As the rhythms of summer hum around us, Hollywood is in high gear, hawking the latest blockbusters that we’ve already seen. This year, if scary movies are your thing, you can brave 140 minutes of genetically-engineered nightmares or predatory space monsters (sound familiar?). Perhaps horror movies are not your thing, but most of us at one time or another have enjoyed hearing scary stories. And that’s just what we find in the Bible today: Luke presents us with many elements of a classic spooky tale – and sure enough, we hear that people are scared. There is, after all, a person possessed by demons. There’ve been plenty of scary movies based on that premise! But demon-possession is not what frightens people in this story.

Ah, but wait - the tale is set in a graveyard - a creepy place if there ever were one! Surely there’s no better setting for a ghost story…but it is not the tombstones that frightens people in the story. Watch out! A muscular man leaps from the tombs, naked from head to toe, raving like a madman (clearly meriting a PG-13 rating). If that were to happen in Daleville, friend, you wouldn’t see me for dust - but even this raving lunatic is not what scares people in this story. We get insight into the man’s terrible mental distress, his frenzied strength, his awful loneliness. We see a horde of pigs, squealing wildly, plunging to a watery death. But in case you missed it, none of these are what scares the people, either.

Maybe you caught what the people of this story thought was really scary. Luke says that “when they came to Jesus, they found the man from whom the demons had gone out, sitting at Jesus’ feet, dressed and in his right mind, and they were afraid” (v35). And when they heard from eyewitnesses how Jesus had freed this wretched person from his demons, from the nightmarish mental illness that had plagued him, Luke says they were “seized” by an even greater fear. Terrified. Is that what you’d expect? That it was not the mania or the violence of this tormented man, but the visible evidence of Jesus’ mercy and compassion that frightened the crowd? That’s a movie not coming to a theater near you this summer. How can we explain such a thing?

To grasp this odd turn of events, we first observe something about our nature as human beings: we are very good at accommodating, acclimatizing ourselves to the way things are. In the ancient world, mental illness was quite common, probably as much as it is today. Well-known were the demons to which we have given various names: Psychosis, Paranoia, Cutting Disorder, Multiple Personality Disorder. But having no sanitariums, no hospitals for those with such afflictions, the ancient world had madmen and madwomen roaming the landscape. Perhaps some still put food out for the man who lived in the tombs, but most who remembered him in better days tried to forget him. They got used to the shouts and screams from the caves where the dead were buried. Better he stays there, than makes a problem for us in town! So the presence of madness and disordered evil wasn’t scary to them. They’d seen and lived with every depravity, every birth defect, epidemic, and foreign invasion since anyone could remember. What’s one more raving lunatic in a world like this?

But an invasion by the power of God – that was quite another matter. When this man who was utterly lost to madness became sane, the only conceivable explanation disturbed them to the core. If you ever thought that to be in the presence of God’s undeniable power and goodness would be comforting, the townsfolk that day found otherwise. The unholy didn’t scare them – but faced with the holy, the world they knew was shaken to its foundations.

And yet hear this, sisters and brothers, for this may be the scariest thing of all: their story is our story. Because there is really no question that our society has made do with the presence of the unholy, and has accommodated evil in a way so thorough and unquestioned, many scarcely even notice it. Consider: we who follow Christ believe in a God Who gives life as a gift, Who imbues it with sacred meaning. Our Christian forebears struggled with War, with how to protect the innocent whose lives were seen as precious before God. But for nearly three generations now, we’ve lived with the applied knowledge of how to unleash the latent, terrible power of the atom. We live in an age when all people, mighty and humble, of any age or circumstance, can and would be obliterated in an instant.

Now thank God our children today do not know “duck and cover drills,” do not know the bristling rhetoric of Soviet politicians nor how close we all came to a world in flames when those missiles showed up in Cuba. But even so, our children are growing up in a society that’s grown very comfortable with death. Today it is a viable option, an acceptable use of force when remote-control missile strikes are used in an attempt to kill just one person, when the innocent dead by their dozens and hundreds are called “collateral damage” and sometimes not even counted. And somehow this doesn’t scare us.

A medical procedure called amniocentesis is calmly and “humanely” used today as a search-and-destroy mission against the physically and mentally handicapped. The inconvenient unborn as well as the elderly sick are easily swept aside, often in the name of “compassion.” Many of us have forgotten what it is to be horrified at such things. Poverty, disease, and starvation take the lives of 29,000 children a day worldwide, but few of us get out of bed feeling disturbed or repulsed by this. Meanwhile, back home, we mete out death as justice, punishment administered by the people, for the people. Metal detectors appear not just in airports but in hospitals and in high schools, and we lament that our children today menace one another with guns – but really it seems that they have just been watching us, learning from us old folks who have gotten so accommodated to the evil around us, to the humdrum banality of everyday death.

To a people who had forgotten the compassion of God for the widow, for the orphan, for the enemy, the prophet Isaiah spoke a word of warning: “woe to those who call evil good and good evil!” (5:20). We live at a time and place where evil is most assuredly called good, brothers and sisters, a time when sex outside marriage is called casual, when the abandonment of marriage is seen as ordinary, when the profanation, the commercialization of God’s unique gift to marriage is referred to as “adult entertainment.”

And none of that scares us, perhaps no more than the presence of a crazy naked man frightened the Gerasenes. It is as if we just don’t know any different, anymore. But even as bad as that is, here’s the scariest part! The truly frightening thing is the absence of a faithful, witnessing Church that actually offers an alternative, a way of life to those adrift in a culture of death. We in the Church point fingers at Hollywood and bewail the decline of decency and manners, but how seriously do we take the task of articulating why we believe that sex, for example, is a good thing, a gift of God for the fulfillment of holy marriage? When we hear that our children, our friends, our grandchildren have concluded that it’s not only acceptable but even good to “live together” as if married but without the entanglements of marriage, do we shake our heads and stomp off in judgmental irrelevancy - which is how the world sees us? Or can we offer, in a spirit of love, a better way that names and claims the good which God has given to us, offering to all a loving community that celebrates and builds up marriage and parenting, and also singlehood?

Can we speak up and name ‘good’ for good? Sometimes I think it is almost too late. Accustomed to our Sunday routines and self-serving veneer of religiosity, we in the Church almost accept our irrelevancy. It is as if we wave from the shoreline when we see Jesus pass by, imagining what it would be like if he landed on our beach. Oh, what a wonderful world it would be if that happened, we think.

But then we recall that he has landed on our beach, and our wonderful world is still a mess. Evil almost has the run of the place, and some of these demons running around we can’t even name anymore. Down by the water, one more raving lunatic is throwing himself at Jesus’ feet, and thank goodness that’s his problem, that we never have to deal with those with shattered lives, those crying in wilderness places, those living in open graves. Now Jesus is talking to that man and lifting him up, unwrapping his own garment and clothing that naked wild man, who isn’t looking so wild anymore.

Now Jesus is looking over our way, and suddenly we know what fear is. Fear is inhabiting a world we were not made for, were never intended to live in, and understanding that with pain and with travail, another world is coming. Fear is facing the choice when Jesus looks at us: will we run and take cover in the tombs we’ve been living in? Or will we walk down to him, and learn what it takes to be citizens of the world that is coming, on earth as it is in heaven.

May God give us the courage to stand up and think it over. Amen.