Caitlin Trussell with Augustana Lutheran Church on June 22, 2025

[sermon begins after two Bible readings]

Luke 8:26-39 Then [Jesus and his disciples] arrived at the region of the Gerasenes, which is opposite Galilee. ²⁷ As he stepped out on shore, a man from the city who had demons met him. For a long time he had not worn any clothes, and he did not live in a house but in the tombs. ²⁸ When he saw Jesus, he cried out and fell down before him, shouting, “What have you to do with me, Jesus, Son of the Most High God? I beg you, do not torment me,” ²⁹ for Jesus had commanded the unclean spirit to come out of the man. (For many times it had seized him; he was kept under guard and bound with chains and shackles, but he would break the bonds and be driven by the demon into the wilds.) ³⁰ Jesus then asked him, “What is your name?” He said, “Legion,” for many demons had entered him. ³¹ They begged him not to order them to go back into the abyss.
³² Now there on the hillside a large herd of swine was feeding, and the demons begged Jesus to let them enter these. So he gave them permission. ³³ Then the demons came out of the man and entered the swine, and the herd stampeded down the steep bank into the lake and was drowned.
³⁴ When the swineherds saw what had happened, they ran off and told it in the city and in the country. ³⁵ Then people came out to see what had happened, and when they came to Jesus, they found the man from whom the demons had gone sitting at the feet of Jesus, clothed and in his right mind. And they became frightened. ³⁶ Those who had seen it told them how the one who had been possessed by demons had been healed. ³⁷ Then the whole throng of people of the surrounding region of the Gerasenes asked Jesus to leave them, for they were seized with great fear. So he got into the boat and returned. ³⁸ The man from whom the demons had gone out begged that he might be with him, but Jesus sent him away, saying, ³⁹ “Return to your home, and declare how much God has done for you.” So he went away, proclaiming throughout the city how much Jesus had done for him.

Galatians 3:23-29 Now before faith came, we were imprisoned and guarded under the law until faith would be revealed. ²⁴ Therefore the law was our disciplinarian until Christ came, so that we might be reckoned as righteous by faith. ²⁵ But now that faith has come, we are no longer subject to a disciplinarian, ²⁶ for in Christ Jesus you are all children of God through faith. ²⁷ As many of you as were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. ²⁸ There is no longer Jew or Greek; there is no longer slave or free; there is no longer male and female, for all of you are one in Christ Jesus. ²⁹ And if you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s offspring, heirs according to the promise.

[sermon begins]

A couple of weeks ago I had a whirlwind, 72-hour, trip to see family related to my first Dad who was lost to schizophrenia. No ordinary get together, the goal was to tell Palm family stories, look at Palm family pictures of my Grandma Ruth and Granddad Palm, their parents, and their children who were my first dad and my uncle Robb who died a year apart, both near 50 years old. Three of my siblings were there, my mom, one niece, my Aunt Jean, one cousin, two teens, and two kids. One rental house. Mmm-hmmm. What could go right?! A lot, actually.

My Aunt Jean, a retired social worker, and I planned the structured time to show pictures and tell stories. We had a big flipchart that I used one afternoon to draw the family tree as a genogram along with more stories, health histories, and personality traits. The flipchart came in handy again the next day to draw the gifts and strengths that we each feel we gained from being part of the Palm family. It’s good to talk about the gifts when there are such obviously hard things in my family’s story. My Grandma Ruth was taken to live at an orphanage when she was 13 years old. We didn’t know a lot about her family. She wasn’t interested in talking about them. My niece has dug up a ton about Grandma Ruth’s mother who was committed to Kankakee State Hospital for the Insane and died there 20 years later.[1] It’s likely that Grandma Ruth never knew any of this about her mother. The asylum’s cemetery is surrounded by an 8-foot fence and not open to the public. The resting place of my great grandmother, Clara, is walled off.

Talking through this new information with my family and getting perspective on our family’s history, it makes sense to me that the impact of such a story is as invisible to us as the air we breathe. Whatever the gifts and challenges of my family’s story happen to be, they are normal to us. Daring to look over the walls of the cemetery, daring to look back to move forward, is worth a try.

The Gerasene demoniac in our Bible story had become a normal part of his community, too. Oh, sure, Legion was naked, unpredictable, dripping with demons, and living in the cemetery alongside the dead when he wasn’t shackled and chained in town, but his community knew what to expect from him. He was their normal. They knew what to expect from the man until Jesus showed up from across the sea. It was the first thing he did in Gentile country. Gentile means non-Jewish, territory. It was the only thing he did on that trip before returning home to Galilee. Must have been an important trip!

Jesus showed up, gave permission for the demons to enter a herd of pigs who then raced to the lake and drowned. It’s curious that the city folks were afraid when they saw the man sitting calmly at the feet of Jesus. Their fear was so great that they asked Jesus to leave town. If this Jesus could heal their demon-possessed neighbor, what other power might he have that could turn against them. Their normal had been disrupted with healing. It makes me wonder about our own comfort with the demons that we know versus the healing that we don’t know.

A lot is known about individual healing and transformation especially related to addiction and recovery. We know that those of us who face addiction and find healing in rooms of recovery like Alcoholics Anonymous process those experiences with an honest accounting of the past. Less is known about how we might transform systems, whether that system is our family, our town, our country, or our world. The more people you add, the more complicated it gets. I’m interested in those systems and what it takes to fight through fear of the unknown future to peer into the cemetery so that we can leave behind the chains and shackles that bind us. I’m interested in how a God who loves the whole world gives us hope and courage by the power of the Spirit to do so.

Notice that Jesus sent the healed man back into his community, back with his people. Restoring the man into relationships long thought irredeemable. I see that demoniac reconciled with his community, and I see our families, and cities, and country and I wonder, do I believe in a God of transformation or don’t I? Do I believe that God has a role for Jesus followers in that transformation or don’t I?

Last Thursday was Juneteenth.[2] Juneteenth celebrates June 19, 1865, the day when many enslaved people in Texas learned of their freedom through the Emancipation Proclamation. Juneteenth is also known as America’s second Independence Day and considered the longest-running African American holiday. Juneteenth is as good a time as any for us as Coloradans and as Lutherans to wonder about how we work for truth and reconciliation across differences of race that are unexamined and embedded—things that seem normal in our policies and practices because it hadn’t occurred to us to look at them in that way. On my mother’s side, I’m the great-great-great granddaughter of a lowcountry enslaver of Black African people in South Carolina. Slavery and its modern iterations including mass incarceration continue to ensnare Black Americans in cycles of poverty, violence, addiction, and isolation from their friends and families. We can do better as we advocate for a transformed justice system that dares to break these cycles and imagine a different future. We can look back to the cemetery to move forward to a different future.

Juneteenth is also a new holiday in Augustana’s Personnel Manual. This means that the office was closed on Thursday along with the Augustana Early Learning Center. Commemorating Juneteenth aligns with Augustana’s mission statement, especially that, “we welcome everyone to worship Jesus…and go serve in the world.” For many of our Black members, staff, friends, family, and neighbors, this is a major holiday celebrating liberation from enslavement and forced work at the hands of White enslavers. Commemorating this holiday in the life of our congregation, doing this one small thing, dares us to look back to move forward.

As a confessional church, we confess our faith in Jesus as Lord of heaven and earth, giver of radical grace and unconditional love. We also confess each Sunday that there is much we do and leave undone that hurts ourselves and our neighbors. Frankly, there’s not much difference between family systems like yours and mine, and larger cultural systems that bring both gifts and challenges. There are differences of scale and impact for sure. But there is no difference in the ways that most of us leave patterns of behavior unexamined and, if they are examined, we can end up justifying those patterns as just the way the world works. It’s just our normal.

The apostle Paul wrote to a congregation of Jewish Christians and Gentile Christians unified by baptism but struggling with the details like who should or shouldn’t be circumcised.[3] Paul reminds us in his letter to the Galatian church that we are free because of our baptism into Christ. Freed in Christ by faith so that all are one in Christ – no longer Jew or Greek, no longer slave or free, no longer male and female. Bible stories name differences all over the place and names us neighbors across difference – think the Syrophoenician woman[4], the Good Samaritan[5], and the Ethiopian eunuch[6] – although in fairness, race as we understand it is a much later 16^th century social construct.[7] Paul isn’t erasing our differences with Christ unifying theology. Unity is not uniformity. Unity in Christ dares to level the hierarchies of race, gender, class, and creed, to level the hierarchies that divide us and help us see Christ in each other. To dare to look into the cemetery of past actions that hurt ourselves and other people in order to move forward in hope.

While it’s reassuring that Christ is the great leveler, hierarchies that divide us seem true in our unexamined assumptions, our biases, our normal. It takes practice to celebrate and not fear difference in other people – practice in prayer, practice in worship, practice in thought and conversation, practice in advocacy, and practice in relationship with all kinds of people. As people freed by Jesus, without any reason to have to justify ourselves, we are free to practice as the body of Christ so that all may freely live without fear.

We live in a time when the world is moving fast, and action is needed. Slowing down to look over the walls of the cemetery can seem indulgent, however, slowing our thinking down is vital when fear shackles our humanity so that our actions align with Christ’s call to us to be peacemakers. Thankfully, Jesus breaches cemetery walls and sets us free. Jesus leads us through fear into community. In Christ, we are children of God who live in hope. Amen, and thanks be to God.

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[1] Kankakee State Hospital, Illinois, Historic Asylums. Kankakee State Hospital (Historic Asylums)

[2] What is Juneteenth? https://www.history.com/news/what-is-juneteenth

[3] Brigitte Kahl, Professor of New Testament, Union Theological Seminary, New York. Commentary of Galatians 3:23-29 for June 22, 2025. Commentary on Galatians 3:23-29 – Working Preacher from Luther Seminary

[4] Mark 7:24-30 Jesus and the Syrophoenician Woman

[5] Luke 10:25-37 The parable of the Good Samaritan

[6] Acts 8:26-39 Philip and the Ethiopian Eunuch

[7] The History of the Idea of Race https://www.britannica.com/topic/race-human/The-history-of-the-idea-of-race