+Points to ponder

1. What is your first impression when you read/hear the story of Jesus and the demoniac at Gerasenes?
2. What do you make of Jesus sending the demoniac home with instructions to tell everyone what God had done for him?
3. Does this story encourage you to tell your story? (Points to Ponder challenge: tell someone your story and then share the reaction with your pastor.)

+Sermon Transcript

Grace, mercy, and peace be unto each of you from God our Father and our Lord and King, Jesus the Christ. Amen.

Let us pray: O Lord, in Your mercy hear our prayers: and as You give us the desire to pray, grant us Your help and protection; through Jesus Christ, our Lord, Amen.

In the book Hell from the Heavens, John Wukovits describes the epic story of the largest single-ship kamikaze attack of World War II. The date was April 16, 1945. The battle was Okinawa. The target was the USS Laffey, a battle-hardened destroyer, a ship primarily assigned to protect other ships from submarines.

The Laffey had been involved in three prior assaults in the Pacific. The ship had seen combat, but nothing prepared the crew for this eighty-minute ordeal in which they were targeted repeatedly by Japanese suicide aircraft. By the time the smoke settled, they’d been hit by no fewer than twenty-two kamikazes. And yet, while they sustained significant damage, they were not destroyed. And it is this story that sets us up for another epic battle, one that Jesus enters into in our Gospel reading from Luke.

The scene is moments after Jesus has calmed the wild waves of the Sea of Galilee. And now, he enters “uncharted territory” – the Gerasenes. Sounds almost ominous, doesn’t it? Pagan property. A dismal place where the demons roamed. And so, we read, “When Jesus had stepped out on land, there met him a man from the city who had demons.” This guy was in rough shape. He was a “streaker” who hung out with skeletons; he didn’t wear clothes and he lived in the tombs.

People had attempted to keep him under lock and key, but he repeatedly broke free. Crazy man. And as Jesus and the disciples haul the boat up on shore, Jesus comes face-to-face with this deranged demoniac. Scary situation. His name? Legion. Luke explains that this is because many demons had gone into him. A legion was a unit of Roman soldiers numbering around six thousand. Can you imagine the damage that thousands of demons were inflicting on this poor man?

But while Jesus is outnumbered, he is not outmatched. Pay attention to the verbiage of the story and you will find out who is in control of the battle. It is Jesus. The demons are begging Jesus not to obliterate them completely by sending them into the abyss – that eternal destination of the damned. You do not beg if you are in control; you beg if you are being controlled. Like a prisoner of war who begs his captors for leniency or a criminal who begs the judge to reduce his sentence, they beg Jesus to go easy on them, to send them into a herd of swine – which Jesus obliges.

And what happens? Luke records: “The herd rushed down the steep bank into the lake and drowned.” They were sunk. What the kamikazes were unable to do to the USS Laffey, the demons did to the pigs. They went down and met their watery grave.

But the story isn’t over. Go back to the poor demoniac. Where is he? He was freed. He is “sitting at the feet of Jesus, clothed and in his right mind.” It’s the posture of a disciple. In Jewish culture, to sit at someone’s feet was to become a disciple of the rabbi. This man is ready to stick with Jesus. In fact, he “begged that he might be with Him.”

There’s that language again, recognizing that Jesus is in control. What does Jesus say? “Return to your home and declare how much God has done for you.” In other words, share your story. The man wants to be a student, but Jesus calls him to be a storyteller. “Go and tell those who saw your previous way of life how much I’ve done for you. Tell them the story of the ‘hell’ that you went through. Tell them of the One who delivered you from the destroyer.”

This story Luke narrates is epic – similar to the story that John Wukovits recounts from the USS Laffey. It’s a story of warfare. The Bible speaks of our struggle “against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.”

Here’s how it breaks down: The devil is a destroyer. In John’s Gospel we hear that he’s come to “kill and destroy.” In Revelation he is called the “angel of the bottomless pit” – the abyss – and “Apollyon,” which translates as “the destroyer.” Make no mistake, Satan and his minions have one goal and one goal only: to destroy. J. I. Packer once said: “Satan has no constructive purpose of his own; his tactics are simply to thwart God and destroy men.”

Think of what they destroyed in this man. They destroyed his dignity – naked and living amongst the dead. They destroyed his relationships – ostracized from his community, living alone. And when cast out into the herd of pigs, what did they do? They destroyed them.

And to this day, we see Satan’s destructive forces at play in the lives of people, in our own lives. Destroying marriages, destroying relationships, destroying livelihoods, destroying the lives of the preborn, destroying churches, destroying the mental health of individuals. It is one strike after another. We hear early in our reading that “for many a time it [the evil spirit] had seized him.” Many a time. One after another, to the point of exhaustion, when we are ready to admit defeat. Sometimes our lives feel like the USS Laffey as we endure one suicide plane slamming into us after another, trying to sink us.

But some might ask: Are there demons still roaming the skies and seas today, lurking there, waiting to destroy us? If you are asking, “Are there people who suffer from demon-possession like this man,” the answer, I believe, is “yes.” And yet, I believe that demons, while they may not always possess the soul of an individual as visibly as in the story here in Luke eight, do cause people significant distress and cause them to do destructive things. I think about people in the grip of drug abuse or alcohol addiction or caught up in destructive lusts of the flesh that inflict pain not only on them but on others around them. And whether these forces are chemical or psychological, there can be little doubt that they are still the remnants of a fallen world that Satan exploits.

I think of a fifteen-year-old girl who made poor choices with illicit drugs, drinking, and other risky behaviors. She had been in and out of short-term mental health facilities. She had threatened to kill herself multiple times. And when I talked with her dad, he said (perhaps without thinking too deeply about his words), “I’m not sure what demons she’s fighting.” We use this language of “fighting demons.” Truth be told, we are all fighting demons – some people more than others. And you can see the wake of destruction that’s left in the lives of people.

So, when we find ourselves here, what do we do? We cling to the Gospel. And the Gospel proclaims simply this: “[Jesus came] to destroy the works of the devil.” While Satan claims to be the destroyer, the Gospel proclaims that

SATAN, THE DESTROYER, HAS BEEN DISARMED AT THE CROSS AND WILL ONE DAY BE DESTROYED.

The apostle Paul says in Colossians chapter two that Jesus has disarmed the powers of evil, making a public spectacle of them, triumphing over them by the cross.

And so, we cling to Jesus, knowing that by His death and resurrection He has destroyed Satan’s power and will deliver us from the destruction that the devil desires to inflict upon us.

We find this as we turn to two places: (1) We go back to our Baptism. Sometimes this is lost in the modern baptismal rite, but in years past, Baptism was seen as an exorcism. The LSB Altar Book includes an alternate form of the Baptism service, based on Martin Luther’s Baptism rite. In it, the baptizer says, “Depart, you unclean spirit, and make room for the Holy Spirit in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.” Speaking of Baptism, notice what happens to the herd of pigs that the demons are cast into. They rush down a steep embankment and are drowned. And isn’t that what Baptism does?

Martin Luther says: “[Baptism] indicates that the Old Adam in us [perhaps we could say, the demons in our lives] should by daily contrition and repentance be drowned and die with all sins and evil desires.” And so, when we face our demons, we declare over them – Ich bin getauft! – I am baptized! – the demons have no power over us.

Which brings us to the second place we turn: (2) We go back to the words of the Bible. We go to the clear words of God that proclaim Jesus’ victorious death on the cross, the forgiveness of sins it won, and the power of God over the onslaughts of Satan. Remember that “He who is in you is greater than he who is in the world.”

And then, as we continue to experience the rescue of Jesus in our lives, we simply tell our story. Like those sailors aboard the USS Laffey, who limped away from battle, scarred and yet victorious, and told their story. Like the man who was once demon-possessed, who was told by Jesus to “return to [his] home and declare how much God had done for” him. We, too – you and I – have a story to tell. And that story begins at home. We tell those who know us well what Jesus has done for us.

Beloved, tell that story; and tell it well. It is a blockbuster story – even greater than John Wukovits’ book – the story of the Redeemer who freed us from the destroyer. Amen.

“May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that by the power of the Holy Spirit you may abound in hope.”