Where is your safe place? I mean that question seriously, so take a moment to think about it. Is it in your home, your hometown, in a favorite place of retreat, or maybe even right here at Trinity?
The prophet Elijah, running for his life from the enraged King Ahab and Queen Jezebel, sought safety in a cave on Horeb, the holy mountain of God.
Estefania, a young teenager from Honduras whose life had been threatened by a gang member, sought freedom and safety through an arduous journey to the United States.
Two and a half years after President Lincoln signed the Emancipation proclamation, Union General Gordon Granger arrived at the Port of Galveston with the news that all slaves were free. Juneteenth—celebrated today—recall the date that Texas finally became a place of safety from the ravages of slavery.
All of these people were seeking a place to survive and—God willing—to thrive and be true to themselves. Maybe some of you here today are seeking safety too. Because the disturbing truth of the matter is that there’s danger afoot in our world. Some of it simply in the nature of being alive, but much of it created by people. Our prejudices, our permissive gun policies, our willingness to treat entire groups as second class citizens create a climate of risk that doesn’t have to exist. Our own bad policy choices have the potential to create unsafe places for other people. And in the process, for ourselves as well.
But we also have the capacity to create safe space. And in fact, that’s something that Christian people have been doing for a long time. The word sanctuary, which is synonymous with our church building, also means refuge or place of safety in contemporary parlance. That’s because in the middle ages church buildings were in fact legal sanctuaries for people under threat.
And in many very good ways Christians continue that tradition today: offering sanctuary to people threatened with deportation, as many US churches have done, or even—through ministries like Octavia’s Kitchen and Second Harvest and the Saturday cook team—offering safety from the ongoing threat of hunger.
Offering places and being people of safety is deeply in our identity as Christians. And when we create safety for people who are marginalized or threatened, we are doing none other than the work of Jesus, who consistently and publicly affirmed people who were at risk and had no other safety. Jesus held up the women of dubious reputations—the anointing woman and the Samaritan woman, for example—not as objects to scorn, but as models of hospitality and evangelism.
And this week we find Jesus doing something equally shocking; meeting with a stigmatized man whom the whole village of Geresa had evidently abandoned, conversing with him, restoring him to his right mind. Yes, there was some drama with demons and pigs, which makes this story quite memorable. But I think to focus primarily on the supernatural elements can distract us from the power we all have—at all times and in all places—to unshackle the people living on the margins of our society. To speak with them, to let them tell us their names, to create the kind of sanctuary that allows them to sit at the feet of Jesus themselves, and be healed by his word.
We don’t know much about what happened to the man known as the Gerasene demoniac after Jesus told him to “return to your home, and declare how much God has done for you.” He did go, “proclaiming throughout the city how much Jesus had done for him,” and maybe that’s healing enough. That is, to claim our power to tell the world what we’ve seen and experienced in Jesus. But we also need safety, for which there’s really no place like home. So let me try out a theory on you. For which I confess there’s no particular Biblical evidence, except for the certainty of God’s lovingkindness, as Luke retells it in various ways.
What if that crazed young man—living among tombs—had once known a home? What if he were a younger son who had squandered his share of his father’s property in dissolute living and had been forced to tend swine—the most unclean of professions—for a paltry living? What if his encounter with Jesus had given him the courage to go home to his father, fully prepared to be treated like one of the hired hands? And what if the father was so overjoyed to see his lost son that he didn’t even wait for an apology, but put a robe on him and killed the fatted calf to celebrate?
The real sanctuary for any of us is to know ourselves as beloved of God, within a community that affirms our worth. Better yet, with a father or father figure who welcomes us just as we are. And in so doing, likewise diminishes the risk for children of all sorts of fathers, and for our most vulnerable neighbors. The conditions necessary for safety might look slightly different for refugees and LGBTQ people and exploited women and black and brown lives that matter, but we are called to create safety for the vulnerable because Jesus protected the vulnerable. There is no East or West to which we can assign people whom we are unwilling to keep safe; there is no Geresa or Guatemala or Galveston we can send them back to.
But the Bible tells us we can run out to welcome them, just as the father in the ancient parable in Luke 15 was said to do. And that’s the logical extension of our mission statement at Trinity, no? We could wait for them to come to our welcoming table, or we could go outside of our own safe place. To meet those who are laboring under fear or shame or who may yet be unable to even imagine the safety of a warm welcome home. We could, like the father of the prodigal—who is a model for all fathers and father figures—run towards them to say “let us eat and celebrate.” Offering a place at God’s table for all—as we do so consistently and so well here—isn’t something we accomplish just through the words in our bulletin or the efforts of our welcoming ushers.
Rather, we have to be willing to go out and meet people where they are, perhaps in whatever is our current equivalent of Geresa. It was a desolate place, which was also a landscape of people who themselves seemed unsafe, if only because they had not yet heard that they are welcome and they are healed. Our city is full of people like the Psalmist, is “athirst for God, athirst for the living God;” wondering “when [they] shall come to appear before the presence of God? If you yourself are thirsty right now, let me say it loud and clear. You are welcome at Trinity. You are safe. The living God is here for your healing.
We who were baptized into Christ have clothed ourselves with Christ. This is our identity, this is our calling. Among us there can be no longer Jew or Greek, no longer slave or free, no longer male and female. There is no longer gay or straight, there is father figure who is less valuable than a biological father, there is no longer insider or outsider, there is no longer Muslim or Hindu nor even unclean Geresene gentile. For we who are called by the name of Christ Jesus—who is our refuge and our safety—must be sanctuary for all.
