Christ’s Power ~ Our Power
Ephesians 1:15-23, Luke 24:44-53
Emmanuel Baptist Church
May 17, 2020; Rev. Kathy Donley
A recording of the service in which this sermon was preached may be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DWBUzi6RvHI&t=2640s
Christ’s Power
Cassandra read the passage from Ephesians beautifully. In those 8 verses, she read 4 complex sentences. In the Greek, all of that is one long convoluted sentence. Paul is piling up phrases on top of each other to try to describe something almost incomprehensible. He speaks about resurrection which offers immeasurable hope and rich inheritance and great power. Great power -- that one is very hard to understand, as Naughty Racoon demonstrated.
At Christmas, we often talk about Jesus who abandoned his power as God to become human, to take on flesh and live with us. Here, what Paul is describing is the power of incarnation in the other direction. Jesus, the human one, has been raised to sovereignty, “far above all rule and authority and dominion, not only in this age, but in the age to come.” In Jesus of Nazareth, God came to earth, and now, in Jesus, a Human One resides in heaven. One scholar says “Humanity may have forfeited its magnificence, but in Jesus the Messiah, it is restored, renewed. . . we see Jesus, the one who reveals both God and our true humanity, the glorious destiny that fits our good creation. We see Jesus, the new humanity.”[1]
Barbara Brown Taylor makes it a bit easier for me to understand. She says, “What we share with [Jesus] – that fullness of his in which we take part – is the strenuous mystery of our mixed parentage. We are God’s own children, through our blood kinship with Christ. We are also the children of Adam and Eve, with a hereditary craving for forbidden fruit salad. Frisk us and you will find two passports on our persons – one says that we are citizen of heaven, the other insists we are taxpayers on earth.”
“What Paul asks us to believe,” she continues, “is that our two-ness has already been healed in our oneness in Christ – not that it will be healed, but that it already has been healed – even if we cannot feel it yet. . .”[2]
Paul prays that with the eyes of our hearts we will begin to see, to perceive, to grasp, the vast richness of our inheritance as God’s children and to live into that wholeness which has already occurred.
Waiting
My last Sunday with you in the Emmanuel sanctuary was on March 8. That was the last Sunday that many of us were there. On March 15, I was away and I’m told that about 20 of you were present sitting in chairs spaced apart. By March 22, we were worshipping via Zoom. Those major upheavals took place very quickly. As soon as we began to get our minds around one fact about the virus, there would be new information to incorporate.
The way that Luke tells the story of Easter, the upheaval is even faster. Jesus’ friends wake up on Easter Sunday in deep grief and fear. It is the third day since they witnessed the trauma and horror of resurrection. They are still coming to terms with that, when the women discover the empty tomb and are told by angels that Jesus has risen from the dead. Peter verifies the empty tomb but he and the other men think that the women’s story is ridiculous. Then two disciples walk to Emmaus and on the way, they encounter a stranger who turns out to be Jesus. They come all the way back to Jerusalem to inform the others, only to be told that the others already know and that Peter has also seen him. Then suddenly Jesus is among them. He eats a piece of fish, as if to demonstrate that he is not a ghost. He goes out and they follow him the two miles to Bethany. He blesses them and ascends into heaven.
How could they even begin to process those events? The day began with the worst kind of sorrow and ended with incomprehensible joy, but somehow Jesus is gone again. How did they experience that incredible roller coaster of emotions? How would they make sense of any of it?
Before leaving, Jesus tells them to stay here until they are clothed with power. Stay here means to stay in Jerusalem. They are from Galilee. They just went to Jerusalem for the holiday, but now Jesus says, “Stay here, where things are not so familiar, maybe not so comfortable. Stay here until . . .”
Jesus doesn’t tell them how long it will be. He doesn’t tell them how they will know when the power comes. Just “stay here until . . .” It turned out to be 50 days. Fifty days until the Holy Spirit came in power on Pentecost. But they did not know how long it would be – a week? A month? A year?
New York has been on Pause for about 56 days now. And we still don’t know how long we’ll have to stay here. I have a new appreciation for the Jesus’ wisdom and the disciple’s obedience. Waiting in place gave them time to process, time to incorporate the massive upheaval of Easter. They needed that time, the being together in the Temple, the season of waiting with ambiguity season because Pentecost was going to be another life-changing event.
Denise Levertov was a fascinating American poet of the last century who often wrote about faith. One of her poems about Jesus’ Ascension is called Suspended. She imagines trying to hold on to God’s garment. She writes
I had grasped God's garment in the void
but my hand slipped
on the rich silk of it.
The 'everlasting arms' my sister liked to remember
must have upheld my leaden weight
from falling, even so,
for though I claw at empty air and feel
nothing, no embrace,
I have not
plummeted.[3]
“I have not plummeted” she says. Those are words I am holding on right now. Things seem unstable and ambiguous. The upheaval of this time is huge but we have not plummeted. By God’s grace, we are facing the challenge, we are not despairing. Like the disciples, we are staying here, until . . .
Our Power
Jesus tells the disciple, “stay here until you are clothed with power.” Paul prays that we may know the power that raised Jesus from the dead.
Power is hard to talk about. For some of us is it a negative word. It makes us think of abuse or violence and we want no part of that. If we do construe it positively, many of us still tend to under-estimate the power of God in us at the best of times. And right now, we feel somewhat powerless, our strength diminished by fear of the virus and the political polarization that makes enemies out of those who need most to work together for the common good.
We just sang “Goodness is Stronger than Evil”. Those words were written by Archbishop Desmond Tutu shortly after the official end of apartheid in South Africa. At the time he was the chair of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which took upon itself the task of telling the truth about the atrocities of the past so that the country could heal. If you don’t know Desmond Tutu’s personal story, look him up on the internet this afternoon. The forces of racism and poverty and persecution waged against him for much of his life and yet, with the eyes of his heart he continually proclaimed “goodness is stronger than evil, love is stronger than hate.”
I read a remarkable sermon by one of Desmond Tutu’s colleagues this week. Peter Storey was a white South African, a Methodist minister in Johannesburg and Soweto during the decades of struggle against apartheid. The sermon I read was one he delivered to the South African Council of Churches in May 1981, just after Bishop Tutu had been arrested and his passport confiscated. In this sermon, Peter Storey spoke about the Jesus who was enthroned far above all government and authority. He called on his listeners to follow that Jesus and to bear witness to his truths. He told them that, as Jesus followers, they were a sign of hope in a divided land.
This was a very public gathering. There was no doubt that what he said would be known by the government. And yet, he clearly and deliberately described the injustice and abuse he saw. Listen to these words: “Our task is to continue to reveal these truths too for what they are. Call us unpatriotic if you will, but we want not part of a patriotism that hides that nations’ disease when that disease is hurting people, hounding people, and breaking people each day.” And later on, he said, “there are deeper and more subtle pressures that bring suspicion and division among us: a readiness to write someone off because his or her view of the struggle is different from my own; the quick labeling of people in destructive ways; a willingness to trade the eternal truth of the Gospel for some fashionable ideology of change.”[4]
Those words sound volatile. They still ring true in our context. Imagine the courage it took to speak them to the oppressors in his government, not just once, but over and over again. What strength he had, to remain clear to his convictions that Jesus is Lord. And what we know, from this vantage point, is that history was on his side. The struggle was long and terrible, but when he proclaimed that apartheid was doomed, he was right. That is the power of the gospel. That is the power that raised Christ from death to the right hand of God.
That same power is at work in us and around us, in so many ways. More than I can name, but here are a few.
The South End Children’s Café serves the children in Albany’s South End. In recent weeks, they have adapted their program to work in this time of social distancing. Every week, they are delivering groceries to provide 5 meals each for 500 children and their families. Last week, they put out the word that supplies were running low. They shared a list of needed items and asked people to make donations yesterday afternoon. The response was overwhelming. They needed a dedicated police officer to manage the line of cars waiting to drop off. One of my friends who volunteers there said, “I started crying when I saw the police officer directing traffic and the volume of food and supplies that were donated. It’s been pretty easy to get discouraged with everything we are seeing and reading, so this was much needed!” That is resurrection power.
Our church and so many others have creatively adapted. Few of us love streaming worship or Zoom gatherings, but we keep showing up, to be here for each other, to see the hope of our calling with the eyes of our hearts. We keep praying for our neighbors and loving our enemies through the power of Christ
I keep hearing from people who are looking to donate their stimulus checks in the best possible ways. I keep hearing that mostly from you. You want to give away money for groceries and medicine and shelter and electricity and all the things desperately needed by those who are especially struggling right now.
Beloved ones, that is compassion and generosity and hope. That is power. The power of Christ raised from the dead who fills all in all, whose fullness and power have spilled over into us. Thanks be to God.
[1] Allen Verhey and Joseph S. Harvard, Belief: A Theological Commentary on the Bible – Ephesians, (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press, 2011), p. 61
[2] Barbara Brown Taylor “He Who Fills All in All” in Home By Another Way (Boston: Cowley Publications, 1997) p.139.
[3] https://www.journeywithjesus.net/poemsandprayers/630-denise-levertov-suspended
[4] Peter Storey With God in the Crucible: Preaching Costly Discipleship (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2002), p 46.