January 26, 2025

 When I was growing up it was very exciting whenever we would have a power outage.  It only happened maybe once a year where I lived, and it never lasted very long.  It was an excuse to get out the flashlights and make forts with blankets in the living room.  It felt like time slowed down and our routine was interrupted in a good way.  And it gave us a greater appreciation for the times we did have power.

We often take our electricity for granted, although I am remembering the terrible ice storm last year that left some of you without power for many days.  We learned a lot from that time about how to be prepared for just such an emergency, how to turn on the gas stove when the electrical switch isn’t working, throwing a blanket down on ice can give you a safe way to walk across it when things are terribly slippery, and how to set up a clay pot heater with a candle and some flower pots that can heat a room. 

There are lots of kinds of power.  There is the kind that comes into our homes and church and businesses and lights and heats our lives.  There is also the kind that comes from God and powers our churches, the power of the Holy Spirit.  Sometimes other powers interfere, when people want to have control or are afraid.  They might use their power to try to thwart the good that is being done.  Just as we take for granted the electricity that powers our homes, sometimes we take for granted or assume things about how church power flows, how things get done and by whom, and the way in which they are done.  That’s partly why it is so nice to have new people coming along to ask questions about why we do this or that.  It makes us think again about power, where it comes from and what it is for.

In Paul’s letter to the Corinthians today, there is power in diversity.  It is like the different power sources in our home, the  power grid and the generator and flashlights and cell phone chargers that we plug in ahead of time so they are ready when the power goes out.  Ordinarily it seems a bit redundant to have these different sources—they take up space and need maintenance, but they are important when the time comes that one source of power fails.

This power in diversity is sometimes hard for us appreciate.  We look for friends who think the same way we do.  We read news that confirms our own point of view.  We like the comfort of knowing what to expect from each other and we don’t change our views very easily.  Sometimes we don’t think we have the energy to deal with different styles.  That’s the way we run our factories—to make so many of the same item.  That’s efficiency!

This is the way we like our ecology, too.  The American dream is a green lawn—a monoculture, unrealistic to achieve, impossible to maintain, because nature loves diversity.  Nature loves redundancy.  Another way of saying it is that God loves diversity, God loves redundancy.  With diversity and redundancy, if something fails, there is something else to come in and take on that role.  People are putting up Mason bee homes so that as honeybees collapse, the mason bees will still do the job of pollinating.  They may be resistant to the pressures that are taking out the honeybees.  There is power in diversity, because each entity has its own gifts.  Even if two people have the same gift, they can help each other or fill in when the other is sick, and the body of Christ continues to serve.  The body of Christ is powerful because of the diversity and redundancy, the fact that several people can do the same job in different ways.

So now we come to the Gospel.  Jesus’ first act after calling his disciples in the book of John, we read last week, the changing of water into wine.  Each Gospel writer has their own perspective about who they think Jesus is.  Part of the way they express that idea is in Jesus’ first public act in each of their Gospels.  For Luke, this is Jesus’ first public act after calling his disciples.  It isn’t quite as dramatic as in the Gospel of John—John was a pretty dramatic guy.  In Luke, Jesus goes home to Nazareth.  Let’s find out what his family and friends and home congregation think of him and what he has to say to them.  Let’s see how he uses his power their and how they use theirs. 

Jesus, filled with the power of the Holy Spirit, uses his power to read this scripture, “¹⁸ “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, ¹⁹ to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”  Jesus chooses and reads this—his confirmation verse, his bumper sticker, his mission statement, which sounds suspiciously similar to his mother’s magnificat that she sang with Jesus’ aunt Elizabeth when he was a little fetus.  Remember, “You have cast the mighty down from their thrones and uplifted the humble of heart.  How you favor the weak and lowly ones.”  Jesus is aligning himself with the Prophet Isaiah.

The congregation would have had mixed emotions at hearing this verse.  They remembered their history of being led through the wilderness and being freed from slavery in Egypt.  They might have disagreed with each other about whether they were currently free, because they lived under Roman occupation.  In some ways their lives were comfortable, maybe the economy was good, but their religion was threatened and they had to give allegiance to soldiers.

And their mixed emotions grew when Jesus said, “Now this scripture has been fulfilled in your sight.”  Isaiah was a pretty important Prophet.  Now this hotshot kid that they knew from his childhood claims to be fulfilling this prophecy.  He’s claiming to have power they don’t think he has.  They might see him as arrogant.  Maybe they thought he was naïve to say it was fulfilled, that it would be that easy.  They didn’t like this display of power, which shook their world view that God’s power was far away from them or maybe they didn’t need it.  Maybe they feared it would disrupt their ideas of who is deserving and who isn’t, of being freed and fed and included.

So Jesus’ high school friends and Saturday school teachers, get ready to use their power to nip this in the bud, to throw Jesus off a cliff.  But his power is affirmed when he escapes their grasp unscathed.  This is just a hint of the resistance that Jesus will face, not just from the people of his time, but to this day.

We are all the body of Christ, all of us together, and we are filled with the power of the Holy Spirit to do this work of freeing the captives, of fulfilling this scripture today. We often see our power as limited, likely to flicker at any time and grow dim.  Sometimes we spend so much energy trying to make sure the lights stay on, that we forget to share the light with others.  We sometimes forget that our power supply is unlimited because it is from the Holy Spirit, or we forget that we are all connected in one power grid with other people doing this work.  What might we do differently if we really had faith in the power of the Holy Spirit?  What would the world like if we realized that we run on Spirit power? 

We have a lot of work to do, but we have resources, power, connections, friends, and the Holy Spirit to help us, and most of all we have God who is faithful and powerful and active and who will transform our world through us and despite us, one way or the other.

God’s power can be surprising and unexpected.  When we’re in a power-outage, you never know when those lights might come flickering back on again.  Get ready, because the radiance of God’s love is shining bright and we are blessed to be part of it.