Our story this morning calls to mind a basic, historical backdrop for the Gospels, which, in turn, reminds us of basic principles of God's character. God's Son was sent into the world to gather the Lost Tribes of Israel (Mt 10:6, 15:24), who had from the beginning been chosen to be one with God. God had set aside for Himself "a royal priesthood, an holy nation, a peculiar people" (1 Peter 2:9). With these words Peter describes the people of the New Covenant, who live in Christ, but they inevitably recall the people Israel, the children of Jacob and their Twelve Tribes, whose story is the subject matter of the Hebrew Bible.

God is faithful:

In God's kindness, patience, mercy, and love, He cannot abide the loss of His peculiar people. He has made a covenant with them (Exod 34:6,10). So He has sent His Son to gather them appointing Twelve Disciples to be governors over them (Mt 19:28, Lu 22:30).

How does a tribe or people become lost? The historical record refers to a conquest of the Northern Kingdom of Israel by the Neo-Assyrian Empire. Ten Tribes were driven out of the land around 723 B.C. The Southern Kingdom comprising the Tribes of Benjamin and Judah remained intact. To the Jews of the first century, these are royal Houses — of Saul and of David, respectively.

Certainly, dispersion fosters neither cultural coherence nor social unity. But we cannot say that deportation must doom them as a faithful people. Doom ultimately comes of faithlessness: neither keeping God's commandments nor conceiving of themselves as a people peculiar to God. The inevitable sequelae to faithlessness is intermarriage, which accelerates the disintegration of culture and social unity .... until, in perhaps two generations, a people become lost to God forever. In the first generation they are half of this tribe or that tribe. In the second generation they are one-quarter. After that, little remains.

This morning's Gospel lesson is about all these things. Jesus takes the Disciples out of their Judean lifeworld, beyond a horizon where everything is turned upside down by "the wind and raging of the water" (Lu 8:24) to the point where they cry aloud,

Turning away from them, the Master, revealing His Divine character, rebukes the sea and the winds:

With His Disciples, Jesus has sailed to the East, to God's horizon, where the first-century historian Flavius Josephus claimed the Lost Tribes continued to dwell "... an immense multitude and not to be estimated in numbers" (Antiquities, 11.33).

St. Luke's Gospel tells us that they arrive to the land of the Gadarenes. This has been a controversial crux in Luke's Gospel. The third-century philosopher Porphyry of Tyre commented (Against the Christians), there are no cemeteries on the shores of Lake Gennesaret; there are no tombs you could live in along the shore; there are no cliffs from which swine could leap into the sea. Anyway, what might swine be doing in any village of the Jewish Levant?

Set before us plainly is a mystery: the Son of God journeying into a lost land, through a disruption in the elements (we might say, through the Bermuda Triangle), and then meeting with a lost people, the children of the Tribe of Gad.

When the Disciples beheld the scene before them they must have recalled Jesus' rebuke resonating now more deeply: "Where is your faith?" For set before them is a tableau of lost faith: people eating unclean food (swine); people living in the trance of demonic possession; people dwelling among the dead, becoming ritually unclean. The story concludes with them rejecting God, Who had visited them from on high (with manifestly Divine powers). They ask Jesus to depart.

The word swine occurs in the Sacred Scripture almost not at all — one time each in Leviticus and Deuteronomy for purposes of prohibiting it; once in Proverbs to describe destruction of the damned; and in the Synoptic Gospels in describing the lost world of Gad.

It does appear in one, other place: the Book of Isaiah, which will have a special resonance this morning:

The first person Jesus encounters breathes an atmosphere of death dwelling among tombs. A major food source for his society is swine. He is possessed by so many demons that their name is Λεγιων, or Legion.

Consider the heaviness. In the first century this word is used exclusively as a military term: 5,000 men. In all of Holy Scripture, the word is used in only two places: in the narrative of the Gadarene demoniac and Jesus' declaration that His Father could send "twelve legions [60,000] of angels" to protect Him (Mk 26:53). In either case, Legion expresses an overwhelming force, an inescapable and crushing power.

The possessed Gadarene, the most extreme case of possession found anywhere in the Bible, is to show the Disciples what a complete and permanent divorce from God looks like .... and what Divinely-appointed governors of a lost tribe would be up against. Demons run rampant through a field of victory. All signs of light and life have been extinguished. This place more resembles Hell (which only God could harrow) than a variant of Judea .... or even Samaria. This is a place of spiritual dying and deadness. All connection with God and godly life has been lost.

This scene forms the general backdrop for the New Testament. Ten among the Twelve Tribes of Israel have been lost, and the Tribes of Benjamin and Judah are in the process of becoming lost — quite literally possessed by Legions and on the verge of being physically dismantled stone-by-stone. This is the scene that has been set right around the time the New Testament is being composed.

Military invasion is a special kind of possession. After all, the locale of the Twelve Tribes of Israel is the eastern shore of the Mediterranean — too rich, too strategically important to be ignored by an imperial power. The Jews cannot hope to retain control of the land. Their only recourse is spiritual intactness. And this can only be done through the intactness of family or religious community (such as the Essenes). Chiefly, a society disappears through intermarriage.

People from the Mainland U.S. visit the Island of Hawai'i with their Hawai'ian language phrase books, keen to hear traditional slack key guitar. But the Hawai'ians have mostly vanished. Demographically, those with at least 50% Hawai'ian ancestry constitute one half of one percent of the present Island population. Yes, the language is taught to some extent in schools, but in practice no one can speak it. Even elderly people, from multi-generational families, do not know it at all (in general). As for music, the young people listen to hip-hop and reggae. And no one actually lives the "old ways." Where did these people go? Are they up in the mountains dwelling with the Menehune? You will not find them, for they were lost through intermarriage and acculturation.

In the Hebrew Bible the twin challenges of intermarriage and alienation from God are writ large in the Book of Kings with the name Jezebel and taken head-on in the Book of Ezra as the people Israel return to Zion following the Babylonian captivity .... with their foreign wives in tow. For marrying outside the faith calls for a certain broad-mindedness — new idols must be worshipped. New traditions much be lived. Old ways must vanish. We read in Deuteronomy,

God blesses us for our devotion to Him. One by one, He blesses us. And there is no mirth in Heaven like that reserved for families and generations who have placed God at the center of their lives. No families on earth shine like these families. Is this not plain to see by anyone who has eyes?

Jesus brought His Disciples into the Lost Land of Gad. He wanted them to see what enslavement to the world looks like. He wanted them to experience an entire culture possessed. The Disciples would not have to journey very far to see it in our own culture today.

Yet, we retain the possibility of devotion to God, of spiritual intactness, one by one, and family by family. We retain the legal prerogative to follow Him and never to be parted from Him. But should the political climate continue on its present trajectory, we could lose these precious and uniquely life-giving prerogatives.

This much we are certain of: the Lord Jesus has promised His followers a vocation of tribulation (Jn 16:33). We can always count on heavy weather coming in on a horizon. We must remain ever faithful. For the Lord is not asleep. He is watchful. If we are true, He will bless us. But if we should panic and give up the ship, we will surely hear His flinty rebuke:

Let us call to mind and cherish the good and decent world we knew not so very long ago. Let us remember the shining families and the Sundays when everything stopped. For that vanished world sought closeness to God, keeping His commandments and honoring Him in its public places.

Not far from where I grew up, a town chained its streets on Sundays keeping the outside world at bay. A wonderful peacefulness and quiet was enjoyed by everyone. People sat on benches on the boardwalk reading or reflecting. For in that world and across the United States, the age of decency had not yet vanished. In their world pornography was illegal. Sexual exploitation of children was not tolerated. And peddling drugs would land you in prison. No one in that world could imagine a candidate for the presidency promising that he will not tolerate devout religious communities because they are "safe havens" for "hate speech."

Let us teach our children and our grandchildren lest they fall into the now-common misbelief that this shining world never existed. More important, let us model this world for them, confident in our faith and banding together in the face of trial and tribulation. Let our children see and hear us reply to our detractors,