the unclean spirit out of the man. In the same way, Jesus comes to us to banish the spirit of uncleanness from our lives.

Jesus asked the spirit's name, and the man answered, "My name is Legion! For we are many." A legion of soldiers was numbered a couple of thousand, so this passage is often translated, "My name is Mob."

Did you ever feel like you had a mob inside you? That there was a crowd of people inside you, not one? Did you ever feel there was a contest going on inside you with many forces vying for control? Did you ever feel like you had this "evil twin" inside and you didn't know who'd win?

When C.S. Lewis was on the road of conversion to Christ, the Spirit of God convicted him by showing him the awful truth about himself. He thought he was a happy, reasonably good pagan, but now this is what he saw:

"For the first time I examined myself with a seriously practical purpose. And there I found what appalled me: a zoo of lusts, a bedlam of ambitions, a nursery of fears, a harem of fondled hatreds. My name was Legion."

All of us live with a split self or divided self and need the healing of Jesus who makes us one. Christ's healing comes to us to make us one.

The story now takes a comic turn. It is as if God knew we needed some comic relief at this moment. The legion of unclean spirits begs Jesus not to send them out of the territory. The spirits beg Jesus not to cast them into the abyss.

The unclean spirits spy a herd of pigs nearby. They get a great idea. Unclean pigs are a great temporary holding area for unclean spirits. So, they beg Jesus, "Let us go into these pigs over there."

In this story, Jesus tricks the unclean spirits -- or lets them outsmart themselves! (That is how it usually works.) He gives them their wish, lets them go into the pigs, and the pigs run headlong into the sea and drown.

When it gets its way, evil is always destructive and ultimately self-destructive.

Now the town's people are upset. Two thousand pigs -- that's a significant economic loss. So they ask Jesus to leave. The townspeople don't care about the man healed; they care about the 2,000 pigs that just went over the cliff into the sea.

Jesus' way often upsets the equilibrium of unjust economic systems: cotton farming based on slavery, prostitution, and pornography, corporate exploitation of third world people, profit driven destruction of the environment, the underground drug trafficking taking the lives of thousands of young people. We politely ask Jesus to leave, we counsel Christ's minister to keep her mouth shut. People becoming free and getting healthy sometimes disturbs the equilibrium of the family system, or the economic life of a community. Remember the story in the book of Acts where Paul delivers the slave girl from her evil spirit which gave her fortune-telling powers. Her owners got upset because Paul ruined their little business, and they have him thrown in prison.

Perhaps the key to the whole story is the admonition, "Return to your home, and declare how much God has done for you."

This poor man is encouraged to focus on the positive, not the negative. His hope for continued healing and health comes from sharing what God has done for him.

All of us can find strength for living when we focus on the wonderful things God does for us.

If we do, we will find ourselves moving, as this demoniac moved, from shame to hope, from a life divided, compulsive, torn, to a life made whole and made one.

One, that is what Jesus wants us to be, one. What if we could find our center, our one unfragmented self? That center is Christ, to know him is to know our own true selves.

When Jesus is not Lord, anything or anyone can be. When Jesus is not Lord, we have a legion of forces vying for control.

But when Jesus is Lord, when he is our center, our friend, our savior, then we become one.

(I am indebted to Dr. H. Stephen Shoemaker and his sermon at Broadway Baptist Church in Ft. Worth, Texas on January 30, 1994 for some of the ideas in this sermon.)