Sometime in the late-1980s my Dad moved to Michigan, which, in case you were wondering, is a long way from California. My brother and I lived in California but would spend the entire summer in Michigan with Dad and we would have a lot of fun. When we were younger we went to camp in Michigan, and went to baseball games, and when it was time to return to California for the start of school we would load up the old 1984 Chevy Blazer and hit the open road. To be honest, I have no idea how long it took to drive from Michigan to California, but as a kid it seemed like forever. But as an adult, looking back, I wouldn’t trade those trips for anything. We saw Mount Rushmore, had a cool drink of water at Wall-Drug, ate Buffalo Burgers in the Dakotas, fell into a creek in Idaho, played at Circus Circus in Reno, endured psychological torture involving a stuffed pig and an open window, got caught in rainstorms with the luggage on the roof in the plain states, and stopped for picnic lunches featuring my Dad’s famous Tuna Sandwiches at rest stops that dotted the route west. But when you total up the amount of time spent forming these memories at Mount Rushmore or eating the Tuna Sandwiches it pales in comparison to the hours and hours driving. Yet, it is this part that my memory is the sharpest. There were these tapes that we purchased at a Shell Gas Station. Greatest Hit compilations from the ‘50s, ‘60s, ‘70s, that featured Bill Haley and the Comets, Little Richard, The Temptations, Diana Ross, Marvin Gaye, and all the other sounds that defined their eras. We would pop these tapes in when our own singing of Christmas Carols, and songs from a Winnie the Pooh VHS would grow wearisome, and we had each perfected the Three Stooges shtick Swinging the Alphabet.
Those tapes were the soundtrack of my childhood and it was some time before I cared or knew anything about any music recorded anywhere near my then current era. I can close my eyes and picture the interior of the Blazer, the landscape of the plain states passing by and hear “Good Golly, Miss Molly”, “Goodness, Gracious, Great Balls of Fire”, and “I know you want to leave me but I refuse to let you go” which still to this day I would contend is just about the clearest description of God’s relationship to us every written, and today, on Father’s Day, I am especially reminiscent of “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough.”
“Ain’t no mountain high enough, ain’t no valley low enough, ain’t no river wide enough to keep me from getting to you.” Marvin Gaye sang it, but Jesus embodied it, and it is in our scripture that I hear it echoing... functioning as a refrain, a prayer and a promise; poetry for those who find themselves in the far off places in their lives. Places like that feel like the opposite of Galilee.
The Jordan River connects the Dead Sea to the Sea of Galilee, and just as modern day Israel and Jordan are on opposite sides of the shore, so too is the landscape of our story. Galilee on the western shore, populated by the people of Israel who knew their God and what was required of them. People could make sacrifices, people could pray at the Temple, and if you could afford a lamb at Passover, avoid the gentiles, and appear to keep the law as you eek out living then you are all set; you can blend right in. On the eastern shore was Gerasea, one of the Decapolis, ten cities belonging to the Roman Empire. Gentile as gentile could get. The temples were Roman, the customs were suspect, and the rules of Galilee and the rest of Israel don’t apply here. No Sabbath to keep, no kosher, no anything; it was a different land. It was very much the opposite of Galilee, and a place that we hate to think of ourselves residing in. And I say that, because I do believe that many of us struggle with the places in our lives that are opposite of Galilee, places where we hide the things we don’t want anybody to see, things that would upset the status quo of our lives as we seek to live them out exclusively in Galilee.
I recognize that I am really trying to work this metaphor. I think that it is a good one but let me say it another way. There are places in our lives, like the cemetery from our reading, that we would really rather never discuss, or have exposed. Places where we hide pain and shame, guilt and regret, and these places seem to exist solely for this purpose. We chain those memories up, throw away the key and try to do our best to live a Galilee life, but like our story, the chains simply do not hold. The people of Gerasea hid their problem in the tombs by the sea shore, places where people rarely go, yet time and time again the problem came back to haunt them. In the cemetery across the lake of our own lives hides many of the regrets of life yet the chains break away and do not hold.
Rabbis were never to enter cemeteries. They were unclean by ritual custom. So where the possessed, and Gentiles were no prize either. Everything in this story screams this land is not your own, this is foreign, Godless territory, and yet Jesus goes there too bringing light to the darkness, healing to the broken, meeting every objection and trepidation with something a whole lot like “Ain’t no mountain high enough, ain’t no valley low enough, ain’t no river wide enough to keep me from getting to you.” The deepest and darkest places of our lives where the no one is welcome are the places to which Christ will cross the sea to get to, will stride through a cemetery to get to, and will walk right up to the shame, guilt, the pain, the anger, the forgiveness you never accepted, and say, “What is your name?”
Naked except for the broken shackles, unruly, and unacceptable – there for all to see – the man we have come to call the Geresene Demoniac falls down upon his knees and when he arises he is a new man. So it is with Christ. What falls down before him arises anew. If our scriptures are true, if Christ could heal this man, if even the darkest demons are overcome with just a word, will you too open those places in your own life to Christ? Will you accept the promise that there isn’t a shameful memory, a guilty heart, or a bruised and broken piece of your created soul that is too dark, to far away, too bedraggled and neglected to overcome the liberation, the freedom of the irresistible grace of a loving God? Will you?
What happens next is the work of the Spirit. I can’t pretend to tell you what lies in store but I can say this: Christ never once healed without creating a witness. Christ never once healed without creating a missionary. Our unnamed, formally broken man was left there on the shores of the Sea of Galilee not because Jesus didn’t want him but rather because Jesus needed him. Our scriptures tell us, “The man from whom the demons had gone begged that he might be with him; but Jesus sent him away, saying, ‘Return to your home, and declare how much God has done for you.’ So he went away, proclaiming throughout the city how much Jesus had done for him.” Jesus left the man right where he found him. “Remember me?”, he might later say. “Remember where I was? Remember the chains, the wailing and the tombs? I am healed, a new man. Do you want to know why?” Brothers and sisters, the Gereseas of our lives are precisely where Christ leaves us. Leaving us there in the midst of the community where we previously hid our shame and buried our pain. It is here that we are left so we might too become missionaries, proclaiming to those who too may be on the opposite of Galilee and need to hear about the Liberator, the Christ, the Prince of Peace, who holds us in his had and sings “Ain’t no Mountain high enough, ain’t no valley low enough, ain’t no river wide enough to keep me away from you.”
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