First Sunday after Trinity 2025

As the long Trinity season begins, James reflects on what it means to live as people of the resurrection — shaped by the pattern of Christ's dying and rising, and sent into the world with the good news of the Kingdom.

Transcript

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Isn't today's gospel a fascinatingly bizarre story? Let's not super spiritualize things or pretend like we know exactly what's going on here. We may be very familiar with this story because it is one of those stories that people have heard before, or because you've been in church long enough that you've heard it time and again. But it's a really, really strange story. Jesus is talking to demons. They have a little negotiation back and forth, they find out each other's names. And then because they ask not to go to the abyss, wherever that is, Jesus sends them into a herd of pigs, which immediately run themselves into a lake and drown. And then the town asks him to leave. We need, I think, to come to the scriptures afresh this morning, asking for God's help in how to understand them. It's stories like this, which periodically come up that remind us that what we're dealing with is not necessarily something familiar, but something extremely strange, something, a story, a set of scriptures that was written thousands and thousands of years ago in a foreign country, in a place that is not our own. And so we need to ask again, what do these what does this story mean? And I say this from experience because this is what I was doing earlier this week, confronted with this scripture, thinking, oh, I've got to talk about this in six days' time. I wonder what these scriptures mean. And the conclusions I reached are not easy. And so what I'd like to do more than I would normally do is show my working. You remember from school and you're in your doing your maths homework, and the teacher says, It's not enough that you know the answer to this formula. I need you to show your working. How did you reach the conclusion of you know, whatever the answer to the formula is? Take me through the steps that got you there. And sometimes stories like this, it's worth doing that slightly more than you would normally because the answers aren't always easy or straightforward. So let me also tell you that the resource I used to get all the answers that I'm about to give you came from uh a project that I'm a massive fan of called the Bible Project. Please do Google them, look them for videos up on YouTube, find all their resources online, Bibleprojects.com. It's really good, academically informed, trustworthy stuff. And uh that's where I went to in trying to work out what this story means. When you're struck by a story like this, one of the things you could do is ask a couple of questions. Questions like why is Luke, why is the author telling us this story? And why is he telling us this story at this point in the gospel? Because we can assume, because this is how rational people talk, that the gospel of Luke has a beginning and a middle and an end, and there is a reason why Luke does all the things that he's doing. So why does he tell this story at this point in his narrative? And where is he driving us to? And what does he want us to learn? Well, the commentators will tell you that Luke chapter 8 comes in the middle towards the end of a section that lasts from Luke 3 to Luke 9, that is called, the commentators call it, Jesus and His Mission. And it has a particular flavor, and it's trying to do a particular thing. It starts in Luke chapter 4 with Jesus making a proclamation in his hometown of Nazareth about who he is and what his ministry is for. The story goes that he opens the book of Isaiah in his hometown, and he stands up in front of his people who would have known him, and he says, This the Spirit of the Lord is upon me to preach good news to the poor and freedom for the prisoners, to proclaim new sight to the blind and freedom to the oppressed. And so these words of freedom and release are extremely important to Jesus' ministry. He says, This is what I'm about, proclaiming release to the prisoners. Release is a very important word in the Jewish scriptures. It refers back to the Old Testament practice of Jubilee, where every 49 years they would reenact the Exodus by setting all the slaves free, by canceling all the debts. And it was just like what Israel experienced in the Exodus when God took them out of Egypt and brought them into the promised land. And so Jesus begins his ministry by saying, This is what I'm about. I am bringing the year of Jubilee through my ministry. The oppressed, the poor, and the enslaved, they will be set free and released from their bondage. Now you might ask, who are the poor? Who is Jesus going to set free? Now, in Matthew's gospel, it adds poor in spirit. And that's also true. Jesus sets those people free as well. But Luke's gospel in particular wants us to think about the poor, because Luke is interested in the social dimension of Jesus' gospel. But he doesn't just mean those people who don't have any money, although he does mean that. He means poor in its broadest sense. So poor in the ancient world could refer to people of low status in their culture, maybe because they have disabilities, or because they're women or children, or because they're elderly. All of those people were of extremely low status in the ancient world, and so they might have been considered poor. Or it would include people who were social outsiders, people of a different ethnic group. The poor, that category, could include people whose life choices have placed them outside the circles of religious acceptability. And Jesus says that his kingdom is for those people, and his mission is to set those people free from the slavery in which they find themselves. And so Luke describes that story, the proclamation of Jesus' ministry, and then he spends six chapters showing us what that ministry looks like. And so from Luke 3 to Luke 9, there are tons of stories of Jesus doing miracles, but they all have a particular flavor to them. So Jesus heals a bedridden sick woman. And then Jesus heals a man who has a skin disease, and that skin disease would have separated him from the religious people because you couldn't go to the temple if you had a skin disease. Jesus heals someone who's been paralyzed and is unable to join their community. But then there's a story about Jesus welcoming a tax collector, a Levite who is not financially poor at all, but because of their profession, he is outside of the society in which they want to live. He's a social outsider. There's a story of Jesus forgiving a prostitute. There's a story of Jesus healing a servant of a centurion. So even the people who are oppressing the Jewish people, the Romans, Jesus even heals one of their servants. And so Luke shows Jesus and Jesus' kingdom bringing about the restoration and reversal of people's whole life experiences. And by doing that, he's expanding the circle of people who are invited to discover the healing power of Jesus' kingdom. And so it's into that sequence of stories that Luke places this story of Jesus healing a demon-possessed man. And so I think this story follows the same pattern of the other stories in Luke's gospel, that it gives us a pattern of ministry. It shows us what Jesus' ministry is all about. And I'd like us to start by asking the question: how does this story fit with the pattern that we've described so far? And I think there are three answers to that. And then there's one answer to the question, and how is it different? What new piece of information about Jesus' ministry do we gain in this story as opposed to the others? So the threefold pattern of Jesus' ministry that we see here. Firstly, God comes to us in Jesus' ministry. God comes to us and God crosses barriers that would ordinarily stop other people. Jesus is not in a place that he should be when he goes to see the demon-possessed man. Firstly, he's in Gentile country. As a good Jewish rabbi, it's not the sort of place he should be going. He's surrounded by the religiously unclean. He's going into demon-filled territory where there are pigs, herds of pigs that Jewish people were not allowed to eat or go anywhere near. Jesus crosses the boundary and goes to that place, to the place of Jewish taboo. Why? Because this is the place where the kingdom must go, where Jesus goes where no one else will. And what we see, therefore, in Jesus' ministry is that grace always goes to the margins, to the margins of society, and that Jesus intentionally enters the chaos and the shame and the place of spiritual death, so that he can bring life. And in doing so, he steps onto the shores of our brokenness. What we see here is God's kingdom breaking in. And what that means is that Jesus must face the powers that have distorted God's good world. This is Israel's Messiah, confronting the true enemies of Israel. Not Rome, not only Rome, but sin and death, and yes, even the demonic. So firstly, in Jesus' ministry, in Jesus' pattern of ministry, we see that he goes to the places that he we wouldn't expect him to go. And he goes to us as an act of grace. And then secondly, we see what happens in the interaction, in the encounter. Restoration is an act of grace-filled spiritual power that results in the complete transformation of the human. So this man who was naked is now clothed. This man who was isolated from fellowship is now included in a community. This man who was disintegrated has become whole. This man who had lost his mind is sane and quiet once again. And this is what we see again and again in Luke's gospel that Jesus rehumanizes people, that his ministry allows for the restoration of the human person. And where the powers of sin and death and sickness and oppression and power dehumanize, Jesus' ministry rehumanizes, so that the image of God can be restored and that creation itself can be renewed. This is what it means to declare release to the captives, to set people free. And then thirdly, having restored the man, he sends him out on mission again. This man, understandably, desperately wants to stay with Jesus and to be and to follow him, to become one of his followers. And you might expect Jesus to say, yes, please come and follow me. That's what he says to other people, is it not? But strangely, Jesus says, No, not yet. Return home and tell of how much God has done for you. And so he sends him back and sends him out into the Gentile world, not with someone who necessarily has all the answers, but as someone who can witness to the grace of God in their lives. So Jesus starts planting the seeds of the kingdom in Gentile soil. And this man becomes the first missionary to the Gentiles. So this is the threefold pattern of Jesus' ministry. He goes towards us into the places where you wouldn't expect to find him. He transforms by grace and rehumanizes people, and then he sends those people out into the world to be witnesses of what they have received. Not necessarily to have all the answers, but to tell the truth of what God has done for them. That's the pattern of Jesus' ministry that we see throughout Luke's gospel in all of those other stories that I mentioned. But there is, of course, one element of this story that is new, that isn't about healing or setting people free or but is about something that might be quite uncomfortable for us this morning. Because release from the prisoners, release for the prisoners, even includes release from apparently demon possession. So let's talk briefly about demons and about those satanic forces. I imagine that most of us here fall into one of two camps. This is certainly something I found in my own life, that there's a large bit of me, well, there's a there's a large section of the Christian community that says that wants to minimize that part of the story, that wants to minimize these stories that seem strange and about demon possession and whatnot. And what they say is something like this the important thing is that Jesus cares for the poor. And that's something I can do. So let's go and do what we can and care for those who are in need. But I'm not gonna think too much or worry about spiritual warfare, spiritual healing, demon possession. All of that stuff seems a little bit crazy for me, not something I'm very comfortable with. I absolutely understand that point of view. A whole different set of Christians that would say, this earthly stuff is irrelevant. It's all gonna go away in the long run anyway. The important bit is the spiritual. Let's get focused on and let's have fun. Let's really dive into what it means to be demon-possessed and worry about spiritual warfare. And I was reminded as uh I was reminded by a wonderfully helpful, wise quote from C. S. Lewis who says this there are two equal and opposite errors into which our race falls about devils. One is to disbelieve in their existence, and the other is to believe and to feel an excessive and unhealthy interest in them. There are two equal and opposite errors into which our race falls about devils. One is to disbelieve their existence, the other is to believe and have an excessive and unhealthy interest in them. So let's try and get the balance right here this morning, shall we? Clearly, part of the uh issue here is personal inclination and personal preference. And maybe I can take a guess about which category most of us fall into given where we are this morning. I certainly ended up in a church like this because I quite like having everything written down, knowing at the start of the service how the service will transgress uh will continue. I really like going to rehearsals where we get told exactly where to walk and how to turn quite 90-degree angles. And so I have a particular preference about this subject because I like to know what's going to happen, and I like to know who's in control, and spiritual warfare and demon possession does not really lend itself to that stuff. And yes, I wonder if the scriptures today are asking us to be very careful about that, about our own inclinations, and to press again into places that are quite uncomfortable. Maybe we need to reflect this morning not just on how we care for the poor, but are we bold and courageous in our prayers? Yes, we must meet the physical needs of Blackburn, but do we expect and anticipate a spiritual lack in the people around us that only God can satisfy? And do we need to reflect again this morning on the truth that it is only the church that can heal the spiritual? There are lots of incredible partners that we work with that provide for all sorts of physical needs. We're glad that they do, and we're glad to work with them, and we'll continue to do all that we can to meet the physical needs of this town and this county. But only the church can provide for the spiritual needs of the people around us. Have we undermined or underestimated that part of our ministry? So uh that's a fairly uncomfortable end to the sermon. I'm not really sure that I have all the answers for us this morning, but I think that's what the text is asking us to reflect on. So that's basically all I've got. And that's also why I've tried to show my working as much as I can, a lot more than I would normally do so, because it's quite a difficult conclusion that I think I've reached. Let me try and summarize in closing. Jesus' life and his ministry was about bringing release to the captives and setting free the prisoners. Captives and prisoners of all shapes and sizes. And Luke makes it clear through his series of stories the different categories of prisoner that we might expect to encounter and how Jesus sets those people free. Jesus met people where they were. He went to them. And by great, by the grace of God, he transformed them so that they could become fully human again. And then he sent them out into the world to be witnesses of the things that they had experienced. That's the pattern of ministry that we see in Jesus' life. And it applies to the things that we're quite comfortable with, for caring for people, for looking after the sick, for being kind to the socially marginalized. But it's also a pattern of ministry that leads Jesus to contend with the dark spiritual forces and to interact with forms of slavery that are nothing short of demonic. So I hope, as followers of Jesus, we would do what we can, empowered by the Spirit, to embody that same pattern of ministry, to reach out to the margins and beyond the boundaries, to experience and be part of grace-filled transformation, to be in our own lives witnesses to the grace that we have experienced. And let us also this morning be honest that being a follower of Jesus and embodying this pattern of ministry may lead us too to the tombs of the Garacines. And may God give us the grace to support those people as well when we get there. Amen.