Among the Tombs

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

Rev. Dr. David Williams

Scripture Lesson: Mark 5:1-20

LISTEN TO AUDIO HERE:

It is not good, or so the word comes from the ancient story of Genesis, for human beings to be alone.  Because we are social beings, creatures woven up of dirt and words, of stories shared and of lives together.

It is our ability to be together, or so an article in this month’s Scientific American argues, that made humankind the single most successful species in the great story of life on this world.  Dr. Curtis Marean, a professor of archaeology at Arizona State University, suggests that is not just our intellects that make human beings what he describes as “the most successful invasive species ever.”  I tend to take issue with the idea that we’re invasive, as if we’re little more than stinkbugs spreading across the continents, but there’s no question that human beings have had a really significant run on this planet.

What makes that possible, Marean suggests, was the unique capacity of homo sapiens sapiens to cooperate socially.  We can share purpose and knowledge with those around us, in ways that allow us to accomplish together what we could not accomplish alone.  We, together, are so much more than we are apart.

This is a true thing.  Sure, individual humans are wonderful creatures.  But when we pool our strength, when we share life together, we become something more than we are individually.  Individually, we can look at the moon and the stars and wonder.  Together, we can reach out and touch them.  

Which is why, in the rustle and chase of human life, it’s hard to see those places where human beings fall into isolation and separation.   Last week I talked about the expectations of culture, of how rushed and busy and distracted we can be.  Because as frenetic and as busy as life can be, in the thick of it there’s a peculiar shadow.

But the shadow-side of that busyness is this: many human beings in our connected, always on culture are increasingly socially isolated.  It’s a strange happening, one that is peculiarly counterintuitive.  You’d think, with all of the new ways to connect and to move, that we’d be much more able to interact with each other.  Yet somehow in that increased movement and exchange, we’ve wandered away from those places of personal face-to-face connection that we were created to require to thrive.  We travel and we move about, and friendships wane, families fray, and the circle of our tribes comes apart.  We were not made for the world we now inhabit, and that means more and more souls fall through the cracks.

And social isolation breeds all manner of soul-darkness.  Separated from other human beings, individuals become more aggressive, more on edge, more prone to paranoia and anger or depression.  We don’t even sleep well, waking throughout the night.  Scientists suggest that this is a natural response for human beings separated from their social group, as an isolated individual alone in the darkness of the savannah would be on edge, on guard against the bright eyes and the panther-fangs, the fight-or-flight instinct kicked fully in.

Being alone breeds what poet William Blake once called the “reptiles of the mind,” and it’s a deep spiral.  Isolation begets anxieties, which make you less able to socially connect, which makes you more and more isolated.   It’s a terrible, dark place, a place of death and madness.

And at the far side of a lake, on a desolate crag near the tombs of the dead, that is where the great story of the Gospel brings us this morning.  The broken soul in question is known as the Gerasene demonaic, a broken soul who was unmanageably shattered.

We hear that his community had been unable to handle him, unable to connect as his rages and angers grew more and more wild and destructive.  Finally, he was cast out from his community, both by his own anger and by their fear, cast out into the wilderness.

He was, as the story reminds us on several occasions, consigned to living among the dead, among the tombs, just him and his demons, who grew and thrived and reproduced until they were legion, a community of delusions and angers and loathings that were his only company.

It is he who steps up and challenges Jesus, he and all of his angers and delusions and loathings, and it is Jesus who...as the story goes...casts them out into a herd of pigs, which promptly freak out and fling themselves into the lake.

Even demons taste better with bacon, apparently.

This always bothered me a little bit, because my first thought is always, awwww, poor little piggies.  What did those pigs do to deserve that?  But for the first century Jewish ears that would have first heard Mark’s version of the Gospel story, pigs were considered ritually unclean, somehow inherently unpleasant creatures.  No one would have been worried about that.

I’m not sure there’s a contemporary analog that works.  Maybe it’s like if Jesus cast the demons out into a gathering of industry lobbyists and their hired congressmen and they threw themselves into the Potomac.  I don’t know.

What is perhaps the most striking part of this story is not the healing, wild and wonderfully mythic as it may be.  It’s the way Jesus interacts with that formerly shattered soul.  After the healing, they are talking, sitting together and sharing conversation.

“Let me go with you,” says the human being who has just finally found themselves and found purpose in their lives.  “Let me go with you.”  But Jesus rejects him.  No, you can’t, Jesus says.  It seems perhaps a little cruel, a little harsh.  Here, all this person wants is the company of the one who has made them whole.  But I am convinced, listening, that what Jesus is doing is not rejection.  Instead, he is responding with words that mark both the nature and completeness of the healing.

Here, to a soul that has lived in the agony of isolation, alone in the wilds with only the voices of madness to keep him company, what does Jesus say?  Go and be at home, with the understanding that home, finally, is a real thing.  Go and tell your friends, with the understanding that friends are there, waiting.

To the demoniac, healed, the most healing and potent words were this: you have a place.  You have a people.  Go be there, among them.  You are no longer alone.

The cost of human isolation is a heavy one, and one that I have personally felt.  It came several years ago, when things were going south in my last congregation, and I looked around and realized that my circle of friends had slowly eroded away to functionally nothing.

Though I’m introverted to the point of hermitishness, a helpful skillset if you’re a writer, I do enjoy the regular company of other people.   So that realization that I’d kind of whittled my total number of friends down to one person, a single friend, who I saw every couple of months?  That was a little disturbing.  

My days were mostly alone.  The kids would go off to school, and the wife off to work, and I’d realize--I’ve got no-one I can expect to talk to for the next six hours.  Not a soul.  Not today.  Not tomorrow.

In the midst of juggling work and seminary and children and church, I’d somehow managed over the years to develop shallow connections with many.  If you can’t go out to socialize with work folks because you need to get kids to tae kwon do, and you can’t socialize with your seminary cadre because you’ve got other commitments, it’s easy for the whole thing to just fade away.

And though church should be the first place one turns for community, there is...for pastors in particular...a danger in the social distance that comes from being the paid professional Christian.  I’d become the part-time organizational guy, the one who put out the fires and settled the fights and wiped the tears and dealt with the building.  I was pastor there, sure.  But I was no-one’s friend.  

Dear Lord Jesus, I thought, I’m lonely.  And as I felt my own reptiles arising...anxieties and angers that began to compromise my ability to serve, I knew I had work to do.

It meant that I had to work to be intentional about finding places of connection, which I was.  I went back to school.  I began volunteering in my community on a regular basis.

This, frankly, is one of the things that congregations, those gatherings of Jesus folks, should do well.  It’s the point of this gathering, of our sharing in fellowship and welcome, in a world filled with those who live among the tombs.

Let that be so, for you and for me, AMEN.