The Power That Counts
March 5, 2000
Mark 9:1-13

    Jesus says, "Truly, I say to you, there are some standing here who will not taste death before they see that the kingdom of God has come with power." (Mark 9:1)
This is quite a promise! Someone among the people he is talking to will see the Kingdom, before death! Tall order but almost immediately in this chapter of Mark Jesus delivers.
It is known as the Transfiguration. This strange moment when three of the disciples see a vision of Jesus with the great prophets of the Hebrew people, Moses and Elijah. The intent of the writer or the intent of God is clear. This is a demonstration of Jesus importance and identity. Jesus appears along side the great prophets. The words of God follow identifying him as God’s beloved son. So it does come to pass that some of his disciples see the kingdom. Or at least the bringer of the kingdom in his full glory. As spectacular as that is it is not the hard part. 
     It is actually much harder to demonstrate the power of God because the power of God is so hard to demonstrate. Now perhaps this event is power enough. Perhaps this vision and God speaking is power enough to demonstrate and is all that he meant. That might be true, and I might believe it to be true except that Jesus then goes on to explain a little bit about the power of the kingdom. He wants his disciples to realize that power is probably something much different than the power that the disciples expect. Because when Jesus speaks of power it is something different than we usually experience as power.
     When Jesus speaks of power he usually is speaking of God’s power and God’s power is peculiar. The Christian God deals in something I call resurrection power.  Power is actually a subject that Jesus returns to again and again because it is probably the most hard to understand aspect of Jesus ministry. Jesus calls something like going to the cross, suffering and dying and being resurrected a demonstration of God’s power. What we might expect from God’s power in modern times might be to be saved from the cross. If God is powerful his son should never go to the cross. In fact if God is powerful then whenever God’s son is threatened not only should Jesus find safety but also those who threaten him ought to suffer severe retribution. That is power!
      That is the power that the world has always understood. But here is Jesus offering a very different understanding. And he even invokes the name of Elijah who also was steeped in the power of God. And because of it he was also a suffering prophet. And Jesus says it is so for the Son of Man also. So Jesus is warning the disciples, as he will again and again, in many different ways, the power of God is something else.
     Jesus knows that the power of God is always about the creative process of making something positive out of something that could only be understood as negative. That is the resurrection at work. God’s power is a creative power and so destroying in order to save even God’s son is, in my reading of scripture against God’s very nature. God won’t do that.
     I think it is time that we took this lesson to heart. We live in a society that seems to only understand retributive power. And we teach it to our children in thousands of different ways. And then we make the means of terrifying retribution available to children, even at the tender age of six years old. We disseminate destructive tools of retribution and power and make them so common that one can even slip into the hands of a little boy. This is a terrible tragedy. Now you can listen to the people creating some kind of explanation that pins the responsibility for the death of that little girl on bad parenting, on the uncle and aunt he was living with, his  upbringing, the drugs that seemed to be all around him but all of that misses the most terrifying point. We have allowed, encouraged, looked the other way, as we have become the most violent of societies. Because on some very dark and frightening level we believe in that kind of power. Not because we are different than other people but because we haven’t the strength to outlaw handguns.
     Columbine should have been the last straw. But the initiatives that were spawned after that terrible day languish in congress unable to be passed because we allow them to not be passed. I saw the President on the television this week. He said there should be such an outcry of moral indignation over the fact that our leaders will not act on this issue that every elected official should feel that they are in jeopardy if they do not do everything they can to curb the proliferation of guns in this country.  
     And let us not argue about all the reasons for these killings. The truth is that if that boy didn’t have a gun he would not have shot anyone. The truth is that if we did not live in a country where guns were so available and so present the police would not have shot at an unarmed man forty one times because they thought he had a gun. If guns were outlawed those students at Columbine would have not had the weapons to do what they did.
     If I am being too political so be it. I can not see an argument that can stand up to the moral responsibility we have to our children to get rid of these guns. Now I never do this but I want everyone to go home, write, email, phone, snail mail your Senators and your congress people and tell them this must be addressed. Do it. Guns are about the wrong kind of power and they are killing us all.
In Christ Jesus. Amen.