Scary story  Luke 8:26-39  This passage has all the elements of
a scary story. Jesus and the disciples get into a boat and a
horrible storm comes up. The disciples scream that they are
going to die, reach the shore, step out onto land—and find
themselves in a graveyard where a naked demon-possessed man is
wandering about. I imagine hissing and whispering and Linda
Blair, but maybe I’ve seen too many movies. As a kid I used to
lie in bed at night trying hard to remember exactly what my
Sunday school teacher said: If I had Jesus in my heart, the
demons couldn’t possess me—but what if I doubted?  In this story
the demons seem nothing at all like those I used to imagine. For
one thing, Jesus speaks to them in a polite manner (James Alison
says he is “courteous and gentle”), and never seems to have a
very hard time with them. They know him—he says some words and
they leave. The more frightening forces of death in Luke’s story
are the religious authorities, the Roman Empire, the crowd in
the end, the forces that co