As we were watching Sing this weekend with our kids this weekend, we laughed as Mr. Moon climbed up and over to the neighboring building when his theater lost power in order to plug into the power from his neighbors. The scene reminded me of the beginning of one of my year’s of teaching. The school had undergone major HVAC renovations over the summer, which required a corner of the classroom to be dry walled to contain the new equipment.
In the case of my classroom, this eliminated the only working outlet in my classroom in which I was supposed to teach technology and plug in a laptop cart. The other outlet in my classroom was shorting out pencil sharpeners, so plugging in the laptop cart could have been disastrous. The solution became to procure a large surge protector with a long chord and to steal power from the connecting classroom. Not a good long term solution, but in the short-term, it solved the power issue.
The lectionary passage from John’s gospel this week talks about Jesus appearing to his disciples, but there’s something in the passage that I haven’t noticed before. Jesus breathes on his disciples, much like Creator God the creation account breathes into the dust and brings that dust to life.
20:19 When it was evening on that day, the first day of the week, and the doors of the house where the disciples had met were locked for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood among them and said, “Peace be with you.” 20:20 After he said this, he showed them his hands and his side. Then the disciples rejoiced when they saw the Lord. 20:21 Jesus said to them again, “Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you.” 20:22 When he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, “Receive the Holy Spirit. 20:23 If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.”
The power of the divine breath giving new life to disciples paralyzed by fear. Re-creation with the divine breath.
As disciples of Christ, we have all ended up in times of fear of paralysis. Times when hiding behind a closed door seems like a much better option than going outside to see what has happened and what it means to walk in the aftermath of a loved one dying; what it means to walk in the realization of a terminal illness diagnosis; what it means to walk with a new identity that we never meant to receive, divorced, homeless, unemployed.
In those moments, we feel completely powerless. Our fear and uncertainty has sapped any reservoir of power we had saved up. In those moments, we can’t find an outlet that will give us the power we need to get up and go out. Again and again in communities of faith and in family units, I see people who are in the midst of crisis trying to sap the power from other people. They try to steal the power that others who have walked through difficult times have found by becoming co-dependent, by taking and taking and never giving anything back.
This is spiritual abuse.
Our power should not be stolen from other people. Although in the short-term it can solve our power issue, it’s not an effective long-term solution. You will have to move from person to person, community of faith to community of faith, sapping people and communities of their power until you are left alone. Our power to overcome our paralysis of uncertainty can only come from Creator God and the Risen Christ who have breathed the divine breath into our dustiness and our fear and transformed us into new creations.