"Deeds of Power"

Mark 6: 1-13

July 8, 2012

Ordinary Time

First United Church – Sermon by Rev. Caela Simmons Wood

When you have a two-year-old who is fairly obsessed with fire trucks, you don’t miss the Fourth of July parade. It was insanely hot on Wednesday – but given the option of being stuck in the house yet again or hauling our family downtown so our son could see the fire trucks in all their glory, we opted for the latter.

We got there early and got a spot in the shade. M waited, somewhat patiently, for the fire trucks and I think both David and I breathed a sigh of relief when we discovered they were near the beginning of the parade. It was insanely hot, but we made the right choice – M was not disappointed by the fire trucks or the rest of the parade.

If you’ve never been to the Independence Day Parade in Bloomington, you simply have to go sometime. Maybe some year when it’s not 400 degrees outside at 10:00am. It really is the oddest little parade I’ve ever seen. A little slice of Bloomington. Mixed in with the fire trucks and patriotic floats thanking our veterans, you get these bizarre little groups of adults dressed in costumes like it’s Halloween. Sometimes they’re playing music. Sometimes they’re just walking down the street. It really is a great celebration of our community – which is what it should be.

Some groups received applause when they paraded past. They weren’t the big fancy groups, but the groups that spoke to people’s hearts. Hoosiers for a Commonsense Healthcare Plan go a loud cheer as they walked past, as did the folks from VoteToAmend.org – a group working to undo the damage done by the U.S. Supreme Court with the Citizens United case. And, of course, the Bleeding Heartland Roller Girls received a round of applause when they rolled past. Something about those rollerderby women really speaks to people – I think it’s the way they are supremely confident, comfortable in themselves, strong women.

Although M was thrilled by the fire trucks, there were two big fire trucks that were a bit more than any of us could take. They blared their sirens and horns so loud that M cried and we all had to cover our ears. I looked around and noticed lots of adults with their hands over their ears as those two trucks went past. And when I looked up at the firefighters driving the trucks they seemed to be oblivious – not noticing at all that they were making adults wince and small children cry.

It made me a little cranky. How could they not notice the effects of their power? Didn’t they know they were being too loud?

Power is an important thing. The power to make people laugh at your crazy costumes. The power to inspire people into a round of applause. The power to make people cover their ears and shrink away from you.

Power is important. And how you use it matters.

In the time of Jesus, power was highly concentrated and formalized. Those who had power had primarily been born into it. The government had power – the power to levy taxes, the power to conscript you into military service, the power to take away your land if they felt like it. And some “ordinary folks” with plenty of money or property or the right name had some power – power to influence, power to share or keep to themselves, power to praise or shame others.

Do you know who didn’t have power? Guys like Jesus.

Jesus – the “son of Mary” as he is called in this passage – shouldn’t have had much power. Notice that Mark didn’t call him the “carpenter’s son” but “the carpenter.” In addition to having a fairly menial day job, Jesus didn’t seem to have a father – which was a problem. Anyone who had to be identified simply as the son of his mother was not someone worth paying much attention to.

When Jesus went back to his hometown of Nazareth, the folks there knew him. And they knew he shouldn’t have power – not according to the standards of their society.

So the problem, of course, was that Jesus was claiming a great deal of power. Thus far, in the Gospel of Mark, Jesus has been on a whirlwind tour of power – healing people left and right, preaching and teaching everywhere he went, cleansing a leper, quieting a storm on the sea, commanding a demon to leave a man’s body, and – finally, just before this scene – raising a young girl from the dead.

You’d better believe that when you start bringing people back from the dead, folks sit up and take notice.

So now we have Jesus, back in his hometown, and when Jesus starts to teach in the synagogue, the folks in Nazareth aren’t having it. They can’t seem to make sense of how Jesus – son of Mary, just Mary – could be claiming the authority to teach.

Jesus’s response? “Eh. No big deal. Prophets are never honored in their own hometowns. I’ll move along.” And the author of Mark tells us that Jesus couldn’t do any deeds of power in Nazareth – well, except for curing a few sick people. Which, last time I checked, was a pretty big deal.

When you’re dealing with a powerhouse like Jesus, he’s hard to shut down – even in his own hometown.

Power is something many of us don’t spend a ton of time thinking about in an intentional way, but it affects nearly every interaction we have with other humans.

When I’m walking down the street and I see a man who is much larger than me and the hairs on the back of my neck stand up and I move to the other side of the sidewalk, you’d better believe I’m thinking about power on some level. When we talk to our bosses, our friends, our parents, our children, our neighbors, our senators, our teachers, the homeless woman outside the library, or the kid bagging our groceries at the store – we’re thinking about power on some level. Even if it’s not explicit.

I had a conversation with a woman earlier this week about financial power. She wanted to know whether it was a bad thing to want to make more money so she could spread it around some more – help people, give to non-profits, support the arts, etc. I said, absolutely not! I think it’s a grand thing to try and earn more money so you can help people.

The use of our money is a key way that almost all of us – even children with small allowances – exercise power over others. The choices we make when we go to the store affect people in our local community and around the world. It’s an astounding thing to think about, really. And, like all kinds of power, money scares some of us off a bit. While some people gravitate towards positions of power and wealth, others shrink from it – not wanting to have power over other people.

This woman who wanted to give more to others also wondered about the ethics of giving money instead of time. She wondered if giving money was just a cop-out because it buys you distance from the very people you’re helping. You write a check but you don’t ever see the person you actually help.

This was a more difficult question for me and I don’t have a hard-and-fast answer. Because spending time with people, interacting with them face-to-face – that’s power, too. A simple smile or a handshake for a person panhandling on the street – an act that simple has the power to completely change a person’s day. An ongoing relationship with a person in need – seeing them week in and week out at the Interfaith Winter Shelter, for example – an act like that has the power to change lives.

We all have power – like it or not. Even those of us who feel like we don’t have as much power as we used to, or as much power as we want, have some measure of power.

And when we’re trying to figure out what to do with that power – be it our money, our words, our time, our actions – we really can’t hope for a better guide than Jesus. Told by the elders in his hometown that he doesn’t have power, he shrugs and goes on healing people. He knows that his power doesn’t come from his last name or his profession.

He knows that his power comes from within – from God.

And he knows something else about power, too. In a culture that held power as a limited-good, those who were trying to put Jesus in his place believed that power was finite. If someone who hadn’t previously had power – like a fatherless carpenter – suddenly had some, it meant he had to have taken it from somewhere. Power didn’t just stretch and grow – it was stolen or earned. And if you received some new power, it meant someone else had lost some.

This is what makes Jesus’s next action so revolutionary. In the face of a culture that believed you would lose power by giving it away, Jesus gave power to 12 of his followers. He sent them out two-by-two and commanded them to heal the sick. He told them they needed very little to do this. In fact, he sent them out with almost nothing except a single shirt on their backs, a staff, and a partner.

Jesus knew that giving away power does nothing to diminish it. Because God’s power isn’t limited. It’s not a commodity. It’s out there and it’s free for the taking.

God’s power isn’t about quantity, it’s about quality.

How do you know when something is the work of God? It doesn’t help much to see who’s doing it and whether they look like they ought to be doing God’s work. You know it by what the work is.

If someone is being helped, it’s the power of God doing the helping. If someone is being healed, it’s the power of God doing the healing. If someone is being loved, it’s the power of God doing the loving.

Wherever people are being built up instead of torn down? That’s God at work.

The power of God is not some intangible thing out there in the ether that’s wholly separate form us. The power of God resides in each and every one of us – fatherless children and lowly carpenters. Single-mothers and those with no children at all. The unemployed and the overemployed.

Just as Jesus commissioned the twelve to go out and do God’s work in the world, Christ calls to us today to do the same. You may not much like the idea of being a powerful person and, if you don’t, I’m sorry. Because I do believe that God calls us to act where we are and to use the power we can claim.

I believe God understands that power is a neutral thing. It can be used for good or for evil and God is always beside and inside each of us urging us to use it for good.  

I believe God understands that there is a difference between power over and power with. We can use our power to force others to do things – even good things. Or we can use our power with others to move all of us forward to better place. We can come together and pool our resources to build each other up into better teachers, better givers, better caregivers.

I believe God understands that some of us want to shy away from power. We’d rather just keep to ourselves, thank you very much. And I think God is continually calling out to these people to step just a little outside their comfort zone and consider the ways they can actively influence the world in loving ways.

I believe God understands that some of us want too much power. We get nervous about being out of control and we want to surround ourselves with people we can control. I think God continues to surround these people with love and care, helping to build them up from the inside-out so they might be inspired to use their power for the sake of others instead of themselves.

God’s power is as real today as it was in the time of Jesus. When we pass the plates each week, we touch the plates and think about the ways we might do God’s work in the world in the coming week. This is no small thing, folks. We all have power – like it or not.

The question for us is the same as it was for Jesus and the twelve – what will we do with that power?