Marsh Chapel Sermon Archive

The four gospels that bear witness to Jesus were clearly compiled by early Christians. We know that because, like Christians today, they disagree with each other. Some bless the poor in spirit. Others burden the faint of heart. A miracle or parable in one is not in others.

The conflicts among the four are confusing. Matthew suggests Jesus fulfills old promises. John suggests he issues new commands. Matthew pictures Jesus seated on a mountain preaching about rewards in heaven. Luke has him standing on a level place, condemning the rich on earth.[1] His seven last words on the cross are scattered across all four reports of his crucifixion.

Sometimes the gospels say Jesus is a lawgiver like Moses, a prophet like Elijah, or a powerhouse named David.

Christians have always found David appealing. He is an icon of beauty that Michelangelo found in marble and a poet of comfort in scores of psalms. Genealogies in two gospels say that Jesus descended from David. Their nativity narratives say he was born in the city of David.[2] And one account of his Palm Sunday entry into Jerusalem says he was hailed as “the son of David.”[3]

Just as the gospels link Jesus to David, so do we every time we offer The Lord’s Prayer. We commonly call it “the prayer that Jesus taught us.” But what we recite,[4] often in King James’ English, is only in part a prayer that Jesus gave his disciples. Its closing words, in which we say, “Thine is the…power,” are actually from a prayer that David offered at the end of his reign.[5]

Bible scholar Amy-Jill Levine calls David a “rock star.”[6] He exuded power. He had been a celebrated warrior since he downed Goliath with a slingshot and five smooth stones.[7] He was praised with singing and dancing for killing ten times more of the enemy than his predecessor had slain.[8] He defeated external threats and crushed internal rebellions. And he put two nations, Israel and Judah, together as one kingdom, which he led to greatness for more than thirty years.

Yet he could be conniving and cruel. He allegedly assassinated two rivals to get to the throne.[9] As king, he often abused power, “taking ill advantage of his charisma,”[10] according to one critic. When he committed adultery with Bathsheba, he suppressed the truth by having her husband murdered.[11] And he avoided accountability for a mistake that killed 70,000 Israelites.[12]

We can connect Jesus and David as persons of power. But it is vital not to confuse them.

Yet, in the history of the church, we have done just that. Our crusades killed Muslims. Our theologians disparaged Jews. Our preachers justified slavery. Our errors let one man[13] consider it pro-life to enter a church and kill a health care practitioner who performed abortions. We confused power with domination. We abused power in God’s name.

Some years ago, my wife Naomi and I had an opportunity to visit churches and church leaders in Peru. We were welcomed with great hospitality that included a dinner hosted by the Methodists’ Bishop and their Lay Leader, who introduced us to the Peruvian wine called pisco. We attended a Sunday school class and worshiped at a storefront Methodist Church in Lima.

While we were in the capital, we went to the Museum of the Inquisition, where we saw artifacts and archival evidence that the church had abused power for 250 years. We saw proof that the church tortured and executed people. We saw weapons with which the church compelled confessions.

But we need not travel to a distant past or place to know how we have abused power in the name of God. Look at Christian history lately and locally. For fifty years, United Methodism abused power with laws that lasted until the General Conference repealed them last month.

We said which people could sing music in the chancel but not celebrate marriage in the sanctuary. We specified which people could place money in the plate but not preach messages in the pulpit. We defined who could play instruments in worship but never be instruments of grace in worship by presiding at Holy Communion. We decided who may be called to preach God’s word, administer God’s sacraments, and order God’s church, based on misunderstanding God’s gift of sexuality. The exclusionary laws are gone.

But history shows it may be a while before we practice fully inclusionary lives. In the middle of the 20^thcentury, Methodists agreed to ordain women as full clergy members, but many congregations still resist having a woman as a pastor-in-charge. In the late 20^th century, United Methodists broke the constitutional system that segregated the church by race. But we are still a racially segregated denomination when we gather Sunday mornings in separate sanctuaries. We are a living legacy of having abused power.

And that makes many of us reluctant to use Jesus’ gifts of power. The mystifying miracles in Mark’s gospel this morning have a message for us. Use the power.

There are two interlocking miracle stories in Mark. We could try to explain them. But rather than view the text as a puzzle to solve, we can read it as a story of two desperate people who desire access to Jesus, defy barriers in the way, and demand that he deliver them from despair. One is a man named Jairus, the prestigious leader of the synagogue with wealth enough to afford servants. He has a dying daughter. The other is a woman without a name or a position. She is a poor social outcast, with an ailment that classed her as unclean and that was so expensive to treat, she had exhausted all her of assets unsuccessfully seeking a cure.

His rank and status provided him access to everything. Her rank and status amounted to nothing. Both expected Jesus to use his power. Their stories in Mark are invitations to trust God’s grace and to demand its powerful touch.

They show that the power of Jesus breaches boundaries in our social structures, economic conditions, gender identities, disabling inequities, and religious laws. They show that the power of Jesus can be used for those near him and far from him. They show that power can be used to overcome private plights and public perils.

During our trip to Peru, we stayed in the city of Lima and also the Inca capital in Cuzco on our way to Machu Pichu. We visited a village in Lomas de Carabayllo, where thousands of people live with no running water. We met a woman who is custodian of a church that has no roof over the worshipers’ heads, no floor but the soil under their feet, and no water except what a truck brings once a week to fill a tank. She sprinkles the precious water on the ground to settle the dust before worshipers begin to dance, and she pours some of it into a baptismal font for believers to touch.

She asked us to visit a family with an ailing child on the hill. They showed us power, not the kind that a dominant force imposes on others but the kind that people share for the mutual benefit of each other. They asked us to pray for the girl. We were migrants in their midst. But they believed the power of God could use us.

Our faith was renewed by a family on a far hill, by a woman who waits weekly for a water truck, and by people determined to access the power of God who defeats disease, deals with death, and delivers the powerless.

Today, you and I gather in a city with privilege and power, with a recent athletic championship, with a lasting legacy in intellectual achievements, and with a history of ethnic strife and racial disharmony. Qe gather in the chapel of a university whose theological school connects to a church that has abused power. Yet it is a school that has educated people to use non-violence as power in the name of the Lord Jesus for changing the social order.

Our predecessors in faith did abuse power. But that should not make us fear to use power.

When Methodists established an institutional church in North America in the late 18^th century, one of the principles to which we committed ourselves was that enslavement was evil. And one of the powers we exercised was an abolitionist discipline to overcome slavery. General Conference directed and Bishops demanded that Methodist preachers regularly deliver sermons against enslavement, that Methodists who owned slaves had to cease ownership or had to cease being Methodists, and that Methodists were to petition their governments wherever slavery was legal to change the law and to abolish it forever. We built that into our discipline across the land.

That was a faithful use of power in 1800. However, we chose to abandon it just three decades later. In 1836, the Bishops told delegates to the General Conference there was nothing Methodists could do about slavery. The conference chose to stop using power to abolish slavery. Abolitionists who held positions of leadership in the church were removed from office.

That was not an abuse of power. It was a failure to use power. We chose not to use the power of Jesus to stop treating the enslaved as perpetual property.[14]

We chose not to use power to deliver children of God from bondage.

Then, after a schism split the church and a Civil War split the nation, we chose not to stop lynching and not to stop Ku Klux Klan members from becoming United States Senators or Methodist Bishops. We had access to power. We did not use it.

When the Methodists in northern and southern churches reunited in 1939, we decided not to use power to end racial segregation. Instead, we established six segregated jurisdictions in The Methodist Church. We made a constitutional decision that we would not use power to deliver the land from white supremacy or racial animosity. Well, it is time to use power again.

It may or may not mean a miracle. But it certainly is our mission. The United Methodist Church, after an era of abusing power over sexuality in the church, must now must now begin using power publicly in other ways—in this church, in this nation, in this presidential election year.

One candidate has martialed a political party and about half of the American people to abuse power over justice systems, health care options, and education curricula. States are imposing their versions of the Bible on children in public schools.

We have to choose whether to use power to prevent what will come if libraries are told what books they can lend, if teachers are told what they can teach, or if narrowly exclusive views of Christian doctrine about the beginning of life will be the only view allowed to have a life.

There are many ways to use power. In May of 1980, when tyrants imposed martial law in South Korea, a photojournalist and devout Roman Catholic was attending Mass when he heard trouble in the streets. He saw people being tear-gassed, beaten, and shot by authorities. He took photos, put them in unmarked envelopes, smuggled them to journalists outside South Korea, and enabled the photos to be seen across the world.

Keeping his identity secret, he stayed alive and took more photos to expose the truth. That led to the end of tyranny in South Korea.

A decade later, he was finally identified when the Roman Catholic Church honored Na Kyung Taek for his courage. The UN compiled his 2,000 photos as a “Memory of the World.” Last week, Mr. Na, who is now 75, stood in front of a wall of his pictures and said, “I just did what little I could.”[15] What he did was use power faithfully. It was enough to change the world.

From now to November, The United Methodist Church and others in America will choose whether our leaders, bishops, and pastors will faithfully use power in Jesus’ name to tell the truth in an election year. The church will choose whether to overcome someone who praises public school displays of Commandments that he has repeatedly and unrepentantly broken. The church will choose whether to use power to expose the falsehoods he promotes and the fear he provokes.

We must never again abuse power.

But we do have to use it.

William B. Lawrence

[1] See the texts in Matthew 1:22, 2:17, and 5:12; John 13:34; and Luke 6:23-24.

[2] Luke 2:4

[3] Matthew 21:9

[4] M. Eugene Boring, “Matthew,” The New Interpreter’s Bible Commentary (Nashville: Abingdon, 2015) VII, p. 133

[5] I Chronicles 29:11

[6] Douglas A. Knight and Amy Jill-Levine, The Meaning of the Bible: What the Jewish Scriptures and the Christian Old Testament Can Teach Us (New York: Harper Collins, 2011), page 333.

[7] I Samuel 17:40

[8] I Samuel 18.7

[9] II Samuel 3:6-39, 4:1-12. But David may have been exonerated of these acts. See Bruce Birch, “II Samuel,” The New Interpreter’s Bible Commentary (Nashville: Abingdon, 2015) II, p. 495

[10] Knight and Levine, op. cit., page 335.

[11] II Samuel 11:1-27

[12] II Samuel 24

[13] On May 31, 2009, Scott Roeder killed Dr. George Tiller, while he was serving as an usher at church.

[14] William B. Lawrence, When the Church Woke (Eugene OR: Cascade, Wipf and Stock, 2022), pp. 47, 64-67

[15] Choe Sang-Hun, “Global Profile: Na Kyung Taek,” The New York Times, June 22, 2024, p. A4.

posted in Guest Preachers on 06.30.2024 at 11:00 am