Year C

Luke 8:26-39

The Very Rev. Denise Vaughn

The Power of the “Ordinary”

We have once again entered the season of Pentecost or as some like to call it “Ordinary Time.” “Ordinary Time” is the part of the church year that falls outside the major seasons such as Advent, Epiphany, Lent, and Easter. It begins after the Day of Pentecost and continues until the First Sunday of Advent, and is the longest season of the church year. The term “ordinary” may be derived from “ordinal,” which means “counted,” as these weeks are counted, this is the 2 Sunday after Pentecost next week is the 3 and so on, and it may simply mean ordinary. Most of the days of our lives are ordinary—no birth or death, no epiphanies or miracles, just time filled with the ordinary love and hope and fear common to daily life.

Although called “Ordinary”, “Ordinary time” isn’t necessarily negative. It’s simply the time of the year when we are not commemorating the major events in the life of Jesus—such as his birth, death, and resurrection—but rather the things he said and did throughout his time on earth. The liturgical color of this season is green, which is why it is sometimes also called “the green season.” Green a very common color, often symbolizes growth. During this season, the church delves deeper into scripture and the life of Jesus and remember how he changed the lives of everyone he interacted with, in ways big and small. This is a time when we explore what it means to live daily in faith, a time of growth.

In the context of ordinary daily life, all our lessons today help us to explore and grow in our understanding of what it means to follow Jesus and experience the power of God. And what we will discover is that God doesn’t always work in ways we might imagine are ordinary. In the Hollywood movies, Oh God! and Bruce Almighty, the writers had God appear as a human, but it was not in some mighty, majestic display like you might expect. It was rather in the unassuming forms of George Burns and Morgan Freeman, respectively. While these movies may not be looked upon as theologically solid, nor are they meant to be, they do make one interesting point about God: God doesn’t always appear in ways we would expect. Nor is God’s power easy to understand, yet it has the capacity to transform lives.   

Elijah, a prophet of God, has just had perhaps the most victorious moment of his life. While Elijah is surrounded by Ahab, the prophets of Baal who want to kill him, and the people of Israel who have abandoned God. God makes God’s self- known as the only true God through a spectacular display of power that we would associate with God. But once Jezebel gets wind of the death of her four-hundred prophets, she vows to kill Elijah, and he must flee for his life. He walks a day’s journey into the wilderness and is exhausted. There under a tree he asks God to end his life. Instead, God sends an angel to care for him by providing for his most basic needs of food and drink. Offering Elijah at that moment, exactly what he needs. That night, Elijah finds safety in a cave where the word of the Lord comes to him not in an earthquake or fire or whirlwind, as we might expect God would. Instead, God comes to him, displaying his power in an unassuming, quiet whisper.   

The Gospel story for today focuses on a man in dire circumstances named Legion. The man is homeless and lives a tortured life among the dead, tormented day and night by a legion of demons. He is an outcast, deeply feared by his community. When Jesus God-incarnate shows up, he is greeted by the man’s fearful cries: “What have you to do with me, Jesus, son of the Most High God? He is afraid Jesus has come only to continue the torture he has long experienced. The demons are also fearful-they know what Jesus can do and the man, he is too weak even to know what he needs. But Jesus knows, as soon as he sees the man he commands the demons to come out of him.

Once again, as with Elijah, God comes to the man and gives him exactly what he needs. The Psalmist today reminds us that the ultimate hope of the persecuted, depressed and downtrodden is God. Sometimes this God, who provides for the persecuted and downtrodden, displays God’s power in a spectacular way, like igniting a soaking-wet altar in order to demonstrate that he, not Baal, is God, of which we read in the verses preceding the Old Testament reading today. Sometimes God’s power comes more quietly, providing food to one who is discouraged, or bringing peace to a man tormented by demons. With the most stunning display of God’s power demonstrated on a Roman cross on a hill in Jerusalem, followed three days later by the empty tomb.  

Through the power of the cross God makes people into new creations. Those who accept Christ by faith, God clothes them with Christ, giving them the ability to live not as slaves to sin but as God’s own children. Which leads us to the real point of the gospel story, the now healed man in response to the power of God that brings calm to chaos becomes a child of God. He obeys Jesus and he goes and tells his story to the people in his town. He tells them all about what God did for him. C. S. Lewis once said, “The church exists for nothing else but to draw everyone into Christ, to make them little Christs. If they are not doing that, all the cathedrals, clergy, missions, sermons, even the Bible itself are simply a waste of time. God became man for no other purpose.”

Christ Jesus came to make all things new. The texts today are partly about how ordinary life sometimes goes and partly about how things can become radically new when the Spirit of God cuts loose with kingdom power. God comes to us and gives us what we need. Yet, God doesn’t always appear in ways we would expect. Nor is God’s power easy to understand, but it has the capacity to transform lives.  As people now clothed with Christ, we too can be all that God desires us to be. With that in mind we can put our hope in God and praise him, for he alone is our Savior and our God. All the wounds of the Gerasene demoniac become a means of salvation as the healed man goes among his people to tell them what Jesus has done. And what a story he had to tell. Abundant possibilities arise out of the ordinary when Jesus comes among us to call us to ourselves by calling us to himself. And what a story we have to tell.