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.