Faith can be a difficult thing.

Shortly after moving to Washington DC in August 2004, I wandered from church to church, Sunday after Sunday, never quite feeling like I fit in. In some churches, I wouldn't even make it through the entire service and would simply walk out in a fit of frustration. On the first Sunday of advent in 2005, this habit finally caught up with me. I decided the church had zero relevance to my life. About 1/3^rd of the way through the sermon, I stood up and walked out. But as I walked out that day, a man not much older than I was came up to me and said "Hi, I'm new here. Do you know anything about the twenties and thirties ministry here?" I shook my head "no," and walked away.

I continued walking towards my car. And then, about thirty seconds later, it hit me. The person who had spoken to me had been my chance to reach out to someone else, to put my faith into action and to make it relevant. I rushed back up the steps of the church and into the building . . . but he was gone. I'd like to say that I saw him again the next Sunday, but I didn't. In fact, I never saw him again. To use a baseball analogy for a moment, we don't always hit home runs. On that day, I struck out without even realizing that I was at bat.

Faith can be a difficult thing indeed.

As if putting our faith into action isn't difficult enough, the gospel writers sometimes offer us stories that are a doozy to make sense of. Today is one of those times.

The narrative of today's gospel is simple enough. Jesus casts a demon out of a man and people are impressed. But other than realizing that Jesus is impressive, what relevance does it hold for us today? The idea of demonic possession certainly doesn't jive with our twenty-first century understanding of mental illness, either in terms of cause or treatment. What then are we to believe?

Bruce Epperly, professor at Lanchester Theological Seminary, notes two themes in the reading that may not be evident at first glance. First, when Jesus reached out to the person, he was committing as subversive act of hospitality. As Epperly states: "As unclean, this person would have been an outsider, banned from her or his community, including synagogue worship." Second, the reading highlights the healing power of the Holy Spirit. As Epperly states, "we are called to understand, welcome, and provide healing hospitality and spiritual formation to persons experiencing mental illness challenges."

Epperly's charge is a tall one, and I don't claim to have any easy answers about how to put his call into action. But here at St. Thomas, we are community of people who are called to reach out to others, whoever they might be, wherever they are in their faith journey. We are a community of gay and straight, young and old, rich and poor, believers and doubters, united by the commitment to see the face of Christ in each other. But we live a in a world of wars, hunger, economic depression, material greed, and general suspicion, it's easy to lose track of seeing the face of Christ in other people until it is too late. We live in a world where Christianity has been used as a tool of oppression instead of a tool of liberation, where many people think that Christianity is synonymous with the Left Behind series or Yes on Proposition 8. As a result, God has been reduced to the idea of a stern disciplinarian or tax collector, who will one day return to earth to extract vengeance.