Proper 12 Year B 2024: John 6:1-21

 In the 2008 movie The Dark Knight, District Attorney Harvey Dent delivers the iconic line, “You either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain.” That line has been used countless times since the movie's debut, serving to represent several different kinds of situations, relating to wealthy people that forgot the causes that mattered to them after getting rich, athletes who fell from grace after reaching the top, and more. Harvey Dent’s line is impactful because it can affect everyone, as people always risk the chance of becoming corrupted and losing themselves in their quest for power or as a result of having attained power.

The Bible, like all of human history, is a story about power. Who has power. Who wants power. What is power. How we respond to those who have power. And how to use the power we have. 

I was teaching a class where we were talking about the Torah, and someone in the class asked, genuinely wanting to understand, about the necessity of the sheer number of laws in the Torah, and why more is needed than the Ten Commandments. My response to him was that the Ten Commandments are a great 10 thousand foot view of ethics, but all relationships are complicated in a way that leads to a need for more clarity. For example, “Honor your father and mother.” Sounds straightforward and reasonable. But then we zoom in a little more and it becomes more difficult to articulate how we honor our parents. The way I honor my parents would be different than how my daughters honor their parents, or how my parents honor their parents, who are no longer living. How do you honor a parent who is abusive or neglectful? A parent who is absent or is active in an addiction? All of a sudden, a straightforward commandment like “Honor your father and mother” is no longer quite so straightforward after all.

In the same way, when I say all the power is held by God, it feels really straightforward. Of course God, the creator, redeemer, and sustainer of the universe holds all the power. But that is just a place to start - then we look at the ways in which God exercises that power in creation. Because one of God’s first steps is to share it. It is astonishing how quickly, in both of the Creation accounts in Genesis, God shares God’s power with humankind. In the first account, straight away God says, “Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the wild animals of the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth.” God gives power to us in the same breath in which God creates us.

My husband and I are working with our five-year-old on questions of power. She really wants to be the boss. And sometimes we let her. In the same way as God lets adam name the animals, we give our daughter power over things she can handle. What do you want for breakfast? Would you rather go to the park or the pool? But then she responds to “please go brush your teeth” with “no, I’m going to run around” in the same way as adam responds to “eat from any tree but that one” by eating from “that one”. From the beginning of our accounts of people, we do the same thing: when given an inch, we take a mile.

Have you ever had to work with someone who is insecure about their own position of power? How awful was it? But also then, have you worked with someone who’s totally secure in themselves and their own abilities? Someone who wants to build up those around them and isn’t threatened by others’ success? Do you still send them Christmas cards? Michael Scott said in the show The Office, “Would I rather be feared or loved? Easy. Both. I want people to be afraid of how much they love me.” And while Michael Scott is certainly not who I’d want for my supervisor…I’d rather have him than someone clinging to power.

John shows us how Jesus responds to the question of power with one sentence in the middle of today’s lesson: “When Jesus realized that they were about to come and take him by force to make him king, he withdrew again to the mountain by himself.” The people want to make Jesus a king in response to his great displays of power, in particular his feeding of the 5000 - 5000 people following him in response to the signs he was doing for the sick -  a reasonable response to what they have been witnessing through Jesus. But throughout Jesus’ ministry, even in the garden of Gethsemane, where Jesus is most afraid, he gives up any suggestion of his own power, praying in Matthew, Mark, and Luke “that this cup be taken away from me, yet not my will but yours be done.”

Christianity as a religion doesn’t have a great history when it comes to questions of power. Time and again we have allied ourselves with the powerful to impose our will upon others as opposed to serving them as fellow beloved children of God. Christians used the existence of slavery in biblical texts to justify slavery in America. We have been active participants in taking indigenous children from their homes and placing them in “boarding schools”. The list is long.

But when we act as the hands of Jesus, not the hands of Christendom, we do great things in the world. We lead feeding and care ministries like the People’s City Mission. We found places of healing - there’s a reason so many hospitals are named after saints - and St. Monica’s treatment center here in Lincoln that was founded by The Episcopal Church. We reduce our appetite for personal power, surrender to God’s all encompassing power, and find strength and courage to do things greater than we could ever imagine. Clinging to power is usually a response to fear. There are so many things we have to be afraid of, from the individual, personal level to huge systemic fears. Power makes us feel like we’re in control of those things. I had an aunt who was so afraid of not being needed that, when a distant relative died around the time of my wedding, she skipped coming to my wedding to help with the funeral. And, she kept working years after she should have retired not because she loved her job, but because her fear of not being needed convinced her that the office would fall apart without her. We, as humans, are so scared of the skeletons in our closets that we forget that by letting them out we can address why we’re so afraid of them and then ask them to leave.

We have choices, when we are afraid. We can cling tightly to our small power and continue to grasp for more power, or we can give it over to God and accept the much larger gift of God’s power. And there's a lot of space between the two. Dealing with our fear is much more than passively offering it to God and expecting it to miraculously vanish. It requires that we do some work. God has been sharing the work with us from the beginning. The puzzle is figuring out what is our work and what is God’s. It just takes some practice to be able to tell when we’re doing our part and when we’re trying to do God’s part. But Jesus helps us in this sorting out process. Jesus knew that his role was not to sit on a throne on this earth, so he retreated up a mountain to pray. It is important that we retreat to our mountains and pray - in first century Jewish thought, “the mountain” is where you go to experience God - that we go to our places where we experience God and pray, to remind ourselves who it is that holds the power in our lives and who can free us from our fears. Amen.