Gloria Dei Lutheran Church

Luke 8:26-39 + Pentecost 2 + June 22, 2025

Due to the heat, the disruption of breaking news, the time needed to absorb yet another violent crisis, and a palpable sense that we’re at a limit, the church council has made the difficult decision that Tim Strand’s retirement will been cancelled until further notice.

Seriously, it’s too many things to make sense of at one time. Bombs last night, now a morning waiting to see what will be unleashed. When and how will the reverberation of violence arrive on our shores. In this land of shorelines,10,000 lakes that still reflect more tears than sky, we’re still grieving last week’s breaking news of political assignations on the other side of a river. And then the appointed shoreline for today with Jesus, demons, and a bay of bobbing pigs. How can we process Tim’s retirement in all this, although it seems clear why he would just want to head to the lake, break free from the chains of both news and bulletin deadlines, the demonic voices of clergy cast out, or, at least, herded over his mental cliff into oblivion, a time to return to his right mind. He, all of us, need his song to come true: In this place, peace abounds, enter now in peace.

So please no more disruptions!

I was already metaphorically on Luke’s beach on Thursday evening, wishing I had more clarity about how the good news speaks to the breaking news, and then to retirement news  and changes that will come. We attended the Juneteenth Concert at Orchestra Hall. I didn’t expect demons to show up but honestly I did expect to see Tim. We didn’t, but it was still a festive, and more diverse crowd. When the conductor Jonathon Taylor Rush, a prominent African American Conductor, walked to the podium, the applause was immediate and enthusiastic. He began to describe the program, all works by Black composers, when someone began shouting at him. Immediately my body tensed.

It sounded like a protest at a political event, only this was Orchestra Hall, where a shouted “bravo” sometimes feels a little edgy. We couldn’t see the person from where we were sitting or see what was being set into motion. The conductor stumbled a little but kept going, but I wasn’t listening because I was trying to understand the protestor. The only words we understood were a call to cast “White people out!” It’s an audacious order, I must say, from the main floor of Orchestra Hall in Minneapolis, Minnesota, even on Juneteenth.

The voice would fade as if being led out, but then start again, each time a shock to the system. Discomfort gave way to irritation at that demanding voice. After all this was a program of Black composers, artists, and a conductor who is bringing his own people’s history to the orchestral stage! Wouldn’t gratitude be the more appropriate response, a bravo after all? With that thought, I knew that the forces of supremacy were stirring.

But finally, there was silence on the floor. Maybe he irritant must have been exorcised, or they just gave up. I felt my body relax a bit. We were left with just the friendly voice of the conductor and a beautiful gift of music. However, as several works expressed Black experience in sound, I discovered that the protestor hadn’t been removed. She was sitting at the lunch counter in the score and on my mind’s stage, refusing to go. I spent the rest of the concert listening to the music with her, grappling with that interruption, caught in the legions of ways race sends us off the cliff. We’re all still drowning in it. That room had a lot going on, a microcosm. We were being invited to look in the mirror.

Luke’s story works this way, too. There is the man, who probably mirrored the historical experience of the people who lived in that region. The Decapolis was a primary center for Greek and Roman culture. Retired military received land they believed they had earned yet had been easy to steal in such a remote place on the other side of the empire. It was the headquarters of one of the Roman legions tasked with keeping the Pax Romana, which sounds nice in Latin, but wasn’t about peace at all, but about safeguarding the transfer of wealth to Rome. A coin from that time was unearthed in that area embossed with the Legion’s mascot, a boar–a pig, unclean to Jewish people. Another historian says that the man also might mirror an event when the town had a disturbance, so Rome leveled the city. The ones who got away lived in cemeteries and had nothing to protect themselves: victims, vulnerable, and blamed for their own plight. If they tried to return home, they would be sent back to their death camp.[1]

And then there is Jesus, both from the other side of the lake and, we will discover later, the other side of the tomb. He mirrors another disruptive power that has arrived on the beach. With a courage that comes having listened to the breaking news of the prophets and knows how everything will ultimately turn out, Jesus heads right into the land where demons dwell. With military language that we don’t hear in the text, but the original listeners would have recognized immediately as Roman commands, he orders the demons, and everything they represent, “Out.”[2] Legions of stories, assumptions, labels, world views, powers that make violence a good, internalized shame, stories we’ve all absorbed and then have used to demonize others. Jesus sends all of it over the cliff and back into the watery abyss where of it belongs. In a way, Jesus is the protestor, the disturber of the Pax, who is simply noting for the crowd that the emperor has no clothes. This, of course, is dangerous, which is why all the townspeople are terrified. What bomb will the emperor drop to make himself look like the strongman?

Every day, our boat runs aground on this kind of shoreline. We step off into our days with all these conflicting demands, legions of voices from without and voices from within that pull us toward the cliff along with the herd, everyone with whiplash from breaking news and breaking hearts. It’s still breaking news that liberation, forgiveness, freedom and its values of grace, love, kindness, generosity, mercy and justice are the lasting story. They have power to cast out legions of things that still chain us and make this world a place of tombs. But, right now, it takes some courage to be the witnesses of that news.

Maybe that’s why we’re here. We know we need to be in the presence of the One who has arrived on the shore. We need to be exorcized, forgiven, healed, nudged, nourished, raised up, not placed in a boat headed away–which honestly sounds really nice right now–but sent back into the land of demons, knowing how it all turns out, maybe with a little less fear and a bit of humble courage. The world has demons, yes, but it is also a mirror for the Spirit of Jesus. We are a mirror for this Jesus, not the Jesus, who in this century will be thanked for a successful bombing raid.

Pastor Osheta Moore reminded us on Wednesday evening that belovedness is our super-power. It’s in the mirror for sure, but usually we take it in because an external voice speaks it to us. The disruptive belovedness of Jesus has been mirrored to legions of people since that first Easter when the power of death itself was disrupted. Love is the one thing that those demonic powers cannot finally withstand. In 1970, Rita Mae Brown wrote this poem that ends with the words, An army of lovers shall not fail.”[3]

On Thursday, as the concert went on, there were voices of protest and exuberant, authentic expressions of joy, harmony that emerged out of dissonance. A countertenor in a sparkly, gender-bending tux, sang Strange Fruit, sung in 1939 by Billie Holiday. It tells the story of the lynching tree and the strange fruit that hangs there. Simply bring those words to voice is a protest. The lynching tree, rather than maintaining white power, would undermine it. The truth hung on that tree, and the truth sets us free. James Cone says that the lynching tree, the cross, becomes the tree of life, and it will heal the nations. You cannot silence the truth. Even death cannot stop the power of life.

As the concert ended, the audience rose to its feet to join the Presence, which was unexplainable but palpable, the same kind of power that was in Galilee on the shore, the same that is in armies of people who trust love is their greatest power. The chains, while perhaps not fully released in so many of us and in so many places, have lost their power to make us afraid. We are free to make music, to sing a new song.

Maybe we can break the news to Tim that he can retire after all. Tim, you have tended that song. With your own gifts, you have cast out demons and healed the sin sick soul. You carried our wounds, our struggles, our joys, our hopes into the glory of God. We send you with love and gratitude to the lake, where you can rest and be free to choose what’s next. However, know that at any time, just like it will be for us here, Christ is likely to break in with another chorus to sing, another disruption that will heal us all. Susan Palo Cherwien’s poetry, which takes flight with in the tune you wrote is what we need for today:

Rise, remember well the future
God has called us to receive;
present by God’s loving nurture,
Spirited then let us live.
Alleluia, alleluia;
Spirit, grace by whom we live.[4]

[1] Ched Myers, Confronting Legion, Radical Discipleship Blog, June 16, 2016. https://radicaldiscipleship.net/2016/06/16/confronting-legion/?utm_source=BCM+Email+List&utm_campaign=e3492ddd2e-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2021_05_05_10_06_COPY_02&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_a44c074ee8-e3492ddd2e-115902065#more-5405.

 

[2] Ibid.

[3] Rita Mae Brown, “Sappho’s Reply,”  “ https://www.the519.org/armyoflovers/aol-aboutus/#:~:text=—%20Rita%20Mae%20Brown&text=“My%20voice%20rings%20down%20through,of%20lovers%20shall%20not%20fail.”&text=We%20were%20inspired%20by%20writer,affirming%20lives%2C%20and%20much%20more, 1970.

[4] Rise, O Church Like Christ Arisen. Evangelical Lutheran Worship 548.

Text: Ó 1997 Susan Palo Cherwien, admin. Augsburg Fortress.

Music: Ó1997 SURGE ECCLESIA, Timothy J. Strand, Augsburg Fortress.