Proper 7
The Rev. Dr. Barbara Schlachter

Okay—it’s truth telling time.  How many of you when you were kids—or now if you are a kid—have ever run away from home?  Hands?

Okay—how many of you ever thought of it? Even as an adult?  Most of you should have your hands in the air!

I ran away once when I was a little girl.  I got all the way to the street and the reality hit me that I had no idea where I was going.  So I simply got in the family car parked at the curb and sat there until I was through being mad.

We have two stories of men who ran away in our lessons today.  Elijah ran away because he was afraid for his life.  The man in the Gospel ran away because he was truly mad.  Elijah ran to another country where he was out of the angry king and queen’s way.  He went to Mount Sinai , made famous by Moses, and sat in a cave, perhaps the cleft of the rock where Moses stood when he asked to see God.  The mad man ran only as far as the local cemetery, where he dwelt as an outcast among the tombs. 

A cave and tombs.  The cave is a place of birth and renewal, being a womb like enclosure.  The tomb is a place of death and resurrection.  They are really quite similar in that they both deal with transformation. 

Elijah sat quietly waiting for God, who indeed came and asked him what he was doing there.  The poor mad man could not sit quietly.  He was possessed with a mob of demons- a legion, which was six thousand men.  He must have never had a moment’s peace, as negative thoughts and destructive actions continually plagued him.  He may also have been a representative of Israel being oppressed by Rome , since he was home to a legion of soldiers. 

But see them in your mind’s eye—Elijah hiding in the cave quietly, the mad man without a name breaking bonds and shackles, in constant motion.  Elijah knew he was waiting for God.  The mad man had no hope of  help from anyone.  But these two hounded men both encountered the power of God.

In what is perhaps one of my favorite stories of the scriptures, God appears.  Was the Lord in the wind—let me hear you say it—NO!

Was the Lord in the earthquake?  NO!

Was the Lord in the fire? NO!

The Lord came after these three traditional theophanies—

in the sound of sheer silence.  The calm after the storm. In the hush that follows a loud noise. Like the sound of quiet after your neighbor finishes mowing his lawn and you can read your paper in peace. The sound of fine silence.  (Pause)  And in the silence Elijah is able to hear God.  God says, Get on with your life.  Go back, stop in the wilderness of Damascus —and we are not told this in our reading—where you will anoint Elisha to be your successor.  The work will continue; your life has not been in vain.  And of course, we know that according to the story, not only is Elijah not killed by Ahab and Jezebel but he is carried up in a firey chariot directly to God. 

The mad man is on the shore in a gentile territory waiting for Jesus as his boat comes into view.  The people of the time believed that demons could talk and they could recognize the divine in Jesus because he had the power to silence them.  Demons feared only God.  The man does not speak for himself until after he is cured; it is only the demons speaking to Jesus.  They recognize his superior power and plea bargain.  Spare us—send us into those pigs.  We aren’t told this in Luke but in Mark it’s supposed to be two thousand pigs.  That would be one pig for every three demons.  And of course, the pigs stampede and the demons and the pigs drown.  And the man is able to sit quietly at Jesus’ feet and listen to him.  That shows how transformed he was.  God’s power is greater than demons, greater than Rome ’s power.

This would have been a funny story for Jewish people because they thought pigs were unclean to begin with, this food supply for the soldiers.  It certainly wouldn’t be a funny story here in Iowa .  Here we can understand why the townspeople wanted Jesus to leave.  He had gone a long way toward destroying the economy. 

And the man, cured now, wants to join Jesus and his friends.  But Jesus is not ready for the Gentile mission, apparently, and he knows it is important for this man to be rejoined to the family that had given him up for lost. 

Both Elijah and the man had their time of silent waiting for the voice of God.  And they were both told to return home.  Go back. 

Apparently God had not heard of Thomas Wolfe’s book, “You can’t go home again.”

But they weren’t told just “Go back, go back to where you once belonged,” to use a line from a Beatles song.   They were given a purpose, a mission.  Elijah was to anoint Elisha; the healed man was to proclaim how much God had done for him.

These are great stories, but to paraphrase the madman’s words, “ What have they to do with us?” Perhaps they are invitations to leave our normal routines and ruts and spend some time in silence, spend some time somewhere else, waiting to hear and encounter God.

Be still and know that I am God.  The psalmist had it right.  It takes stillness and silence to hear God, to recognize what God may be saying to us in the rest of our lives.

You don’t have to go to a cave or a cemetery—although cemeteries are often the quietest and most beautiful of places and caves are cool in more ways than one.  It is summer—a time when natural outdoor beauty is easy to come by.  Your own deck or backyard can be a place for prayer.  The place you are going on vacation, a near-by park or woods provided you have enough bug repellent can be a wonderful place to sit and wait for God.

You may want to go to the water’s edge like the madman and meet Jesus there.  My favorite outdoor prayer place is on the shore of Lake Erie where I grew up.  As I walk on the beach where the lake and Old Woman Creek converge, I know Jesus will meet me at the water’s edge.

St. Bruno who founded the order of the Carthusians, thought that monks needed beauty for contemplation and provided each of his monks with a little house and walled-in garden as an aid to their stillness.

We are all too often much like the madman—thrashing our way through life, always moving, unable to sit still.  There is so much to do!  We have so many obligations, and so many things we want to do.  It is a contemporary form of madness.  I know because I suffer from it at times.  That is why it is so important for me to take time, to carve out quiet early in the morning and fill my inner well.  The demons will always have more for us to do than we can accomplish.

Sometimes we don’t take time to sit quietly because we are afraid we might become aware of painful thoughts or feelings that we would rather not think or feel.  But the alternative is so let them fester somewhere under the surface, using large amounts of precious energy to keep them hidden and quiet.

We actually can run away by staying busy. But it is really good to let these difficult memories or fears rise to the surface so that we can experience them and place them directly into the hands of God.  We don’t need to run from them.  We need to befriend them and let God take care of us.  Learn what we are supposed to learn.  Then let them go.

But often when we sit, nothing hard comes up, only a deep sense of gratitude and appreciation for our lives.  It is as if we are simply dwelling in the present moment with the love of God all around us and within us.  There can be nothing better.  It is the mystic heart within us awakening and connecting, and filling us so that we, like Elijah and the lovely healed man, can go back to our days, our busy-ness and do what it is we are here on earth for, with renewed energy and purpose.

It is the mystic heart that understands that all things and all beings are connected and how Paul could write the words in today’s epistle: “There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.” 

 To close, let me encourage you to find some quiet every day. And run away; find some special place of beauty and solitude this summer, so that you can be refreshed and come back to all that God has given you to do and be.   Run away and let God find you; let God meet you in the stillness, perhaps at the water’s edge.