When Pigs Fly (Luke 8:26 - 39)

     Jerry was an ad man.  A darned good one, if he did say so himself, which he often did.  To be a darned good ad man—which, don't you know, Jerry was—you had to have a lot of smarts, a lot of ego and, most of all, a lot of self-confidence.  You had to know that the campaign you pitched to your boss’s toothpaste client was the best darn toothpaste campaign there ever was, guaranteed to sell more toothpaste than any other campaign in the history of toothpaste ads and make the client oodles of money, and heap praise and adulation—not to mention a big fat raise—upon whoever thought it up.

Jerry had self-confidence to spare.  Until, that is, he didn't.  Until one day Dan—who was the head of the agency everybody called “Big Dan”—invited him into his office and introduced him to a brand new, wet behind the ears and very young associate. “Jerry,” Dan said, “Meet Sebastian.”  The two men shook hands.  Draping an arm over the older man’s shoulder, he said to Sebastian: “This is Jerry Sommers, the man behind the Kooky Kola Care Bear ads.”  Jerry smiled modestly—the Kooky Kola Care Bear ads had sold more Kooky Kola that year than ever before—or since—not to mention what it did for Care Bears.  The TV spots, especially, were clever, funny, and so sweet it made your teeth hurt—kind of like Kooky Kola itself—and they’d won five industry awards and made everybody a bundle of  money.

But the newcomer didn't seem impressed at all; he just stared at Jerry with dead-fish eyes and said “Wow.”  Big Dan didn't seem to notice: “Sebastian here was top of his class at Harvard, and I managed to scoop him up before anybody else.  I'd like you to show him around, show him the ropes.  Who knows?  Maybe some of that old Sommers magic will rub off.”  Sebastian smirked and said “I can hardly wait.”  Big Dan laughed uproariously—was it too uproarious? Jerry thought—and ushered them out of his office.

No sooner were they through the door and into the cubicle farm inhabited by lesser mortals, than Sebastian turned on Jerry and hissed “stay away from me, old man . . . I’ll find my own way around.”  And he stalked off on the direction of his new office, which was nice, but of course not as nice as Jerry’s corner abode.  And after that, every time they encountered one another, the new guy would smile cordially,  but it never reached his eyes, which continued to look to Jerry like the blank, saucer eyes of a Mako Shark.

Jerry started to avoid the new guy.  When he saw Sebastian rounding a corner in the hall, he turned the other way.  When he heard him in Big Dan’s office, he would abandon any plans he might have had to talk with his boss, even if it was urgent.  When he saw him walking around the perimeter of the cubicle farm with his personal secretary—he gotten one awful fast, in Jerry’s estimation—he'd duck into the middle and pretend to consult a startled office worker.

Thus was born his fear, and as a way to handle it, avoidance wasn't bad.  But what Jerry didn't realize was that fear grows on you, it branches out into other things, metastasizes like a particularly insidious cancer.  He began to fear that the agency was going to terminate him and he'd be penniless.  He began to fear that the agency was going down the tubes and he’d be penniless.  His subway commute became tortuous: instead of enjoying the ride, maybe reading the Times or a good book, he'd glance furtively around, jumping at every sound, convinced that he was going to be mugged, robbed at gunpoint, or something worse.

He stopped going outside his condo, sending out instead for whatever he needed, and his personal hygiene began to slip, just a little, but people at office began to notice, that and his increasingly erratic behavior.  But it wasn't until Big Dan found him cowering in the men’s room, squatting on a toilet with the stall-door closed, that it came to a head.  “Jerry,” his Dan said, “we have to talk.”

And so Jerry lost his job, and though he looked for another, word spreads fast in the advertising industry, and he was damaged goods.  Truth to be told, he didn't try very hard . . . his fear of rejection was overwhelming.  And so began his inevitable slide:  he couldn't afford the payments on his condo, so he moved into something he could manage, which wasn't much in that city.  He held down a series of increasingly menial jobs—his fear kept driving him to quit, or got him fired, and it wasn't long before he reached the end of his rope, and he was on the street.

And I don't know if the man Jesus met in the tombs had a similar downfall, but it was certain that he was as full of demons as Jerry.  Whether they were psychological, like Jerry’s, or real live, flapping-around, pitchfork-carrying devils didn't really matter: they made him unclean, unfit for ancient society just like Jerry was unfit for modern society.  Though the man from Gerasa was a gentile, he was still outcast, living in the tombs among the dead.  So too was Jerry:  his demons drove him first into the agency bathroom and then onto the streets, homeless, outcast, unclean. Once in awhile, somebody would drop some money into the crumpled hat deployed hopefully in front of  him,  but most folks would wrinkle their noses and cross the street at the sight of him.

One day, Jerry was sitting on the sidewalk against the side of a flop house, eyes downcast, when a pair of shoes hove into his line of vision and stopped.  They weren't the shiny black shoes of the police, nor were they tasseled loafers like he used to wear. They were tattered New Balance running shoes, topped by the frayed cuffs of a pair of faded jeans.  Jerry allowed his eyes to slowly look up, past the Grateful Dead tee-shirt and beaded necklace into the face of a man about his age.

“Hey, friend!” said the man, smiling.  “You ok?”  Jerry looked at him incredulously?  “Do I look ok?” he said.  The man threw back his head and laughed, full-throated, uninhibited, as if he weren't standing in front of a homeless guy on a boiling July day.  “I guess not,” he said.  “My name’s Cory.  What’s yours?”  Jerry looked at the man and some sliver of Sunday School learning came to him: “My name’s Legion,” he said, and once again Cory threw back his head and laughed.  “Lots of demons, huh?  Well, Legion, how long’s it been since you’ve eaten?” “A while,” Jerry admitted. “How’d you like a hot meal?” Cory asked.  Jerry peered up at him, suddenly suspicious.  “You’re not some kind of Jesus-y person are you?”  Cory’s smile broadened.  “Some kind,” he said.  “But you don't have to do anything you don't want.  There’s no sermons, no hymns, no preaching.  Absolutely no strings—you can bail out at any time. C’mon . . . It's just around the corner . . .”

Legion nodded warily and began to gather up his few possessions, shaking his head and shrinking away when Cory offered to carry them.  As promised, it wasn't far, and as they entered a modest living space—tattered couch, matching chair and a couple of end tables—a wonderful smell assaulted his nostrils.  How long had it been since he'd eaten?  Cory gestured to the dinette set with cracked vinyl chairs and said “won't be a minute” and disappeared into the kitchen.

The meal was simple but delicious, and afterward Cory stretched and said “coffee?”  But Legion’s fear and paranoia—held in abatement while he ate—had returned full force, and he was already fidgeting glancing at the door.  “Uhh . . . I've gotta go . . . “. And true to his word, Cory smiled and got up to see him out—no singing, no preaching, no strings.    As they passed through the living space, he saw a well-worn Bible on the end table.

At the door, Cory told him: “You want dinner tomorrow night, stop by.”  And as Jerry mumbled something noncommittal, but fears chittered and whispered “Now we know his game . . . he’s going to lull us into complacency with good food then rob us blind.  Or worse, try to convert us.”  And he didn't go back the next evening, or the next, but on the third evening his hunger got the best of him, and when he knocked on the door, Cory greeted him like an old friend.  And that evening, Jerry stayed for coffee, and there were again no strings, and though he didn't come the next night, he did come the night after that, and soon it was every evening, and Cory and he became good friends, and their discussions were wide-ranging and almost never involved religion.

Gradually, Jerry regained his trust and equanimity. His fears began to plague him less and less.  Cory invited him to volunteer for the shelter he directed, but he never got the feeling that Cory’s friendship—or fine dinners—depended on him doing so.  Cory introduced him to contemplative meditation, which allowed him eventually to detach himself from his fears and come to realize that they were not him.  It wasn't overnight, and it took some doing, but Jerry was able to rejoin the human race.  And he often thought that if all churches offered genuine spiritual transformation, instead of arguing perennially who was in and who as out, who could be married and who couldn't, and how many angels could dance on the head of a theological pin, he would have joined one a long time ago.

By any standard, the demon-infested man from Gerasa was unclean.  His countrymen tried to keep him locked up, tried to keep clothes on his back and food in his belly, but his demons drove him time and again into the wilds.  What it took to heal him was an encounter with Jesus . . . Not some theoretical knowledge that Jesus is with you, as important as that is, but a real, experiential encounter.  At the heart of the story of the man from Gerasa, stripped of all its symbolic trappings—yes, the pigs were unclean too; yes the man’s name was Legion, as in Roman—stripped of all its symbolic finery, the story is at heart about an personal encounter with Jesus.

Jerry’s story is too.  It's a story of a personal encounter with Christ in the form of his interaction with Cory.  I don't mean to imply that Cory was Jesus come again, but that he was the face of Jesus for the hurting man.  Like every one of us, Cory represents Jesus to the world, and what we do, how we interact with others determines how they view the risen Lord.

I couldn't help but think of this in the wake of the terrible events of last Sunday morning.  As the evidence mounts that the murder of 49 women and men was a hate crime at least as much as a terrorist one, many Christians refuse to acknowledge the fact.  Worse, though dutifully reporting that churches opened their doors to grievers, the media also gave pastors Roger Jimenez of Sacramento and Steve Anderson air play, showing videos of their vile and hateful rants against members of the LGBTQ communities.  Guess what stories stick in the mind more?  Meanwhile, the entire congregation of an orthodox Jewish synagogue up and invade a gay bar, hugging and consoling and grieving with its patrons over the tragedy.  And this was in Washington D.C., far from Orlando.  Funny that it took Jewish folk to represent Christ so vividly.

Sisters and brothers, Jesus came to the man with demons and healed him with no strings attached.  He didn't require that he join the church, he didn't do it so church numbers would grow, as so many of our churches today do.  In fact, Luke says, he commanded the unclean spirit to leave him before the man even spoke.  A lot of times, we agonize over how best to represent Jesus to the world, but it's really very simple: just look at Jesus.  It's what Cory did.  Amen.