The Gospels use a variety of narratives, images and stories to convey the meaning and power of Jesus as the Christ. The parables, the great healing events, the decisive personal encounters, the Holy Week drama all present a compelling glimpse of One who reveals to us what God wants for human life. Some of this New Testament story sounds offbeat to our modern ears and has apparently sounded that way for generations. Thomas Jefferson, for instance, put together what he considered a useable New Testament, including only those narratives he believed relevant and edifying. As many of us might do, Jefferson excised the passage we read this morning. Who needs that demented scene: wild disorder, fierce confrontation, shattering screams, dusk-deepened shadows, an isolated graveyard, demons scurrying like rats across a murky hillside, swine plunging over cliffs into the deep? It sounds like a Stephen King special. "Get us out of here," we say. "Enough of this lunacy. Give us the parables, the sermon on the mount. They tell all."

But they don't. They tell us a lot, but they don't tell us all. To exclude those men savaged by demons and ostensibly brought to wholeness, to exclude them from our understanding of Christ's significance would severely impoverish us. Each of the Evangelists tells of this occasion in his own way. The passage immediately preceding this one, in Matthew's Gospel, for instance, conveys the marvelous picture of Christ stilling a terrible storm at sea. What do we see there? Magic? Sorcery? Not on your life. It illuminates the promise of God's forging coherence and peace even amid the storms threatening to disrupt or submerge our lives. Just so this morning, the event pictured in that enemy graveyard—self- destructive insanity, fear of violence pervading the neighborhood, a town's livelihood wiped out—Matthew affirms the power present in Jesus as capable of bringing reconciliation and healing out of the chaotic impulses raging within us, between us, among us. We may find this imagery of Matthew odd, alien and obsolete. But, friends, Matthew's concern and the New Testament's promise are as up to date as this morning's newspaper.

But first, let's get a grip on "demons." "Demons." What are they all about? Haven't the likes of Freud, Einstein, Darwin and Jonas Salk put an end to all that? Demons? Are we for real? Do you know what the word demon means? It comes from a root word meaning "to divide, to splinter, to fragment, to smash into pieces." When Jesus steps off that boat into the dusk, climbs among the tombs in alien territory, he confronts human beings divided, splintered, ravaged by clashing forces, disintegrating, in chaos. Those demoniacs live among the dead; we find them alone, disordered and as Mark's parallel passage describes, bloodied from self-inflicted wounds.

In these Gadarene demoniacs Matthew depicts the clashes going on in each of us and across the world. He describes the turbulence in our personal lives. He describes the war going on amid the peoples of the world: nations, creeds, cultures, each one making claims ending up in divisiveness and destruction. Matthew knows the strange powers having it out within us and battling for hegemony in the world at large. And he brings the promise of God almighty to bear on each of these tumultuous and chaotic arenas.

In these Gadarene demoniacs Matthew depicts the struggle he sees going on in each of us. He describes the wars going on for dominance in our personal lives, wrestling with instincts, urges, ambitions. He knows we exist as battlegrounds suffering our highest aspirations and meanest desires, our best intentions and our selfish wills. Matthew knows the unifying angels and divisive demons have it out within us.

What do these demons look like? What do they feel like? How do they make an impact on us and our ties with other people? Well, let me give you a not-so-subtle illustration of the little divisive perversities dividing us: a little demon called envy. It is the demon in us eager to make a shambles of someone else, the demon mixing appreciation and contempt, contemplating pleasure in the hoped-for demise of the other. Judith Viorst, in one of her spicy reflections entitled "The Whole Truth" captures the essence of this demon we frequently harbor and release in salacious gossip and a petty vanity. Listen:

He always called her honey and
She always called him sweetie and
He always brought her flowers and
She always stroked his hair.
Their beautiful relationship was
What a marriage should be and
The rest of us regarded it with
Envy and despair.
She always called him lover and
He always called her baby and
She always praised his brilliance and
He always praised her wit.
No wife was more adoring and
No husband more devoted and
The rest of us were jealous I'm
Embarrassed to admit.
He always called her dearest and
She always called him darling and
He always hugged and kissed her and
She always held him tight.
They just announced they're filing for
Divorce tomorrow morning and
The news has filled the rest of us with
Absolute delight.

Ah, envy; you demon! Are any of us on speaking terms with you? That demon can cut us off from one another!

And the demonic does a job at dividing us against ourselves. Amid life's pilgrimage we encounter splintering, centrifugal forces tearing us in any number of directions, often leaving us paralyzed, threatened, alone. For some of us the isolation and terror compare to the Gadarene demoniacs and we feel abandoned by others and by God.

Some time ago, I read the revealing autobiography of a reporter for the Washington Post, a young woman by the name of Tracy Thompson. She called her autobiography, "The Beast." It tells of her terrifying bouts with depression. She describes her body aching intermittently in waves, as if besieged with malaria. Loss of appetite and fatigue assault her; intimacy with her husband becomes a foreign notion. Her sentences break off, she loses track of them halfway through, her words tangled. While everything around her she assumes to be solid and rational, her very being seems falling apart amid a flat and colorless world, a beast let loose, "not a creature" she writes, "but a force, something that has slipped outside the bounds of natural existence, a psychic freight train of roaring despair, an implacable and unpredictable enemy." She finds herself exiled "into a foreign territory of the mind, although this foreign territory is right next door. It is a room—imagine it as plain, white, featureless empty—which most people may never enter and from which others may never leave. Those of us who have seen it from the inside may or may not be able to send back bulletins, and until now those bulletins have been understandable to others only in the music of poetry, in music itself, or in the simplest of prose. 'It's cold in here,' we may say. 'I hurt. I am miserable.'"

William Styron, called it "darkness visible," Remember? He speaks of "anarchic disconnections, dank joylessness, a storm of murk, a sense of two selves, a dark drizzle of horror."

There are people in this congregation this morning who know this despair. As Tracy Thompson observes, it represents a room many of us will never enter and Styron echoes her by saying those of us who never have gone through it can never empathize with its bleakness and pain. I believe him. And we cannot know if, indeed, it was this dreadful affliction tormenting those pathetic creatures staggering amid that dismal and grim Gadarenes graveyard, but it must have been something terrible, an affliction very much like it.

Oh friends, the New Testament tells us it knows this monstrous estrangement, this vast gulf isolating us from one another, from ourselves and from the very ground of our being. It tells us that Christ knows the depths to which life can spiral, the despair we can fall into, the disintegration of mind and heart, body and soul that can grip and tear us apart. Matthew tells us, though our very viscera deny it and all our sensitivities be numb to it, though we feel and convince ourselves we are beyond the help of other people—in Styron's case, even the most sophisticated medical procedures and regimes—Matthew insists that none of us live beyond the scope, the pursuit, the reach of a loving, identifying God. The New Testament recognizes that life may reach unfathomable depths of despair. It recognizes, as well, that our God is one who follows us there, confronting the demons ripping us apart and urging, pressing, praying us to restoration. For all of our profound sense of isolation and exile in a "plain, white, featureless, empty room" no one else can enter, locked from both sides, the God of Jesus Christ, says Matthew, enters the depths with us, suffers with us, hangs onto us, envisions a new future, seeks to forge restoration and wholeness for us. Someone else has the last word. We are not alone!

And yes, the God of Jesus Christ seeks to forge restoration and wholeness not only for each of us; our God seeks wholeness and restoration for our world as well. This planet of ours, and we human beings who inhabit it, can initiate and suffer from self-inflicted wounds born of demonic forces no less so than individuals. Take a look at the shape our world is in as we worship here this morning. The hatred between Israelis and Palestinians is palpable. The eagerness for peace rife among both peoples, the pathologies of fear, ancient terrors, gross misunderstandings, the urge to run one another into the sea, or with a religious rationale to conquer territory and resources: if only sanity and reason would prevail, but the demons of fear and contempt, dehumanizing the other, divide, splinter, run rampant and rule.

Or this war on terror. My soul! The President warns us of a long drawn-out conflict. The Vice President tours the Middle East apparently shoring up allies in a coalition to unseat Saddam Hussein. American troops and military hardware are being sent to Yemen, Georgia, the Philippines, Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Indonesia, the President promising more wherever the invitation surfaces. And just across the River, MIT receives a fifty million dollar grant for futuristic combat gear. Said one anonymous professor, "Imagine the psychological impact upon a foe when encountering squads of simply invincible warriors protected by armor and endowed with super human capacities."

Friends, I fear the demons are on the loose. To be sure, the violent, suicidal, murderous, iniquitous events of September 11, 2001, illustrated the active presence of demonic influences inflicting our world. And Americans, with immeasurable wealth and overwhelming power, must know that as a people and as a nation in a world where devastating poverty, continental wide epidemics, religious and military tyranny hold sway and our natural tendency to support international stability carries the day, that peoples in inferior station will resent us, perhaps hate us for sustaining an unjust, and perverse status quo, itself demonic.

Three weeks ago, as you know, the North American Conference of the World Council of Churches met here, in our own Mary Norton Hall. Konrad Raiser, a German, the General Secretary of the World Council of Churches, delivered an address using the vivid image of the Prophet Jeremiah of repairing the breach and rebuilding the destroyed city of Jerusalem. In that address Raiser offered a lucid and ominous perspective on our current international condition. " Since October 8," he said,

We are caught in the US-led global war on terrorism. This war, which is presented as a struggle for the defense of freedom and thus for a just cause, nevertheless, follows the logic of war and has already claimed untold numbers of new victims. Since terrorism itself negates the international rule of law, including humanitarian law developed for situations of armed conflict, the war on terrorism is also being conducted outside the rule of law. International relations are more and more being subjected to military considerations, and we witness the development of a new international security ideology based on the geopolitical and economic interests of the United States. In many countries, there has been a re-emergence of the politics of national security, which was dominant 20 or 30 years ago. People's struggles for social justice and human rights are being regarded as at least potential manifestation of terrorism and exposed to harsh suppression. However, the enemy in this war on terrorism is not well defined, but rather diffuse and unseen, which is used as a justification for the unlimited scope of this global campaign.

And then, making reference to the World Council's current commitment to a Decade to Overcome Violence, Raiser continues,

From the initial focus of the Decade to Overcome Violence on urban and domestic violence, violence against women and the manifestations of structural violence, we are thus thrust back into the massively destructive violence of war, both on the side of the logic and practice of terrorism and on the side of the overpowering military strategies of the United States together with allied governments. How can the message of overcoming violence be heard in this situation? How can the commitment to build a culture of peace and reconciliation be made effective in view of the demonic manifestation of violence in our world?

After asking these questions, Raiser harks back to a previous effort of the World Council in the late sixties, a campaign to combat racism. And at the close of that 1969 statement the world Council affirmed,

Our struggle is not against flesh and blood. It is against the principalities, against the powers of evil . . . Ours is a task of exorcism. The demons operate through our social, economic and political structures. But the roots of the problem are as deep as human sin, and only God's love and man's dedicated response can eradicate it . . . It is God's love and not the hatred of man that must ultimately triumph. By God's love, by the power of God's spirit, some day soon we shall overcome.' Recalling these sentences reminds us of the depth of the challenge which we are facing as we struggle against the spirit, logic and practice of violence, seeking to build a culture of peace and reconciliation which is rooted in right relationships.

So, who in our world of the war within ourselves and the wars against each other, who will finally bear the last word? Will it be the demons seeking always to pry us apart from within? Will it be the demons setting us against one another? God forbid! As we gather on this Passion Sunday, we remember the demonic is not strange to our God. If the demonic took control anywhere, it took control at the Cross. Religious hierarchies, political structures, national myths, ethnic solidarity—capable of violence all of them—turned justice upside down and crucified One come to save and heal. On that bloody Friday afternoon we see the Demonic in full array and in control.

Or do we? Or do we? Remember? We call that Friday, "Good." Good Friday! How come? Good Friday? Because the Demonic events of that Friday were reversed, overturned, transfigured by the healing, reconciling, recreative event of Easter Day. You see the last word comes not from the executioners, the mockers, the silent and cowardly crowds. The last word comes from a God who will not let us remain in the clutches of divisive, injurious, wounding agents. The last word comes from Love that desires and recasts us whole. The last word comes, as Matthew would have it, from the restorative and reconciling power of the One who even yet strides up alien beaches, invades the scattered tombs, and from broken pieces heals each of us, commissions each of us, sends each of us as agents of reconciliation, mediators of coherence, ambassadors of joy, of re-creation and peace.

Scripture Reading
Matthew 8:28-34

When he came to the other side, to the country of the Gadarenes, two demoniacs coming out of the tombs met him. They were so fierce that no one could pass that way. Suddenly they shouted, "What have you to do with us, Son of God? Have you come here to torment us before the time?" Now a large herd of swine was feeding at some distance from them. The demons begged him, "If you cast us out, send us into the herd of swine." And he said to them, "Go!" So they came out and entered the swine; and suddenly, the whole herd rushed down the steep bank into the sea and perished in the water. The swineherds ran off, and on going into the town, they told the whole story about what had happened to the demoniacs. Then the whole town came out to meet Jesus; and when they saw him, they begged him to leave their neighborhood.