The Pleasant and Green Neighborhood

Epiphany 4b February 1, 2009

Deuteronomy 18:15-20
Psalm 111
1 Corinthians 8:1-13
Mark 1: 21-28

I know you won’t believe this, but church sometimes brings out the crazy in people.

Do religious institutions attract crazy people, or does just something happen to us once we get in here? Is it because places like these hold all our hopes and dreams? Because they speak of promises of a better life for the world God has created? Do we get angry because these are promises denied, or delayed?

Do these places make us crazy because our hopes are so high for them, and then so frequently dashed to the ground? Or are these places of safety, of refuge, where the troubled and angry and possessed know that they can come and be allowed to vent and rage and fume and act out. Quiet havens, broken dreams, unfulfilled promises: why do you come to this sacred space?

The Gospel of Mark tells us nothing about the neighborhood around the synagogue in today’s story. It’s in Capernaum, which was a city in Galilee – not a fancy town, but a town of fishermen, of traders, of people from all across the Roman Empire. A hardscrabble town.

It would not be a stretch to imagine the neighborhood around that synagogue to be something like the neighborhood around here. And it is not any kind of a stretch to imagine someone walking in here, as angry and as loud and as possessed by any number of demons as the man in today’s story.

A couple of hundred years ago another crazy man walked into a church. The demons that haunted this man were, it can be said, coming at him from the outside. He lived in England during the early industrial revolution. He saw all the dark sides of those days – the ruined country-sides, the overcrowded cities, the soot-filled air, the overworked children, the lavish homes and lives of the rich. This is not what God intended for England, ranted William Blake:

And did the Countenance Divine
Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here
Among these dark Satanic Mills?

New England as well as Old England knows what happened to those false promises of the industrial revolution. This church now owns a parsonage in what used to be a shoe factory. This city is now no closer to the centers of power – to Beacon Hill, say – than rough andtumble Capernaum, in hardscrabble Galilee, was from Jerusalem. Promises were made when this church was built, promises to be here, in this place, in this community, for a long, long time.

This community has changed – changed enough to make some people really, really crazy – and this church is still here, still opening our doors for whoever comes in, happy, sad, troubled, young, old, clothed and in their right minds, or ripping their shirts off and possessed by demons. This church is still here.

What makes us crazy, here between Pleasant and Green Streets? What gives us hope, here between Pleasant and Green, or should we call them, “not-so-pleasant” and “anything-but-green”?

Long ago, in that far-away synagogue in Capernaum, Jesus stopped the demon in his tracks. When we read in the Gospel of Mark about “demonic possession,” it is a metaphor for alien ownership. The person who is possessed by the unclean spirit is owned by someone other than God, just as Galilee and Judea were owned by the Roman Empire and not by the people who actually lived there, just as the very earth under the disciples feet and the sea in which they fished were owned by interests which put their profit ahead of people’s lives.

So much of Brockton is owned by somebody else. It’s enough to make you crazy. We are third in the state in the number of foreclosed homes. If you’ve lost your home, or can’t afford a home, or don’t live in MainSpring, then you rent: your home is owned by somebody else, and if it’s not heated, or maintained, or safe – well, it’s enough to make you crazy.

This church is still here. Can we live up to the promises we made over 100 years ago? Can we be the church God is calling us to be?

William Blake’s response to what he saw as the broken promises of England was to shake his fist in anger:

Bring me my bow of burning gold!
Bring me my arrows of desire!
Bring me my spear! O clouds, unfold!
Bring me my chariot of fire!

I will not cease from mental fight,
Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand,
Till we have built Jerusalem
In England's green and pleasant land.

And so what about Brockton’s green and pleasant streets? Some remarkable things have happened this year – we have made great strides toward that mission to which God calls us, to be the church – the place of safety, refuge, hospitality, hope, transformation – in this place and at this time.