One of my favorite movies is The Shawshank Redemption - there are tons of good scenes in that movie, but one of the most poignant is of an old man who is finally released from prison.  Prison has been his whole world, and when he walks out of those gates, he really has no clue how to live in freedom.  He has no community, no connection, no idea of how to really manage his own life, and finally there is a scene with him, hanging from the rafters of his little room in a boarding house. Freedom was just too frightening to endure.

          This scene from the Gospel of Luke is reminiscent of something like The Exorcist;  full of drama, fear, demons, casting out of demons, pigs, and of course, a man who had been living possessed for several years - a man living wild in the tombs, except when he could be captured, then he was bound in chains and shackles - but he would break the bonds and head back out to his crazy fearful life, cut off from any sort of community.  At that time any mental illness was considered to be demon possession.  And along comes Jesus who casts the demons into the pigs, and the pigs ran over the cliff into the water and were drowned.  Instead of throwing a party, celebrating the man's return to sanity, they were seized with fear and asked Jesus to leave.  This was a wild card they were not equipped to deal with -  who is it who has power over the demons and can heal someone who is possessed?

          The man was freed from his chains, but the people were in bondage to their own fears.  Twice Luke tells us they were afraid, they were seized with fear.  Fear can be pretty paralyzing can't it? Fear of the unknown, fear of failure, fear of change, fear of freedom.  We often come face to face with the power of God to free us, and our fear of what that freedom might mean.  We confess that we are in bondage to sin and cannot free ourselves - but sometimes that is where we stop, because being freed might just be more than we bargained for.  How many times do we stay locked in our fears because they are comfortable, and we have become accustomed to them?  And if we are locked in, we don't have to take as many risks.  Like the old man in The Shawshank Redemption, sometimes the thought of freedom is just more than we can bear.  Any one of us can look at our own lives and see the places where we are stuck, locked up.  It's easier than change.

          Talk to someone who has lived for years afraid to get out of an abusive relationship - I heard of a woman who broke up with her boyfriend 27 times before she finally could be done with that relationship!  Talk to individuals and families who have dealt with recovery from addiction.  Often it is when an addicted person is on the road to recovery that the relationships fall apart, freedom from what was is too uncertain.  Or someone who stays in a job they hate - because it is less frightening than looking for something new.  The daughter of a friend was so unhappy in a school that she tried to overdose rather than tell her parents that she wanted out of that school, she thought they expected it of her, that she would be a failure if she left.  When the psychiatrist told them, "She wants to leave the school", their response was, "That's fine with us."  She had been locked in by what she imagined to be their expectations.  We can stay chained to the past, and we can be chained to worry about the future.  We can be chained to our own prejudices, our own way of looking at the world.  Take it a level deeper, we stay stuck in our beliefs that God is a God of judgment who keeps score and punishes accordingly, we stay stuck in thinking that if we just do more, God will be more impressed with us.  We would rather be miserable in that prison than trust Jesus.  We ignore the radical nature of God's power to break those chains, to blow the future open with redeeming love that calls us forward, that sends us out instead of locks us in.

            Jesus came to set people free - and they would not have any of that - they were afraid, they sent him away, and finally one day, they hung him on a cross.  They didn't really want someone changing the rules of the game, they didn't want to have to think beyond the law.  Freedom was way too overwhelming.

For the man described in our gospel lesson today, freedom meant restoration - he is dressed, in his right mind, sitting at the feet of Jesus.  I am sure he would have liked nothing better than to get into the boat with Jesus and his other disciples and stick close to the one who had healed him.  But Jesus had another plan for him - he wanted him to proclaim, to go back, scary as that must have been, he wanted him to return and tell people about what had taken place, about what God had done for him.  

Finally, this is not a story about pigs or demons or even the man who was healed, it is a story about God, and how that story lands on our stories.  It is about the ministry of Jesus that would not be accepted because to trust the God of love and compassion was just too frightening.  Freedom might mean that anything is possible, and if anything is possible, then it might mean that those we safely keep in chains are now restored and whole, or that we become unchained from our own fears.  It might mean that things aren't as predictable as we had thought, and that Jesus has power over all that would hold us down.

Trusting in the power of God does not cancel out all fear, and some fear is just plain wise, but trust in God frees us so that we don't make our fear the god of our lives, so that we don't live as though we are in chains when Jesus has come to break those chains.  It frees us so that the good news is set loose in the world.  We know all about the power of evil, the power of the chains that bind people - we see it all around us and we experience it in our own lives.  But we put our faith in the power of God, the power that is wrapped in love and binds us, not in chains, but in grace, a grace that calls us to go out into the world and tell others what God has done in our lives, a grace that reminds us that we belong to Christ, and a grace that has the power to break us free from the chains and restore us to life. AMEN