26 th Sunday of the Year
I’ve been thinking about my talk today, or for this weekend, for a couple of weeks now. And all around us – in the country nationally, what we’ve been exposed to,
are threats of coercion, and justifications for it. Men with power using it, or threatening to use it, in intuitive and personally justified ways.
Now in our religious talk we frequently describe God as powerful. Very often, in our hymns, in the pictures we put in our churches, the images we use to talk about
or describe religion, the images in the news of public religious leaders, so often what they are about is power. And much of the time it is about their power. Here I am, really working very consciously not to fall over, and I imagine that in the public press some idiot could possibly even describe me as a powerful parish leader. Talk about crazy. But even more important, how completely out of touch it is with the heart of the Christian tradition.

But still, we do have images and descriptions of Jesus where he is described as powerful. How are we to think of them?

I want to move ahead to the end and say how. It is right for us to look on his statements claiming authority as a reality. But we should look on that same power and authority in the same way as He did, as a good to be put to use for those who have such a limited share in it. And here we have so much to learn. I was lucky in that in my own introduction to parish ministry I was given a concrete, and very personal example of what that human way could be like. Back in around 1972, when I was teaching at the GTU, a Union of Catholic and Protestant seminaries in Berkeley, a Jesuit from Alaska came for a year of study. His aunt was an artist living in our parish in Berkeley. I was using her studio learning to paint, and he and I became friends. He asked me how I was doing. I

told him I was bored stiff. Everything I was doing I could do in my sleep. So, he asked me: “you want a real challenge? ‘Yes’. ‘I’ll get you a real challenge.” It was. He arranged for me to spend the following summer running the Eskimo parish in Bethel, Alaska — way out where the Kuskokwim River, second biggest in Alaska, opens up into the Bering sea. Closer to Russia than to Anchorage. The Eskimos traditionally set up a camp way out on the river, and spend the summer catching the migrating salmon heading upstream from little boats, hand over hand, one by one. A million pounds by the end of that Summer. There was a native hospital in the town, served that part of the coast. Pregnant women from a big circle would be flown into town ahead of time to await the arrival of their baby. There were usually about 4 or 5 in town at a time. They were bored, missed the summer fun at home, used to come to daily mass, we’d talk afterwards.

They told me – as did the community leaders – that it was the local practice, right after their delivery and still sort of groggy, to encourage them to have their tubes tied. I mentioned that later to my brother who was chief of staff, and a surgeon, at a medical center outside New York. He said they’d never suggest that to any woman in their hospital. That was between the woman and her doctor. But that was in 1972, after the signing of the Native Claim Settlement Act. And the development of the local oil fields was taking off. Going back to the images of Jesus as powerful. We all have different kinds of power and authority. But what we can do, and are called on to do, when the opportunity presents itself, is look at that same power and authority as he did – a good to be put to use for the benefit of those who share in it the least. We are awash in people – by our standard, very poor people – who share so little in public

power and public authority of any kind. So little. The little that some of us know that we also may have is still so huge by comparison. My hearing aids, one of the pair, wore out a couple of weeks ago. I’m picking up my new pair at Costco maybe this week. I had to go through a lot of forms and exams and stuff. But I’m still picking up my new ones – at 91. We have so many images in our churches. In the scriptures we read every Sunday there are images of authority of Jesus presented using images of power and authority presented week in and week out. But we should, and we can, look at them as he did. A human reality. A reality that can and should be put to use for the benefit of those who share in it, so little. And sometimes – more than often – not at all.