** Since this blog was posted in July ’22, it has been accessed (read?) hundreds of times – a far greater access than any other posts on this website – from numerous countries all over the world. Even today, it gets one or two views almost every day. I’d very much like to know why. Are you real human readers? If so, what do you all have in common, and what is your particular interest in this article? Or is this some kind of electronic ‘bot’ phenomenon? What is the story? If you are reading this, please respond in the ‘Leave a Comment’ box at the bottom of the page. I will be very grateful for your feedback, thank you. (Editor … St Francis Webguy)
What kinds of habits do you own to? Don’t you find life is muchly governed by habits, predilections, assumptions and preconceived ideas?
It occurred to me that when drinking tea I always leave the last millilitres at the bottom of the cup, and I wondered why, when a coffee cup usually gets drained. The answer was obvious when I thought about it. My early tea drinking experiences were from teapots, when the bottom mouthful was always full of off-putting tea leaves. Now, well into the twenty first century, tea bags protect us from tea leaves so they no longer populate the last mils: one can drain the cup. But, one doesn’t. Well … this one doesn’t. He’s developed a sacred, irrational habit.
It is said that habits are hard to break. Get rid of the ‘h’ and you’ve still got ‘abit’. Get rid of the ‘a’ and the ‘bit’ is still there. Get rid of the ‘b’ and … what? You’ve still got ‘it’!
Don’t think there are any easy solutions. I bring problems, not solutions.
Breaking habits take commitment and discipline, of course, but even before that – awareness. You have to recognise a habit before you can can it. Be aware that it even exists. Then you have to desire change. Only then the application of commitment and discipline and determination and all those habit-busting things.
No. No easy solutions. But here’s a story (maybe apocryphal, maybe not) that illustrates the problem, and the ridiculousness of some habits. And the need for awareness; and may even have something to say about religious practices and traditions. And the sacred habits of tea drinking.
Once upon a time there was a monastery in Tibet. The monks in the monastery meditated from dawn to dusk. One day it so happened that a cat wandered into the monastery and disturbed the monks. The head monk instructed that the cat be caught and tied to the banyan tree until dusk. He also ruled that every day, to avoid interruption during meditation, the cat be tied to the banyan tree. So it became a daily practice, a tradition in the monastery. To catch the cat and tie it to the banyan tree before the day’s ceremonies commenced. The cat remained tied to the banyan tree as long as the monks meditated. The tradition continued. One day the head monk died. As per tradition the next senior-most monk was chosen to succeed him, and all other traditions, including the banyan tree custom, were continued. One day the cat died. The whole monastery plunged into panic. A committee was formed to find a solution and it was unanimously decided that a cat be bought immediately from the nearby market and tied to the tree before starting the meditation the next day.
In time, the tree also died, and was replaced.
The tradition is followed in the monastery even today, and, centuries later, learned descendants of the spiritual teachers have written scholarly treatises about the religious significance of tying up cats for meditation ceremonies.
A recent post on Franciscan theologian Richard Rohr’s daily blog featured guest writer Diana Butler Bass, an American author and explorer of divine spirituality. She says that over recent years she has had to respond many times to the question, “Why do you stay Christian?” She says she knew many fancy answers but in the end “it’s because of Jesus”.
That might seem the perfectly simple answer to some or even many of you. “Of course it’s Jesus,” you might say, and so might I – but I then found myself thinking about who Jesus has been for me over my lifetime of Christian experience, and today.
In her recent book Freeing Jesus, Bass suggests that our relationship with Jesus is a “dynamic opportunity to see God and ourselves perpetually anew”. Jesus has not stayed the same for her through her whole life’s journey. And, while open to understanding that a verse in Hebrews says, “Jesus Christ is the same, yesterday, today, and forever”, she herself hasn’t stayed the same yesterday, today, and forever. Neither has the church or the world stayed the same yesterday, today, and forever.
The ‘who Jesus is to me?’ question arises especially in this encounter we have in today’s passage from Luke. It’s a familiar passage but this time my very first reaction on reading it had me wondering if Jesus had got out of bed on the wrong side that day!
Another source just starts: “That Jesus: he can be quite enigmatic.”
When his disciples ask if they should command fire to come down from heaven and consume unbelievers, he sternly tells them, “No.” A village does not welcome him, and he simply moves on to another village.
A convert says she will follow him, “wherever you may go,” and he replies, “Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests.” He invites a stranger to follow him, and that one replies, “First let me go and bury my father”— and Jesus says, “Let the dead bury their own dead.” And another asks simply to say farewell to his loved ones. To this one, Jesus says, “No one who puts a hand to plough and looks back is fit for the kingdom of heaven.”
You have to say it does read rather like a litany of crankiness/grouchiness. Or it could be looked at this way: Jesus reprimands James and John for wanting to resort to retaliation or violence as a response to inhospitality, and he avoids conflict by simply moving on from an uncomfortable situation. The next three interactions could be picked apart and analysed forever – and no doubt have been – but we can’t deny that Jesus appears to be saying something like: “If you wish to follow me, you must drop everything and everyone in your life. Just give up everything and follow me.”
And just where is he leading? To Jerusalem, as it says in this passage, “to be taken up.” To his betrayal, crucifixion, and death.
How do we hear this? Can our Jesus be ordering us to put aside our livelihoods, our relationships, and to abandon our property in order to enter into pain, suffering, and the very jaws of death?
That might depend now on whether you see Jesus as someone to worship or someone to follow. Nothing new here, both have their supporters, both are traditional. But, for today, let’s consider the possibility that Jesus is asking us to follow him. Because, if we were only to worship him, we might be expecting him to save us from trials, to rescue us from danger, to keep us from harm. That’s what an omnipotent God should do, right? That’s how the Almighty really ought to treat those he loves and who worship him.
And that’s exactly the problem if we make Jesus a mere religious focus, instead of a journey toward union with God.
Richard Rohr provides an insight here, telling us that the shift over time — from following Jesus to worshipping him — made us become a religion of “belonging and believing” instead of a religion of transformation. A religion of belonging and believing is concerned about who’s in and who’s out, about what specific doctrine people subscribe to, and about how they support the institution called the church.
A religion of transformation, on the other hand, focuses on change. Changing ourselves into more and more of whom God is calling each of us to be, and changing the world around us into a more hospitable place for all of God’s creatures.
This way Jesus calls us to is much harder work. We might be like Elisha and ask for a double share of Elijah’s spirit. We might wait around for the whirlwind to pull us into heaven. And we might hope for divine power to part the waters before us. Or, we can settle down and do the work given to us: to share love, to spread joy, to wage peace, to foster patience, to nurture kindness, to exhibit generosity, to seek faithfulness, to cultivate gentleness, and to strive for better self-control.
As Paul writes to the churches in Galatia , we are “called to freedom” and this freedom comes by leaving things behind. Maybe not every possession, maybe not every relationship, maybe not every thing and everyone — but certainly we are called to leave behind what Paul calls “the works of the flesh”. To leave behind anger and quarrels. To leave behind dissensions and factions.
Jesus’s promise to all of us — that we will be inheritors of the kingdom of heaven: this does not promise us avoiding all difficulties in this life. The spiritual life is not one without pain, without suffering, without challenge. This is what it is to follow Jesus, rather than just worship him. To accept our baptismal calling to become dead to sin and raised to new life. To seek, by word and example, to do justice, to love mercy, and to walk humbly — following our God on the same path. This path that may lead us directly into whirlwinds or even through the valley of the shadow of death.
But never on our own. “I am with you,” Jesus promises. This path can and will leave a world behind us a little better, a little kinder, and a little safer. The path can and will leave us stronger, more spiritually fit, and better able to cope with whatever lies ahead.
If we truly follow Jesus, we have an amazing trailblazer ahead of us. One who set his face towards Jerusalem. One who never repaid anyone evil for evil. One who forgives and expects us to do likewise. One who requires only love — for others, for God.
Disability Awareness Sunday and Te Pouhere Sunday (highlighting the three Tikanga (cultural streams) of the Anglican Church in Aotearoa New Zealand and Polynesia) are celebrated today. From being ‘them and us’, to being ‘us together’, weaves together Te Pouhere and Disability Awareness through becoming united in our diversity. Our differences can strengthen our communities. Differences can divide and separate us as people, causing misunderstanding and hurt. How then do we stop differences separating us and start to celebrate diversity as a strength, we are asked?
And so, responding to this, we come to this gospel reading, which is one that has troubled me over the years and left me with more questions than answers. I remember us going over this at length during our Luke in Lockdown series, so today I bring you this thought provoking response from our Christian sister, Debie Thomas:
The Demoniac, 1811 George Dawe (1781 – 1829)
He haunts the places of the dead. Every night, the townspeople hear him, shrieking among the tombs. When they’re quick enough, they catch him, wrap his wrists and ankles in chains, and haul his naked body — securely shackled — back to town. But there’s no containing the crazy; he escapes each time. Trailing broken chains behind him, he wanders the wilds, tearing at his skin until it bleeds, trading one kind of pain for another. If he has a name, no one knows it. If he has a history, no one remembers it. If he has a soul worth saving inside his living corpse, no one sees it. No one looks.
Until Jesus does.
The story of the ‘Gerasene demoniac’ is a tough one for us 21st Century Christians to enter into, because it’s full of details we find bizarre. Chatty demons? Suicidal swine? Instantaneous healing? Isn’t this the stuff of black comedy? Or horror? And just how is an ancient exorcism story ‘Good News’ for us?
I know that much ink has been spilt in recent decades trying to address what Christians of today find archaic and troubling about this story: Was the man really possessed by demons, or “just” mentally ill? Isn’t there a danger involved in merging acute psychological suffering with evil? If the demons were real, why did Jesus negotiate with them? Why did he even show them mercy? And what about those poor pigs?! Why did they have to die to secure the demoniac’s healing? Didn’t Jesus care about them? Or about the economic welfare of the pig-herding townspeople who watched in horror as their livelihood disappeared over a cliff?
These are valuable questions, and I don’t mean to dismiss them. But I worry that focusing on the stranger parts of the story prevents us from seeing how it can be our story, a story of our here and now
First, I think the story is our story because it begins precisely where we ourselves need to begin, and that is with a question. “What is your name?” Jesus asks when he first encounters the possessed man by the lake. Remember, the man approaches Jesus, not to ask for help, but to push Jesus away. Maybe to scare Jesus away. In all likelihood, his approach is violent and feral. But Jesus asks for a name anyway, and by doing so, he begins to recall the broken man to himself. To his humanity, to his beginnings. To his unique and precious identity as a child beloved of God.
What is your name? Has there ever been a more loving, searching question? What would happen if you allowed Jesus to ask it of you? What would happen if you asked it of others? Who are you? Who are you, really? Beneath the labels and the diagnoses, the pretence and the piety, the fear and the shame? Who are you when no one in this world is looking? What name do you yearn to be called in the lonely stretches of the night? Who were you before you lost yourself? Before something vital in you died? Do you even remember?
Jesus begins where we must begin. With an honest questioning and naming of ourselves. Can we allow him to search us so deeply? Can we hear him asking the tender and intolerable question: What is your name?
Second, I believe the story is our story because it tells us the unflinching truth about our condition. “Legion,” the man says in response to Jesus’s question. My name is Legion. A multitude. A vast host. An incalculable swarm. Why? Because (Luke’s Gospel tells us) “many demons” torment him. In other words, the sources of his brokenness are myriad. The assault on his mind, soul, and body is multi-pronged; it comes from many sources braided together.
Perhaps it doesn’t matter how we choose to explain these “demons”. Regardless of what language we use (Biblical, theological, medical, sociological), what we know for sure is that the man’s condition strips him of sanity, dignity, and community. It keeps him in isolation. It renders him anonymous. It encourages him to mutilate his own body. It deadens his soul and divides his mind. In short, it deprives him of self-control, and propels him towards self-destruction.
Does any of this sound familiar? The truth is, what ails us as human beings is Legion. The evil that haunts us has many faces, many names. We are all — every one of us — vulnerable to forces that seek to take us over, to bind our mouths, to take away our true names, and to separate us from God and from each other.
Some of us suffer from depression or anxiety. Some of us are addicted to sex, alcohol, wealth, or thinness. Some of us are slaves to the internet, or prone to bitterness, or caught up in cycles of dishonesty, or in lust with our own rightness. Some of us can’t shake traumatic memories. Some of us were abused as children. Some of us are seething with jealousy. Some of us are imprisoned within systems of injustice that stretch back so many centuries, we can’t imagine liberation. Some of us experience our skin colours, our accents, our genders, or our sexualities as magnets for other people’s hatred. Some of us know exactly what St. Paul is talking about when he says, “What I want to do ….I do not do, but what I hate… I do.”
If we expand the definition of “possession” to include everything that conspires to keep us dead when God wants us alive, then the story of the Gerasene demoniac is not an ancient oddity. It is the air we breathe. The zeitgeist (the defining spirit or mood) we inhabit. It is the pandemic of our time.
That’s the bad news. But it’s not where the story ends. The third reason I consider the story “our story” is because it tells us exactly where salvation lies, and it does so without hesitation or apology. When the demoniac sees Jesus, he falls down before him. When the townspeople come running to see what’s going on, they find the man “sitting at the feet of Jesus, clothed and in his right mind.” Salvation, in other words, lies at the feet of Jesus. It lies in surrendering to the one who alone has the power to cast out the horrors which torment us. This is not because Jesus is an arrogant megalomaniac. It’s because evil in all of its incarnations finds him terrifying. It’s because there is no death-dealing power in this universe that can withstand the saving, healing, resurrecting power of Jesus. It’s because even the most destructive demons we can conjure up beg for mercy when he comes to town.
Our hope is grounded in what Jesus has done … in the power he has already demonstrated. And it means we have every reason to share this Good News, as did the healed man, with confidence.
If only we could stop there. But Luke goes one step further in this Gospel account of the Gerasene demoniac, so we must, too. The fourth reason to embrace this story as our own is because it illustrates an unpleasant truth about human relationships. When the townspeople see that the demon-possessed man is healed, they don’t rejoice. They express no relief, no gratitude, no hospitality, no awe. Instead, they recoil in fear, and beg Jesus to go away. What does this mean? Maybe it means we humans prefer to stick with demons we know, rather than embrace freedoms we don’t. Maybe it means the shackles and chains that bind so many of God’s children are the instruments of our own cruel making, the weapons we wield to manage our own fears. Maybe it means we settle for tolerance instead of challenging ourselves to love. Maybe it means the Gospel doesn’t always bring peace — it also brings upheaval, messing with our moral categories, economic comforts, and social structures in ways we find offensive. Maybe it means resurrection sometimes comes along and kicks our butts so hard we ask Jesus to leave us alone — because we’d so much rather stay dead.
The story ends with Jesus commissioning the healed man to stay where he is and serve as the first missionary to his townspeople — the same townspeople who feared, shunned, trapped, and shackled him for years. I have to admit, this detail makes me laugh, albeit ruefully. Isn’t this just like Jesus? To choose the very people we consider the most unholy, the most unredeemable, the most repulsive and unworthy — and commission them to teach us the Gospel? THAT is God all over.
Here then is a story about our truest names. Here is a story about resistance and resurrection. Here is a story about the Jesus who finds us all naked among the tombs, clothes us with dignity, scatters the demons to save our souls, and turns us all into storytellers who will help heal the world. There is no ‘them or us’. This is OUR story.
Ok, here’s a new look at current social discourse.
Does the phrase paradigm shift mean anything to you? It means a shift of paradigm, obviously. Got that? No, probably not.
Thomas Kuhn
So, what’s a paradigm? Not easy to define; especially since the word was hijacked by science historian and philosopher Thomas Kuhn around 1960 to describe a deeply established mindset of scientific thought. It served him to describe how all science is based for a time on a defined, agreed body of knowledge and belief and practice until … along comes another body of knowledge and belief and practice which replaces (or subsumes) the former: the first paradigm changes (shifts) to the new paradigm. It’s “a profound change in a fundamental model or perception of events”, according to Wikipedia. The classic example is the way Science’s total embrace of Newtonian Physics (after the late 1600s) shifted to embracing Quantum Physics after the work of people like Rutherford, Bohr, Planck and Einstein in the early 1900s. Or the way the early belief that the earth was the centre of the universe shifted to the radical new idea that the earth actually revolved around the sun (a la Copernicus and Galileo). Or the way evolutionary theory replaced creation theory in not just scientific thought but also in the global public mindset.
The phrase then migrated out of science to use in any field or discipline where huge change of thought or attitude or mindset was identified. Notably in the fields of psychology, philosophy, economics, linguistics and medicine. (A huge paradigm shift occurred in medicine in the 1800s from ‘miasma’ theory to germ theory, as the basis of disease).
Max Planck
My point, and I do have one (quoting Ellen de Generis, 2007), is that we can all get caught up in one paradigm or another, one which may or may not have good foundation; and change from one to another is very difficult. Paradigm shift usually takes time, because proponents of the old are very reluctant to let go, to embrace the new. Max Planck, really the founder of quantum mechanics, wrote in the early 20th century, “A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it”! A truism that has been re-framed to “Science progresses one funeral at a time”.
We all hold to our own paradigms, don’t we? We subscribe to the Christian paradigm or the Islamic one. Or atheism. We are pro-abortion or pro-choice (a paradigm shift which is taking place in America this very month). There used to be a strong anti-gay paradigm; now the paradigm (and it’s taken a while to shift) is strongly pro-LGBTQ+. The same could be said of current pakeha uptake of Māori culture and language. Or to be vax-compliant or not.
And, always, some of us are zealots and some of us are … less zealoty.
Which paradigms do you hold to? And how resistant to ‘shift’ are you? What would it take to overcome the old, to embrace a completely new paradigm? I am persuaded that which paradigm you cling to directly correlates to which culture group or Facebook feed or public discourse you identify with – what echo chamber you belong to! And I’m not saying you need to change, or should change. But it is wise to be aware of the psychologies that tend to hold you fixed in one paradigmatic mindset, resistant, and not open to radical beneficial change.
stfrancischurchtairuanz 