the preacher boy returns

this draft actually changed just slightly the morning of -- but you'll get the big idea. if you're *seriously* going to slog through it --

you should probably read these stories from the Revised Common Lectionary first:

The Mountain & The Naked Guy.

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FADE IN: torrential rain beats against the stern weathered face of a sixty-something man who breathes with the desperation of someone who has just finished a marathon. A dark figure in a short tunic moves toward him. He comes close; he looks terrified. “The queen heard about your slaughter. She vowed to her gods that she will s-s-slaughter you too.” The messenger cringes, but the stern weathered face isn’t…instead fear leaks into his face. He staggers backward two steps, and then, he runs into the downpour.
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In a small clay house a ten-year old boy, also dressed in a tunic tortures his small sister. She whines. She shrieks, but he continues to tickle her. Their mother carries pitchers of water in and out of the house. But at the shriek she whirls around. “You!” she shouts at her son, “Do you want me to take you out to the tombs? Do I have to chain you there?”

The boy and the girl stop and grow quiet and stare at her, horrified. She leaves for more water.
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The boy carefully pulls himself to the top of a shale ledge. His eyes appear full of fear and the thrill of danger. Unfortunately, he sees nothing dangerous. Pigs graze in a field on the other side of the huge calm peaceful meadow surrounding the tombs. Water from last night’s storm beads on each blade of grass. He had forgotten the storm.

FLASHBACK TO: Last night, the boy sits up on his bedroll in the CRACKING thunder. His sister’s eyes wide with terror in the lightning flashes. And suddenly. It stops. The rain. The lighting. Quiet. Like this quiet. Here in the meadow…until: CRACK! The sound of a Chain thrown against a stone. And a howl that sounds more animal than human. There! The boy can see him, just barely around another tomb. Heaving his heavy chains against a stone. His body, smeared with mud and blood, is otherwise completely naked. His beard, caked with feces and drool. The boy turns & runs.
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And the man with the stern weathered face runs, too. The rain is gone, but he still runs. He runs through bushes, over rocks. He doesn’t run fast, but he runs as if his eyes can see – they strain to see – farther – over miles and miles of lumpy desert – a jagged outline of a mountain.
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And a different boy, a thousand years later, polyester shirt, bowl-cut hair and a red and white bike rides like a demon to keep pace with the stern weathered runner and the boy in the meadow. He rides fast through the parking lot of a boxy brick church and past an overgrown lilac bush. The bike skids to the ground as the boy jumps off and scoots through the lilac, against the edge of a stone porch. Beneath the bushes four of his best friends wait. “I saw him” pants the boy.
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The running old man pants too. He staggers to a stop. He falls next to a bush, and, as if he took a heavy sedative, he sleeps. Hard.
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The bright sun glares through the lilac bush and prints shifty prison bar lines across the faces of the sweaty eight year old boys as they welcome their friend back to their lair with questions. THE CAP BOY?! You saw him? Did he have his gun? Did he chase you? He looked mad, didn’t he? He’s so mean.
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The old man, the runner, sleeps and sleeps. In the middle of his dream – full of flagellating prophets and fire from heaven and a wicked angry queen – an angel wakes him. “Elijah, Eat this bread,” she says, “you’ll need it for the journey.”
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I don’t know where the name “Cap Boy” came from. I know he lived across the street from the back of my brick church next to our yellow parsonage and our Christian School. I know that when I rode my bike around that very small block in the very small town of Perry, Michigan, and saw him across the street, that I had never seen him in my church or school. I know he was lanky and several years older than me with the same kind of swarthy skin that I had pictured when I read books like “Treasure Island” and “Kidnapped.” And we all need danger to lurk at the boundaries of our communities, don’t we? So when the “Cap Boy” started firing his cap gun at us as we rode past on our bikes, he became the dragon at the edge of the sea -- the Scary Old Woman in the rundown house at the end of every block – the Calormen at the edge of Narnia – the Middle Easterner sitting two seats behind you on the airplane – your child’s literature teacher at high school who is clearly gay. The Cap Boy.

We plotted under the lilac bush how we could mount a strategic defense against the Cap Boy. He scared us! Sometimes he jumped out from behind the cars that someone was always working on in front of his house, and CRACK CRACK the cap gun would terrify us and we felt the blush of being humiliated and we banded together with ridiculous plots of muddy water disguised as kool-aid which we would trick him into drinking. When we rode past his house we pedaled with the vengeance and fear of the pursued.
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CRACK go the chains against the stones of the tombs. The boy in the cemetery runs, but the screams of the crazy man are louder. He calls out in gibberish, but the boy hears the familiar syllables of his own name in the ranting. Two years ago one of the elders of the village suggested chaining the crazy man up so that he wouldn’t eat children.
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Elijah runs again. Long before his eyes can see the mountain rising out of the desert, his heart can see it. The memory buried with his ancestors calls to him. The mountain rises jagged and uneven against the sky. Lightning cracks around it. Clouds swirl everywhere. Fireballs roll up the mountain. Bushes erupt in eternal flames. A light on the other side of the mountain burns so brightly that his retinas would burn for days. He runs and sweats and pants.
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The boy runs too. He hears the screams. Images flash of the terrible desperation in the crazy man’s eyes, the camera shakes as it follows the lunatic running and screaming and leaping and rolling. Naked and hideous on the ground.
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CUT TO: Elijah’s finally standing on the Holy Mountain. He can barely stand at all for the wind storm. He has to hold on to the rocks desperately so he won’t be blown over the edge.

CUT AGAIN: He’s still crouched behind a rock on the same mountain, only now, the rocks are shaking. It’s a massive earthquake.

ANOTHER CUT: Fire blazes out of the rocks, through the air, its everywhere. Moses’ puny little burning bush was nothing compared to this firestorm. The prophet strains to see something. Looking for something…

CUT TO: The boy freezes. The crazy, bloody, naked man shrieks louder than before, but this time its not gibberish. “What have you to do with me, Jesus, Son of the Most High God? I beg you, do not torment me!” The boy spins around. A rabbi stands before the crazy man who is strangely still. They converse. CLOSE UP on the boys widening eyes as the man relaxes, sits and the pigs across the way begin to shriek. Organize into an absurdist regiment of doomed soldiers plunging over the cliff, row by row to their horrible death.
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Now there was a great wind, so strong that it was splitting mountains and breaking rocks in pieces before the LORD, but the LORD was not in the wind; and after the wind an earthquake, but the LORD was not in the earthquake; and after the earthquake a fire, but the LORD was not in the fire; and after the fire a sound of sheer silence. Then there came a voice to him that said, "What are you doing here, Elijah?
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I walked into the Wednesday night gametime at my church, two weeks after my father had performed the funeral for the Cap Boy’s father. CLOSE UP on my widening eyes as I recognize HIM. Here. The Cap Boy was – impossibly – at church. I avoided him. I avoided his eyes. I hoped he would never come back. Him? Here? At church? Ruined everything.
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“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 were afraid and they asked Jesus to leave them; for they were seized with great fear.”
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One of the tricky parts of reading such exciting stories in the Bible is figuring out where to locate ourselves in the story. I think there are several right answers in these stories. Maybe we find ourselves on the fringes already. Maybe we’re fleeing to the faraway lands. Maybe we’re terrified of the people who live at the boundaries of our world. Our Cap Boys.

As I think back about the Cap Boy, I’m embarrassed by how we constructed him. How I responded to him. We’ve all been in groups when we suddenly realized that the group saw the world in a much more narrow – more closed way than we wanted to be a part of. I know that much of my growing up experience was an attempt to find my way out of groups that felt too small. Maybe as I decided to join a charismatic church and then maybe again as I got drawn into the akrac spider web, and maybe when I decided to leave the medium sized town I called home, and definitely, admittedly, as I decided to go to school again…or to travel – I was deciding that what I needed to do was to cross the street. Get off of that small Perry, Michigan block – and become more empathic, less ethnocentric, more cosmopolitan, less small minded, more well-travelled, more open. It’s a journey that most of us, one way or another, have been on. And there’s some truth in that journey.
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One way to find God or find out where Jesus is working…is to go find the edge of our community. Or better the edge of the world, and listen. Because in one way or another, don’t we all live in a small town? Doesn’t God always intervene at the edge of the world? But then what? After God redefines for us what we thought to be the BOUNDARIES of who we are. What we’re capable of. What we can afford to have faith in. Then what?
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In the sheer silence God asks, “What are you doing here, Elijah? Jesus has one foot in the boat, and he looks at the crazy man who’s now chillin’ with clothes on and freshly rinsed hair and beard. “I think I need to come with you.” A little panic in his eyes, a false note of confidence in his voice. Elijah, too, yammers on and on, all kinds of know-it-all, been-there-done-that in his voice as he raises his complaint to Yahweh.
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Where I grew up – a sermon wasn’t a sermon unless you could stick your landing. The ending mattered a lot. So only a part of me was very excited when I read through the lectionary readings; not every pulpit-supply-hack gets lucky enough to have Mt. Siani, a firestorm, shrieking pigs and a naked demoniac. But the ending? What is all this stuff about? Because at the end of these fantastic stories I’m here. Standing in a room full of people who have just weathered something horrible or something beautiful – a new baby, friends who left, friends who died, a disease diagnosed, a graduation, the end of stressful season at work – and in the wild storm that it has been…God has probably, as God is prone to do, revealed something about his nature in the Xtreme Xperience that has been your recent life. And most of us, afterwards, whether we’re exhausted or pumped, want to do something NEW, BETTER, BIGGER. We want to leave our old block and cross the street into something new.
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One of our favorite students came to visit us a few weeks ago after traveling to Nicaragua for a week and talked about what an amazing mountain-top experience he had. He talked about how sure he was that things needed to change for him. That he really wanted to re-focus his values. He, like many of us, had this urge, this need, to take the transforming experience of encountering God and turn into something NEW, BETTER, BIGGER.
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There’s a long silence that I think Luke left out of the story after the newly sane demoniac begged Jesus to know if he can come along for the ride. Probably the same silence after Elijah’s complaint. And after the silence, if you read the stories in context, the answers God offers them both are remarkably the same. I don’t know exactly what this answer means for you (in the light of the storm you’ve experienced), but I can’t think of a better ending…
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Jesus Says: "Return to your life, and declare how much God has done for you."