Know the truth - Pentecost II 2022

We switch back to reading in Luke's gospel this week, after our sojourn with John's community in the season of Easter. We'll get anecdotal; we'll tell stories of healing, or presence, of ethics and teachings, of justice for those without power. Luke's Gospel has a lot going on.

We return, liturgically, to what the Church calls 'ordinary time.' (Think of this in contrast to the weeks-long overlay of the movable feast of Easter and all the liturgical timing that depends on its date, from Lent to Pentecost.)

Ordinary time. Extraordinary occurrences. The cosmic, daily stuff of our lives.

This week's story from Luke: Jesus sails across the sea of Galilee (the 'Syrian Sea' as one of our hymns this Sunday alliteratively calls it) to a land of foreigners -- a bit of a hoped-for breather after his teaching and healing in his home country?

Fresh off the boat: an encounter with illness, homelessness, ostracization, shackles, pain. The ills of the world are legion.

Demons, in first century thinking/cosmology, are corrupted creatures - or, are that-which-corrupts-and-destroys-the-creatures-of-god. All too familiar, regardless of the exotic, ancient setting of this particular encounter. (Anyone watching the January 6 hearings?)

To encounter stories about demons-and-healing on the level of symbol, first, is not to suggest that there is not power in the world we might call demonic, still, that works to corrupt and destroy the creatures of God. Symbols used in stories we inherit are themselves palimpsests of words placed over real things, in the attempt to communicate real things to us, we who read and seek understanding today.

I worry about the pigs -- both a livelihood and wealth destroyed in order to heal this one human person, and another species with which we share our common habitat, the earth. I mean: I think about the pigs as part of the symbol-system of the story; I also think about the pigs as the 21st century person I am, and would not care to have us perpetuate an anthropology that privileges human needs above the needs (or rights?) of other species on the planet. The story is not voided of meaning if we add that attentiveness to it: the heft of the Biblical witness as a whole is enhanced for us when we treat the texts not as empirical roadmaps or transcripts of eternity but as a compendium of many sorts of truths. This is neither a story about pigs, nor about the supposed superior needs of humans. (One might call that assumption of superiority, itself, a demonic power we are learning to unmask, even today.)

What and where demons are ('legion'!), and how to speak truth and healing to them and those parts of creation possessed by them -- that is still the task before us. It need not look like a scene from The Exorcist in order to be, nonetheless, true. And, any part of the truth leads us into all-the-Truth, as Jesus constantly says.

Jesus knows the name of the demons, and has power to heal the creature held in their corrupting power. He knows the truth. (Our tradition says he 'is the truth'). Speaking the truth creates space to be free.

The Body of Christ knows the names of the demons that corrupt and destroy the created things of this world (planet, ecosystem, habitat; mind, system, relationship; watershed, body politic, family...). The Body of Christ has power to speak healing to all creatures (including itself). The Body of Christ knows the truth, the power of speaking parts of the truth, the power of being led into all Truth, over time.

This week marks the solstice - the fullest extent of light-filled days in Earth's northern hemisphere. I think of Juneteenth, when the word of freedom was finally brought to all after being criminally withheld to further the ends of exploitative cotton-gin capitalism. I think of Pride month - in Christ, all binaries are contained and exploded - certainly sexual ones - and our lives are rooted in that truth that leads to abundant life for all creatures of God -- each in their own way, holy and beautiful, and true.

I often wonder about what life was like for that person, staying behind among his own people. No more pigs. The neighbors all begged Jesus to leave them alone and leave. Yes, there this person wanders, clothed in his rightful mind, at peace, simply '...proclaiming throughout the city how much Jesus had done for him.'

When we learn to speak that part of the truth given to us to know and understand, we will be led into more truth, and given power to heal, together.

We will know the truth, and it will make us free.