Rabbi Edwin Friedman, the renowned expert on family systems in church and synagogue, wrote a book titled: A Failure of Nerve. It’s all about leadership and being self-differentiated. It’s about leaders not falling prey to being demonized by anonymous voices or being sucked in to focusing on the weakest link in the system rather than putting time into where the energy lies. And that’s our guy Elijah in today’s passage from Kings. He had been through a really hard time, stood up and faced down 450 prophets of the god Baal to determine which God was the true God of Israel and triumphed. There is always a cost involved when a person stands his or her ground and people are out to get Elijah so he ran away. He had a failure of nerve, gave up, believed he was all alone in his prophecy role and thought maybe he should just die but then God came along. When God spoke to him, God did not say “Oh Elijah, I’m so sorry that you are afraid. Tell me all about it.” Instead God said “What are you doing in that cave? Go back to work.”

An encounter with the Living God does not mean that we will lead a safe and secure life – sometimes it means quite the contrary. Believing in and following God means being an active participant in bringing about wholeness – fullness of life - not only for ourselves but for others as well. Answering God’s call is not a time for a failure of nerve.

And then our focus for the morning shifts to another man who had been living not in a cave but in tombs. For a long time he’d been dead to the world, living among the dead because he was possessed by demons – lots of them. And he too had an encounter with the Living God through Jesus of Nazareth. He was healed, cured, demons tossed out and he asked Jesus if he could just stay with Jesus, hang out with him, but Jesus, like God with Elijah, said, “Go back home and tell everyone what God did for you.” So the man went back home and did just that. Not failure of nerve there. In this story, the people had a failure of nerve. At first they were astounded by Jesus’ healing powers but then they became afraid so they asked Jesus to leave.

It could not have been easy for that man to go back home because people had life-long held opinions about him and knew how to deal with him as he was, not as he had become. They were used to excluding him, pretending he wasn’t a part of them, keeping him stuck – dead to them - so how to deal with this man who suddenly returned and declared, “Look what God did for me. I am whole and healthy and I’m back.”

Shutting out the person who reminds us of what we fear or how we behave is our failure of nerve. It is always easier to avoid tackling the hard problems in life or the differences in people.

Have you ever been so filled with demonic spirits that you lived in a cave? That's pretty drastic, yet sometimes we do hibernate, stay to ourselves, shut others out, because we just can’t cope with the possibility of rejection or misunderstanding.

The author of the Gospel of Luke us that the man possessed by demons in this situation had grown used to his life, accepted that this is way things are, even though he was miserable and in pain. And his community also accepted his situation.

When I was growing up in Ocala, Florida, there was a loner who lived there. We – young people – called him Old Man Sibley. Our house at that time was barely in the city limits and we were surrounded by unpaved roads and lots of wooded areas (now it’s a four-lane highway). Old Man Sibley had a run-down house a few roads away from our road. And his house was surrounded by an overgrowth of scrub brush and palmettos. Sometimes we saw him around town pushing a cart with clothes or something in it. I never got close enough to actually see what was in the cart – all opinions were based on assumptions.

We dared each other to creep up to Mr. Sibley’s house and touch the door. I am sure it never occurred to us to just walk up and knock and say hello or to greet him on the street. We had classified him as ‘different’ – a nut case – and that is where we kept him. One day new houses started being built and Old man Sibley’s house disappeared – right along with Old Man Sibley.

God has this great way of nudging us to remember things we don’t want to remember. Sometimes out of the blue Old Man Sibley pops up in my memory bank and I wonder, “Was he just man who was down on his luck and needed some friends? Wasn’t he someone’s son, or maybe someone’s father or brother? Was he really a normal person but because he was different no one bothered to get to know him? What kind of life did he lead – really? What would it have been like if Jesus had come upon Old Man Sibley and healed him and made him whole? Would we have welcomed him into the community or would we have continued to keep him at a safe distance, living in his own tomb?

In The Message (Eugene Peterson) version of today’s scripture the author says for those townspeople it was too much change, too fast. They knew how to deal with the man possessed by demons – ignore him – stay away from him – exclude him. If all of a sudden he was healed what would they do with him? Rather than opening up some space to let him in they discounted him and instead decided they wanted Jesus to leave. Who knows - Jesus might cast out some more demons and then they’d have a whole bunch of new people to deal with – no way.

It is always much easier to exclude people than to do the hard work of loving and accepting. It takes nerves to offer hospitality and love to people who are different.

Those of you who keep tabs on the Episcopal Church know that this is true even in the church. We are part of a larger entity known as the Anglican Communion which means that we are really diverse conglomeration of Provinces, Dioceses, and local churches. And we have ‘issues’ about inclusion and exclusion. We are composed of really liberal thinking people, people who like to walk the middle way, and people who would rather walk away from the Episcopal Church than to do the hard work of loving and accepting women and others who do not fit into their idea of who should be in – mostly straight white males.

The President of Province IV, a man of color, met with the women at the Kanuga gathering when I was there last week. He said, “In the past the President of Province IV has been a bishop but you can see that I am not a bishop. The President of Province IV has been a priest but you can see that I am not a priest.

I am a layperson. He never said the obvious, that in the past those positions had been held by white males. He did go on to say that we, the women, needed to remember that not until 1976 were women allowed vote and voice on the floor of General Convention, “and now,” he said, “you are in charge. The Presiding Bishop is a woman and the President of the House of Deputies is a woman.”

And this is true those offices are held by women who definitely have the nerve it takes to stand firm in those positions but it is not easy for them at all. Every time they stand their ground on the prevailing issues of the day – mostly to do with women and gay rights – lots of resistance comes from other parts of the world and the church – where people just want things to stay the way they were back in the 50’s- the days of Ozzie and Harriet, when churches were filled with happy children.

Those days also meant that segregation was the norm, there were no shopping centers, so church was the only game in town on a Sunday morning, to make a phone call we picked up the phone and someone said, “operator,” women knew their place at home, and gay people stayed in the closet. We are not going back to those days. The Episcopal Church is not going back to those days. They are gone, thanks be to God.

As leaders, as followers of Christ, we cannot ever allow ourselves to get side-railed by people who are fearful or hateful or insecure in their own faith. Some churches in the United States and some provinces in the Anglican Communion have threatened to walk away if the Episcopal Church does not go backward. Some of the churches in the United States have withheld their money – just as sometimes parishioners withhold paying a pledge when they are unhappy about the rector or the leadership. This is a very unhealthy way of using resources against the mission and ministry of the church. We give to God out of thankfulness for what we have been given – not for what we think we should get or deserve.

We are a church that is moving forward with God’s call to offer unconditional love and acceptance to all. Even to demoniacs who might live among the dead. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to hear people say, “Look at those Episcopalians - what nerve they have!”