Got Power?

The Reverend Barkley Thompson – Rector, St. John’s Episcopal Church

 It was the Tuesday after Friday’s windstorm—a “derecho,” we are told—and I had just boarded the elevator at Lewis-Gale Hospital.  It was crowded, and my vertical traveling companions were a representative cross-section of our fair city, people of varying races, backgrounds, and states of health.  I always feel awkward on crowded elevators, and this time I decided to make conversation.  Given the circumstances across the valley following the devastating windstorm, I asked vocally, “Ya’ll got power?”

 It turns out that, storm or no, when a priest poses such a question on a crowded elevator, people receive it in many different ways.  Clearly, a couple of folks took my inquiry to be about the progress of AEP work crews in their neighborhood.  But others thought I’d asked, out of the blue, a deeply spiritual or existential question.  Their circumstances when they boarded the elevator were many: Some were ill; some were grieving; some were in shock.  And the priest had just asked them, “Yes, but do you have power?”

 Armando Maggi, a professor at The University of Chicago (my alma mater), teaches a class entitled “Preserving the Spell.”[i]  Professor Maggi begins the class by showing his students a clip from the opening scene of Walt Disney’s 1938 film Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.  The movie begins with the evil witch in her castle asking her magic mirror who is the fairest of all.  It then cuts to Snow White in her scullery maid’s smock, singing as little cartoon birds gather round her.  When Professor Maggi turns off the DVD, his students giggle at the silliness they’ve just seen.  It is the reaction their professor hopes for.

 Seventy-five years ago when the film was first released, dismissive laughter would not have been the audience’s reaction, Maggi says.  But now, fairy tales lack magic.  We’re no longer satisfied with them, which is why we desperately attempt to retell them in new and compelling ways.  (Indeed, Snow White has been remade on the big screen twice this year alone, once as a comedy and again as a dark and somber action film.)  Stories that once enchanted us, gave us hope, and offered windows into something different and new have exhausted their ability to move us.    The old stories have lost their power.

 The same week I read about Dr. Maggi’s course, TIME Magazine published a story entitled, “The Greatest American Antihero.”[ii]  The story tips its hat to today’s top-rated TV dramas—shows like Mad Men and Breaking Bad—but it also points out the disturbing nature of our adulation for their main characters.  Don Draper in Mad Men is a talented and suave adman, but he’s also a philanderer who will bury the good work of his staff in order to further his own jet-set career.  Walter White in Breaking Bad is a high school chemistry teacher who turns into a crystal meth drug lord, eventually killing anyone who stands in his way.

 The heroes in these shows are antiheroes, and—as the title “Breaking Bad” conveys—they succeed by drifting from morality to amorality to immorality, and they rise to dizzying heights while maintaining a veneer of goodness and polish.  And people love to watch them.

 As is so often the case, television mirrors to us what we demonstrate again and again in our real lives, with the kind of models we raise up in politics, sports, entertainment, and business.  We seek out antiheroes, I believe, because we’ve given up our sense of the heroic.  Snow White, with her message that purity and love can overcome malevolent darkness, makes us laugh.  You see, we need the power of goodness and light, but we no longer believe in it.  We’ve grown cynical, and so we give our admiration—indeed, our hearts—to antiheroes who have learned to use shadow to make their way, to succeed, and to conquer.  Rather than recoiling at the way they compromise goodness for power, we credit their ingenuity and endurance.

 First century Palestine was not so different.  Again and again, people’s expectations had been dashed.  God’s prophets had been struck down so often that their messages of compassion and grace were laughed at.  Grass-roots heroes had emerged who could not deliver on their promises.  And so antiheroes like King Herod and his kin, whose royal claims were tenuous and predicated in equal measure on collusion with the Roman Empire and a brutal and heavy hand, who drew strength from darkness, rose to dizzying heights.  What a stark choice in whom the yearning powerless could place their hope: a laughing stock or a polished monster.

 Do you see, then, why in the Gospels the masses flock to Jesus?  Do you see why they’ll cross sea or desert just to touch his cloak?  He is different from everything else they’ve experienced or heard about.  He is no fairy tale wrapped in fantasy.  He is real.  His cloak is spattered with the same mud as theirs.  He bears the same sores on his feet from walking miles of dusty road.  But in love he is uncompromising.  He will not succumb to cynicism, and he will not bend to the world.  He is the light which darkness cannot smother, and in his light there is power.  If only the least, the lonely and the lost can cast their eyes upon him; if only they can touch the fringe of his cloak; they know they’ll have power, too.  They’ll find true healing and hope and joy.  They’ll discover light that pierces darkness, and they’ll carry that light with them.

 It was true then, and it is true now.  Perhaps the old fairy tales have lost their force and most goodness in the world fails and falls short.  Perhaps the world lifts up antiheroes in whom we are encouraged to place a sorry and diluted hope.  But it’s a false choice.  There is a hero—one hero—and he is present today just as he was on the muddy banks of Galilee  The God of love and light and power is manifest in Jesus the Christ.  This is no fairy tale.  It is the deepest reality, the really real that flows beneath the surface currents of the world.  It is here—he is here—waiting for us to touch the fringe of his cloak.  And so I ask you, “You got power?”

 St. John’s Episcopal Church is located at the corner of Jefferson Street and Elm Avenue.  Summer Sunday worship is at 8 a.m., 10 a.m., and 5 p.m.  Look St. John’s up on the web at www.stjohnsronaoke.org.



[i] “Spellbound,” by Lydialyle Gibson.  The University of Chicago Magazine, May-June 2012, pp. 52-57.

[ii] “The Greatest American Antihero: Walter White is badder than ever, but has dark TV become a cliché?” by James Poniewozik.  TIME, July 16, 2012, pp. 60-61.

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