I preached a very unsatisfying sermon on power yesterday. I like these complicated ideas, but they tie me up in knots. I get in and can't get myself (or the congregation) out.
Power fascinates me. Succinctly, power is defined as "the ability to do something." You move the couch, you've exerted power. You speak a word out loud, you've exerted power. Power's like money in the sense that it's not intrinsically good or bad. It gets moral value when it gets put to work. It's not how much power you have, but what you do with your power that matters. In the classic superhero conundrum, "do you use you powers for good... or for evil?"
Another question that theorists bat around is whether individuals "have" power. Some have said that power is a relationship, only actualized between two entities. I have power ("the ability to do something") vis-a-vis my son, who is 5. I can physically make him do something, or I have the ability to punish him if he fails to do what I want. But he has power over me, too. He knows I want to be loved and respected by him, so he learns to use his power to check my power. He is funny and persuasive, which are potent powers of influence.
Power is also both relative and often invisible. We may not be aware of the power we have in a relationship or the ways that we are using our power. Physically attractive people have power in our culture, and that's obvious. But "white power"--the subtle privileging of skin color in social settings--may be wholly invisible to the one who uses it. When we're not aware of our power, we are most in danger of using it... well... for evil.
Power matters for the church. Yesterday in the sermon, I cited Ernest Becker, who wrote in Denial of Death,
“We
tend to worship power and give our loyalty to those who dispense it." Whoever has power, we treat as (a) God. Becker is right, I think. All of us, religious and non, worship power. The question is not whether, but what kind of power do we worship?
Here's the rub: what is most compelling about Christianity, for me, is the way it inverts assumed notions of power. Christians, if we model the way of Jesus, trade in certain kinds of power ("worldly") for others (victory over fear and death). Our God is powerful in some ways (moral authority, love, resurrection), and renounces other kinds of power (money, political power, popularity). I have always assumed that Christianity's power required we make this trade - a kind of power-swap. If we pursue both tangible and intangible power, do we change the message of Jesus and the kingdom he proclaimed?
What is our own church's hunger for power? What is the hunger for power in our own lives? What institutions are offering us power right now? What kind of power? What power does Jesus offer? Can we have it all?
ReplyDeleteI finally got off of the ecclesiastical ‘power and authority’ train a few years back. And although it seems like I have been standing on a train station platform alone without a ‘community’, in many other ways I have begun to feel more like a follower of Christ -- needing Him rather than ‘his representatives’, organization, rites and specific ordinances (although I am glad that I was formally baptized a Christian).
In a book I’m reading that has all of the Nag Hammadi ‘scriptures’, the author at one point states (about ‘Pleroma’ and ‘fullness’ with regard do James and Peter) , “The two figures have been interpreted as opposing symbols of the Gnostic community and the emerging orthodox church: members of the Gnostic community have no need of an intermediary to obtain salvation, while the members of the great church are grounded in an ecclesial structure that they need if they are to be ‘saved’.”
This begs the question: What was the organizational structure and attending dynamics of the primitive church that Jesus established really like?
Me, great question.
ReplyDeleteMy experience is that all of us rely on established power structures, on some level. Those structures help us make choices and discern right and wrong. It's basic social psychology--we like to be with others.
It's interesting to think about what that early church would have been like. My own sense is that it would have been a lot like our churches today. Some people were there for the "religious experience." Many (if not most) were there for social and psychological reasons.
I do think it's interesting that the gospels don't really set up an organizational structure--only Luke writing in Acts spends much time on that. Maybe John (with the "Beloved Disciple"). But mostly, it's just a bunch of women and men hanging out on the margins of society, eating, drinking, healing folks.