The essay question on the Shakespeare 101 test should have been easy.  What’s the difference between tragedy and comedy?  I filled many pages of a blue book with thoughtful, reasoned argument.  I got a “B”.  My friend who got an “A” said simply: “A comedy resolves itself in a positive way, a tragedy ends sadly.” 

I’ll never forget a Thursday study we had several years ago that was based on reading contemporary short stories and discussing important theological motifs within those stories.  One of the stories we read made me very angry and sad.  I started the discussion asking the group “So did you like the story?’ and one of the participants immediately said “I thought it was the funniest story I’ve read in a long time?”  Funny?  You thought that poor sad woman was funny?  Sure, didn’t you get this part and this part and this part?  It was hysterical.  She was right, she was absolutely right.  I had put on my serious reading lenses and I was taking all that was meant to be light and humorous as if it was infinitely important and I had missed the point entirely.

Sometimes I think we do that with the Bible.  We put on our serious lenses and read every incident with the same weighty, dour perspective.  The gospel is ultimately comedy, ultimately it is all informed by the resurrection—it is hopeful and joyful and gracious.  Yes, there is tragedy—we get to the resurrection through the cross and there is the tragedy of brokenness and pain and hunger and we can’t disregard any of that but the story doesn’t end there.

Take our gospel lesson for today—this is just a great story, definitely one of my favorites.  There is so much to this incident; it is like a gem with a hundred facets.  Now I could preach, and honestly I have preached on any number of things that are truly a part of this gospel:

I have done sermons about demons and how they are very real even in our world today; the demons of anger, obsession, depression, addiction, bitterness and fear.

I could preach about Jesus going to a Gentile place; a place that is ‘other’ than us

I could preach about how Jesus walks right in to a situation that everybody else defined as horribly unclean.  Tombs were unclean, swine were unclean, naked men were unclean—and yet Jesus just waltzes right into the midst of all this uncleanliness and makes himself unclean as well. 

I never preached on the political implications of a demon that is called “Legion”—the name for a battalion of Roman soldiers but some day I might. 

I’ve never preached on Jesus complete disregard for the economics of the Galilean pork producers as they watch their livelihood fall headlong off a cliff—and I probably will never preach on that. 

Now all of those are valid topics to explore.  But just for today let’s take off our pious Bible lenses and consider the comedy here.  After a terrible night of storms on the Sea of Galilee that Jesus had to rouse himself to quiet, Jesus and the disciples land at the country of the Garasenes.  We can’t identify that place today so maybe it’s enough to know that it was a gentile land.  No sooner does Jesus set his foot on land than he’s accosted by a naked man living in the cemetery.  (Think shades of Monty Python.)  Jesus doesn’t mess around, he instantly commands the unclean spirit to come out, but the spirit, who already knows who Jesus is and knows his name starts to negotiate.  The spirit has taken over the man.  (Think shades of “Men in black”)  Jesus asks his name and he replies “legion” conjuring up not one spirit seeking a host in this poor man but hundreds maybe thousands.

Now the really bizarre part.  The demons already recognize Jesus superior power and know that they are defeated but they see a herd of pigs and ask to enter them.  Jesus is wilier than they are because he lets them enter the pigs and then sends the herd headlong into the ocean.  (Think shades of Beetlejuice)  Those who are charged with the care of the pigs immediately head into town to tell everyone, probably so they won’t get blamed.  And when the townspeople come out they see this man, who in the past, they had to chain and shackle sitting at Jesus feet clothed and in his right mind.  The crazy man is completely sane.

I’m not sure we can say the same for the townspeople.  Now I’ll allow they would be surprised and a little shocked but shouldn’t they sometime have come around and been happy for the man who was lost but now is found.  Isn’t there any joy?  Are these folks so stuck in tragedy that they can’t allow for comedy, for grace?  Wouldn’t they want to congratulate the poor man and celebrate with him just a bit?  Instead we’re told they were afraid, so afraid they ask Jesus to leave.  After all if Jesus can do this what else can he do?  It is scary to have him around.  So without much ceremony Jesus prepares to leave. 

But before he does another odd thing happens.  The former possessed man begs to go with him.  Now just for a minute think of all the people Jesus has invited to “follow me.”  Start with the twelve, add Martha of Mary and Martha fame, the rich young ruler, Nicodemus, Zachius and on and on.  This poor man is asking, begging to go with and Jesus sends him back saying “return to your home and declare how much God has done for you.” 

Apparently, despite their lack of hospitality, Jesus hasn’t written off the Geresenes either because he sends them a living witness to the grace of God.  Think about it, if crazy, now sane man had followed Jesus in two three weeks the people would have forgotten.  Tales would grow up about how he wasn’t really healed, They’d say, maybe he had a momentary respite but I swear I saw the crazy man in Capernaum.  Tales would be told of Jesus kidnapping him and making him a slave.  But if those same people had to see the crazy man whole and healthy each and every day giving thanks to God then maybe they’d have to open themselves to the possibility of the grace of God and that can be life changing. 

The crazy/sane man might have dreamed of following Jesus, to hear him teach the crowds, to see him heal others. Maybe someday to write a gospel but he had more important work to do.  Jesus wanted him to go back and testify to the one thing that would make sense of all the other things in his life, the love and grace and mercy of God. 

This isn’t simply the story of one person’s healing.  Luke writes this story so that we will catch a glimpse of the grace that holds our lives together.  God comes to us in our conflict and confusion and offers us a sense of purpose.  Our name doesn’t have to be legion; we can be “Christian”.

It’s an evil spirit that destroys the hope of a single purpose by pulling us in a thousand directions.  We have such divided loyalties.  We want this and that and the other thing. 
We constantly have to choose between work and home, this commitment and that one, helping others and taking a break, what we want to do and what we need to do. 

The psychologist Sam Keen who was popular a number of years ago for giving men a voice to their feelings by retreating them and making them talk wrote in his own personal journal:  “there are so many lives I want to live, so many styles I would like to inhabit.  In me sleeps Zorba the Greek’s concern to allow no woman to remain comfortless.  (Here I am Lord, send me.) Camus’s passion to lessen the suffering of the innocent, earnest Hemmingway’s  drive to live and write with lucidity and the unheroic desire to see each day end with tranquility and a shared cup of tea.  I am so many, yet I may be only one, I mourn for all the selves I kill when I decide to be a single person.  Decision is a cutting off.  I travel one path only by neglecting many.  So I turn my back on villages I will never see, strange flesh I will never touch, ills I will never cure and I choose to be in the world as a husband and father. 

Life calls us in a lot of different directions, to a lot of different purposes and sometimes it’s hard to know what direction to go. 

In C.S. Lewis Screwtape Letters, the older demon Screwtape suggests to his nephew Wormwood that the way to ruin people is to make them think of Christianity as another part of their lives, rather than as the central focus:  “Nurse him on to the stage at which religion is only a Part of his life.  Once you have made the world an end, and faith only a means, you have almost won, and it makes very little difference what kind of worldy end he is pursuing.”  The demon wormwood has gotten to most of us.  We set our sights on a dozen different pursuits.  It’s hard for us to say, “This one thing I choose.”

God offers the grace that will hold our lives together.  If we center our lives in grace then love becomes the criteria by which we choose.  If we let God, then God will make grace the stack pole around which everything else gathers. 

So Jesus commissions the crazy/sane man to return.  And he does, bearing witness with his new life and our comedy ends with a positive resolution. 

Amen