The
Reverend Luther Zeigler
Emmanuel
Church
June 23,
2013
“Jesus then asked
him, ‘What is your name?’ He said, ‘Legion’; for many demons had entered
him.” Luke 8:30
My family is from a tiny farming town in southern
Pennsylvania. The town has the promising
name of ‘Newville,’ but the name doesn’t quite fit anymore; it has been a
hundreds years, at least, since there has been anything new there. My grandfather on my dad’s side was a dairy
farmer, and he had a few hundred acres of farmland on the outskirts of
town. Dad grew up on the farm, the
youngest of seven. My grandfather on my
mom’s side managed Newville’s feed store.
While he wasn’t a farmer himself, his feed business was all about
serving the town’s farmers.
After my parents got married, they eventually moved away
from Newville to pursue their own dreams in the big city. But as a family we always returned to
Newville to visit my grandparents, especially during the summers, when my
brother and I were off school. The one
thing that I learned during my summers in Newville is that folks in small towns
look out for one another. They know
their neighbors. Small town people think nothing of stopping by a neighbor’s
house to borrow some flour, or to look in on someone who is sick, or just to
have a cup of coffee. They go to church
together, they watch each other’s kids play ball on the weekends, they sit on
each other’s porches at night and make conversation, they eat supper together
without feeling the need to call it a dinner party, and they tend to keep their
doors unlocked at night. They take the
time to know and care for each other.
As a small boy, I don’t know that I then appreciated all
of these virtues of small town life, but there was one particular summer day
when I learned a lesson in this little town of Newville that I shall never
forget. I was 8 years old and it was
just another sleepy summer’s day in the country. My father and brother were off doing
something, my grandparents were busy with the day’s chores, and it was just my
mother and me. “Why don’t we take a walk
down to the Walker’s place?,” my mother says.
“It has been awhile since I have seen Jeff.” I knew most of my grandparents’ neighbors and
I had never heard any mention of the Walkers or of a Jeff. “Who are the Walkers?,” I ask. “They live down by the spring,” she
says. “I used to take care of Jeff when
I was a young girl in high school. Gosh,
he is probably in his twenties by now.”
And so, off we go, walking down Big Spring Road, and then
up a gravel lane to the Walkers’ place.
As we approach the house, my mother stops for a moment, and turns to me
and says, “Don’t be alarmed, but it takes a little getting used to Jeff. He is in a wheelchair. And he has trouble controlling his arms and
legs. He has something called cerebral
palsy.” The words meant nothing to me
then. I had never met anyone with
cerebral palsy. But the image of a
wheelchair-bound young man with an inability to control his limbs conjures up
enough of a specter so that I begin to feel my stomach tighten a bit with
anxiety, not knowing exactly what to expect.
My mother knocks on the door and an older woman
answers. “Mrs. Walker,” my mother
says. Recognition spreads across the
older woman’s face. “Carol!,” she
exclaims as she sweeps my mother into her arms.
My mom introduces me as we make our way across the threshold into the
Walker’s modest bungalow. After a few
minutes of small talk, my mom asks for Jeff.
“I haven’t seen him in years and I was hoping he might be up for a short
visit,” my mother says. “Sure,” Mrs.
Walker says, “he is out back on the porch.”
My heart is pounding audibly by this time and the twinge
in my stomach is now a full-blown knot.
I keep my distance behind my mother as she swings open the screen door
and walks out on to the Walker’s back porch.
Over in the corner sits a wisp of a young man in a wheelchair. He is in shorts and a tee shirt. His bare arms and legs are stick-like, more
bones and flesh than muscle. He is a bundle of motion, twisting and turning in
his wheelchair, each limb seeming to have a mind of its own. His head gyrates to and fro. The disease of cerebral palsy has progressed
to a point that he no longer has control of any of his muscles, from his arms
and legs to even his facial muscles.
This is Jeff Walker.
As my mother moves toward him, I can see Jeff’s eyes meet
hers. He recognizes her. And at that moment, his movements become even
more frantic as he turns and desperately but unsuccessfully tries to move his
wheelchair to meet my mother. My mother
glides over to him, kneels down, and gently kisses him on the forehead. She pulls a chair up next to his wheelchair,
takes his gnarled hand into hers, and strokes his hair. Sounds come from Jeff’s mouth that I do not
recognize as words but that my mother somehow seems to understand. They talk and sit together for what must have
been twenty minutes or so.
All this time, I am frozen in place with my back up
against the outside wall of the house. I
am about as far from my mother and Jeff as I can be while still being on the
porch. I am paralyzed with fear. Panicked, I seem to have as little control of
my body as Jeff does of his. I want
nothing more than to leave. It feels
like a nightmare. And the twenty minutes
or so my mother spends visiting with Jeff seems like an eternity to me.
As I tell you this story, I feel a certain amount of shame
at my behavior. At the time, as a young
and inexperienced boy, I was unable to see Jeff Walker as a human being. To my immature eyes, he was just a tangle of
limbs, a frightening apparition, a deformed caricature of a person, someone or
something to be shunned. Only now, after
years of reflecting back on this little episode, do I see what my mother was
trying to teach me that day. She saw in
Jeff Walker a beautiful, intelligent, young boy trapped inside a badly damaged
body. She understood that he was a young
man craving to be loved, to be known and embraced by other human beings, but
whose experience of life rarely yielded such a gift. Almost everyone Jeff encountered would recoil
in horror upon meeting him, like I did, never able to get past the ugliness of
his disease to meet the beautiful child caged inside.
In ancient times, people did not have as clear an
understanding as we do of the range of physical and mental diseases that can
rob a person of his humanity and cause
indescribable suffering. And so we often
encounter in our Bible, stories, like today’s gospel reading, where a person
afflicted with an extremely debilitating disease is portrayed as being
possessed by demons. This unfortunate man
lives in the darkness of the tombs, naked and alone, shunned by all. He is tormented by unknown forces so
extraordinary that they take command of his body and mind. The people seek to shackle his arms and legs,
but his afflictions are so powerful that they break the chains of social
control.
When Jesus asks the man his name, all he can say is
“Legion,” literally meaning “thousands.”
One scholar of this text has commented that this is one of the saddest
lines in Scripture because this man has been so ravaged by disease and disorder
that he can’t even remember his name. He
identifies only with the “legions” of demons that have taken over his body and
mind. His humanity, dignity, and self-respect
have been utterly destroyed.
We can only speculate as to what set of mental or physical
disorders may have been responsible for this man’s condition. But that question is really beside the point,
for the truth of the matter is that this naked, suffering, and abandoned man
called “Legion” is a haunting metaphor for the full range of demons that
struggle for the control of the human soul.
Demons like schizophrenia, bipolar disorders, different types of
psychoses and phobias and anxieties, autism in all its forms, various sorts of
addictions and compulsions, dementia, and the full range of neurological
disorders, including, yes, cerebral palsy.
The list of such demons is literally “legion.”
Today we have names for these conditions and understand
something about their underlying biological and psychological causes, but that
understanding doesn’t in the least reduce the terrifying reality they embody
for those who live with these demons.
While few of us, thank God, are as tortured as this man called “Legion,”
each one of us, to one degree or another, has our demons. We have our anxieties, fears, addictions,
crippling ailments, pathologies of one sort or another.
The startlingly good news of our gospel story, however, is
that there is no disease, no disorder, no demon beyond Jesus’ reach. Jesus meets us in our greatest moments of
need and weakness. In those dark places
of our soul, in those tombs we sometimes wander, Jesus is there.
These miraculous stories of healing are often interpreted
merely as evidence of Jesus’ divine power.
But let me suggest that there is something more going on here. Miracle stories in the Bible are seldom about
the miracles themselves. The miracle is not the ultimate point. Rather, the
miracle points us to a deeper reality, to a truth about God and where he is
calling us to go.
The true power of today’s gospel story resides in Jesus’
willingness to encounter “Legion” as a human being, to cross the social
boundaries of stigma, to see past the outward signs of his horrible disease to
the humanity within, to move beyond fear to understanding, to care for the
abandoned. The true miracle of the story is not merely that Legion is healed;
the true miracle of the story is that we are healed when we set aside our
fears, reach out, and love those who are broken or disfigured or possessed with
demons; including, I might add, ourselves.
Many years ago I learned that Jeff Walker had died,
another victim of the terrible disease of cerebral palsy. When I heard the news I was overcome with
remorse: not merely a sadness because he
had died, but a sense of regret that as a young boy I had lacked the compassion
and maturity to embrace Jeff as the loveable person he was. But I am grateful that my mother, God rest
her soul, showed Jeff the love I could not find and restored to him a sense of
dignity that his disease had tried to erase.
She embodied for me that summer’s day the deep truth in Jesus’ healing
of this man called ‘Legion.’ She wasn’t
able to cure Jeff of his cerebral palsy.
But she was able to give him a glimpse – and to give me a glimpse – of
the Kingdom toward which God is calling us, and of the redeeming love that God
now shares fully with them both. Amen.
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