With Authority and Power

One way to understand what it means to be a Protestant is to pay attention to authority and power. 500 years ago, the reformers (Calvin, Luther, Zwingli, and Knox), 500 years ago they said, tradition is not our authority, tradition is not how we define what is good and true and orderly.  Centuries of traditions, the foundational definitions of the church, the reformers said, that is not it.  No. They rejected the traditional authority of the church.

To power they said, "not the pope, not the cardinal, not the bishop, and not the priest."  The power of the church, and this is an important distinction, the power of the church is not to be found in them.  We rejected tradition as authority, and we rejected the apostolic succession as the power of the church.  After 500 years it may not seem like a wild leap or a radical risk anymore, but it was.  In the spirit of Cortez, the reformers burnt our ships.

After they rejected tradition and the pope, the reformers were asked, then where does authority and power reside?  Who is in charge and who gives them the power?  The authority, how do you define what is good and right and true and beautiful, how are these to be determined? To this the reformers said, the Bible.  The Word of God is our authority.  You can hear this claim 500 years later when Baptists say, "no creed but the Bible."  And thus, was born the idea of "biblical authority."

To power, who gets to decide, who is in charge, to whom is the authority given, the reformers said, the people.  The power is with the people.  Probably the clearest example of this is the American congregational system.  All power to decide, all authority given, resides in the vote of the people.  Authority is found in scripture; power is found in you. 

Now, has this worked well?  Is this true?  For the most part, despite the temptation of cynicism, yes, it is true, and it has worked well.  We should be proud, and we should be humble about the reformation of the church.  By placing the bible in the hands of the people, by removing centuries of abusive traditions, protestants fostered freedom.  And freedom is the heart of the gospel.

In the late '90s, my father and I traveled to Scotland.  For the reformed this is a second holy land.  In Edinburgh John Knox led the reformation.  The bible became the authority and the elders of the church, the people, were given the power to lead.  We were on a pilgrimage to Edinburgh at the cathedral of St. Giles not far from Knox's house and out of nowhere came a deacon of the church filled with fury.

Discovering I was a Presbyterian pastor from America, he made his case, he pleaded with me, and he was quite loud about it.  He kept shouting again and again, "there is no bishop but the Christ!"  He was so worked up that even my firm agreement with him didn't settle him down.  He needed more than affirmation; he needed me to be as angry as he was.

What riled him up or set him off was this: the ecumenical movement which began after WWII had reached a critical impasse.  Denominations needed to elect representatives to finalize interfaith initiatives, statements.  To go beyond dialogue, the ecumenical movement needed people to vote on behalf their tradition.  For the Catholics and Orthodox this was fine.  They had traditional authority and a hierarchy of bishops. Yet, for the Protestants, this was juxtaposed to who we were.  The power is never in a bishop; the power is in the people.  Not even for one vote, one day. There is no bishop but the Christ.  And to the credit of the Scots, no bishop was ever elected.  500 years is a lot to discard.

It is also true that with 500 years of our own tradition, the authority of the Bible and the power of the people has run into some problems.  Protestants have gone to extremes with the Bible.  We have made it an idol at times, twisting what was written into all sorts of foolishness.  And we have discarded the Bible as too antiquated, too infused with the abuse it was meant to overcome.  In the same way, power to the people has not always led to dignity for all people.  Power to the people has often suffered the quality of the people in power.

It's best to see this as a living question, not a settled one.  How is the bible our authority today; and how is it that the power is with the people today?  These are great questions for the church.

When Jesus walked Galilee, when he preached in the synagogues, healed the broken, the people were amazed by his authority and his power Luke says.  And they were right to be amazed.  But what is the authority of Jesus and what is the power he possesses?  Before we look to those questions, just a small confession here.  Asking these questions and listening for the answers in Matthew, Mark, and Luke, this can radically change your life.  If you learn what it means to find the power and the authority of Jesus, you will be set free.

Our lesson today seems like a bit of a throw away, an innocuous incident.  It's hard to see its importance at first.  Yet, and this is not hyperbole, this little story is the basis, the form of salvation.  If you want to be rescued from darkness, here is the place to start.  Last week we looked at a catalogue of anger; this week it is as if we have a catalogue of freedom and redemption.

Our lesson today has three factors or components, a catalogue as it were, of how Jesus brings the good news.  The first will sound strange, but here it is.  Jesus is indifferent to suffering.  He doesn't try to fix people; he doesn't go looking for people to save, to heal, to help.  The man with the unclean spirit comes to him.  And Jesus doesn't offer to help.  It is almost as if he heals him to keep him silent.

Next, Jesus tells the demons not to speak.  They call him "The Holy One" which is a name of God in Hebrew Scripture.  You would think that if Jesus was the Messiah and he was the fulfillment of a great hope, you would think that if he was the one, being identified as such would be a good marketing scheme.  But he does the opposite.  He commands the demons not to speak and he will tell the people he heals, "say nothing to anyone."

He is indifferent to suffering and he does not claim to be the messiah.  From these comes the third part: freedom from suffering is not about him, not about who he is.  Freedom from suffering lies within us.  It is not about believing in Jesus; it is about believing what he taught.  And what he taught was this one claim: if you want to save your life, you must lose it; if you want to be great, you must become least; if you want to be free, you must die to live.  He was indifferent to suffering; he didn't make the gospel about himself; and the promised freedom he offers is within us; we have the power to be free.

The catalogue of freedom is nearly complete. Luke adds one more element to it.  Jesus heals without harm.  This may not seem like much, but this is perhaps the most radical claim about Jesus, that he could heal without harm.  An example of the opposite may help.  Ask an orthopedic surgeon, can you heal without harm? They will say, no.  Ask the oncologist prescribing chemotherapy or radiation or surgery, can you heal without harm? They will say, no.  Ask the counselor can you heal the trauma without causing injury or pain?  They will tell you no.  To heal without harm is not possible.  There is always injury built into the healing.  Hence, the last claim in our lesson is a radical vision of hope.  Somehow Jesus heals without harm.

              About twenty years ago, AIDS in the U.S. was under control.  New drugs were developed, new protocols were in place, so AIDS was no longer a death sentence, but a health problem to manage.  In our success we had stages of development and thus drugs that were more powerful and drugs that were no longer the best.  Given our lack of need of the lesser drugs we shipped them to sub-Saharan Africa. 

              In the nations of sub-Saharan Africa, the infection rate of AIDS was in the double digits.  Nations like Malawi where there was an infection rate of 13%, this was an astounding health crisis.  So the drugs were welcomed.  But with the drugs came unforeseen challenge.  This was not a shot you got, or a pill you took once.  This was a cocktail of pills a patient took under the supervision of a healthcare professional.  This required monitoring and adjusting of doses and lots of tests.

              Recognizing this challenge, we funded the hiring of lots of healthcare workers, thousands of front-line professionals were enlisted to administer the antivirals.  The effort worked in that the AIDS mortality numbers declined.  But the success created another crisis, an even bigger crisis than AIDS. 

Hiring away all the healthcare professionals to monitor the antivirals left no one running the nutrition centers, so deaths from malnutrition and starvation skyrocketed; no one was there to lead the bed net programs or treat the kids with malaria, so death from malaria skyrocketed.  All of this led to the same with dysentery, the third killer, a wild increase in mortality.  Lowering the death rate in one disease led the numbers of deaths in the others to tragic extremes.

              When Jesus was confronted by the man with the unclean spirit, he didn't offer to help, but he did heal without harm.  You would think that if Jesus was the Messiah, then believing in him would have been his main message.  I am the one.  Believe in me.  Yet, he silenced the demon.  It wasn't about him.  He didn't ask people to believe in him.  His message, what he taught was this: you have the power to be free.  The power is within you.  If you die to live, you will be free. That is the gospel Jesus preached. 

              We are all tempted to fix people.  To give them our answers, our beliefs.  In our desire to help, though, we often do harm.  Trying to do good, we do evil.  I will never forget the feeling of foreboding standing in a rural clinic filled to the gills with crates of antivirals.  I could not have predicted the amazing health crisis they caused, but I did have a deep distrust.  I could feel in my bones, "this is not good." 

              The example of Jesus, how he lived, and the teaching of Jesus, his authority and power, they are not just true in the church, they are true of life.  In Capernaum he showed us how to bring what is good.  Don't make it about yourself, don't seek to solve others' problems.  Let them find the power within.  Find the power within yourself.  Have the power and authority to be free.  Live unto the greatest of possibilities, to heal without harm.

              Jesus didn't ask the man with the unclean spirit to believe, to follow him, to adhere to his ideals.  He offered freedom.  Jesus didn't ask the people to believe in him. He silenced those who called him the messiah.  Because he was humble?  No.  He silenced them because what he taught was not about himself. It was about us.  We have the power to be free.  This is the good news.  Jesus was free and you can be too.  Amen.