Poolesville Presbyterian Church
05.08.2016; Rev. Dr. David Williams
Scripture Lesson: Ephesians 1:15-23
Gift giving has changed a little bit over the years, as time has passed.
Not so much for Mother’s Day, which in my household still involves the usual chocolates and handmade cards and breakfast in bed. That hasn’t shifted, nor shall it ever. Dark chocolate deliciousness must always be the gift, forever and ever, AMEN.
But other gift giving has changed. As the children grow from being children into men, gift-giving is less and less about stuff. They have more than enough stuff, stuff enough that for all of the stuff that has poured into our house, my offspring really don’t desire any more. We’ve got giant bins of Lego, untouched for years. We have enough Thomas the Tank Engine tracks in storage that Metro could probably use them to rebuild the system. We have enough unused gaming systems and abandoned iPhones that collectively have more storage and processing power than most of the supercomputers of my childhood. Material gifts are immaterial.
Why not get what they most want?
What we offer, now, is the gift of power. Not magical power. Not their own orbital battlestation. Not a small army of robots. Not by shoehorning a Dodge Charger Hellcat motor into our minivan. We offer power as our culture presents power. Meaning, cold, hard cash, moolah, a little bit of cheddar. This is the gift that my no longer young ones most desire. Give me the ability to do what I want. To have. To travel. To explore. To do, in this moment, as I wish.
Money represents work, represents energy, represents a way to symbolically transfer labor for goods and vice versa. It is power.
That gift was almost always, if I’m honest with myself, my favorite gift as a teen. It meant I could do what I wanted, get what I wanted, that I could extend my will out into the peculiar world of our economy and have things that I’d otherwise not be able to manage.
Because wealth is power, as we social creatures have constructed it, power that we use in our lives to express and extend ourselves. If you have wealth, you are free to do as you wish. You can have that gaming system. You can travel. You can eat as you wish, where you wish. You can have commonly understood ownership over a patch of earth.
It kinda sorta works. But it also fails, in the same way that giving your mom a card filled with twenties isn’t likely the best gift today. Sorry, mom.
Power is inherently problematic, something our society really and deeply struggles to grasp.
That power, our power, the way we understand and share power together, manifests itself in some peculiar dynamics. Take, for instance, the recent case of Haiti and the peanuts. Haiti is the deepest mess of messes, a nation that barely functions. The hardscrabble agriculture attempted by its farmers is not enough to feed those who live there, leading to chronic malnutrition among Haitian children. For the subsistence farmers in Haiti, just getting by is often impossible if there’s a bad harvest, which leads many to flee the countryside into the deep, desperate poverty of the cities.
This last year, the USDA came up with a plan to use excess peanuts from the American harvest to insure that Haitian children had enough to eat. We had the food. They needed the food. It seemed simple enough. Only the challenge, given the power dynamics of our economic system, was more complicated. Because if you flood Haiti with free peanuts, Haitian peanut farmers can’t sell their crops, meaning more people are forced to abandon their farms, which means more hungry people without work in the cities, and a nation rendered even less capable of feeding itself.
Our power dynamics, the dynamics of wealth and mammon, seem strangely unable to resolve this seemingly most straightforward of problems. People are hungry, there’s more than enough food, but the system itself just can’t manage to make that work. Just as six thousand years of human war has never quite managed to bring about peace, the power of mammon seems never to have quite managed to resolve human need.
That truth rings peculiarly against the texts for today, all of which talk about power.
Ephesians sings about it the most, in a unique voice.
This letter is one of what Bible scholars call “deutero-Pauline” letters. That means that it was most likely not written by the Apostle Paul himself, but by one of his disciples writing in his name. Scholars believe this for a variety of reasons. Ephesian 2:20, for example, seems to assume that the apostolic period is over, which would be odd had Paul been the one writing it.
It also has one of the most peculiar styles, one of the oddest voices, in all of the New Testament. Paul was a precise, thoughtful, analytic thinker, clearly trained in rhetoric and a gifted writer. The author of Ephesians, on the other hand, wrote in a strangely circular, oververbose style, writing sentences that just went on and on, sentences that could be diagrammed with a spirograph, that went in fractal loops like a Mandelbrot set.
Even if this isn’t written by Paul, it’s still clearly written from the perspective of someone who was formed in the crucible of Paul’s teaching. From that foundation, the author of this letter presents us with how we are to deal with life, once we’ve had the audacity to assert that we are disciples of Jesus Christ. That’s the entire point of this first chapter of Ephesians, and it’s some pretty bright white line stuff.
Ephesians is not the letter to go to if you’re looking for permission to goof around as a Christian. Because as the opening of this letter establishes, God is in charge. Over and over again, themes of authority and power are stated and restated, with the word “power” surfacing again and again.
“Power,” in the Greek used by the author of Ephesians, is dunamis. It gives us the words dynamic and dynamo. In describes the interplay of energies, it give us words like dynamics. As we human beings tend to understand it, it is wrapped up in the idea of control, of ruling over. Or we hear it as destructive, like dynamite.
We hear this opening, this swirling praise of power and glory and authority, and we conceptualize that in terms of the familiar. We visualize gold and shine and sparkle. We see a mighty monarch on a throne.
But power, in the Christian understanding, is a little different. God’s power is not expressed as ours is expressed. Where we use power over one another, God is abundantly giving. Where our power tends to seek its own interest, clotting and congealing around itself, God’s power is always pouring out in grace and possibility.
In that, God’s power is like the love of one who cares for us. Like a mother, yes, who pours herself out body and soul for us. But also like a father, or like a grandmother, like a friend.
It is that form of power that builds and restores, that form of power that sets things into right relationship. It is creativity, turned in grace towards one another, as unselfishly giving as the morning sun or a spring rain.
In every exchange with others, in every moment where you can turn your life’s energies towards them, let that be the taste of power that they receive.
Let that be so, for you and for me, AMEN.
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