Untitled Sermon (20)

Let me tell you a story about a guy. And his interaction with a religious leader.

I have to start by telling you a little about this man. He’s an absolute menace to society. He has one of those reputations that nobody wants. He’s that guy that when a mom sees him on the street corner, she pulls her kid a little closer.

He’s completely insane and wildly unpredictable. His brokenness is obvious to everyone—but it’s not the type of brokenness that elicits pity necessarily. It’s the type of brokenness that elicits fear, that makes you want to get away from the guy because you aren’t sure if you’ll be the next one he harms.

If people can become monsters, this guy is exhibit A. But that’s his past…He gets radically saved. I mean, whole town talking about it, complete 180. Like it’s not some show, he’s not scamming, radically saved, totally changed. He was once the definition of unstable. Now he’s stable.

So, this guy has a testimony that would sell out stadiums. Can you imagine the influence that this guy could have on the kingdom.

And he meets up with this religious leader—a guy with no small influence. And he begs that religious leader to let him go on a tour with Him. He wants to tell everyone about Jesus and what has happened in his life.

What do you think this religious leader does? How would he respond?

You know what he says to him?

Go home.

Return to your home.

Unbelievable, eh?

There’s a bit more familiar version of the story I’ve just told. Stand with me as we read from God’s Word

Mark 5:1–20 ESV

They came to the other side of the sea, to the country of the Gerasenes. And when Jesus had stepped out of the boat, immediately there met him out of the tombs a man with an unclean spirit. He lived among the tombs. And no one could bind him anymore, not even with a chain, for he had often been bound with shackles and chains, but he wrenched the chains apart, and he broke the shackles in pieces. No one had the strength to subdue him. Night and day among the tombs and on the mountains he was always crying out and cutting himself with stones. And when he saw Jesus from afar, he ran and fell down before him. And crying out with a loud voice, he said, “What have you to do with me, Jesus, Son of the Most High God? I adjure you by God, do not torment me.” For he was saying to him, “Come out of the man, you unclean spirit!” And Jesus asked him, “What is your name?” He replied, “My name is Legion, for we are many.” And he begged him earnestly not to send them out of the country. Now a great herd of pigs was feeding there on the hillside, and they begged him, saying, “Send us to the pigs; let us enter them.” So he gave them permission. And the unclean spirits came out and entered the pigs; and the herd, numbering about two thousand, rushed down the steep bank into the sea and drowned in the sea. The herdsmen fled and told it in the city and in the country. And people came to see what it was that had happened. And they came to Jesus and saw the demon-possessed man, the one who had had the legion, sitting there, clothed and in his right mind, and they were afraid. And those who had seen it described to them what had happened to the demon-possessed man and to the pigs. And they began to beg Jesus to depart from their region. As he was getting into the boat, the man who had been possessed with demons begged him that he might be with him. And he did not permit him but said to him, “Go home to your friends and tell them how much the Lord has done for you, and how he has had mercy on you.” And he went away and began to proclaim in the Decapolis how much Jesus had done for him, and everyone marveled.

It was Jesus. Jesus told the guy to go back home. Why? As one theologian put it, “just as Jesus’ movement is picking up momentum, he tells a man not to follow him.”

And if you look at the geography here…and what happens it’s even more astonishing what happens. Jesus goes out of his way to do this. That demon possessed dude seems to be Jesus’ only stop here. And it’s not like what we see with the other disciples. Peter, Andrew, James, John....live your fishing boat, come and follow me. But not with this demon possessed guy. He travels all this way to heal the guy and THEN even though the guy is begging to go with Jesus, Jesus tells him to return to his home…and there, tell the story.

Why does he do this?

To answer this question we’re going to have to go way back to the Garden of Eden and we’re going to need to learn a little about the nature of healing and trauma. And I hope by the time we get to the end you and I can see a little about the importance of stability and planting roots.

All the way back to the Garden...

In Genesis 2:15 we read

Genesis 2:15 ESV

The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it.

That word there for “put him” is an interesting one. It doesn’t mean the same thing as “place”, like you might be placing pieces on a chess board. You put the king, right here. You put the knight and the rook here.

It’s not that kind of put. There is another way in which that word might be used. It can also mean something like rest for safe keeping. Like giving a treasure to a little kid and saying, “now you go and put that some place safe”.

What it means here is more like I’m going to put you to work. But where they are put to work is significant as well. It’s in the garden. Now, when we picture this it’s not like a vegetable garden—that rascally groundhogs can come in and eat your beans.

No, the word means enclosure. It’s a safe space. Chaos and Garden are not words that belong together. Rest, tranquility, beauty, etc. Those are words that belong in gardens. Not chaos. The garden isn’t where the wild things are.

Here is the picture then, God encloses humanity in this garden, safe from all the wild things, and puts humanity to work to cultivate beauty.

Stable.

But there is a tree in this garden and this tree is like a door into the place where all the wild things are. Don’t open that. Don’t eat of that fruit. It’s off limits.

But humanity doesn’t listen. They partake of the fruit. They bring chaos, instability, etc. into this garden of peace. That’s not the stuff that belongs in the Garden of God. To allow them to remain would mean that Paradise (which is connected to the word garden) now has the wild things in it.

So look at what happens. Listen to Genesis 3:23-24

Genesis 3:23–24 ESV

therefore the Lord God sent him out from the garden of Eden to work the ground from which he was taken. He drove out the man, and at the east of the garden of Eden he placed the cherubim and a flaming sword that turned every way to guard the way to the tree of life.

Sent him out. Or in verse 24 drove him out. He’s booted out of the enclosure, out of the garden, and into the place where the wild things are.

Humanity is exiled. But notice that we are still tasked with, “working the ground” but the language is different. The soil is different. He’s not working with beauty to create beauty. He’s working with thorns and thistles and doing so in the midst of chaos. Trying to make meaning out of all of this.

Humanity still has that same drive to create beautiful things—but now it’s marred—the material is different. And so that drive doesn’t lead to fulfillment but now it just leads to futility. He has moved from stability to instability, into a world of chaos.

But God doesn’t leave us alone out here where the wild things are. No, he is actually working to bring us back to the Garden. He’s working to take out all of the instability and chaos out of our hearts and once again plant us, deeply rooted, never to leave into the garden.

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Now look at all of this in Mark 5. Right before this story you have a chaotic storm. The disciples are on the lake. They think they are going to die. Yes, this is where the wild things are. This is life outside the garden.

This is where we feel all of the pain, the suffering, the futility, the frustrated longings, the sleepless nights, the tears, the stench of death, all of that...

But there is still beauty. There is still life. There is still redemption. It’s not something that you just abandon.

And Jesus steps onto that boat in the midst of chaos and with one word, he calms the storm. He brings stability. What man is this? Only God can do that stuff! Who is this guy!

And now we have a similar story with this demon possessed man. Look at all the instability here.

Mark wants us to see how he’s unable to be controlled. No one can bind him. And he’s cutting himself with stones. We would call this mentally unstable.

In Luke 8 we see a few more details

He doesn’t wear clothes. He’s wild, unfettered it seems. But it’s uncomfortable. You don’t have a coffee with a nudist.

He doesn’t live in a house. No home cooked meals. No laying his head down on a pillow. No embrace of a loved one. No four walls to shelter from the elements. No home. No roots. Instead he lives in the tombs, amongst the dead...

And in Luke 8:29 we read this, Luke 8:29

but he would break the bonds and be driven by the demon into the desert.)

That’s what demons do. They bring the chaos. They hate stability. They moved him away from friends, from place, from family, from home.

And look what happens in the story when the demons leave this man. They enter into a herd of pigs and what do they do? Chaos. They also ran away. As one author so wonderfully put it,

Look at this interesting play in the text: the previously pastured pigs, the pigs that had a home, were now homeless, living among the tombs, cast into the chaos of the deep. Before, it was the demoniac who was on the run; now it was the pigs, while the homeless demoniac was settled and re-homed.

And look at what Jesus does with the guy. I love this. He’s sitting at the feet of Jesus. Stable.

Sitting.

Such a simple action, but it’s something he hadn’t engaged in for years. He has color back in his eyes. There is life there again.

Jesus bring stability into the chaos. This is a picture of redemption. It is a picture of what Jesus is doing with every one of us. And it’s a little foretaste of glory. This is where God is aiming to take you and I. Out of the place where all the wild things are, and into the place of stability, of joy and peace…where all is right with the world. Shalom.

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We are almost ready to answer our beginning question. Why did Jesus say “no” to his missionary career...

But first we need to know just a little about trauma. Here is what trauma will do to you. When you’ve experienced some sort of trauma…maybe it’s one really bad experience, maybe its something like complex trauma—a long season of abuse.

Even when we are removed from those situations our body develops responses. And we might not even notice that it’s happening. But something rises up within us to either fight, flight, or freeze.

But one thing trauma doesn’t do—it doesn’t build. You can’t garden and trauma. Either the garden will push out the wild things or you’ll kill all the plants.

I’m going somewhere here. Follow me. Chaos, instability, life outside the garden creates this.

I sin against others and that is participating with the wild things. It’s making home in the chaos, it’s planting a life outside of Eden. It’s building in the chaos. It’s trying to find a home. Make my own way of things.

And I’m sinned against. The wild things impact me. I both create different levels of harm in the life of others, in myself, and then I’m impacted as well.

How do we heal?

Those who are experts on dealing with trauma tell us that there are three big things that need to happen for healing:

I need to tell my story.I need to tell my story safely to another human.I need to tell a new, different story with other humans.

In other words, we have to go back to that place of trauma, that place where the chaos and instability happened, and it needs to be rebuilt and re-framed. A new and better story has to be placed over it.

But trauma runs. That’s the absolute last thing that it wants to do. It prefers a comfortable instability to the unknown stability which redemption might bring. It’s too risky to re-enter. Too dangerous to garden.

Now, let’s think about this guy for just a moment. How much carnage has this guy created in his life? How many people do you think he hurt? What kind of a relationship did he have in the community?

I mean, let’s just say the really uncomfortable thing here. Dude was naked all the time. That’s not really something you come back from very easily. You aren’t the naked guy screaming in the cemetery, yelling at people, throwing rocks, breaking chains, cutting yourself, and such and then made the mayor of the city when you decide to calm down a little.

You’ve burned so many bridges. You have a reputation. There is way too much shame to undue. The family name is tainted. You can’t go back.

Do you see where I’m going yet? What does the demonic create? Instability.

It uses our trauma, it harms us, and then uses the very nature of that harm—our response to harm—to keep us in even more bondage and create even more harm until we are ultimately destroyed.

But what does Jesus do?

He breaks the cycle. He gives stability. But watch this…we’re ready to answer our question. Why did Jesus tell him no?

Because going without first returning would have been entering back into demonic instability.

This is the first time in quite some time that this guy has been stable. He hasn’t had a place (you can’t call the tombs a place) for years. He has to go back. In his book, The Power of Place, Douglas Grothe says this,

Trying to live and die in one place over a long period of time is painful. Often the greatest pain inflicted on us comes from those closest to us. Jesus knows this, for his own family “went to take charge of him, for they said, ‘He is out of his mind’” (Mark 3:21). Jesus later said, “A prophet is not without honor except in his own town, among his relatives and in his own home” (Mark 6:4). And like Jesus, we know the difficulty of staying in our homes and in our home country. We want to run, to flee, to go with Jesus to any place other than the place of our old associations, our stagnating pain, our peculiar relationships with our particular family and friends. We think it will be simpler on the other side of the lake. But Jesus won’t let us run away.

Sometimes demons make missionaries. And we can participate when we put an undue weight on the word GO in the great commission to the neglect of the word MAKE.

For Andrew, Peter, John, James the hard thing was to go. To leave their success and enter into discipleship with Jesus. For this formerly demon-possessed guy the hard thing was to stay.

THIS is the ground you need to work.

Jesus freed up this man so that he could stay. And that’s exactly what he did. He became the resident missionary as he “began to proclaim in the Decapolis how much Jesus had done for him, and everyone marveled.”

What do we do with this story?

First, the main point of this passage is that Jesus alone can heal the chaos. Jesus can calm the raging sea. Jesus can take the demon possessed man, throw back all that chaos, and have him sitting in His right mind. Jesus enters into where the wild things are, and he tames it and redeems it.

Perhaps, today that is what you need. That is your pray. Jesus, calm the storm. Calm the chaos. Calm the raging sea. I can’t do it.

And maybe this is a call into some deeper work. We don’t like to do that. We don’t like to dig in deeper and get true healing, it can be too painful…we don’t want to stop...

I can’t believe I’m going to use SpongeBob Squarepants as such a fitting illustration…but here goes...

In one particular episode SpongeBob comes down with what they calls the Suds. It’s basically like having a really bad cold, but for SpongeBob it makes him sneeze bubbles.

He tries to go to work but gets sent home. And there his best friend Patrick tells him not to go to the doctor’s office b/c it’s filled with all sorts of horrible torture devices and outdated magazines. So, SpongeBob decides that Patrick should try to fix him. What he tries to do is plug up all of the holes in SpongeBob (remember he’s a sponge—yellow and porous is he)…plug up all the places where the bubbles are coming out.

But this doesn’t work. Every time SpongeBob sneezes he inflates. He’s sent bouncing away, sneezes violently blasting corks everywhere and blowing up the restaurant.

What SpongeBob tried is exactly what we try to do. We try to plug in the holes. Fill it with activity. Fill it with pleasures. Fill it with whatever we can. Whatever it takes to avoid the “doctor”.

But it doesn’t work. Hurt has to go somewhere. Pain must have a landing place. It’s got to come out. And so we end up getting angry at weird times, depressed, irrational, controlling, frivolous, rootless....chaotic.

Jesus can bring healing to anything. It’s not always as quick as what we see in this story…but we can be assured that someday “we will be sitting there, clothed and in our right mind”.

Maybe today, that’s what you need. To come to Jesus for the first time.

Or maybe you need to come to Jesus and say, “let’s do some deeper work. I’ve got to have some healing here…I’ve been running and running and trying to plug up all these holes…I can’t do it anymore. I need you!”

Or maybe you’ve experienced that healing and you need to be obedient in telling your story. “Tell them how much the Lord has done for you...”