Fairhaven UMC

And so the town in Ohio where I went to college was settled by people from colonial Massachusetts. But now they’re forgotten. And most in that cemetery, because it was so old, belonged to people whose families and loved ones are long gone too. But that’s not true of how God works.

And God reenacts this moment that we see in Genesis chapter 1, where breathing into lifeless dust, he creates Adam. As individuals with hearts and minds and souls and dreams. God enlists us to participate in it. was at work in Christ when God raised him from the dead and sat him at God’s right hand in the heavens, And so I found in Europe last year, by first time there, it’s really jarring to go into a cathedral or some great ancient church in Europe and find yourself surrounded in the ground, in the walls, by all these dead kings, these archbishops, these poets, these literal saints in some cases.

The God who puts skin on dry bones, who puts breath in dead lungs, promises that the saints will not remain unnamed. These stacked gravestones really bleakly represent the fear of death, what death looks like. So you have the winged skull that’s very classic on stones from that era. to prophesy to a valley full of dry bones.

And this valley that was moments ago a lifeless desert, hopeless, depressing, overwhelming with just the sense of decay, is now an ocean of living, breathing human beings. And say to them, And the way that it’s designed just makes you feel like you’re somewhere on the edge of Salem in the 1700s. What is the richness of God’s glorious inheritance among believers? Prophesy to the lifeless bones that litter our world, the dry bones of injustice, of despair, of sickness, of fear, of just not caring. Nameless, silent, numberless, jumbled chaos.

Ruach can also mean spirit. It can also mean wind. These bones will live because Christ lives and through him, so can we. which is inevitable over two centuries.

God’s not going to teach Ezekiel anything. And then he answers God with a statement that’s really a question. But awaiting this word from God to restore them to life, to put breath in their lungs, to put skin on their bones once more. whips through, rips among us even now.

And well before he even finishes the prophecy, this sound erupts. And so nestled in the back of this burying ground, in the back corners, in the shadows underneath the trees, there’s a couple piles back there. Now that said, the prophet Ezekiel has a different outlook on this. But also through Ezekiel, God promises that God’s going to bring them out of the graves.

Now, Ezekiel doesn’t say yes. Now, if we’re to prophesy, we need to know what to say. And so the correct answer to can these bones live again, human one, is see for yourself. But the promise from God remains here.

And it’s like you’re confronting a pile of bones on one hand, but also this hope that surrounds you. There are times in our lives when we feel like we’re nothing more than a pile of dead bones. And sometimes I think we even feel worse than hopeless. And the word of life comes from God.

and standing among tombs, standing in a cemetery, Human one, God calls to Ezekiel once more, prophesy to the breath. Israel back in Ezekiel’s time, these people possess no hope at all. But to return to the cemetery here for a minute. They can’t be read.

I don’t think they were mostly done on purpose, This promise comes from God to Ezekiel, but it’s transmitted through the human ones. They’re never going to stand next to the place where they originally marked. In the deepest darkness of this valley, when we’re standing among bones, when we are bones, What does this look like? You all have heard this before, particularly around this time of year, but I love cemeteries. I think we feel apathetic.

Presumably, the prophet doesn’t have much of an appetite for offering answers, for offering All of that that’s mentioned in this story is all the same. God’s not going to verbally impart some wisdom, some way of understanding the world. What is he doing? And so God responds back to Ezekiel, who’s given a good answer here, not with wisdom, not with theology or some sort of explanation, but with a command. God tells Ezekiel what to say, what to believe, what to prophesy.

And what is the overwhelming greatness of God’s power that is working through us believers? Sounds like an earthquake. In some ways, I think it’s a shame that we no longer live among our dead in urban America and we keep our distance. but things freeze, things thaw and freeze again. God, in this story, could have spoken to the bones in this valley This powerful wind moves within you, You have the finger that’s pointing towards heaven, reminding everybody that walks past that you’re going to die.

And he says, Lord God, only you know. I envision Ezekiel wading through waist deep bones, our hope can be that the greatness of the past, As God walks him through this valley of bones, you imagine his sandals crunching on teeth It was on the western frontier at the time towards Columbus. The wind that carries Ezekiel, the breath that goes into the bodies, all of that’s the same word. As far as they’re concerned, they’re completely finished.

far above every ruler and authority and power and angelic power, I think that’s worse because that means we don’t care. It’s got this black wrought iron fence around it, and the markers are that old brown sandstone. They’ll be raised up. And filled with divine breath, these people rise and they’re a new creation.

And the bones all clatter together. Can these bones live again, God asks. And whatever person they told of, whatever lifespan, is just vanished. They’ll be filled with spirit once more.

that same spirit that carried Ezekiel into the desert. All our hope, all that we’ve ever held onto is just lifeless, it’s just cold, a heap of tombstones. And breath in the Hebrew here is the word ruach, which means all kinds of things in Hebrew. Of the great cloud of witnesses, of the saints that have come before, of all the hopes of the past, life, death, past, present, future, all in one place.

the legacy of love, the hopes that have come before, In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen. Roots tear through the soil. certainty about matters of life and death and the power of God.

I always have. This back corner of the cemetery is just chaos. And that’s a good answer. They’re not going to remain these blank gravestones piled up in the corner.

That’s the quote from Ezekiel. And so they have this beautiful old graveyard, like a burying ground, they call it in Puritan style. that God and Christ who rose is opening the way for us to do that too. They find the others that they belong to.

You know, hopelessness at least still recognizes that hope exists as a possibility. Instead, God gives him something to do. scrambling onto a big rock that’s like an island in the middle. God’s breath turns dust into life.

Never to be aware that their ancestor’s gravestone is out of place or missing or damaged. And the Apostle Paul, who knew the resurrected Jesus, is telling the church this same kind This power is conferred by the energy of God’s powerful strength. It’s God’s power, but it’s Ezekiel who dares to live it out, who dares to speak it, that They’ll be given a home on rich, fertile land and all things are going to be new again. all by himself, without Ezekiel even there, And they’re held above the grass on these wood shims.

I was an unofficial tour guide for the cemetery in Slippery Rock when I was a teenager. any power that might be named now or in the future. none of that’s actually passed. Many of these gravestones had been eroded by acid rain beyond readability.

Because the obvious answer, our answer, is flat out wrong. And God, to be clear, does not disagree that they’re hopeless. And so Ezekiel prophesies to the bones exactly as God tells him to. And God tells Ezekiel, prophesy, tell this wind, this spirit to fill these bodies and make them live again.

These bones, the Lord explains to Ezekiel, they represent all the company of Israel, the children of God. and fingers, all this white dust kicked up behind him. The gravestones that are scattered above ground will never stand again, and the bones below them never. It’s hidden away like junk in a closet, all these forgotten people and things.

God makes him a participant. This is our breath. They reassemble into human bodies with muscle and skin. He’s just been carried by this wind of God, teleported into this apocalyptic location.

Amen. But one thing, even as I found a lot of peace there that always troubled me, is that over time, many of those stones had fallen. But I think here’s the astounding thing that Ezekiel shows us about that. He climbs up and he yells, dry bones, hear the Lord’s word.

We draw a little closer this year in spirit, if not in proximity, but in our cemeteries, for the most part, we put them out in the distance. and commanded them to live once more, to rise up, to march, to be revived. Not the granite we have now, but the old weathered sandstone. None of these promises that are in Ezekiel, They’re stacked, like back and forth, like Lincoln logs.

One is like life breath that’s in all living creatures, the breathing that marks us as alive, life breath. They’re not going to remain dry bones. And more so, I think, than the stones that are still standing..

. And this is what happens. This is in our lungs. And Ezekiel prophesies.

I did a couple walkthroughs on the history days. This is the command that we’re given. God’s power is..

. of conversation, the church in Ephesus, here in Ephesians 1, as we heard: I pray that God says, prophesy over these bones. Like, theoretically, things could be better. And nameless, countless, identical bones are pulled together as people.

And we’re certain that nothing is ever going to get better. Whenever Paul is speaking, God refers to these people as being in graves. Prophesy the Lord God proclaims, I am opening your graves. that are in the New Testament, that are in Revelation, He says all of that word for word.

actually makes it happen. And the people, this extraordinarily large company, Ezekiel says, the Hebrew word is the same as like a legion or an army. The answer a human one like you or I or Ezekiel would give, which is that the dead stay dead, And I love to walk there, particularly in the fall. And it’s just dozens and dozens of sandstone slabs.

And God asks, Human one, can these bones live again? No. And they’ve got all these stark Puritan symbols on them. Human one. Because this is what God does.

I just like being there. All the saints of the past that we’ve loved and cherished, the hopes that we’ve held onto, The overwhelming greatness of God, the Ruach, the Ruach, This is the reality of death, of decay, of destruction. But they’re still not alive, Ezekiel says. And I wonder, what does it look like? none of that is past.

You know, there’s something about the environment that’s very peaceful to me. And this is how I imagine the bones, the valley into which God drops Ezekiel. But apathy is worse because apathy is the darkest kind of depression. You, human ones, are sent to speak to the bones.

So Ezekiel doesn’t know what he thinks. But that’s not how God does it. It’s present. We say like Israel did, our bones are dried up, our hope has perished, we’re completely finished.

the eyes of your heart will have enough light to see what is the hope of God’s call. It’s now. They used to mark a grave somewhere in there. God’s not finished yet.

It’s still what God is doing. How can what is dead live again? So he hesitates a second, right? Instead, God turns to Ezekiel. You don’t even have this desire for things to get better. To be in these resting places, like in Westminster Abbey, there were probably more dead people in there than living people.

They’re together. It’s an army of people that stands up. is true by the laws of nature, right? the joys, the dreams of the past, those things are never dead and gone. They’re all there.

They come to life. But they’re not living. You. You just kind of are.

You prophesy to the bones. They stand on their own two feet after being nothing more than a pile of bones. Right? Amen. You.

And they’re like, oh, my God. But, You prophesy. And. God refers to these people as being in graves.

We’re completely finished. Amen.

My strong impression is that popular interest in Halloween has exploded over the last decade or so. And maybe that’s just because the Chinese imports have gotten really good and you got a skeleton in everybody’s yard or an inflatable or something. It’s never been a small thing in my lifetime, but now it’s huge. So as of last year, I looked at some numbers here.

Over half of Americans dress up for Halloween, kids and adults. That shoots actually up to 60% if you’re looking at people about 40 and under. Almost half of Americans start shopping for Halloween more than a month in advance. And.

And stores begin putting out Halloween supplies as early as April. Home Depot apparently calls that their halfway to Halloween sale, which sounds very unappealing to me. We live in a culture that is just obsessed with the things that we’re supposed to fear. There’s something about Halloween that gets us these days.

And so this season, Americans will spend $12 billion on Halloween embracing death, ghosts, the supernatural. But consider this at the same time. Even as our cultural appetite for this stuff, for the mysterious, explodes the church, this institution that’s built on spiritual things, the incarnation, the resurrection, the Holy Ghosts. is a retreat.

Religious participation in America is at a 200-year low, depending on the numbers you look at. And younger generations are more likely to say that they’re not really anything than anybody ever has in the past. Even usually whenever people weren’t going to church very often, everybody was like, well, I’m a Christian, though. I just don’t participate.

So on one hand, people are deeply into this holiday, more than ever, where the supernatural is front and center, where ghosts and witches and goblins are everywhere. Everywhere we turn reminds us of death. That’s something we generally avoid in our culture at all costs, but this is a whole month that we just surround ourselves in it. Last night was the night market in Allentown, which the whole thing is basically.

.. skulls and tombstones and all that stuff. Thousands of people.

The horror-themed gym across the street from my house hosts a monthly event called the Sunday Sabbath. They do like yoga or something. The name makes me grip my teeth, but that’s another story. And I guarantee you that on a Sunday morning church hour, they get quite a few more people in there than we do.

Meanwhile, this strange institution that we’re in that’s built to bridge the gap between the common and the mysterious, the natural and the supernatural, kind of faltering culturally. Generations of people have lost interest. How can both of these things be true at once? And I think there’s a lot of reasons for that, but one that we can’t overlook is that we’ve become shy about the supernatural reality that we claim to believe in. We don’t talk about this stuff.

We’re almost a little bit squeamish about it, a little bit embarrassed. But at that point, what do we have to say if we kind of set aside the supernatural stuff that someone can’t get in a shinier package somewhere else? It’s a mistake for us to steer clear of the parts of human existence that are confusing, that are scary, that are mysterious, the stuff that exists beyond rationality. Shakespeare famously wrote in Hamlet, There are more things in heaven and earth than is dreamt of in your philosophy. The church is more interested in selling most of the time, you know, morals, a moral teacher, community service, and those things are good.

But the people around us know they need both those things and also the occasional exorcist. And if you don’t believe me, ask me sometimes how many, how often people have requested that from me. Ask me how many times Pastor Matt told me he had the same experience. I never would have thought.

And Jesus obviously has plenty to say on this front. The Bible in general does. And I think we need to run towards these weirdest components of scripture. We have to recognize that they’re not just old ghost stories.

They hold something for us today, too. And that’s why I picked these two readings this morning for our Ghost Stories of the Bible series. One of these, I’m sure you’ve heard, we’ve done it before, Jesus and the Gerasene Demoniac. It’s in Matthew, Mark, and Luke, Jesus casting the demons out of that man.

And one of these stories you probably haven’t because it’s in Leviticus, and we don’t really preach in Leviticus very often because it’s mostly rules and regulations. But this is Leviticus’s discussion of the scapegoat, the goat that is used to purify the people of Israel on Yom Kippur. I pulled out some sections of that ritual there. And what both of these passages have in common is their acknowledgement of a deep physicality of the reality of demonic forces, of evil things, these tangible manifestations of sin and evil.

Leviticus speaks about atonement, you know, being reconciled with God, and that requires the casting out of evil among the people. How can God be there if there’s also evil there? And Mark speaks of exorcism, which is a different manifestation of the same thing. Cast out the evil, bring the good in. And put simply, Scripture and our experience, I think, are clear that evil has some genuine force in the world.

It’s a real thing. It actually exists. And we’re fooling ourselves that we think that’s just an ancient or childish way of understanding the world. In confirming our baptism, our membership in the United Methodist Church, we have a vow in there that says we vow to renounce the spiritual forces of wickedness, reject the evil powers of this world, And that’s a more contemporary way to say what older liturgies in our tradition called the world, the flesh, and the devil, which was also a Harry Belafonte movie in the 50s about these things.

But not to be too lighthearted about it here, but I’m reminded of a meme, which is actually just a scene from the Pirates of the Caribbean movie from about 20 years ago. And the undead pirate captain says to the woman that he’s holding as a prisoner, You best start believing in ghost stories because you’re in one. And then the light changes, he gets in the moonlight, and he turns out he’s a skeleton, right? You should believe in ghost stories because you’re in one. This stuff is worth taking seriously.

There are spiritual forces of wickedness in the world. And acknowledging that doesn’t mean that we have to fall victim to this temptation to blame everything that goes wrong on the devil. I know people who do that. That’s not helpful either.

But there’s something to this. In our world, in our lives, there are shadowy places of chaos, of disorder, of darkness. And in our readings today, we see it in the land of Azazel. The tombs where the demon-possessed man lives.

The depths of the Sea of Galilee where these pigs flee. There are places where demons lurk. But God calls us out of the darkness, into light, into freedom, empowers us to get there by the power and the name of Jesus. And Leviticus and Mark both help us to understand what that looks like, written thousands of years apart.

The text this morning from Leviticus 16, as I mentioned, is a piece of the process that God institutes for Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement for the people of Israel. That was two weeks ago now, actually. Aaron, who is Moses’ brother, is the first high priest when the people come out of Egypt and head to Israel, and God gives them instructions to, for an annual rite of purification. One day a year where they make atonement for the nation’s sins to restore their relationship with God.

They look back over the whole year, look towards the next year, and seek to be made right. And the contents of these rituals are complex. The whole chapter is this. Leviticus in general is a slog because of the detail to it.

But there are two major components. One. offering to God and repentance of sin. And that’s summed up with these two sacrificial goats.

One is just given as a pretty standard offering to God, a burnt offering, very common through scripture. That’s what you do to get your sins forgiven. You offer an animal to God. And the second, this is where it gets kind of weird, is designated as Azazel’s goat.

So the high priest confesses all the people’s sins, put his hands on the goat’s head and confesses all the people’s sins for the year. And then someone’s job is to drive that goat off into the wilderness, into the desert, and somehow literally it carries their sins, their darkness away with it. It goes all on the goat and goes away. And this is where the term scapegoat comes from, by the way.

A scapegoat is a goat, originally. In older translations of scripture, you’ll see it in the King James, they don’t use the word Azazel, they translate it to scapegoat, but scholars generally think it should be Azazel and scapegoat’s a bit of a stretch at this point. Now, at the same time, we don’t know what or where or who Azazel is. It’s a mystery.

And lots of Jewish and Christian writers have tried to figure this out over the years. The early Christian saint Origen said that Azazel is just Satan, it’s just the devil. Another name for Satan. Jewish tradition, including in other books beyond the Bible, the book of Enoch, which is an apocalyptic Jewish book that’s not in scripture, It talks about Azazel being a fallen angel, actually the one who taught humans warfare and violence and how to make makeup.

Interestingly. And some other scholars consider Azazel to be a particular area. It’s a land, the desolate place where the goat would go. And so indeed in a few places in Isaiah, we see all these ideas fused together because Isaiah talks about Shearim, which are often translated as goat demons who live out in the desert.

And so, But the point of it is, regardless of what it means specifically, the scapegoat of Yom Kippur is designated to hold the weight of the people’s sins, and in some mystical way, it takes them away with it, away from Israel, away from God, and instead off to Azazel. And you might call it a collective exorcism. This nation acknowledges its sinfulness, it acknowledges the darkness that has gathered over it, and exposes it to the daylight. And that’s something I think every nation, ours included, might consider from time to time.

What do we need to repent for? Because sin holds power and must actively be repented of. It must be driven away for healing to occur. Right? And as Christians, we know that we don’t need a goat anymore. Jesus has taken his sin on our own body.

He’s carried it into this desolate realm of death. He’s rose again. But the concept of the scapegoat is the same. God’s atonement is the active, the physical expulsion of evil.

And this is the power we see in the gospel reading today, too. So this meeting that Jesus has with the spirit-possessed man in Gerasa. And it’s such a striking story. So Gerasa is along the Sea of Galilee, across the sea from where Jesus normally is in Galilee.

And so Jesus gets out of the boat on the lake shore of this new town. We can assume he’s not really been here before. And the Gerasenes have this local celebrity, if you will. He’s this man that everybody knows about.

They carefully avoid him. They don’t want to get caught near him. He’s out of his mind. He’s tortured by demons.

He constantly shrieks. He hurts himself. He dwells far away from other people living in the graveyard, the tombs, a ritually unclean place. You’re not supposed to hang out there.

That’s where the dead are. It’s bad for you. Now, it doesn’t seem like from what Mark tells us that this man is dangerous to the other people. I mean, he’s dangerous to himself, but not other people.

He is the one who suffers. And so when Jesus arrives, gets out of the boat, the strangest thing happens is this man runs down the slope all the way down to the beach to the lakeshore to meet Jesus. And he screams, what have you to do with me, Jesus, son of the most high God? Swear to God that you won’t torture me. Isn’t that weird? Think about this.

So this man, who’s obviously terrified of Jesus, sprints to him the moment Jesus shows up. Why? Well, I think you can see the internal war that the guy is going through. The human being, the one who is made in the image of God, longs for the liberation that Jesus can bring, longs to be healed, longs to meet Jesus, to be touched by Jesus. But the spirits who bound this man desperately wanted to drag him back into their place, their home in the tombs.

And I think this is the nature of the demonic, of evil. It tries to drag us away from God who breaks our chains, who lifts us up, who reconciles us with one another, and instead keeps us in the midst of chaos, of violence, at war and in conflict with ourselves and others. Mark tells us in the next couple verses that long before the man even approaches Jesus, Jesus has already called out with authority, commanding from a distance, before he even sets foot on the sand, unclean spirit, come out of this man. And so whenever he arrives in front of Jesus, Jesus asks the man, or maybe the spirit, his name.

But the spirit answers. And the evil spirit says, Legion is my name because we are many. It turns out there’s not just one demon, one evil spirit in this man. There’s countless in him, torturing him, controlling his life.

And they begged Jesus not to run them out of the area. Yeah. And what’s worth noticing here is I think that we can conclude that Mark is talking at two levels in this story. So on one hand, there are actual demons at play here.

This guy’s filled with demons. Jesus casts them out. The demon’s name is Legion. At the same time, the demon’s name is an obvious reference to the Romans who are occupying the area.

Roman armies are called Legion. They occupy Judea. They occupy Galilee. They have their boot on these people.

They are making Israel miserable. They are defiling this country. And so demons, they do have this straightforward spiritual existence we tend to imagine, you know, the ones that are in the sky. But also, they can exert control over human structures, over things that are bigger than us as individuals, right? governments, armies, economies, all sorts of institutions that thrive on human suffering.

I think Jesus looks at this man and he’s pointing to both things: the armies and the demon individual. Demons are not just these isolated spooky entities, mischievous little spirits that work on the individual level. They inhabit human systems. They are both legion, the demon, the spirit, and legion, the occupying army.

Both legions that we see in Mark are demonic. They’re just different in scale. And John Wesley affirms this in his writing on evil angels. He has a sermon about all this stuff.

And he says that evil spirits or demons are cosmo critores, which means governors of the world. Right? what Ephesians calls the rulers of the darkness of this present age. And Wesley goes further, says a little bit about this. He says, There is nothing which Satan so cordially abhors as the love of our neighbor.

And he uses, therefore, every possible means to prevent or destroy this, to excite either private or public suspicion, animosity, resentment, to destroy the peace of nations or families, and to banish unity and concord from the earth. And this indeed is the triumph of his art, to embitter the poor, miserable children of men against each other and urge them to do his own work, to plunge one another into the pit of darkness. So anywhere this sort of conflict exists, where there’s a breakdown in love of neighbor, where there’s conflict, where there’s violence, so too there is spiritual conflict there between humans and the legions of the demonic. And so Jesus in Gerasa, the land of the Gerasenes, brings this conflict to light.

It’s already going on. He just makes it obvious. He just makes it obvious. he sends these demons out into a herd of pigs, 2,000 pigs.

I don’t remember noticing the number before. 2,000 pigs. The demons are sent into them and then run into the sea and drown. And I think just like the goat, this is a collective exorcism again.

It’s for all the people around. And the scapegoat has just given way to these pigs. Right? But watch what happens next in this story. So the man is immediately healed, which is great.

The man who had run to Jesus asking for the demons not to be healed, Jesus casts them out. The man is in his right mind again. He’s sane. He’s no longer slicing himself with rocks or screeching.

He’s just calm. And how does the crowd respond to that? You would think they’d be happy for him, that this guy who’s lived in misery for who knows how long is good again. But they’re terribly upset. They demand that Jesus leave the area.

Isn’t that weird? These people seem to have been annoyed or sort of irritated by the demon-possessed man who was always screaming in the cemetery. But when it gets down to it, he’s just kind of part of the local scenery. They’ve gotten used to him. but when Jesus sends the man’s demons away completely, when he’s healed, when he’s fixed, when he’s ready to rejoin them in society, they’re terrified of that.

They hate it. They don’t like it. They wish the demons were back. They didn’t want a collective exorcism.

They didn’t agree to that. And these pigs who are, despite being an unclean animal, Jews aren’t supposed to have any contact with them. These pigs, 2,000 pigs are now at the bottom of the lake. Do you know how much money 2,000 pigs are worth? Think about that.

Jesus just crashed the local economy. Right? The crowd demands that Jesus leaves because the peace that he brings them comes with a cost, and that cost is their way of life. We’re comfortable, I think like these people in Gerasa are, with a background sort of hum of evil in our lives because we profit from it. We benefit from it.

We want cheap goods, for example. So we accept the spiritual economic forces that continue to exploit workers in the environment. We ignore the kinds of demonic chaos and abuse in our prisons, our jails, our immigration facilities, because they provide the illusion of security must be worth it. We want a stable retirement.

So we look past the reality that our stock market thrives when corporations churn out weapons, objects of addiction, from gambling to alcohol. These things are the economic bedrock of our country, of our world. And so Jesus’ liberation of one single man here meant the destruction of a herd of 2,000 pigs, the entire local economy again. And so if Jesus were to cast out the evil in our systems, in our world, what might fall apart that we actually kind of like a little bit? And so Jesus casting out legion exposes the systems of sin that the people of Gerasa, like us, have come to rely on and tolerate and kind of like.

Okay? Do we rejoice at one person who is liberated like these villagers could not do? Or would we panic like they did if the market price of security, of comfort starts to go up? If people are living lives of freedom, but the world around us is getting a little costly or a little less comfortable for us, what happens then? Right? We see all the world suffering. Every Sunday morning we lament all of it. We pray for it to stop lifting up these situations of war, of homelessness, of hunger, of racism. But what if Jesus actually stepped in and ended those things? What if he did? Would we rejoice at the liberation that he’s created or would we start to panic like these people? people, realizing that, geez, we didn’t think some of these demons were that bad after all.

We kind of liked having them around. Luckily, Jesus doesn’t care. Jesus doesn’t care that we don’t understand what spiritual and real freedom looks like. He doesn’t care that oftentimes we don’t understand that he offers a better way for all of us.

He steps in and makes it happen anyway. He doesn’t ask their permission to drive these demons out. He just doesn’t. And he calls us to either get on board with that work or get out of the way.

The die is already cast. Satan and his angels are going to be defeated once and for all. We’ve read the end of the book. All the work that Jesus began in his earthly ministry is completed and also in progress at the same time.

We’re living it. And so in the grand scheme of things, we can either join Jesus’ apostles. He sends them out, commissions them to resist, to cast out evil spirits, to go into the world and heal. We can join them in that.

Or we can follow the pigs into the depths of the sea. And don’t underestimate how tempting that is for all of us. And now none of this means that we’re to be scared. This is a weird, creepy, scary story, but we’re not supposed to be scared.

Evil is real. Evil has power. There are forces at work in our world that are beyond our understanding, and Satan is big. And we’ll continue to meet these spirits, these evil things in our world, in our lives, and we’ll continue to meet these spirits.

But here, in the body of Christ, we confess that we’re complicity in these things, but also affirm what Mark and Leviticus proclaim, that God has the power to cast evil out. If we confront it in ourselves and in our world, God can free us all. We have renounced the spiritual forces of wickedness, and now we’re called to join the work that Jesus began, that Jesus continues to, And so do we join this mission to cast out? Or do we follow the pigs into the lake? Be free this day. Accept the invitation that Jesus gives us to be free, to be healed, to be restored.

Proclaim what Jesus has done for you and for the world. In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.

So, since we have, by popular demand, extended this Sunday School Stories series, I had people say that they liked it, so we figured we’d put it through the end of September, I unfortunately ran out of Sunday School Stories. We hit a lot of the big ones already. You know, we got the Noah’s Ark story, David and Goliath, all that stuff. And I realized, you know, we tend to hear a lot of the big gospel Sunday school stories pretty regularly anyway.

Like you’re probably going to hear the Good Samaritan sometime this year. You’re going to hear about Zacchaeus in the tree. So I asked Stormy for a recommendation. I said, what do we got left? A deeper dive story, one that you haven’t probably heard as often, but one that’s familiar.

And her first thought was Samson and Delilah. And that’s an excellent choice because, indeed, I haven’t thought that much about this story since I was in vacation Bible school, except in the context of that song, Hallelujah, that is very popular. And offhand, I had to think a bit before even remembering which book of the Bible it was in. And.

Like, I don’t think about Samson very often. I think that’s good here because I’m able to dive into this story without much in the way of preconceived notions about it. Maybe you are too. I highly doubt anyone’s preached about this in a long time.

So Samson, as a character, as we read this story, is almost more Greek or Roman mythology in flavor than what we tend to associate with the Bible. This is a very different guy than Abraham or Moses. And in fact, biblical scholars have pointed out that While Judges was being written, this portion of Judges was being written, the Greek myth of Hercules was floating around the Mediterranean. And it’s very possible that the authors could have taken some flavor, some inspiration from the Greeks here.

That happens a lot in scripture. You can see stories from these cultures next to each other influencing the way they tell their stories. Now, uncommonly for scripture, but similarly to Hercules, Samson has what we might call superpowers, right? He’s got superhuman strength, not unlike the Hulk or Superman or something. And like Superman, he has his own hidden kryptonite, except his grows on his head.

And lots of interesting stuff is happening here. But you know, as I think back to what I’ve heard about Samson and Delilah, when I’ve heard this story before, what’s striking to me is I don’t remember anyone ever telling me why it matters. What does this mean for us? You know, Samson’s cool, he’s interesting, sure. But so what? Is he more than just kind of this biblical boom-pow, you know, action hero? And the answer is yes.

Because this story’s got a whole lot more going on than just an action tale. Yes. So we’re most familiar with Samson from this final story that we heard this morning. That represents the very end of his life.

It ends with his death, right? But Samson has this grand heritage, this saga of his whole life that goes across a few chapters. So the previous three chapters, we read the beginning of one about his birth, but there’s all these larger-than-life stories about Samson. So his conception is very interesting. Right? He’s born to a man named Manoah and his wife, and the scene, obviously, as you heard it, sounds a lot like Jesus’ conception.

Manoah’s wife is infertile, but a messenger from God visits her in the night and assures her that she’s going to conceive a son. Very familiar. And whenever she does, she’s to dedicate him as a Nazarite. And what a Nazarite is, is kind of like a monk, not a priest, but a monk, a man whose whole life is consecrated to God’s service.

So from the morning, from the moment that he’s born, he’s going to be in service to God. Samuel was like this in the book of 1 Samuel. He is given by his mother to the temple from the beginning. It’s a frequent way that people serve.

Okay. And so his mother is never supposed to touch any alcohol while she’s pregnant, no unclean food, and whenever he’s born, his hair is never to be shaved, which is the primary way that Nazarites are set apart as different. This is very common for monks right now, right? Hindu monks, or Buddhist monks rather, will have their whole heads shaved bald. Medieval European monks, they’d shave the middle part so they’d have that goofy ring of hair around the outside.

Nazarites just never shave. And then the messenger promises Samson is going to be the one who begins to save his people from the Philistines who are dominating them at the time. Samson has been set apart by God. He’s been chosen as this special instrument in the service of God’s people.

So as he grows up to be an adult, he is made judge over Israel. In the book of Judges, the rulers of Israel are called judges. And what that is is before they had a king, this is kind of a decentralized, weak form of ruler. They would usually just sit out.

They’d hear cases. They would decide between people to try to just keep some order. So Samson becomes a judge. And in the meantime, he engages in all of these heroic acts.

Again, these larger-than-life tales. Okay. He’s occasionally basically possessed by the Spirit of God, which gives him all this crazy power. He goes into Hulk smash mode.

And we see in the previous couple chapters, he tears a lion in half with his bare hands. He burns all the Philistines grain fields by tying torches to the tails of 300 foxes that he caught by hand and sets them running through the farm. So all the grain burns down. And then he kills in a fit of rage, a thousand Philistines with nothing but the jawbone of a donkey.

But despite this superhuman ability, this task that he was given from birth, we can kind of see, maybe you hear this, that Samson is a loose cannon from the start. Nazarites have three important vows. They’re supposed to keep their whole lives by virtue of their position. Never drink alcohol.

Never touch a dead body, animal or person. And never cut their hair. And long before ever meeting Delilah, Samson, Samson has already broken these first two vows. The story gives us all these hints that Samson goes to these wine festivals, all kinds of stuff there.

And then whenever he rips the lion in half and then he goes and messes it. So he’s violated the dead body commandment. And so he’s just incredibly impulsive. He can’t keep hold of even these three things.

And despite being the one who’s called to begin liberation of his people from the Philistines, he falls in love with this Philistine woman, demanding her as his wife. This is before Delilah. And long story short, whenever he finds this Philistine woman he wants to marry, it ends up causing all kinds of violent unrest between Israel and the Philistines because her father marries her off to someone else. And so he just explodes in this rage.

And in the meantime, between this failed marriage and meeting Delilah, Samson sleeps with a Philistine prostitute. The man is just not a good leader. He’s a terrible Nazarite. Again, three vows, and he can’t do them.

And to be clear, it’s not like he’s doing a lot of repentance or self-examination after each one of these blunders. He’s controlled by whatever desire strikes his mind that morning, and his strength gives him the ability to do it. He sees it. He wants it.

He gets it. He wants a wife. He takes her. He feels like he’s been insulted or he’s been wronged by somebody.

Well, he’s going to go berserk and murder a thousand Philistines in revenge. Judges tells us he stacked their bodies like firewood. And he’s sort of like King David in that way in his peak years. David was impulsive.

David was power drunk. Right. But Samson is much dumber. Samson is no poet.

Samson wasn’t going to be writing psalms about his experience. We don’t see any evidence of introspection on Samson’s part. He just rumbles through life. And then we get to Delilah.

And it’s unclear whether Delilah is a Philistine or an Israelite. She lives in the historic valley, which is kind of in between. People always assume she’s a Philistine, but we don’t know. But anyway, Samson falls in love with her, again, unthinkingly, much like with his poor Philistine wife.

And Delilah is immediately recruited by the Philistines as like some Cold War Soviet double agent. She’s supposed to spy on Samson for the Philistines and determine his secrets. Her assignment is to find the source of his strength so they can defeat and kill him, and in return she’ll be given this enormous amount of silver. And you gotta love her strategy here.

Her strategy is simply to ask Samson, Please tell me what gives you such great strength and how you can be tied up and made weak? If Samson weren’t a complete idiot, she might be a little bit concerned about this question. This is about the most suspicious way you could possibly ask him this question. And Samson could have called her off at this point, seeing there was something fishy, and found some other beautiful woman, clearly not a problem for him, fell in love with someone else. But he is blinded by lust or love, whatever.

Neither of which is any excuse to set aside wisdom. And he plays her game. And he’s cautious enough, at least at first, not to tell her his secret of why he’s so strong. And it’s such a weird situation.

He seems completely aware that she’s got ulterior motives. But he continues on with her anyway. And she’s deceptive. He obviously knows that or he wouldn’t have lied.

And it’s just this completely inadequate response to what is obviously a threat to his life. He’s in danger, but he’s still playing with fire here. And presumably that’s because he thinks he can work his way through this with his own strength, his own cleverness, which we clearly know that he shouldn’t rely on that. If he checked in with God once in a while, he might get a wiser plan, but he doesn’t.

And instead, Samson and Delilah go back and forth three times. And each time, Samson makes up this fake answer about how to defeat him. She does whatever he describes by tying him up in various ways. And then she sets up a Philistine ambush.

It sounds like the Philistines, she literally lets them into the house to come get him. And every time, because he lied about the source of his strength, he easily escapes their grasp. And finally, Delilah has had enough. Now, if you really love me, Samson, you’ll tell me.

You’ll stop making a fool of me by lying. And she nags him for days and days and days until Judges tells us, this is the quote here, he became worn out to the point of death. He’s the strongest man in the world, but Delilah nagging him for a few days, he can’t take it. And I think this is supposed to be funny, by the way.

This story is a comedy in a lot of ways. And you just picture this woman nagging Hercules day after day until he finally says, fine woman, I’ll tell you if you leave me alone. And he reveals a secret. You know, it’s his hair.

And now we need to understand this more deeply than the simplified way it’s told in Vacation Bible School. It is not, again, it is not the hair itself that is the source of Samson’s strength. It’s that his hair is uncut because he’s a Nazirite. It’s not just the hair.

It’s because he is a Nazirite, one who’s consecrated into the service of God. His relationship with God is the source of his strength. His hair is just the symbol of that strength, the sign. The same way baptism, the communion elements, are outward signs of something that’s happening inside, that’s what his hair is.

But this time, whenever he’s told Delilah about his hair, she knows that she has him. And the Philistines, they pay her in advance. They know that this is it. She gets all this silver.

She’s ready. And she persuades Samson into taking a nap in her lap. And while he’s sleeping, she calls in a man to come shave his head. And Delilah wakes him up when this is all done, telling him once more the Philistines have come, and for whatever reason, he assumes that once again he can easily escape.

He says, I’ll do it again. We see this vivid evidence of his foolishness. He knows perfectly well that his strength resides in the covenant his hair represents. And he knows that he’s told Delilah that.

He knows that Delilah has betrayed him to the Philistines three times already. But he’s still convinced that he’s going to get out. He’s going to be fine. And of course, the Philistines do capture him.

They gouge out both of his eyes to cripple the possibility of him resisting. I think that’s a sign, too, that he’s already spiritually blind, but now his eyeballs are gone. And they put him in prison in the Philistine capital of Gaza. Same one.

And while he’s there, he’s forced like an ox to power the stones of a grain mill. You know, like whenever they used to have a donkey walking around in a circle to turn the flour mill, that’s what they make Samson do. And whenever he gets in there, his hair starts to grow back. He’s in prison.

His hair grows back. And his life ends as impulsively as he lived it. Some biblical scholars in the post 9-11 era have pointed out that Samson basically goes out as this ancient version of a suicide bomber. He brings down the Philistine temple around him with thousands upon thousands of the Philistines and their rulers wounded or killed with that demolition as the temple collapses.

Okay. And this is not a good thing. I don’t think this piece of the story is supposed to be like, one cool last thing Samson did. That’s not the case here.

I don’t think the writer of Judges wants us to think that Samson is a hero. Notice this here. Samson asks God before he pushes down these pillars to empower him for this one final act of revenge. But God doesn’t answer.

God does answer Samson sometimes. In the previous couple chapters, Samson would pray for something and God would respond. But God doesn’t answer here. And I wonder if maybe we should be understanding that at this point, Samson’s connection with God is broken.

He’s just tossed it out the window. The strength residing from his gift remains, but he’s disconnected. And so Samson, who’s done whatever he’s wanted his whole life, not caring whether he harms other people, himself, his nation, God, He’s left by God to his own devices at the end. And naturally, what would Samson do but use his freedom to kill people, to enact vengeance, to complete this process of self-destruction that he’s lived his whole life doing? And he is just intensely tragic, right? He’s called from before he’s even born to this big time, illustrious role.

He’s supposed to serve as this messianic figure for his people. He’s supposed to be like a Moses. He’s supposed to be leading his people into freedom, getting that started, getting the Philistines from off their back. And in some ways he does, but mainly just as collateral damage by killing as many people as he can in the process.

Samson is a fool. He’s reckless. He’s been personally selected, empowered by God for this really wonderful task for his people. but he seems to totally forget why he was given all this strength to begin with.

He forgets that his power comes from his covenant with God, and he just neglects that covenant over and over and over again. He’s consecrated to God from birth. His power derives from God’s Spirit, but he lives a life that’s just hilariously out of touch with what he was supposed to be. And he expects that God is going to hold up God’s side of the bargain no matter what, while he can’t be bothered to fulfill his most basic vows.

Samson, I’m giving you all the strength in the world, and you can’t even not drink wine or touch a corpse. Yes. the Lord and Israel, the nation that he’s supposed to be responsible to, just never ever figure into his thought process. He never stops and thinks, well, what about God? What about my people? His position, his power, the gifts that God has given him, they’re for him.

And he’s fully aware that the source of his power is his relationship with God, but his lust, his need for vengeance, his self-centeredness make him stupid and irresponsible about it. In what way is this true for you? Think about that. Samson’s issue here is predominantly lust. That’s clearly his problem.

Every destructive decision that he makes is because of his desire for some different woman. But this kind of deadly sin, as the Catholic Church puts it, can be anything. Maybe yours is pride. Maybe yours is greed, anger, jealousy, a desire for vengeance, the need to control or to be liked.

Maybe it’s something else. We all got our own thing, at least one of them. And it’s very easy for these things to grow, to take over, particularly if we enjoy them, which we do. That’s the whole point.

And then we forget our covenant with God. Think about this. Through Scripture, God punishes people for their sin. We know that.

We see that all the time. But it’s also important to notice that, especially throughout the Old Testament in the prophets, many times their own sin punishes them just fine and God doesn’t have to step in. God doesn’t have to intervene to punish people. You commit sins in the right way, the wrong way, it’ll get you.

And again, notice that God is just completely silent in this story of Samson and Delilah. God doesn’t speak in the whole part that we read. Samson is doing his own thing. God is not involved anymore.

Samson is not talking to God. Samson and Samson alone bring down that temple. on his own head, taking thousands of innocent people with him. God lets him have it his way.

And Israel continues to spiral into greater and greater crisis. The book of Judges just gets darker and darker and darker through the rest of it. He could have turned things around, but it gets worse. Now, none of us have God-given superpowers like Samson.

Maybe you do. I don’t know. But all of us have this relationship as Christians that John Wesley, in his commentary on this chapter, called being spiritual Nazarites. Wesley says that each of us as Christians are spiritual Nazarites.

We’re people who are set apart for a covenant relationship with God through Jesus, and We’re called to use the power, the gifts that God gives us through us for God’s work. And this is where Samson fell the most short. Again, his hair grows back when he’s in prison. His strength comes back.

The outward sign of his consecration, this covenant, it was restored. And then this final feat of strength, he pushes the temple pillars down and he goes out in this blaze of destruction. And his last act, right, despite calling to be a wise judge over his people is this vengeance. Um.

.. And again, we hear that God has been silent through it all. And now, as he prays once more, God is silent again, not giving an answer.

And the covenant between God and Samson has been severed. But the physical gift remains. He still has that gift he was born with of strength, symbolized by his hair. And this tells us something crucial about our relationship with God.

the gifts that God gave us can carry on, even whenever we become detached from the God that gave them to us. We can be like Samson, who is visibly a Nazarite. We can move through the motions of our faith, despite having let the spiritual aspect of our relationship with God wither. We can preach.

We can engage in mission in our community. We can teach. We can attend worship. We can give all these Christian things.

We can keep doing those things. But if our hearts have drifted from God to ourselves, something has changed. Samson is still strong. We would still have those gifts.

But he was going at it alone. We’d be going at it alone. This gift that God had given him for liberation became a tool of vengeance. Samson expected God to show up no matter what, even as he couldn’t be bothered to fulfill his vows to God.

And this issue… of separating our gifts from the reason that we’re given them is a danger for all of us that we could all have.

We can forget that the source of our power isn’t our long hair or our talents or our titles, our respect, the influence we’ve gained through our lives, through the resources we’ve accumulated. None of those are where our power comes from. The power that matters is in our relationship. with God, our ongoing faithfulness to the covenant that we made when we were baptized.

And the story of Samson is just so painful because he’s called to something so good. He’s called to be this messianic hero, but instead wastes his gifts as this self-serving fool. He never understood the freedom he was meant to bring his people had to first begin with his commitment to the God whose nature is freedom and grace and justice. And as spiritual Nazarites, that’s true for us, we are set apart to be instruments of God.

of liberation, of justice, of peace. And that means actively embodying that love in the world, that we do what the general rules of the United Methodist Church say, do no harm, do good, attend upon the ordinances of God. If Samson had done those three things, can you imagine? And so the question for us is never really, do I have the strength to do this thing or that thing? The question is, am I still in the relationship that is the source of that strength? Are we letting our own self-centeredness, our pride, our need for vengeance or control grow until we’re blind, until we’re serving someone else entirely? the power that God has given us to be heroes like Samson, each in our own way, comes from a life in God’s presence, living with God, using God’s gifts for God’s kingdom. May it be so.

In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.