Use Your Powers for Good

1 Corinthians 8:1-13; Mark 1:21-28

“Use your powers for good.”

Does that sound familiar?

For me, it conjures up vague images of superheroes: cartoons and epic movies and panel-drawn stories. Buffy says it. StarWars, Superman, Spiderman and others teach it – sometimes to their friends, often in an attempt to get a supervillain to see the light:  Use your powers for good, not evil.

The internet tells me that that particular phrasing has been gaining popularity over the last twenty years, but you don’t need the internet to know that the idea has been around much longer. Just a couple minutes ago, we heard Paul tell it to the Corinthians of two thousand years ago: Use your power for good, he exhorts them. Not to harm.

Paul sees the motley collection of new Christians in Corinth as potential superheroes, filled with extraordinary power. The exact same power that we see today in the story of Jesus teaching and healing in the synagogue: the power of direct connection to God that can eliminate demons with a word, and astound a skeptical crowd.

These are ordinary people, very much like you and I, walking through their daily lives with a power that gives ordinary words and everyday actions the ability to create faith or destroy it. To connect other people directly to God’s healing, saving love, or to cut them off.

And some in Corinth are so full of their own faith and authority that they are using their confidence in God in a way that cuts off or damages the connection to God of their siblings in the church.

Because they’re eating meat.

Christianity does not require vegetarianism. But in Corinth, at that time, most of the meat available (and probably all of the food at the good parties) came from a temple of the Greek or Roman gods.  The meat in the market, and on society’s tables, belonged to, had been sacrificed to Apollo or Poseidon or another god. 

Of course, as Paul notes, the confident Christians of Corinth know that Apollo and Aphrodite and Poseidon aren’t really God, so there’s no power or danger in their meat to separate us from our true God.

Meat isn’t like that for you and me. But we might watch TV shows or read novels that contradict what we teach in Sunday School and pray in church. We might work on Saturday – the Sabbath – or play golf on Sunday, and find that it doesn’t harm our deep and life-giving relationship with Jesus, our faith in God.

Great. That’s power, Paul says. Power that comes from our knowledge of God, and makes us free.

But that is not true for everyone. And that’s what matters.

Some in the Corinthian church know that the Greek and Roman gods aren’t “real”, like the one true God we know in Jesus. But they still feel their connection with God eroding if they eat the meat – because the meat comes from someone honoring an unreal “god” that denies the reality of our true God.
And when the confident Christians they know are living it up at the Poseidon Diner, eating idolatrous meat publicly in the Corinth Town Square, it makes them doubt their own faith, their own closeness to God.  The holy community that builds up our trust in God is weakened, pulled down.

So stop, Paul says to the confident in Corinth.
Apollo’s meat might not hurt you, but if it hurts someone else – if there’s even a chance that someone else may lose their connection to this holy community, to the forgiveness, transformation, and salvation of Christ, or to the deeply rooted trust in God that enables us to act with love in this messy, selfish, dangerous world – 

cut out that meat right now and eat your vegetables.  

Don’t tell me what you know about idols. Show me how you love one another.

Imitate Jesus himself, limiting your freedom so that you can help other people receive more love, more healing, more hope and joy.

Use your power – your connection to God, in yourself and through your community – for good, not for harm.

Paul looks at his friends and fellows in Corinth – looks at us, you and me – and sees potential superheroes, infused by baptism with the Spirit of God, given authority to share Christ’s good news, equipped by the prayers and practices of our faith with the extraordinary – super – power of God which can absolutely heal and save the world.

Paul wants us to know that power, because if we don’t think of ourselves as powerful – if we just think of ourselves as free – it’s easy to hurt others by accident.

What you say out loud when the internet goes out, or impeachment’s on TV, may not hurt you – unless it hurts your kids or grandkids or friends who hear it, and doubt or disrespect gets into their relationship with you, or with others.

Maybe you and your boss or a client have a joke about company ethics or policy that’s funny because you know it isn’t true. But co-workers who respect you start to worry about where they work.

I know a lot of us don’t think of ourselves as powerful; very few of us think of ourselves as spiritual leaders.  I hear about that almost every time I invite one of you to take on a new ministry.  

I bet those “smart” people in Corinth didn’t think they were all that powerful, either.

But we are. 

We are all empowered by God to build one another up in love and generosity and fellowship and hope, starting right where and how we are.

We are in fact powerful, with the healing might of God.

That power is desperately needed right now.  We are apart physically or politically; we and the world are worn down with the losses and labors of a year that requires the impossible, and we need the power of God to build and heal.

Many of us feel our connection to God and community worn down by screens and distances and the people who aren’t here. So use your power for good: 

make a point to invite someone to participate in remote worship with you – watch at the same time, have chat open between you in worship or a little telephone coffee hour right after. 

Be a buddy, or ask for a buddy, for Bible reading or participating in a Trinity project like sandwich making for Cathedral Kitchen, or one of the Lent learning opportunities that will launch soon. 

Find or make a personal connection in online work or school that helps you want to be present, when all of us are so exhausted we want to check out. 

We may be feeling our national community worn down these days, too. So use your power for good and choose unity or hope in some small but visible way. Find something in common with that neighbor with all the awful lawn signs or the acquaintance who starts fights on your Facebook posts: and rescue puppies or pick up litter together. 
I expect Andy Kim didn’t think he was particularly powerful when he started picking up water bottles in the Capitol Rotunda on January 6, but he built up and strengthened the trust and hope of a lot of people whose faith in our nation was damaged by the division and disrespect and danger of the Capitol invaders.

We may be feeling torn and worn and distrustful about COVID restrictions that make no sense to some of us and aren’t even close to enough for others.

So use your power for good: Let friends see you being generous with people who can’t accept the same COVID risks that you do. See yourself doing that.

Because when we make the effort to be present and supportive to others in a way that does not trigger fear or danger, we build up hope, and help others find safe and strengthening ways to use their own power to love and bless and heal.

The power of God that Paul sees in Corinth, in us; the power of God that Jesus poured out on the world and invested in us, is love: the generous, self-giving love of Christ which comes into the world to heal and free and build us stronger. 
If we can love – if we will love – all the daily words and actions of our lives are infused with power beyond what we imagine.

So use that power for good.

Connected, Empowered

 Mark 1:4-11; Acts 19:1-7

The Episcopal Church starts every calendar year, more or less, with the stories and remembrance of baptism.

So today we heard the story of Jesus, baptized in the Jordan, and launched into ministry as God’s Beloved Son, full of the power of God, as witnessed by the Holy Spirit. And the story of the disciples in Ephesus baptized with the Holy Spirit, the baptism John promised us Jesus would bring, who immediately speak with the power of God.

Both of those stories remind us that baptism – Jesus’, Paul’s, yours and mine – is not a simple cleansing, with forgiveness. And it’s not a protective shield to keep us from getting worn or dirtied or injured by the evil in the world.
Instead, baptism is the sacrament that creates us – and keeps re-creating us – as children of God, connected to Jesus and one another in God’s nurturing, unbreakable love. And baptism empowers us with the Holy Spirit, to speak and act and live as part of Christ, God’s hands and feet and heart active day by day in this world. 

I need that reminder right now. Maybe you do, too.

Right now, it can seem like many protective shields we’ve counted on – whether masks and distance, or tradition, or the US Constitution, or anything else – are thin and fragile. The coronavirus gets closer to us, our friends and family. The familiar rituals of church can’t be in church. The US Capitol building was overrun by a mob intent on disrupting our constitutional process and overturning a democratic election – and who succeeded in committing national security breaches, theft, selfies, and trashing the place, if nothing else. 

Many of us feel vulnerable, feel a betrayal of trust: new or renewed disappointments in elected leaders; familiar resentments and the bitterness of division with our fellow citizens; the echo of ages of injustice and oppression in the strikingly different ways Washington responds to the “protests” of privilege and the protests of the disenfranchised.

Some of us feel unprotected, many of us feel isolated, in the face of COVID cases that rise and rise.

We all need that assurance of connection, that experience of empowerment that Jesus demonstrates at the Jordan river, that Paul conveys in Ephesus, and that God offers each of us in our own baptism.  It doesn’t matter whether we’re baptized as infants, children, or adults: we who are baptized are marked forever as children of God, connected by love to God and to every other one of God’s children at the root of our souls. We who are baptized have been given the gift of the Holy Spirit, the opportunity to transform the world, to heal betrayal, resist evil, not with our own strength, but with God’s, in the simple actions of our everyday lives. 

I know it doesn’t always feel that way.

I know it’s easy to feel powerless in the face of the news. Easy to feel disconnected from one another.

I know there are days, or hours, or years, or moments, when the love of God, the community of faith, the transformative power of the Spirit seem unreal, or completely missing from our lives.

I know there are times when our baptism doesn’t really seem to matter.

That’s why the church calls on us to actively renew our “Baptismal Covenant”, as you and I will do today in just a few minutes.

When we renew this covenant – in worship together, or in our personal prayer – we repeat the Creed as the story of God’s love: in creation, in the coming of Christ, in redemption and resurrection and eternal life and forgiveness and our connection with the whole communion of God’s people, now and to come.  

We repeat the promises that describe the way we live in response to knowing we’re beloved children of God: living in community of faith and prayer; loving all God’s children as ourselves, or as Christ; trusting God’s forgiveness enough to seek it when we get tangled up in the ordinary evils of the world; inviting others to share the good we’ve been given; and sharing in God’s work of building a world where justice and peace come naturally and human dignity is universal. 

As we repeat all that we sink our soul’s roots deeper into the love of God we need in the face of evil, despair, confusion, disconnection or indifference.

When we affirm that we live this way with God’s help we accept all over again the gift of the Holy Spirit that has empowered us to use God’s strength, not just our own, and remember that we are part of God’s work of healing and transforming the world.

I need that now; maybe you do, too. 

In a statement responding to the events of this week our Presiding Bishop Michael Curry anchors us in the history of our faith as we face this historic moment, and asks us all to “make a commitment, a renewed commitment, to live the way of love as Jesus has taught us.” 

That is exactly what we do in renewing our baptismal covenant today.  

And Bishop Curry asks us to act on that by “go[ing] out and bless[ing] somebody. Bless somebody you disagree with. Bless somebody you agree with. But to go out and bless somebody by helping somebody along the way.”

When Bishop Curry says that, I’m reminded that we don’t have to solve a national crisis or cure a deadly illness or produce miracles in one fell swoop. 

We do it little by little, in the face of crisis, and in the day to day.

The actions of the way of love, of the baptized life, are usually small: a little stretch for us on our own, within reach because we’re empowered with God’s love and Spirit. 

Things like saying “I think it would be wrong to do that” or “I want us to do the right thing” when it would be easier to stay silent and let it go. 

Being generous in some small way with a stranger you don’t know; being generous – repeatedly – with a co-worker who irritates you or a friend who can’t keep up. 

Admitting our failures and asking forgiveness, one small thing at a time.

Letting someone know you want to pray for them. 

Praying, even when you don’t feel like it. 

Praying – even just a little – for those who feel like our enemies.

When I do one of those things, I can actually feel God’s love just a little more closely. I can feel just a little more strength, the power to do one more thing, fueled by God’s strength and spirit. 

And that makes it just a bit easier to resist the evil in the world that tries to use fear or isolation or resentment to pull us into hate or despair. Just a little bit easier, each time, to face a world that can be dangerous, disappointing, oppressive, or lonely. Just a little bit easier to recognize and be part of the healing, generosity, renewal, connection, grace and love that God has built into us, into all creation. 

Our baptism is a gift God gives us not just for weeks like this one, but for any of the weeks or hours or years when we wonder how to respond to betrayal, loss, exhaustion, or evil; when we need transformation, hope, trust and joy.  

In those times – and also, maybe especially – in the times when nothing seems to be happening and baptism feels irrelevant, God and the church invite us to renew ourselves in this unbreakable connection of God’s beloved children, in the power of the Holy Spirit washed into our everyday lives.

So let’s practice that now.

Let’s receive God’s gifts of connection and power again today, renewing our baptism in God’s love and strength, for these days and all the days to come.