Trinity Church in the City of Boston
The Rev. Morgan S. Allen
June 22, 2025
IV Pentecost (Proper 7, Year C), Luke 8:26-39
In you, O Lord, have we taken refuge; for the sake of your name, lead us and guide us.1 From Psalm 31. Amen.
Inspired by Upton Sinclair’s 1927 novel, Oil!, Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood2 Paul Thomas Anderson, director. There Will Be Blood. Paramount Vantage, 2008. opens in a New Mexico desert in 1898, where Daniel Plainview searches for silver with a pick.3 Though parenting the twenty-first century, young-adult American has proven a difficult task – so different from the loving labor of raising them in the home – I have enjoyed sharing with my children the movies and books and artists that were formational for me during my years in their current season of life. I came of age as Paul Thomas Anderson, the great auteur, reached his zenith, and my son recently watched Anderson’s 2007 triumph, There Will Be Blood. This morning, I set that film beside the story of the Gerasene Demoniac from Luke’s Gospel, and then set both in this moment of our national and global life. As he discovers a vein of ore inside a mine, his mule falls over dead from the oppressive heat above him. The film cuts, and Daniel, bearing a heavy load of stone and metal, now walks around the dead animal and loads his wagon, but as he climbs back into the hole, a foothold breaks and he falls violently to the floor of the cave, snapping his right leg. He passes out.
Another cut and Daniel wakes with gasp. He pulls himself out of the mine to discover that the wagon has tipped over under the weight of the rock it holds, and his canteen has spilled in the tumble and now sits in a small circle of mud. There is another cut, and Daniel pushes the righted cart with his back and his one good leg, inchingly moving toward a town we can just make out along the horizon.
Jesus and his disciples cross the Sea of Galilee.4 Luke 8:22. Stepping out of their boat, a “man of the city” confronts Jesus.5 Luke 8:26-27. There is a cut, and we see this man, naked and living in a graveyard.6 Details inspired by Luke 8:27. His hair, long and disheveled, frames an unshaven face and a nearly toothless, maniacal grin. His back arched, he wrings his hands nervously – compulsively – and moves quickly through the shadows of headstones.
Another cut, and we see the man, some years earlier, chained to the wall of a cave.7 Luke 8:29. While his hair and beard are shorter, his eyes plainly witness the familiar madness he will reveal in the cemetery. Flailing about against the wall, the metal of his shackles presses into his flesh and draws blood until, in a rage, he rips the chains from the rock and scales the wall of hid prison, a startled salamander.8 Ibid.
It is 1902, and Daniel Plainview walks with a limp toward another dark hole. There is a cut to him and three men working furiously in the pit to turn a large pipe into the ground. They push and pull and twist and slip on oil-soaked shale. The bit suddenly catches and will not budge. After a breath, the four men have at it again, grimacing and grunting, screaming until the bit loosens and suddenly spins freely, without any interference at all. They lift the long pipe out of the ground and discover its end dripping with oil. Another cut, and the men are kneeling at a small, black pond of crude which they urge into dusty barrels, bottles, buckets, cans – any container that they can find.
In a shrill scream, the naked man screeches: “What have you to do with me, Jesus, Son of the Most High God? I beg you, do not torment me.”9 Luke 8:28. The disciples keep a distance behind their teacher. His eyes squinting, Jesus asks the man, “What is your name?”10 Luke 8:30.
“I am Legion,” the man replies in a deep, reverberating voice. Raising his flashing eyes to meet those of Jesus, he sneers threateningly, “I am Legion, for I am many.” Suddenly, in the pleading voice of a child, the man begs Jesus, “Please, Holy One. Have mercy on me and leave me be! Do not send me into the abyss!”11 Luke 8:30-31.
It is 1908, and Daniel Plainview has exchanged his oil-soaked overalls for an overcoat. He wears a neatly trimmed mustache and sits it in a high-backed chair on a makeshift stage before a standing-room-only audience of farmers and ranchers. He addresses the body: “Ladies and gentlemen, I’ve traveled over half our state to get here this evening. I couldn’t get away sooner because my new well was coming in at Coyote Hills, and I had to see about it. That well is now flowing at two thousand barrels and it’s paying me an income of five thousand dollars a week. I have two others drilling and I have sixteen producing at Antelope. So – ladies and gentlemen – if I say, I’m an oil man, you will agree. You have a great chance here – but bear in mind: you can lose it all if you’re not careful. Out of all men that beg for a chance to drill your lots, maybe [only] one in twenty will be[, like me, an] oil [man]; the rest will be speculators – men trying to get between you and the oil men – to get some of the money that ought by rights come to you. Even if you find one that has money and means to drill, he’ll maybe know nothing about drilling and he’ll have to hire out the job on contract – and then you’re depending on a contractor [who’s] trying to rush the job through – so he can get another contract just as a quick as he can. [See,] This is the way [the world] works.”
The disciples retreat further, and Jesus takes a step toward the madman. “We beg you, Holy One, let us go into those pigs where we may still have life. You may have this one man back – spare us and we will spare this one.” Jesus turns his head toward the herd of swine and returns his gaze to the flashing eyes. “Go, then,” Jesus says.12 Luke 8:32.
The man convulses, his body twitching, his mouth foaming. There is a cut, and the pigs begin to snort and toe the dirt until – without warning – they rush down a steep bank and hurl themselves off the precipice and into the lake where, squealing, they drown.13 Luke 8:33.
“When the swineherds saw what had happened, they ran off and told it in the city and in the country. Then people came out to see what had happened, and when they came to Jesus, they found the man from whom the demons had gone sitting at the feet of Jesus, clothed and in his right mind. And they were afraid.”14 Luke 8:34-35.
It is now 1922, and we see a mansion of impossible finery: marble floors and stone walls, thirty-foot ceilings and an indoor swimming pool. Clutching a nearly empty bottle of whiskey, Daniel Plainview stumbles into a bowling alley in the basement of this, his home. He leans against the wall, slumps to the floor, and passes out.15 As he had done in the beginning of the film.
There is a cut, and he raises himself to all fours. With blood on his hands, he howls like a madman among the tombs: “I took what I wanted when you weren’t looking and the blood of the lamb is in my [fat] pocket … I am the third revelation! I am who the Lord has chosen … I am older and [I am] wiser and I am not a false prophet …”
Painting with the macabre, these stories employ hyperbole to communicate their truth and to announce their warning. As the film begins, Daniel Plainview’s bad luck is so terrific – his mule dead, his water spilt, his leg broken – that only supernatural strength, courage, and determination can save him. Such supernal gifts – born from below, as these were – come to take their toll on his spirit, for Daniel’s fortune arrives with a price. Along the way to his great wealth, he welcomes Legion. So many times, he had enough. So many generous roads, he could have taken.16 The storyline of Plainview and his adoptive son maps these roads, both those available and those declined. But he never stops for sufficiency or grace or thoughtfulness for others. Daniel’s great strength becomes his great selfishness; his courage becomes his recklessness; and his determination becomes his insatiable greed, a ravenous appetite consuming him, until there is no Daniel at all, but only sin itself, still thirsting, still hungry for more.
Likewise, the Gerasene Demoniac’s history suggests his madness is not congenital, but chosen. That is to say, he is not by chemistry a schizophrenic or a manic depressive as we might name such conditions today. Instead, bit by bit, moment by moment, sin by sin, he becomes an embodiment of offense against the God of Life. Perhaps his madness began modest, when he coddled a treasured vice only when no one was looking and only when he really needed a little something extra. And then, as his madness grew, he did not know a day without his precious vice, for, after all, he deserved such a luxury for all that he had done, for all the head endured. And then, in the end, he does not anymore indulge his vice, but he becomes vice itself. He takes to the tombs, a Gollum who gives up his home and bed for a pillow of dead man’s bones.
The narrative curve of There Will Be Blood halts here, with no rising action, climax, and comfortable dénouement as we have come to expect in our American cinema. Rather, the film presents the descent of Daniel’s soul as unrelenting and unchanging: down and down, worse and worse and worse. Anderson warns that even a luxury estate can become a graveyard, tenpins made into tombstones.
Last night in Iran, American threats became bloodied hands. The passing selfishnesses our elected leaders had once nuzzled with the lights turned low … the incremental meannesses they have begun to pull from their pockets in the glare of day … in choosing war, they now become those cruelties they had previously delivered only for partisan performance. If original sin exists, surely it is this: we have been made complicit in the murderous death-dealing of war by no conscious choice of our own. Mad as drunken barons hungry for more – and hungry not for more good, but for more sin – the demoniac few have imperiled us all, souls and bodies.
Cast into the tombs, people of God, consider the transformation of the Gerasene and take heart: he was naked, and Jesus clothed him; he was wild, and Jesus made him well; he was feral, and Jesus made him faithful. Jesus lifts this man from hopelessness to life … life! In a world covered by shadow, the demoniac becomes the very Gift of Light.
As we can, where we can, we, too, now choose life and walk in that light. Abiding Jesus’ instruction, we, “Return to [our] homes, and declare how much God has done for [us] … proclaiming the Good News of salvation throughout our [cities].”17 Luke 8:39. And even at the grave, we will make our Alleluia song18 From “The Burial of the Dead, Rite I,” The Book Of Common Prayer (1979): “All we go down to the dust; yet even at the grave we make our song: Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia.”, until all the world knows the love of God in Christ and loves one another as Christ loves us.
Held in common by this Love,
Amen.