”Who then is this?” indeed!
A man who cures leprosy with a touch; who casts out demons, and calms
the sea just by speaking to it? It is a
pity, but as modern readers of the ancient text, we often miss out on a lot
that the gospel writers wanted us to know and to think about. Indeed, in first century Judea all of these
things - all of these miraculous powers - screamed of Jesus’ inherent
divinity. To a Jew, Leprosy was the
worst of all possible curses: a punishment for sin that was literally living death. As ruler over both life and death, it was
believed that only God could bestow leprosy and therefore only God could cure
it. So when Luke describes Jesus as
healing 10 lepers and then proclaiming to the crowds “Did only this Samaritan
come back to give thanks to God?”, it is not on only a challenge to the
people’s views about Samaria, but it’s also a challenge to recognize and accept
Jesus’ true nature.
And the fact
is the Gospels are literally filled with these kinds of references to Jesus’
divinity. Despite modern beliefs that
ancient people were superstitious and stupid folk - believers of literally
anything up to and including that miracles happened all the time - the
surprising reality is that we find rather the reverse. Many Jews of this era thought the age of
miracles was behind them, and what few wonderworkers they believed were real
weren’t really how we would envision them.
People like Hanina Ben Dosa and Honi the Circle Drawer didn’t really
perform acts of power, they were what we would think of as just really
effective at Prayer. Much like today,
yes we find the ancient world had its version of Palm readers and weavers of
magic spells, but in all of ancient history the miracles ascribed to Jesus are
singularly unique. Then as today if
somebody walked around our cities and towns, bringing sight to the blind and
making the infirm stand up with a command, the people would not ask just “Who
are you,” but “WHAT are you”.
As such, you
can imagine my confusion when I heard a former pastor of mine said that the
real Jesus was just a human being, that his divinity was manufactured centuries
later and of the four gospels only John ascribes any divinity to Jesus at
all. As I was interning at a very
progressive Church, It didn’t shock me that they thought that way, I simply found
it tragic. I found it tragic that even
Christian clergy could know their own books so poorly. So when Mark writes “Who is this that calms
the seas with his very voice?” What on earth or in heaven could create order
out of chaos with but a word?”, well, rest assured he had one Being and one
Being only in mind.
I say all this
to you because I want to talk to you about the power of Jesus, and to talk to
you about the power of Jesus I first need to make that power very real to
you. When the earliest Christians quote
stories from Jesus’ life, it is from these gospels. When the earliest Christians were martyred
for their faith, it was over what was in these books. We live centuries apart from the founders of
our country do we not? Even today, we
would know whether George Washington was real or a myth. Even
today, if somebody ascribed miraculous abilities to Thomas Jefferson, we would
know whether or not it was true. If
these stories were false, we might laugh at them, but we certainly wouldn’t die
for them. And yet that is exactly what
our Christian forbears did for the Jesus in our gospels.
Now why is this important? Why do we need to understand Jesus’ power as
real? Because I need you to take it
seriously. I need you to take Jesus’
power seriously because we all need to take Jesus’ use of power very, very seriously. That God became a human being and had the
power to shape the very elements of creation itself and that He would sooner
die a criminal’s death before using that power on another human being, this needs
to be central to our Beliefs as Christians…and it’s not.
In America,
we have an addiction to power. No, not
an addiction, we are having an adulterous affair with it. We chase endlessly after wealth, fame, and
political office. We say to ourselves as
Christians if I only I can get my hands on more money, if only I were famous,
if only I had a title that would make people do what I say life would be
better. Brothers and sisters, how can
this be?
Now, there is nothing wrong with
these things in and of themselves. There
is nothing inherently evil with having money, there is nothing bad about being
famous or holding political office.
Jesus’ life shows us that Power does indeed have a godly place, my
complaint is as Americans we have absolutely no wish to find out what that
place is. We want so desperately to keep
our myths that somehow power solves our problems, but the fact is it doesn’t.
If you need
proof that we do this, I can only point you to how we as a society accomplish
everything. We punish. An
out-of-work single mother thrown in jail because she couldn’t find babysitting
while she went to an interview, a man thrown into jail for legally marrying his
16 year old wife because of a poorly worded statutory rape law, a twenty year
old walks into a South Carolina church with a gun, we continue to believe that
having power over another human being no matter the circumstances somehow
magically makes the world a better place.
But it doesn’t.
We value power to the point of
insanity. We indoctrinate our kids to
value strength, to be strong and never to be pushed around - but we are
outraged to find children get bullied to the point of suicide. We insist on our rights, we demand not to
have our time infringed upon, so much so that every time when see our spouses once
work is done, we blow up and make all these ultimatums about their behavior - And when our spouses finally won’t see us
anymore , we have the gall to ask why. This
obsession with power, this need to force other people to do what we want even
goes to the very core of the way we do religion. When Craig (our pastoral associate) gave his
sermon last Sunday, he called out our Bible Publishers and our Bible Commentators
for not translating what was actually there and let me tell you I applaud
him. As a seminary graduate, I can’t
emphasize enough how important a job our Bible translators have and yet despite
this there is next to no accountability for what they print. The publishers have learned how to sell
Bibles and what sells Bibles to our American Culture is to fill it with words
like “Obey” even when the text clearly doesn’t call for it. Because homosexuality is such a hot topic,
they make sure put in verses decrying it when anyone fluent in the language
knows differently, and finally to sell Bibles they make sure to twist as much
as possible to talk about the end times even to the point of ridiculousness. Many Christians believe in a Rapture, the
taking up of all true believers before God punishes indiscriminately everyone
else. Whether you believe in it yourself
or not we need to realize that belief in the Rapture is very recent. 17 centuries passed in the common era before
any Christian believed in the Rapture, almost two millennia of Believers
pouring over the same Scriptures we have today and yet not one of them ever
believed in it. Yet we find it in our
Bibles today don’t we? Well, in
actuality maybe we aren’t pouring over the same Scriptures after all.
But this is
who we are as a culture. Publishers
learned long ago what makes Americans buy Bibles and that is simply to make a
product that helps us lord it over our neighbor. Bible’s that let us thrust our
fingers into its pages to tell the other person to obey, Bibles that let us
critique and discriminate against how God made them to be, Bibles that let us
envision a world where God finally kills everybody but us. It…has…to…stop.
After
spending two years in a very liberal church, I know I don’t agree with much of
their theology, but they do have one thing over the rest of us. A fair critique they have is that more
conservative theologies make Christ into a cog, nothing but a wheel in some
grand inexplicable scheme of salvation.
In Liberal Theology Christ is an example to live by. They don’t just pour over his words looking
for something that might be a command, they try to see what he was doing and
the example he wanted to set. In our
gospel story for today, Power is Jesus’ last resort – not his first. In the middle of the storm, even when it was
at its worst, even when the boat was flooding and about to be capsized, he
decided endurance and faith in the Father were far better choices than to
simply command the world to do his bidding.
Indeed, if it were up to him he would not have used power at all. But when the disciples cried out to him, in
their panic and on the verge of their utter despair, it is then that Jesus calms
the seas and brings order to the chaos of that moment. Even then, however, it was power used for God’s children, not against, and
indeed afterward Jesus still proclaims that faith was still the better option
of the two.
Power, you
see does not accomplish what we think it does, and when I hear atheists from
our culture scoff… when even they think so much of Force and Violence that they
ask “how can you believe in an all-powerful God when there is so much evil in
the world,” my answer to them is why do you think that power accomplishes
anything? A stone thrown violently into
a pond brings the water down for second, but in the end the stone just sinks
out of sight and the consequences of our actions end up rippling everywhere
else, including back to us. If history has taught us anything, it is that
bullets and bludgeons do little to change men’s minds and forcing others to be
good people in fact has never once made them into good people. Indeed, if the goal is to create a better
world to live in, Peace and Perseverance prove far better, and taking a bullet
instead of spending one is a far more incredible show of strength.
So what are
we to do? How can we, tiny and
insignificant as we are, remotely take on the incredible violence and ugliness
of our world? The first step is we stop
pretending it is the big and powerful things that matter. Every big thing happens because of a
multiplicity of small things. It is the consistent
little choices that build up to the evil or the good that we do. And in that vein we come to step 2: If we are
to change the little things, we must change our attitudes that are turning the
little things bad. We must do things
like control our worry. Our worries and
our frets make mountains out of molehills, it makes us focus on ourselves
rather than actually solving the problem.
God sees our situation and has already provided a way out of it. Worrying about it only makes our responses to
the situation selfish and poorly thought.
Worry makes us into ugly people and ugly people make ugly
decisions.
But we must not only control our
worry, we must not only keep constant vigilance over our fears, we must also stop our blaming. When we worry, when we give into our fears,
we automatically concoct a reason for those fears and those reasons are usually
anything but reasonable. We saw the
results of this in Charleston South Carolina, where a young man who worried
that despite that white people were ¾ of the population and that we constitute 90%
of the people in political office, he still felt that his race was somehow in jeopardy. And because he believed his race was in
danger he decided the only option was to shoot people praying in a church, and
now 9 of our brothers and sisters have been taken away. Parents will no longer have their children,
and their children will no longer have their parents. I am sure we don’t have the full story, in fact I am absolutely convinced that we
don’t have the full story, but what I can tell you no matter the state of
his mind that one act of hate will now create chances for thousands more, and
that is what brings us to our final step.
We need to be involved.
After living less than 40 years on
this planet, I can tell you these tragedies have one thing in common. Very, Very rarely are plots like this kept so
secret that nobody could have truly stopped it.
We live in a society that is so apathetic to violence we have to tell our
young women to yell fire when they are being assaulted, because that’s the only
thing that makes us pay attention. Jesus
did not hide away his entire career, he lived amongst the people – it is why he
is called Emmanuel: God with us. He comforted
and protected the wounded in his midst and He challenged the powerful that did
the wounding. He brought healing to the
desperate and peacefully brought the ridiculousness of His enemies back on
their own heads. We need to learn to do
the same. Like Jesus we need to learn
to have faith instead of fear, we need to learn to craft solutions instead of
making people into the problem. People
will be the problem all on their own, believe me we don’t need to do it for
them. Finally, we must realize the teachings
of Christ are worthless unless they are embodied. We, too must live amongst the people and we
must be the power of Christ in a world that so desperately needs it. May we do so lovingly and in Christ’s
Name. Amen.
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