Sunday, June 22, 2025, Second Sunday after Pentecost

“Up from the Tombs”

Psalm 4:1-8; Isaiah 65:1-9; Galatians 3:23 -4:7; Luke 8:26-39

Order of Holy Matins

Hymns: #761 “Rock of Ages, Cleft for Me; #697 “Awake, O Sleeper, Rise from Death”; #935 “Tell Out, My Soul, the Greatness of the Lord”; #526 “You Are the Way, Through You Alone”

Dear Friends in Christ, 

     Grace, mercy, and peace to you, from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus. Amen.

     I’ll warn you today from the get-go, the story in our Gospel reading today is just plain nuts. Imagine those poor disciples standing there and watching all this, speechless and dumbfounded and frightened out of their minds. We like things to be “normal,” with solid ground beneath our feet, and everything we see to be just what we see. The idea that there’s an unseen, supernatural, spiritual world that we can sometimes feel but never see - that the angels and demons, the good angels and bad, are battling it out all around us, that there really are “spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms,” as St. Paul says - is disconcerting and frightening and a subject most of would honestly rather avoid.

     But “spiritual warfare” is a real thing. There’s a real heaven and a real hell, good angels and bad ones, all as real as real can be. Satan is real, a genuine fallen angel, and Jesus even calls him “the prince of this world.” The devil has been “cast down to earth, knowing he has but little time”, the book of Revelation says. And the spiritual battle going on is for possession of our souls. To accept what the Bible says as truth, to believe what Jesus says and live in the Christian faith, we simply have to believe in the existence of that unseen, supernatural, spiritual world, or nothing the Bible says makes any sense. So come along for the ride! Our Gospel this morning reading has it all - demons and evil spirits that can enter a man’s poor soul and ruin it, a Gentile lakeshore with a herd of pigs, and a Son of God from heaven who has supernatural power over every evil thing.

     Jesus and His disciples “sailed to the region of the Gerasenes, which is across the lake from Galilee.” The Gerasenes was Gentile country; so the disciples must have been wondering, “Jesus, what in the world are we doing here?” The answer, we’ll discover, is that He went there for the sake of one poor, suffering man; and also for the sake of the people that man would one day reach with the Good News about what Jesus had done for him.

     “When Jesus stepped ashore, He was met by a demon-possessed man from the town. For a long time this man had not worn clothes or lived in a house, but had lived in the tombs.” Let’s call him the “Tomb Guy.” He’d come to be possessed, somehow, by evil spirits. What exactly those were, the nature of them, is hard to tell. When Satan was cast down from heaven, one third of heaven’s angels joined in his rebellion and were cast down with him; the devil has a lot of help. Evil spirits come in many forms, and manifest themselves in many different ways - spiritually, mentally, physically, in addictions and destructive habits, in wrong-headed ideas and religious cults, in false teaching and twisted ideologies. Watch the news for a few minutes, and it isn’t hard to see what the devil is up to, or to see what people are capable of when the devil talks in their ears and gets into their souls.

     The “Tomb Guy” was crazy - out of his head, homeless, running around naked, scaring people, out of control; nobody knew what to do with him. Our jails and the streets of our cities are full of seemingly “hopeless” people like him. When the poor man saw Jesus, he cried out and fell at His feet. But when he cried out, it wasn’t him crying, but those demons who controlled him. He (or they) shouted, using his voice, "What do you want with me, Jesus, Son of the Most High God? I beg you, don't torture me!" 

     Can you imagine the disciples, standing there watching all this? Not knowing why they were stopping in a place like this in the first place - and then here comes this crazy man, screaming at them, and everything starts happening all at once. The Tomb Guy saw Jesus, and the demons inside him knew exactly who Jesus was - the “Son of the Most High God.” The devil knows when he’s overmatched; he’s only a fallen angel, after all. He wants to fool us into thinking he’s a match for God, but he knows he’s not. The demons cry out to Jesus, “I beg of You, don’t torment me!” What is it that torments the devil? What hurts him most of all? The Truth! God’s Word! The devil’s kingdom is built on lies, and the devil can’t stand the truth, because it brings his kingdom, his house of cards, down to the ground. “At the name of Jesus, the devil has to flee.” The end of his kingdom has stepped onto the Gerasene shore.

     Jesus had commanded, ordered, the evil spirit (or spirits, whatever the awful thing was) to come out of the man and be gone. This poor man would often be seized by whatever it was that had gotten hold of him. They’d put him in chains, lock him up, put him in jail, but they couldn’t build a jail strong enough to hold him. He’d break the chains, off would come the clothes, and back into the wilderness he’d go, a danger to himself and to the health and safety of anyone who crossed his path. I saw one of those Live PD cop shows where a man was on meth and who knows what else, and they tazed him four times, and it didn’t faze him at all; he just kept on coming. It took a dozen officers to wrestle him to the ground. “It was like he had superhuman strength,” they said.

     Jesus asked him, “What is your name?” The man didn’t, or couldn’t answer for himself, because it wasn’t him talking anymore, but whatever had gotten hold of him. The demons answered, “We are legion.” How many is a legion? Just as a reference, a typical Roman legion had four or five thousand men. Once a demon moves in, he invites all his friends, a flash-mob of demons, all come to live in that poor man – until whoever he was or used to be was in there somewhere, but didn’t have a voice or a say in things anymore. (A good thing to remember in mercy, when you’re watching the news or one of those shows).

     Now the story, the whole event, just goes to a whole ‘nother level of crazy. We know this was Gentile territory because of the presence of the pigs. For the Jews, pigs were unclean; they were forbidden to eat the flesh of pigs or touch them or keep them. (You remember the story of another poor boy, a Jewish boy, a prodigal son, whose life had been reduced to wallowing in a pigpen). The pigs are appropriate here though; it seems right somehow that unclean spirits should be sent into unclean pigs. (But I can’t help feeling a little sorry for the pigs whenever I read this story).

     Again, the story is just insane! The demons rush off into the pigs, and the pigs rush down the bank and drown themselves in the sea. Astonishing! We’re not told where the demons went after that or what became of them. Back to hell maybe, back to the pit, back to the Abyss where they’d come from, one would hope, where they couldn’t hurt anybody anymore; the Gospel doesn’t say.

     When those tending the pigs saw what had happened, they ran home to tell everyone about it. They were astonished, confused, and confounded at what they’d just witnessed; and they were going to have to explain what happened to the pigs they were supposed to be looking after.And the people went out to see if the pig herder’s story was true. And when they came to Jesus, sure enough, there were the pigs floating dead in the lake, and the demons that had tormented the Tomb Guy were gone. He’d been incorrigible, untamable, out of his mind crazy, scaring everyone half to death. And now here he was, sitting at Jesus’ feet - calm, coherent, and at peace, with all his clothes back on. And that made them afraid.

     All that “angels and demons” stuff, all the supernatural things, all those spirits we can’t see, are frightening. It makes you feel small and powerless, to realize that a world of unseen things is really there. The Tomb Guy, against all odds, by some miracle, was suddenly himself again, for all of them to see. “Then all the people of the region of the Gerasenes asked Jesus to leave them, because they were overcome with fear. So He got into the boat and left.” 

     When we come face to face with such things - when the devil shows himself in some evil way; and then when God opens up and does some mighty miracle and shows His power over evil things - we can either accept in faith what we can’t understand and praise God for it; or do what these Gerasenes did, and reject what our own eyes have seen and send Jesus on His way. Like Ebenezer Scrooge waking up after his walk with the Ghost of Christmas Past and saying, “Bah! Just a bit of undigested beef!”

     There is a spiritual world that none of us can see. There is a real and terrible devil, Satan or Lucifer by name. There are good angels and bad ones, active in the world. God the Father Himself is a Spirit, whom “no one has seen or can see.” The Holy Spirit is invisible as the wind, until He comes to move things. Jesus our Lord is God taken on human flesh, with a power in Him we can’t begin to understand. And He loves us and cares for us and “delivers us from evil.” Our ultimate deliverance from evil has come by the cross, and by the astounding, supernatural miracle of the Resurrection. We’ve been saved not by what anything in this world can do for us, but by a heavenly out-of-this-world intervention, and by a miracle of God’s holy grace.

     Without coming to grips with the fact that there are truly “spiritual forces in the heavenly realms,” and a Holy Spirit of love and truth with the power to overcome them all - whatever faith is left after rejecting those things would be hollow and shallow and empty and not of much use. Our Christian faith is by nature spiritual and sacramental. And faith itself is a supernatural thing. “My kingdom is not of this world,” Jesus said. Jesus took on the devil in the wilderness with nothing but the truth and the Word of God; and gave the Tomb Guy back his life with nothing but a Word. And that’s all we need as well, to win the spiritual battle for our souls that all of us are in. Save us, O Lord, by Your Word of truth.

     The Tomb Guy, now free of the spiritual tomb he’d been living in, wanted to climb in the boat with Jesus and sail away with Him; who wouldn’t? But Jesus had another purpose for him - the purpose Jesus had in coming to a Gentile land of pigs in the first place. It wasn’t just the Tomb Guy he was after, after all; it was also his family and his neighbors and his friends. What better witness can there be to Jesus, than someone “who once was lost, but now is found?” Someone who knows what life was like in those awful tombs, and now knows the joy of being freed from them? Someone who was dead in their sins, but now by the grace of God is alive again?

     “Return home and tell how much God has done for you,” Jesus told him. O Lord, I’d rather go to Borneo or the Philippines, than preach the Gospel in my own hometown.

I’d rather preach to a room full of strangers, than to that crowd around my own family table. But we, if we’re faithful, go where the good Lord sends us.

     “What great things God has done for me!” the old hymn says. Jesus rescued the Tomb Guy from his life among the tombs. And the Tomb Guy is all of us, or at least it was - dead in sin, living in the shadow of death, without a hope in the world. But now we’ve been redeemed – bought back from the graveyard, brought up from the dark places our sin had taken us, to this life of forgiveness and grace and joy. Jesus told that man to go home and tell everyone how God had blessed him; may we in our joy now do the same. In Jesus’ name; Amen.