May 17, 2026
• Rev. Dr. Rob Fuquay
St. Luke’s UMC
May 17, 2026
YIGBY—Yes in God’s Backyard
“Yes to Mental Health”
Mark 5:1-20 (selected verses
I was 21 years old when I started seminary at Candler School of Theology at Emory
University in Atlanta. They had a program then called Supervised Ministry, a clinical education program in which students served as chaplains in settings like hospitals, recovery clinics, abuse shelters. I was assigned to the Georgia Retardation Center, and yes, that is what it was called. It was a residential facility for people with mental and physical disabilities that was closed in 1997.
When older students would ask where I was assigned and I told them, they would grimace and say, “Good luck.” It was considered one of the hardest.
I would go for four hours every Monday afternoon to Building L-7, which housed the most mentally challenged patients at the hospital. With the exception of one or two, none of the patients could speak beyond grunts or groans. Imagine being 21 and receiving no training or direction about what I should do in this time every week. The staff were polite but I knew not to interfere with their work. When I asked one of them what she thought I should do, she said, “Honey, I don’t know. You’re the chaplain.”
That first day was one of the most helpless experiences of my life. I didn’t realize the preparation it would provide for all the times I would sit with people in other hospitals feeling helpless and uncertain as to what to say. These patients would teach me the ability to be present.
As the weeks went by I grew more comfortable with my time there. Staff showed me ways to interact with patients. One liked to look at pictures. Another liked to play a game. One enjoyed sitting by the window looking at the clouds and listening for thunder. After sitting with someone for hours at a time, week after week, one day that person reached out and touched my hand. I would learn what a significant act that way.
I would find that these patients would teach me patience. And I had no idea at the time what this experience was teaching me about ways to enter the worlds of people who felt worlds apart from me.
I, and my fellow rookie-chaplains, had to regularly present verbatims and theological reflections before our peers and supervisors. I dug around in an old box this week and found one of my reflections. I wrote:
I felt guilty yesterday after being on Spring Break and dreading going to my placement. I felt it was wrong for me to feel this way when the people here have been here for years without ever having a break.
At 2:30 the staff took everyone outside to practice for the special Olympics. I was shocked at what I saw. I realized capabilities in people that had before been hidden to me. I saw not only physical ability but understanding and comprehension. Patients I didn’t think had any mental awareness were responsive. I realized this was their Spring Break. I realized a potential in each person in L-7 that made me wonder how I would feel or act if I spent every day inside that building. I’d probably not be too responsive either.
Looking back, I would say that assignment was putting me in touch with my humanity.
I was taken back to this time 42 years ago while working on today’s sermon. Our scripture lesson this morning is known as “The healing of a Demon-possessed man.” In the Bible demons were often a way of explaining conditions that folks didn’t understand. Things like epilepsy, neurological disorders, and mental illness or disabilities. That last one is the case with today’s story.
We chose this because May in Mental Health Awareness month and the church has often struggled to deal with mental health in a helpful way, or recognize it at all. Its easy to avoid such matters and that’s what we see in this story. It is a story about mental challenges, how a community treated this, how Jesus treated it, and how the church might treat it.
The story opens with Jesus and the disciples crossing the Sea of Galilee by boat. It says, “They went across the lake to the region of the Gerasenes.” (Mark 5:1) As you can see by this map, Galilee wasn’t just the name of the sea but the whole region on the western side of the lake. It was a Jewish territory. The other side was Gentile. It was known as the Decapolis or area of the “Ten Cities.” This area was non-Jewish. They ate pork and followed other customs that would have been unclean to a Jewish person. Jesus’ disciples had probably never been to the Decapolis before.
As soon as they arrive, a man approached them. Listen again to the descriptions of him:
--He was controlled by an “impure spirit”
--His community tried to chain him
--He would break loose and live among the tombs.
--He would harm himself
This tells us a lot not just about him but about his community. He no doubt suffered from what we would call today, a mental illness, or have mental break. His community didn’t know what to do except confine him and be okay with him being out of community. People no doubt felt safer that way. So he lived among tombs.
This isn’t uncommon. Societies have since struggled with the best way to treat mental disabilities. In Indianapolis, the old Central State Hospital was first built in 1848 as the Indiana Hospital for the Insane. The aim was to keep patients out of sight of society.
Many of the patients who died there were buried in a field next to the hospital. They didn’t have family or anyone to claim them. Its just been in recent years that many of these graves have been discovered. Hundreds of them.
So it’s interesting that it says the man in this story lived among the tombs.
But here is an even more interesting line in this story. When the tormented man saw Jesus, he cried out and fell down before him, shouting, “What do you want with me, Jesus, Son of the Most High God? In God’s name don’t torture me!” For Jesus had said to him, “Come out of this man, you impure spirit!” (Mk 5:7-8)
Notice Jesus started acting on the man’s behalf before anything else happened. The rest of this story is all a result of Jesus acting. He commanded the unclean spirit to come out of the man. That sounds spectacular, like the stuff of horror movies and exorcisms. But actually that is something of a distraction.
If we focus too much on the behavior, we lose focus on the person. Once we put a label on someone, “demon-possessed…troubled…a problem,” we lessen their humanity, and honestly that is an easier way to go, because when we lessen someone’s humanity we lessen our responsibility to them.
But Jesus doesn’t get distracted. He sees a human being in need. He didn’t wait to be asked to help. He didn’t wait until the man did something demanding action. Jesus saw a person in distress and went to him.
Jesus treated people with problems, he never treated people as problems.
Now, up to this point the disciples are there, which means the church is there because the disciples represent the church. But disciples aren’t involved in the situation. They are watching which means they should be learning, because that’s what the word disciple means, it means learner. So what is the church learning? Or rather, what should the church be learning?
Frankly, looking at the way the church has dealt with mental health, you have to wonder. The church often gets distracted. We focus on labeling problems and lose the persons. And, some churches treat mental health so simplistically it’s like Jesus is a drug to offer. People get told, “You just need Jesus to fix you.” And we lose our healing potential.
We have a person in St. Luke’s who shares about her journey dealing with mental health challenges and how the church in her past has been unhelpful but also how the church has been helpful. Let’s listen…
It takes a lot of courage to share as Holly did, and I know she would want that courage to give courage to people who maybe feel like they can’t talk about their mental struggles. The church has been partly responsible for that, treating people as if its something to be hidden. And sometimes being simplistic, as if being more spiritual will take it away, or if we had more faith we wouldn’t need medication. But that can be a dangerous message, especially for someone who has a chemical imbalance, and medication is what brings stability. Staying on needed medication can be what keeps a person from becoming a danger to others.
But what Holly tears up talking about is how this most recent experience has given her a new appreciation for how church can be a help…(message to the choir)
Let’s go back to the scripture story, because it focuses on the power of community…to get it wrong but then get it right. The demons in the man cry to Jesus not to cast them into the abyss. Clearly Jesus has power to help this man’s torment.
There was a herd of pigs close by (remember this is Gentile country!). The demons ask Jesus to cast them into the pigs. Again, lots of theatrics here. Don’t you wonder what the demons sounded like? Would it have like voices in the movie The Exorcist? But, again, this can be a distraction, because it’s what happens next that is the key.
The demons are cast into the pigs and the pigs rush into the lake and drown. The Gospel of Mark, in telling this story, adds that there were about 2,000 pigs. Why? Because there was a cost. Think of it in modern dollars. The average butchering hog sells for about $5 a pound. The average weight is between 1,000 and 2,000 pounds, so spilt the difference and say 1500 lbs. How many pigs were there? 2,o00. That means $3M just drowned in the lake!
So the farmers whose job it was to take care of the swine, ran into town to explain what happened and no doubt to make the point that this was not their fault. So the people arrive and, “They saw the man who had been possessed by the legion of demons, sitting there, dressed and in his right mind; and they were afraid…Then the people began to plead with Jesus to leave their region.” (Mk 5:15,17)
Does that surprise you? They saw the man, one of their own, now healed, but they want Jesus to leave. Could it be because they focused on the loss rather than the gain?
Helping people has a cost. That’s what we are to see in this story. Not to be distracted by the spectacular events. Again, that’s a distraction. The focus in on the cost, and how a community would rather live with one of their own staying unwell and away from them, than being made whole and doing what it took to get him there.
Helping people, especially when it comes to mental health, has a cost. The cost is dollars, but sometimes the cost is time and energy and effort.
This is an area our youth ministry has invested in, in recent years. They have been involved in Teen Responders, an organization that gives Indy-area teens the knowledge, skills, and resources to care for their own mental health and respond to peers in crisis. Our goal is make sure teens have the tools they need to respond in ways that are healthy and effective, while taking care of themselves. Through trainings and resources, we are working to see improvement in the mental health of teens in our community….
This is when we see the church getting it right, when we make it okay to talk about mental health and invest in helping people.
And that brings up one last observation to make from our scripture. We do see the community getting it right. Go back to the story. The townspeople ask Jesus to leave, so he and the disciples get back in the boat to go home. The man who was healed begged Jesus to let him go with him, “But Jesus refused and said to him, “Go home to your own people, and tell them how much the Lord has done for you and what mercy he has shown you.” (Mk 5:19)
Now why would Jesus refuse to let him join them? Most likely because Jesus knew what he would face. He would face people’s prejudice and rejection because he was a Gentile, and a Gentile who had been demon-possessed. He had already been rejected once. Jesus didn’t want him to face that again.
So the man starts telling everyone in his region what Jesus did for him.
Now watch this!
Two chapters later, in Mark 7, Jesus returned to the Decapolis. This time it says, “(The people) brought to him a deaf man who had an impediment in his speech, and they begged him to lay his hand on him.” (Mark 7:32)
What a change! Two chapters before they begged Jesus to leave. Not they welcome him and beg him to heal another member of their community! What happened? They discovered that when one member gets better, the whole community gets better. That helping one was worth the cost, because it helped all of them.