2nd Sunday after Pentecost

Luke 8:26-39

So today we are having our Ministry Celebration.  A day where we celebrate our shared ministry together.  The ministry of all believers.  And especially the often overlooked and unseen ministry of folks who quietly toil away at activities inside and outside the church, that make a huge difference in the life of the church and the world but often goes unnoticed.   We wanted to take time recognize all the ways that the people of St George’s work together to make this place what it is.

 

And this day has been in the works for months.  We worked out the whole summer schedule, we picked a date, we planned and announced things, we got things set up.  And then a couple of weeks ago I went and actually looked at the texts for today, and they are a mess.  This is really not anything near the bible texts I would have picked in order to talk about the church’s shared mission.  So much so I seriously thought about trying to change them out, while also quietly cursing that we didn’t do this last week where we got to talk about rejoicing and thankfulness and all that.  But then I threw myself on the mercy of the Holy Spirit and I prayed about it, and read and thought about it and that tricky little swirly, whirly Holy Spirit brought me around to understand these texts are actually perfect for today.  Because it turns out, if you take the time to really look, to gaze past the flashy parts, to read to the end, this Gospel story from Luke is really the perfect example of the subtle ways that quiet ministry works.

 

But first we have to take a step back and see where we are, because the scenery around us has changed pretty radically.  We have spent better part of 2 months living with Jesus at the Last Supper in John and following Peter and Paul around the book of Acts.  And now suddenly the season changes, the paraments are green and we show up right smack in the middle of Jesus’ Galilean teaching ministry in Luke and this is where we will be living for the rest of the summer.  And this is made a bit more difficult even by the fact that Easter was super late this year so we missed like 3 weeks of really important introductory material about Jesus’s escalating mission to redefine them meaning of clean and unclean that we would normally have read over the last few weeks and instead we just show up with our story today with this kind of bizarre story.

 

And the thing is, this story is so extreme that it almost borders on satire.  It is almost a caricature of Jewish thoughts on ritual purity.  Everything, everything, in this story is radically unclean from the location in the Greco-Roman Decapolis, to the man himself who is demon possessed, naked and living in tombs, to the fact that they specifically name the demons “legion” after the Roman army, and put them in pigs, the most unclean of animals to drown them.  It’s like the whole story has a giant flashing red unclean sign on it.  This is the totally wrong place for Jesus to be doing ministry.

 

But Jesus is totally unbothered by thus all.  His ministry is not the slightest bit impeded by this supposed impurity and it takes only seconds for him to put it right.  He heals the man and restores him to right relationship and within moments the man is dressed and sitting at Jesus’s feet like a proper disciple.  And then as very often happens, people get frightened and drive Jesus away.  And that us where the story gets interesting for us today.  Because as he is leaving, this newly healed man begs Jesus to take him with him.  He just wants to follow Jesus, away to new places.  And astonishingly Jesus says no.

 

The gospel says “Jesus sent him away, saying, "Return to your home, and declare how much God has done for you."  And there is something interesting about this word home ‘oikos’ in Greek, it doesn’t necessarily mean a physical house, which also wouldn’t make much sense here because this man probably didn’t have a house, the story says he had been living among the tombs and in the wilds and Jesus certainly isn’t sending him back there.  But it has a much stronger connotation of a deeper home, like the place you are from, the place you belong.  Jesus sends him back to where he was known, to where he was always meant to be.

 

And then the story says “So he went away, proclaiming throughout the city how much Jesus had done for him.”  And we never see him again.  This man is not numbered among the apostles.  As far as we know, Jesus never returns to Gerasa and this man never rejoins him.  Yet here is the odd thing, some of the oldest churches that archeologists have ever found are in this area.  Some of that may be that because the people here didn’t participate in Jewish rebellions, so their ruins are simply better preserved. But regardless, we do know for sure, that there are followers of Jesus present in significant numbers in this community, from very early on, despite the lack of apostolic presence.  And I like to think that this man and others like him may have had something to do with that.  He is the very definition of the unseen yet impactful ministry of the followers of Jesus Christ.

 

And that is what we are celebrating the today, people who stay close to home and quietly go about the mission of the church, who may not be following Jesus across the planet, who didn’t go to seminary and don’t do this for a living.  Yet it is their ministry, it is your ministry on which the true church is built. 

 

Because in a very real way, we are each like the man in this story.  After we have been healed, after we have been forgiven of our sins and fed at the table, Jesus says to each and everyone of us, return to the place where you belong and tell everyone what God has done.  And everyone has a place somewhere in the community of the church, in the family of God, even if sometimes it’s hard to feel or identify.  Everyone has a ministry, has a way that they serve the Lord.  And I would say this is especially true in a church community such as this one.  St George’s in mighty because of you.  It is mighty because literally everyone here has been pitching in and doing ministry in this place and in this community, some of you for decades upon decades upon decades to make this place what it is. 

 

And so today we are thankful.  We are all so grateful for the many ways that Jesus calls us and our fellow congregants to the places we belong in ministry, especially those less glamorous and less visible jobs.  We all know and are thankful for the folks who get up front and lead worship and sing and hold office, but today we also celebrate the people who make coffee, and refill the candles, who fix broken drawers and shovel snow, who keep the books and buy supplies, because without you this place would be nothing.  And every single act of ministry here, every single act of service is important and vital.  As Paul tells us today there is no Jew or Greek, no slave or free, no male or female, no hierarchy of ministries, what we do, we do together on equal footing in service to God Almighty.  This is no unimportant ministry, even if it is less visible, everything matters, everything counts, even if no one know about it but you and God.  So today we celebrate and recognize in each other all the ways that Jesus calls us to serve God and our neighbor.  Amen.