They came to the other side of the sea, to the country of the
Gerasenes. And when he had stepped out of the boat, immediately
a man out of the tombs with an unclean spirit met him.
I'm a recovering alcoholic in my 16th year. In my early stages
of recovery, I was very touched by this story of the Gerasene
demoniac in the gospel of Mark (5:1-20). It was already a favorite
of mine because it is such a powerful story. But in my recovery,
it struck me that this is a story about a drunk.
Actually, this man is possessed by a demon, but I saw him as a
fellow drunk. The more I reflected on this story, the more I realized
how perfectly it describes the life of addiction and the good
news of the possibility of recovery. As I share with you my reflections
on this story, I invite you to reflect upon your own addictions.
We all have them, just different kinds. Most of us have more than
one. We need all the help we can get to deal with them.
The story begins by noting that Jesus and the disciples came across
the lake from the land of Israel, where Jesus' ministry has been,
into Gentile territory, where the Gerasenes lived. Immediately
we are introduced to estrangement and alienation, because Jesus
and the disciples are aliens in this land. It's ironic that the
first person they encounter there, in fact the only person described
there, at least initially, is a man who is estranged and alienated-from
himself, from God, and from his neighbors. He is a man without
a home. His condition is hopeless. That is the point of the story.
And we see as we move along in the story that all kinds of things
have been done to try and save him.
This is an advent story, a story of God's coming. God comes into
this man's life, just as God continues to come into your life
and mine, always seeking us out.
The term "unclean spirit" lets us know right away that
Mark sees this event in spiritual terms, as a spiritual problem.
Of course, the term "alcohol" is a translation from
Latin meaning "spirit," which is why we refer to alcoholic
beverages as spirits sometimes.
If we think of this man as an alcoholic, he is one who thirsts
after the Spirit. He longs for something to feed the depths of
his soul. He has hit on something that doesn't satisfy his longing,
and which takes him away from it. But the longing is authentic.
He wants to be fed. He needs nourishment of his soul.
He lived among the tombs, and no one could restrain him anymore,
even with a chain; for he had often been restrained with shackles
and chains, but the chains he wrenched apart and the shackles
he broke in pieces; and no one had the strength to subdue him.
Night and day among the tombs and on the mountains he was always
howling and bruising himself with stones.
Here we get a pretty good description of what it is like in the
life of an alcoholic or a drug addict. Those who are addicted
to substances are notorious for the ways in which they abuse themselves.
Alcoholics fall down stairs, get into fights, and are injured
in car crashes, bruising themselves in many different ways. And
if they are not caught up in this kind of violence, the consumption
of alcohol itself is a long-term abusive process which is a way
of killing oneself, slowly but surely. A colleague once told me
that when he got into recovery, he had eight different illnesses,
all alcohol related. This is the power and the depth of the addiction.
Fortunately, however, within a few years' time he was healed of
all of them.
The story also says that the man rejects the help of his family
and friends. They have done their best to restrain him; they have
probably even called the police to have him locked up, thinking
maybe that will make him sober up. They've taken all of these
drastic measures, because things have gotten so bad. They've exhausted
themselves trying to save this man and nothing helps.
Furthermore, the man chooses isolation over community. He has
left home, and now lives in a graveyard. What a metaphor this
is for a kind of living death. In my own experience of being addicted,
the isolation, loneliness, despair, and desperation I felt was
like a living death. Life was simply not worth living. When alcoholics
reach the point where the only thing they live for is to get another
drink, they are already spiritually dead.
The question is, Why doesn't he quit? Of course, we are all sophisticated
enough now to know that the man has a medical disease. It's a
disease of addiction, but in biblical terms he is demon possessed.
I think we in the church have made a serious mistake in casting
the demons out of the Bible. The demons that haunt our lives are
powers that are stronger than we are, and with which we need help
for our salvation.
The attempts to save this man were mostly external: restraining
him, putting him in jail, kicking him out of the community, kicking
him out of his family. But this is a spiritual disease, and we
only experience healing from spiritual disease as our spirit is
spoken to. If we are to have deliverance at all, it must be spiritual
deliverance.
We may reach the point of despair. Soren Kierkegaard says that
despair is really the beginning of hope, because that is the point
at which we give up. We stop trying to save ourselves. We finally
reach the point at which we are willing to turn our lives over.
When he saw Jesus from a distance, he ran and bowed down before
him; and he shouted at the top of his voice, "What have you
to do with me, Jesus, Son of the Most High God? I adjure you by
God, do not torment me." For Jesus had said to him, "Come
out of the man, you unclean spirit!"
Notice the man's ambivalence. On the one hand, he runs up to Jesus
and falls down on his knees, which would be a gesture of obeisance,
worship, or at least respect. On the other hand, he screams at
Jesus, "Why have you come here to torment me?"
In treatment for addiction, it is the most common experience to
regard our counselors as the enemy, as our tormentors, not as
our helpers. They are making life miserable for us, and we hate
them for it. "Why do I have to put up with this? Why can't
I have a drink? I would feel a lot better."
Then Jesus asked him, "What is your name?" He replied,
"My name is Legion; for we are many." He begged him
earnestly not to send them out of the country.
Jesus doesn't take the man's anger literally. He doesn't respond
to the torment question, but rather speaks to the depth of him.
He says, "What is your name?" as if to say to the demons,
"Who is in charge? I want to speak to him."
A legion in Jesus' time was 4,000-6,000 men in a military unit.
The name Legion means, first of all, that this man has lost his
identity. In this powerful story, we never know his real name.
It is as if he has become known simply as the "town drunk."
A second implication of calling him Legion is that he is the scene
of an occupying army. Many different voices are arguing in him,
tearing him apart within. In one moment he is filled with denial,
in another he is condemning himself, in another he is rationalizing.
A third implication of the name Legion is what we call codependence.
This man is sustained in his alcoholism by a codependent network.
Alcoholism is a social disease. It is not possible for alcoholics
to sustain themselves in alcoholism without a network that allows
them to keep drinking. People who make up the codependent network
may not even be aware of it.
Many people did not know that I was an alcoholic. I was very clever.
The people who were a part of my life, nevertheless, were my codependent
network. For as long as they did not think I had a problem, I
thought that was proof positive that I did not have a problem.
In a very subtle way, I was using them to sustain myself in my
alcoholism. The healing process involves not simply the healing
of the individual but dealing with the network that sustains the
person in his or her addictive behavior.
Now there on the hillside a great herd of swine was feeding; and
the unclean spirits begged him, "Send us into the swine;
let us enter them." So he gave them permission. And the unclean
spirits came out and entered the swine; and the herd, numbering
about two thousand, rushed down the steep bank into the sea, and
were drowned in the sea.
We all have a shadow side that is a part of us, but we have decided
not to live it out. Alcoholism is my shadow side, and it had taken
over in my life, as it had taken over in this man. I believe that
it is always going to be there, as long as I live.
In more than 15 years, I've never had another drink. But I frequently
have dreams about drinking again. When I dream that I have gone
back to drinking, I don't know where it started. I hate myself
for it, I'm ashamed of it, and I feel in despair about it. When
I wake up, I am always so relieved that it is only a dream and
that I didn't really take a drink.
Having this dream is a ministry to me; it reminds me of my true
condition. The alcoholic part of me serves to keep me whole. It
is a part of who I am, and my remembrance of this is what helps
keep me sober and moves me toward being a more whole person. We
cannot destroy the shadow side.
When Carry Nation carried out her turn-of-the-century crusade
to abolish alcohol, she was dealing with a very serious problem.
This was before Alcoholics Anonymous came along, and it was hopeless.
Families were being wrecked, and she was doing her desperate best
to try to change things. She went in to saloons with her hatchet
and destroyed bottles and furnishings. But she approached the
problem with the idea that it is possible to destroy the shadow
side. She approached it as an external problem rather than an
internal, spiritual problem.
The mythology in Jesus' time was that demons had to be invested
with some kind of bodily form. So Jesus permitted them to go into
the pigs, and that drove them crazy. They went off the cliff and
were drowned. (Pigs, of course, were despised by Jews, so getting
rid of them was no loss.)
I'd like to suggest that these 2,000 pigs represent the codependent
community, and that this is their baptism. The apostle Paul says
that as we are baptized into Christ's death so we are raised into
his new life. When the pigs went off the cliff and were drowned,
they were baptized. The codependent community was converted from
codependency to a support community.
One of the things I did when I was in treatment, when I stopped
drinking, was to invite a number of friends to our home to tell
them my story. None of them knew it. What I did in telling them
was make them a part of my support network. It would no longer
be possible for me to be with them someplace and nonchalantly
have a drink, because now they knew that alcohol was off-limits
to me.
For Legion's healing, there had to be a will for wholeness on
his part. Two things are true at the same time: Only God can heal
us, and only we can will our healing. Legion cannot be healed
apart from his own will to be healed. In his screaming and crying
out, in his yelling at Jesus, I think we hear the plaintive cries
of a sad and pathetic human being who longs to be whole and does
not know how to ask for help. Jesus hears that call. Jesus' power
of healing matches this man's will to be healed, so that he is
made whole.
The swineherds ran off and told it in the city and in the country.
Then people came to see what it was that had happened. They came
to Jesus and saw the demoniac sitting there, clothed and in his
right mind, the very man who had had the legion; and they were
afraid. Those who had seen what had happened to the demoniac and
to the swine reported it. Then they began to beg Jesus to leave
their neighborhood.
Notice the community's ambivalence: The savior has come but is
not welcome. This should not surprise us. Recently I heard a man
whose wife is a recovering alcoholic make a very candid comment,
a confession on his part. He said, "My wife was a lot easier
to manage when she was drinking." You can imagine the resistance
on his part to have this woman come alive.
We could apply this to the issue of world peace. In some ways
we can't afford world peace. Just think what would happen if we
closed down the whole military complex today. We would have utter
chaos in this country. The B-2 bomber is being funded because
all these members of Congress have constituencies who have some
economic stake in it.
I don't mean to be uncompassionate to people in military-related
jobs. We shouldn't take their situation lightly. But we should
understand the investment we have in the addiction of militarism.
As much as we in this country believe in peace, we are ambivalent
about paying the price necessary to have peace. I think this is
one reason why the Pharisees, Sadducees, and others hated Jesus
as a healer, and kept trying to stop this healing-because they
were not all that much in favor of a healthy and whole community.
The underlying fear and resistance here on the part of the community,
on the part of Legion, is the loss of control. And the fear is
grounded in our distrust of God's love. What if I let go of all
this?
I volunteered myself for treatment of my alcoholism. But before
I did, two things kept holding me back. First, I feared condemnation
once I came out of the closet. It didn't happen. Second, I thought
I couldn't live without alcohol. I hated it, I was miserable,
life wasn't worth living, but I couldn't imagine life without
it. That's the whiskey talking. It comes from a distrust of God's
love: What if I let go? Will grace hold me up?
As he was getting into the boat, the man who had been possessed
by demons begged him that he might be with him. But Jesus refused,
and said to him, "Go home to your friends, and tell them
how much the Lord has done for you, and what mercy he has shown
you." And he went away and began to proclaim in the Decapolis
how much Jesus had done for him; and everyone was amazed.
Luke's version of this story says that the man had taken off all
his clothes. It's not uncommon on the back ward of mental institutions
to find people who refuse to wear clothes. I'm not sure all of
what that means, but it certainly does mean a loss of self-respect
and dignity. The earlier reference that the man is now "clothed
and in his right mind" means he has begun to love himself
again.
But this is only the beginning. As Jesus leaves, the man wants
to latch on to Jesus, but Jesus refuses to let him follow. What
preacher would turn down the opportunity to have a witness like
this man trail along, saying, "Look what this guy did for
me. Here's my story"? Instead Jesus says, "No, you go
home."
Recovery, first of all, means liberation not bondage. It is often
the case that when we get liberated from something that binds
us, we want to attach ourselves to the person or organization
that was the instrument of our liberation rather than accept our
freedom.
Second, while we want to make a break with the past, it is important
that we claim our past, that we not deny or reject it, that we
not be ashamed of it or hide from it. This man needed to go back
home where he could claim his past and his future. Part of recovery
is sharing the good news. It is part of our healing to tell our
story; it is a way of keeping us sober. And it is beneficial to
others to hear our stories.
We share our good news as a part of our recovery and that never
stops. This is the importance of story-telling. It is a way God
uses us as wounded healers.
HARRY C. KIELY, a United Methodist pastor currently serving
St. Paul United Methodist Church in Laytonsville, Maryland, originally
preached this sermon at Sojourners Community worship in Washington,
D.C. This material comes from his unpublished book Grateful
Recovery: Spirituality and the Healing of Addiction.
Read other articles by:
Kiely, Harry C.
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