Pentecost 4, Year C
The Rev. Dena Cleaver-Bartholomew
Are you crazy? That is the question we ask when someone makes a choice that makes no sense according to our understanding of the world. Sometimes people are, literally, insane. They are not able to distinguish between what is real and what is not, what is healthy behavior and that which is destructive. At other times people make choices that do not fit within our standards of normalcy. Our culture encourages such risk taking…to a degree. “Thinking outside the box,” and “pushing the envelope” are two common phrases for expanding the normal boundaries without crossing them in a frightening or unacceptable way. Then there is “skating over the edge,” and “jumping off a cliff,” both of which provide vivid visual metaphors for having gone too far in crossing the line of tolerable behavior.
Elijah
made a choice to publicly challenge, humiliate, and then kill the prophets of
the local god Baal. These were the
favored prophets of Queen Jezebel, who had already shown herself capable of
arranging the murder of an innocent man because her husband wanted his
vineyard. Was Elijah crazy? He had to know his choice could have enormous
consequences. These days we speak of “suicide by cop,” when someone
intentionally provokes the police into shooting them. Was Elijah choosing suicide by offending the
queen? Jezebel vows to have his life as
punishment for his deeds and Elijah lies down under a broom tree, ready to
die. But God has another plan. Elijah has made the choices he has, not
because he is crazy, but because God has called him as a prophet to confront
King Ahab for failing to be loyal to God.
In order to reaffirm Elijah’s call and faithful service, Elijah is led
to the mountain where God met with Moses, where he too encounters God
personally. After the drama of wind,
earthquake, and fire, God becomes present to Elijah in “a sound of sheer silence.” Elijah
has carried out a prophetic career that required great courage; now is not the
time to fear. He is not alone, for God
tells him “I will leave seven thousand
in
In contrast to Elijah, we have the Gerasene demoniac. He was crazy. He had so many demons he called himself Legion, the word for a group of nearly 6,000 Roman soldiers. Theirs had indeed been a hostile takeover, resulting in his naked, homeless, terrifying, self-destructive existence. When Jesus allowed the demons in him to enter the herd of swine, they literally “jumped off the cliff.” His healing left him “clothed and in his right mind.” This, it turns out, was more alarming to the local people than the previous situation. Suddenly they faced a man who had the power to change reality as they knew it in a powerful, direct, and personal way. This was no longer a story about some unfortunate guy who was possessed and then isolated to suffer the consequences, one whom they could relegate to the tombs and attempt to confine. Instead this was about Jesus, who could reorder the way the world worked, displaying power enough to drive out a legion of demons and bring order out of chaos. Jesus had the power to effect real change, the kind of change that transforms lives and opens up a whole new realm of possibilities. Jesus wasn’t just “thinking outside the box.” He was threatening its structural integrity. Now that is frightening.
In the movie Strictly Ballroom the main character, Scott, is a champion ballroom dancer like his mother. His parents own a dance studio and he is a rising star, poised to win the Pan Pacific Ballroom Dance Championship. He finds himself compelled to begin integrating new steps of his own creation into his competition dances and faces reactions of shock and dismay for straying from the prescribed norm. Is he crazy? The strongest reaction comes from the elders, those who teach ballroom dance, and have hidden from Scott the secret that they stomped just such behavior out of his father when he was younger. Dancing that was not “strictly ballroom” threatened them, for as they soon discovered, “If you can’t dance a step, you can’t teach it.” This marvelous parody shows just how frightening it can be when the parameters we take for granted are threatened, and how anxiously reactive we can be to change. In the end, at the Pan Pacific Championship, Scott learns the truth of how his parents faced the choice of gambling with their security as future dance instructors by dancing with creativity and passion, or playing it safe and crushing his father’s spirit. Like the Gerasene people gazing in astonishment at Jesus and the man he had healed, they could not take the risk of giving up what they knew for what could be. As Scott’s father encourages him to go and dance full out, he confesses his regret at the choice they had made: “We had a chance, but we were scared. We walked away. We lived our lives in fear.”
We
all face choices. At times it is wise to
know when to say no. That’s why we talk
with young people about drugs, alcohol, cigarettes, gangs, and other high risk
options we must navigate in life. We
also need to talk about fear, about what it is to hold ourselves back from
opportunities that call us into something new.
Playing it safe is good when it comes to buckling our seatbelts and
getting a check up. It is not good when
it limits us to too small a space in life.
We as individuals may find ourselves led to places we hadn’t imagined
ourselves ever being, doing work only God could have foreseen. We at
Amen