The scene is painful to behold and hard to figure. It reminds me a little of Eugene Lowry, who said, I don't believe in the devil, . and furthermore I wish he would leave me alone! I would rather think the whole thing with a demon-possessed man is just a strange story that has nothing to do with us. Like the David Letterman top ten list that said you might be possessed if sparks fly out of your mouth when you hiccup or you don't need a rearview mirror to see the car behind you. But let's take a closer look and see if this isn't closer to home than we want to admit. [Thanks to Ann Bell for both of these sources.]BR>
Jesus and the boys disembark from their Sea of Galilee boat trip. The Lord has just had to order the winds and waves to stop misbehaving. Turns out he wasn't just a teacher, after all-someone to tell us how to cope with things beyond our control. He himself has power over things beyond our control-power to change things that control us.

Well, no sooner do they touch beach than here comes a man coming apart at the seams. He has lost control of himself; we don't know how. Spirits rip him apart body and soul. We see the effects. He is a city man, Luke says, but no more. Hard to have a social life when you can't keep your clothes on in public, don't you know?! He doesn't live in a house now; he sleeps among the dead. His body itself is like a tomb in which demons have made their home.

I have met this man before, or others like him. I have sat with a tearful husband who had just retrieved his wife, who had been walking around the neighborhood naked, talking about people and things he did not understand. She was out of her mind, we all agreed. She thought she was someone else, or more than one person from one moment to the next. I have been to the psychiatric ward and talked with a man I had once known, who seemed to have become someone else. Sometimes psych wards can feel like cemeteries. We send people like the man in the story there because we don't know what to do with them or how to help them. We don't want them to hurt themselves or others. We hope someone will do something for them. Drugs and counseling. Rest and recreation. Prayer and patience. Maybe slowly some remnant of the person we knew will return. Maybe he or she will come together again.

Mental illness is a mysterious and scary thing. In the wake Ronald Reagan's death we are more aware of the effects of Alzheimer's disease. How sad to think on Father's Day of sons and daughters who will look into the vacant eyes of one whose eyes used to dance with joy at the sight of his children! Mental illness is not all one bolt of cloth, but whether we are talking about a loss of mental capacity or depression or bipolar or schizophrenia or multiple personality disorder or any one of many diagnoses, there's a common coming apart at the seams. There are grades of mental illness, of course. Sometimes people function fairly well, even though they themselves feel the tearing apart going on. Hugo Wolf wrote of how his own chronic despair felt from the inside: To be sure I appear at times merry and in good heart, . and it looks as if I feel, too, God knows how, well within my skin. Yet the soul maintains its deathly sleep and the heart bleeds from a thousand wounds. [Quoted by Kay Redfield Jamison, An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness (Vintage, 1995), p. 39.]

Now, I am not equating the Gerasene demoniac in Luke with all those who suffer mental illness. I don't even know whether we would diagnose him mentally ill today instead of demon-possessed. But it's easy to imagine this man as a curiosity instead of a cousin. It's easy to write him off as having nothing to do with us, when the point might in fact be the opposite. If Jesus had the power to do something about the most extreme example of someone who had been written off by family and friends, someone who might have even written himself off, someone who was lost to everyone but God, maybe we ought to hear that some people we think are too far gone are not. Maybe we are not too far gone ourselves.

Drug and alcohol addiction is a kind of possession, isn't it? Something gets a power over us that separates us from our own will. We are not ourselves anymore. We have been taken over by a power that robs us of our freedom. The same is true when we have allowed other people to control us. When too many priorities compete with our sense of call and we get lost in the middle of it all, we are Legion. When we feel torn apart by the need to please others who would be happy to control us for their purposes, we cease to be ourselves, and we are renamed-like the Gerasene demoniac-by the army that has invaded us.

What is your name? Jesus asks the man. Legion, he says, for WE are many. The "many" aspect is what has often fascinated us about the demoniac, but there's something else here. Legion is a Roman military garrison of about 6,000 armed men. This is Gentile territory, and Luke wants us to know that Jesus will go anywhere to liberate those who are possessed by occupying powers. A country and its military forces that were warring within him possessed the man. You can even see that in the reaction of the swine herders. The swine into which Jesus cast the demons would have been used to feed the soldiers of that region. No wonder, then, that his healing did not thrill the people of that area. It's always the economy, stupid! The rule of money rules.

When you lose your freedom to act and feel that you are defined by what is outside of you, it is not outside of you at all; it is an occupying power. When you live worried about what others think of you, you are owned by the thoughts of others. That too is demonic. When generations of families are broken before they are even formed and people grow up never expecting to achieve anything, that is the demonic power of despair. When you internalize inferiority or superiority because you are black in a white culture or experience your own white privilege as a right, then either way you are occupied by a foreign and unholy power.

What can be done? Too often, we think, nothing. We look at parts of South Dallas and we think of it as a Gerasene cemetery where people something less than fully human wander about hurting themselves and others. We treat those areas like quarantine zones. Keep them away from us. Don't waste our money on improving their schools or streets or parks or neighborhoods. They are so far gone they can't be helped. They have come apart at the seams.

Yet we cannot believe this gospel for ourselves while denying it for others. God has given Jesus the power to bring together even those who are most torn apart. Jesus liberates us from unholy powers in order that we might have order return to us. Jesus' power brings together body and soul. Jesus' power brings together minds that have been divided and spirits torn asunder. Jesus' power brings together people who have been separated by all manner of divisiveness.

The deliverance from oppression and the freedom that results always and only comes from the power of Christ at work in us, even if good medicine and good counseling are means Christ uses. It usually doesn't happen as quickly as with this demoniac. C.S. Lewis says that miracles are simply compressed time. What God would do eventually in making all things new, God speeds up now. So if the healing of the demoniac means anything to us, it should mean there is a miracle for all us if we patiently wait upon Christ. None of us has come together perfectly yet, since our final redemption at the last day will be the complete coming together of all our being as God intended. But those of us, who have already known the power of Jesus to bring some measure of wholeness to our brokenness have received a new occupying power. The presence of Christ within us not only works for our healing; it calls for us to work for the liberation and healing of others.

This past year Wilshire has come together with a few other churches to begin a ministry of liberation with 3-and 4-year-old children in high-risk neighborhoods. FaithLEAP Dallas puts money and volunteers from resource churches into host churches that are located where the need is greatest. Studies have shown that first-graders not reading at grade level have only a one in ten chance of catching up. Those not reading at grade level by the third grade are unlikely to graduate from high school. One study has shown that adults born in poverty who participated in a high-quality active-learning preschool program at ages 3 and 4 have half as many criminal arrests, higher earnings and property wealth and greater commitment to their families. Isn't that important to us?

The LEAP curriculum (Language Enrichment Activities Program) is scientifically proven to improve test scores among poor children in otherwise chronically hopeless settings. The faith component is spiritually proven to transform lives. What a combination! But there are still some 9,000 children in Dallas County alone that are not being served by Head Start or DISD pre-K programs. What will become of them? Are we to consign them to lives of poverty and ignorance and hopelessness and crime? Would Jesus be content to leave them to roam among the tombs of their existence, isolated from the rest of us? Does Jesus' salvation power have anything to do with the coming together of such minds and bodies, such children and their families, such schools and churches, such communities rich and poor? Surely it does, or Jesus would never have gone to Gerasa and would never have healed the man and would never have sent him back to his family and his city. And Luke would not have felt the need to report on it to his church some 40 years later if it did not matter.

If you want to help with this effort, you can. If you want to pray for it or give toward it, great. This is what the church is about in the world: being the presence of Christ for others. The power to liberate and heal is not ours, but the One that is in us has the power to work miracles through us if we have the will.

Dallas Morning News columnist Steve Blow told the story the other day of an African-American teenager named Darnna Banks. She has graduated from Booker T. Washington High School and will attend the University of Hawaii in the fall to study to become a pediatrician. What's remarkable about her is her commitment to volunteerism. She has put in over 1,300 hours at Children's Medical Center. She learned from her mother, Wanda, the joy of volunteering. It all comes from the root volition, which means "will." When you are free to offer yourself willingly to those who need you, you participate in God's mission to the world. It's not just about you! her mother would say. Darnna got the message. Have you? [The Dallas Morning News (June 18, 2004): 1-2B.]

God's salvation is the coming together of heaven and earth, God and humanity, souls and bodies, powers visible and invisible, Jews and Gentiles, men and women, slave and free. But only Jesus has been granted the power to put the world together.

So with apologies to The Beatles: Come together right now, over him.