As many of you know, a lot of Park City has been shut down over the presence of the H1N1 Swine Flu virus in our town...well, if one case so far counts as a "presence." At the Health Department's recommendation, we're not holding any "large group gatherings," which includes Sunday worship. But I wrote a sermon anyway and it's below. You can also catch the podcast on our website.
Mark 5:1-20
There have been a bunch of national magazines arriving at newsstands in the last several months that have featured a picture of a smashed piggy bank on the cover. In each case the pulverized piggy was grinning, but the stories about the economy that were grimly told inside the magazines were nothing to smile about. These days when that little piggy that is our bank account goes to market and sees the 401k disappearing, it cries “Wee, wee, wee!” all the way home--which is probably in foreclosure. When we start having to dig through the pig for loose change, we’re getting down to a crisis of pig sty proportions.
Lots of folks blame Wall Street hogging up bad debt or CEOs who’ve pigged out on big money while their companies went bankrupt. The government’s trying a bailout, but everyone’s concerned about too many pork barrel projects getting thrown in the to mix.
And now, this very week, we encounter another porcine problem. The Swine Flu, or the H1N1 as it’s more properly called, is threatening to reach pandemic proportions. Schools are closing, travel advisories being issued, and folks are wearing surgical masks and buying their weight in hand sanitizer. With some confirmed deaths in Mexico and health officials brooding over a potentially historic health crisis, anxiety is running high. But the question that many are asking is, “Is it really that scary, or is this all hype? Is it a true health emergency or simply a pandemic of paranoia?”
At this juncture we still don’t know for sure. But it’s pretty obvious that we’ve all been hit hard by some seriously bad news in quick succession over the last several months. The year 2009 has already left many people wallowing in fear, doubt, and despair. The Chinese may call this the year of the ox, but you could definitely make the case that this is really the year of the pig.
When the Scriptures refer to pigs it’s usually in a negative context. The Israelites were forbidden to eat these “unclean” animals (Leviticus 11:7; Deuteronomy 14:8). While it’s common to see this as an ancient sanitary precaution, it more likely had something to do with the fact that other ancient pagan peoples saw swine as being sacred. In 167 B.C., for example, the Seleucid ruler Antiochus deeply offended the sensibilities of the people of occupied Jerusalem by polluting the Temple with an offering of a pig to the Greek god Zeus. This was the “abomination that makes desolate” referred to in Daniel 11:13. There wasn’t much that was more repugnant than a pig in ancient Israel.
Paganism was one disease the people in first century Israel didn’t want to catch. As we are seeing in our study through the Old Testament, the pagan practices of Israel’s Canaanite neighbors brought on a debilitating illness of sin and death. Worshipping idols, syncretizing their belief in God with belief in other gods, would ultimately result in the devastating pandemic of exile at the hands of the Assyrians and Babylonians. The very existence of their nation had been held in the balance.
So, by the time of the first century, the ancestors of those Jews who had been taken into exile were, by and large, very sensitive about anything pagan or porcine. Keeping pigs was not something your upstanding Israelite would do.
Which brings us to this story in Mark, also told in Matthew. Jesus has gone to the other side of the Sea of Galilee to the region of the Garasenes. Scholars don’t know exactly where that was, but the implication of the text is that it was territory that your average Jew would avoid like the plague. For one thing, there were tombs everywhere, it seemed, and being around the dead was also a ritual no-no.
That brings up a point about the idea of uncleanness. The ancient Israelites believed it to be, in some sense, “contagious.” If you touch an unclean thing, that makes you unclean and then if someone touches you, they’re unclean, etc. We’ve been hitting the hand sanitizer hard these last few days, but in first century Israel the whole thing was about getting yourself cleansed ritually in a mikvah in order to preserve your purity. Bottom line is that if you didn’t want to get the virus of uncleanness, you just didn’t go where those people were. Call it the original “social distancing” strategy.
But notice that Jesus goes there anyway. A wild man comes running out of the tombs—a man so crazy and his actions so bizarre that, as Matthew’s Gospel tells us, nobody could pass that way. The man’s seeming insanity increased his strength to the point that no one could contain him. He was demon-possessed, isolated, and outcast.
It’s interesting to note what has happened during this most recent panic. I read an article on CNN’s web site this week about how the flu has brought out some of the latent racism of our culture as Mexicans and people of Hispanic descent are, in some places, being considered pariahs because the flu supposedly began south of the border. Countries are shutting off travel and commerce with Mexico, which threatens to further topple its already fragile economy.
What we don’t understand, we fear and what we fear, we tend to hate. The implications of that fear are all over this story. The Jews feared the pagan Romans who had conquered their land. The religious people feared the unclean Gentile people because they didn’t act properly and their disease of religious idolatry could be contagious. Everyone feared the man running wildly and dangerously through the tombs.
Everyone, that is, except Jesus. Read the Gospels enough and its pretty evident that there’s really nothing that scares Jesus. Now, you could argue that’s because he’s the Son of God and all, but I think there’s a different reason he’s not afraid. See, Jesus isn’t afraid because he’s got a larger vision for the world beyond himself.
Look at the previous context at the end of Mark 4. That’s the story of Jesus and the disciples crossing the Galilean lake in a boat that is nearly swamped by one of the storms that is common to that region. The disciples, even though they are experienced fishermen, are in an absolute panic. Now, surely, they had weathered other storms but in their groupthink they allow the terror to overtake them. So they wake up Jesus. “Don’t you care if we drown?” they ask.
But Jesus rebukes the wind—“Quiet! Be still!” The wind dies down. You’d expect that from someone who was the Creator God come in the flesh. All of creation is at his command. But Jesus doesn’t look impressed with himself here. Instead, he rebukes his disciples. “Why are you so afraid? Do you still have no faith?”
See, for Jesus the answer to fear isn’t all about knowing what to do, though that’s important. The disciples knew how to fish, how to pilot a boat in a storm. We know how to quell the spread of disease—washing our hands, covering our mouths when we cough or sneeze—we’ve been taught that since we were little. Yet even with all that knowledge, we still can become frozen with fear. The answer to fear is faith—faith in God, faith in the power of God to make us whole, faith that God is at work in the world, faith of the kind that sees God’s hand at work even in the midst of difficult times. In the midst of a viral storm, Jesus seems to be saying to us, “Quiet! Be still!” No need to panic when God is in your boat.
So when Jesus is confronted with this maniac demoniac, he doesn’t cower in fear. He moves right toward the problem. In this case it’s the violence of evil at work in this man. The term “Legion” that the demon gives its collective self is instructive here. After all, Legion was the name of the basic Roman fighting unit. There are those pagans again. This man is possessed by great powers, evil powers, powers that want to remain in the country and wreak havoc on the populace.
But the powers can’t stand up to Jesus—that much is clear. They beg Jesus for a new home—a home where they belong—with the pigs. The legion of demons enters a herd of swine nearby and causes them to throw themselves into the sea, which in biblical terms always seems to represent chaos and disorder. In effect Jesus takes all the fear, all the suspicion, and all the terror and puts it where it belongs—back into the realm of chaos.
Remember how the biblical narrative starts in Genesis? There is a formless void of watery chaos, but then God separates the sea from the land. God brings order out of chaos. And he does so with a word. With a word, Jesus brings order out of chaos and a man’s life is restored.
Even the pig herders got this. They ran back to town and told the story. The people came and saw the former maniac now clothed and in his right mind. But notice their response—they were afraid! And they begged Jesus to leave their region!
Fear is what keeps us wallowing with the pigs. Fear is what keeps us from seeing the truth. Fear is what drives us deeper and deeper into chaos.
And Jesus asks, “Why are you so afraid?”
This pandemic won’t be the last. The economy will rebound but will go through another down cycle at some point. We can watch the news and be gripped by fear for our lives and our livelihoods, or we can live as Jesus people—people who see these situations and other people as opportunities to serve and bring a message of hope.
Jesus told the man to go home and “tell them how much the Lord has done for you and how he has had mercy on you.” Jesus took his problem and gave it back to the pigs. Maybe that’s where our anxiety needs to go, too.
It’s important that we pray for those affected by the Swine Flu, but it’s important that we be praying for and in ministry with people who are sick every day, people who are crippled by fear, those who have been immersed in the chaos of life outside of a relationship with Christ. We can’t just make that a concern when there’s a crisis!
It’s perfectly OK to take precautions. That’s what we’re doing with church this Sunday. I think Jesus would concur with that. But we musn’t be willing to give into fear, now or at any time. As it says in 1 John 4:18, “Perfect love casts out fear.”
In the Year of the Pig, we need more than ever to turn our focus toward the Lamb of God—the one who takes away the sins of the world. The one whose perfect love can cast out all fear.
You've got to be kidding me. I can't believe they shut down churches. I wonder what they would have done had this occurred during Sundance?
Posted by: Chris Howlett | May 10, 2009 at 12:13 PM
By the way, nice sermon. Since you didn't get to preach it, I'll preach it in Lexington sometime. :)
Posted by: Chris Howlett | May 10, 2009 at 12:14 PM