“Unshackled” Colchester Federated Church, June 22, 2025, (Luke 8:26-39) Second Sunday after Pentecost
Our Gospel story is rather unique. Luke sets the scene by telling us that Jesus and his disciples sailed to the Gerasenes’ land. This detail might not mean much to us. Though Luke’s audience would have understood that the setting is among Gentiles—danger may be ahead. Jesus sailed across the lake to the land of the Gerasenes, and there he encounters an outcast who is living among the dead. The man was from the city and possessed by demons. He is naked and homeless.
I told you this Gospel story is unique! So much so that we can easily pass off this story of the Gerasene Demoniac as unhinged. After all, Luke tells us that a legion of demons come out of this man, enter a herd of pigs, and rush down a bank to drown themselves. But maybe we can avoid the temptation of thinking that this story is irrelevant just because it’s odd. Because the thing about demons is that demons don’t care if we believe they exist or not. The great preacher Fred Craddock once said, “Not believing in demons has hardly eradicated evil in our world.”[1] It doesn’t mean that we don’t have things in our lives that hold us back from God. It doesn’t mean that we don’t have things that make us feel less than or weighed down by something almost destroying us inside. We may not call any of this “demonic,” but that doesn’t make Bible stories about exorcisms completely irrelevant.
We can see that as soon as Jesus steps into the country of the Gerasenes, the man with the demons is right there in front of him. Jesus wasn’t on his home turf anymore and encounters someone in deep spiritual pain. And Jesus doesn’t leave the man where he found him. Jesus lifts him out of this abyss. Jesus was no stranger to suffering. He acts like a friend to the man contending with those demons, seeing this man’s humanity and inherent worth and dignity.
The reaction of the people of the surrounding country to this healing is both fascinating and sad. The people see the man healed and ask Jesus to leave them alone because they are seized with great fear! This story has economic implications. Can we imagine the monetary loss that the owner of those herd of pigs that drowned in the lake incurred? Maybe that person was among the crowd who asked Jesus to please leave them alone. So Jesus gets back in the boat and returns home. Though Jesus does so knowing that the healed man could also return home and be restored to his community.
Stories about Jesus exorcising demons are about transformation. They are stories about helping people who are suffering to experience wholeness by meeting them right where they are. Because this man who had been on the margins of society—living in the tombs, naked, sometimes under guard, and bound with leg irons and chains—is healed and restored to his place among his people. This is the classic pattern we see in the Gospels—healing and restoration. Though Jesus doesn’t take the man up on the offer to go with Jesus as one of his disciples. Instead, Jesus tells the healed man: “Return home and tell the story of what God has done for you.”[2]
When we encounter the healing power of God—a God who desires us to live lives of wholeness—perhaps that can be scary at first. Especially if we are used to being bound to something that has held us in place. Even if that reality has caused us pain, at least it is familiar. Remember that the Israelites bitterly complained in the wilderness. Some folks wanted to return to slavery in Egypt because at least they wouldn’t starve to death. The Israelites said to Moses and Aaron in Exodus 16, “Oh, how we wish that the Lord had just put us to death while we were still in the land of Egypt. There we could sit by the pots cooking meat and eat our fill of bread. Instead, you’ve brought us out into this desert to starve this whole assembly to death.”[3]
The people had just escaped slavery, and this is the reaction! We sometimes find ourselves in our own familiar abyss. But as Christians we know that new life in Christ means that our lives have changed. We are invited to go into the deep with God.
It is interesting that this story from Luke is in the Lectionary near Juneteenth. After all, Juneteenth celebrates the emancipation of enslaved African Americans. It is a holiday that celebrates freedom. Juneteenth can remind us that we are all created in the image and likeness of God as we considered last Sunday when we heard Psalm 8: “When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars that you have established; what are humans that you are mindful of them, mortals that you care for them? Yet you have made them a little lower than Godand crowned them with glory and honor.”[4]
Freedom is one of the cornerstone values of this country. It is important to name and claim this, but not all people experienced freedom upon setting foot on these shores. Those of us who are younger in particular may take some of this history (or even the power of communication) for granted. These days news spreads almost instantaneously given our technology, especially social media platforms and news apps and breaking news notifications and texts and emails. How many times have we seen someone post on town Facebook groups asking if anyone else lost power? The news cycle is about breaking news.
Juneteenth reminds us that there were enslaved people who had no idea of certain events that had occurred to grant them freedom. President Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation took effect on January 1, 1863. Congress passed the 13th Amendment officially abolishing slavery on January 31, 1865. Though these were national events that would have seemed like they were taking place in another world if one were enslaved on a plantation in a place as far flung from Washington D.C. as Texas, especially given that most people who were enslaved were not taught to read or write. Because knowledge is power. How would that beloved child of God know anything about emancipation?
Major General Gordon Granger issued General Order Number 3 on June 19th, 1865. This is what Juneteenth commemorates. This order declared:
The people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free. This involves an absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves, and the connection heretofore existing between them becomes that between employer and hired labor.[5]
The truth is that it took years for the news of emancipation to reach those who were enslaved in some instances. It is hard to even imagine this reality with how quickly news travels now and with the literacy of our society. Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. wrote a marvelous essay about Juneteenth that appeared in both The Root and PBS online. Professor Gates reflected, “When Maj. Gen. Gordon Granger issued the above order, he had no idea that, in establishing the Union Army’s authority over the people of Texas, he was also establishing the basis for a holiday, ‘Juneteenth’ (June’ plus ‘nineteenth’), today the most popular annual celebration of emancipation from slavery in the United States. After all, by the time Granger assumed command of the Department of Texas, the Confederate capital in Richmond had fallen; the ‘Executive’ to whom he referred, President Lincoln, was dead; and the 13th Amendment abolishing slavery was well on its way to ratification.”
Freedom eventually won the day. Just like the Gerasene man living among the tombs, all of these beloved children of God were unshackled and set free. Let us remember the hard lessons of our collective history. And let us give thanks to God for new life. Amen.
[1] Fred Craddock as quoted by Kathryn Matthew Huey, UCC Sermon Seeds for February 1, 2015 (Fourth Sunday after Epiphany, Year B).
[2] Luke 8:39, CEB.
[3] Exodus 16:3, CEB.
[4] Psalm 8:3-5, NRSVUE.
[5] From General Orders, Number 3; Headquarters District of Texas, Galveston, June 19, 1865, as quoted by Henry Louis Gates Jr., “What is Juneteenth?”, https://www.pbs.org/wnet/african-americans-many-rivers-to-cross/history/what-is-juneteenth/
Lauren Ostrout ~ on being made well 