I love amateur photography.  I have taken a few really good photos in my life and many not so good or mediocre ones.  I am amazed at the PICs that Emily (our church member & wedding photographer) has taken of my Emily (my daughter), but I know she is a professional, and I know she has a good subject to work with.   I hope to someday get a good camera and one of those super-duper printers that are wide carriage and take eight separate ink wells.  Of course, buying eight cartridges of ink is worse than filling up the Yukon with a tank of gas, but the resultant prints are remarkable.

            My favorite things to photograph are flowers and landscapes respectively.  I also like photographing architectural features and most other things as well.  But what I really get into when I have the time is fixing photos with digital editing software, such as Photoshop.  I have made many a lousy picture pretty good with the digital darkroom on the computer. And to be fair, I have made many a good pic crummy by not knowing when to back away from the computer.  I have a friend and former colleague who is an excellent photographer who was slow to convert to digital from film, because the artist in him knew that you have to begin by capturing a good picture that should stand on its own.  However, my equipment and ability is only fair, so pairing that with fair to good computer skills gives me the chance to get a one in a million photo once in a blue moon. 

            Dianna and I have differing ideas when it comes to photography.  Dianna has never envisioned a photograph that did not have people in it, especially if the people belong to our family.  And since it is mother’s day, I will acquiesce to taking all the family shots that she so desires and store them in some digital wasteland, because we no longer print 300 pictures of everything to go in an album or shoebox. You see, the mother of my children is a “people in the picture” person, and I on the other hand do not prefer people in my pictures.  This is true largely because I fantasize about being an artist. And I ask you, did Ansel Adams have people in his black and whites of Yosemite?  I think not.  I don’t remember seeing the Adams family smiling big toothy grins and acting foolish, holding up two fingers behind mom’s head, dad wearing sunglasses, a goofy hat, an a pair of binoculars all with an extra camera hung around his neck. Nor did I see any kids in the pictures with one wearing an “I am with stupid” T-shirt while the other one wore a shirt that disclosed the fact that he was indeed injudicious, all the while with people from a foreign country in the background feeding the squirrels right in front of an English language sign that says “don’t feed the squirrels; they have been known to kill people at the Grand Canyon.” I really don’t remember seeing an Ansel Adams like that.  And I would rather be Ansel Adams than Olan Mills any day.   OK, I know, others such as Andy Warhol became very famous for taking portraits, so I guess I should keep an open mind.  Of course that guy is also famous for photographing a can of Campbell’s Tomato Soup.  That’s right, just a can of soup.  So hey, next time we go to Yosemite, instead of the family I could just take a can of soup to photograph in front of Bridal Veil Falls.  It is a thought.  Somehow I think I might be the one replaced by the can of soup!

I really do not mind people in my pictures, just not every single one on them.  Just scoot over long enough for me to get a shot of Old Faithful all by its lonesome just in case it turns out suitable for enlarging and framing.  So we have 400 pictures of the Grand Canyon in part because 300 of them have Wilson’s in them and I squeak out another hundred in an attempt to capture the unobtainable on film.  And while I will get in big trouble for this one, we have to always ask strangers to take a picture of the four or us, soon to be the five of us, everywhere we go, and they never speak English and they never can figure out my camera, so it is a challenge.

            I do want pictures of “the fam,” but we look just the same at every single overlook we stop at.  I don’t change that much in 30 minutes.  And if we chronicle our presence at old faithful, is it really necessary to have our pictures at every single geyser in Yellowstone?  I mean there are more than 500 of those puppies in the park. I think we have proof that we were there!  Of course I have a sneaking suspicion that if I don’t shut up, I may not be in the next set of pictures we take on the road.  So, honey, can we line up and get some deacon here to take our pic after the service to prove we are at church?

            All kidding aside, sometimes photographs affect us on a deeply visceral level.  Who can forget the 1983 cover of National Geographic which featured a 12 year old girl from Afghanistan who was fleeing to a refugee camps in Pakistan?  Her face loosely wrapped in a tattered rusty red garment and her remarkably piercing but haunted green eyes is thought to be the best photo that has ever graced the cover of the esteemed magazine.  Truly a picture is worth a thousand words. Or how about the one where little John John Kennedy is saluting as his dad’s funeral procession passes by?   Or how about the shot of Neil Armstrong standing starkly alone in his space suit on the surface of the moon?  Or those four unnamed soldiers who are raising an American Flag on Iwo Jima?  Or of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. preaching about a dream in front of tens of thousands on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C?

            I was also deeply moved, no I was deeply disturbed by the recent publishing of the discovery of 10 never before seen photographs of the aftermath at Hiroshima, as discovered by Sean Mallory, a professor at the University of California at Merced.  They were found in a cave outside of Hiroshima, and recovered and placed in an archive at Stanford in 1998, with the stipulation that they could not be revealed until 2008.  I will not describe the horrors of the pictures; I think you can figure out that they were not pretty.  They have an immediate impact when you take one look at the horrors and tragedy of war, and how we treat human beings as insignificant who are created in the image of God.

            What an exercise in power that was, dropping those bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  I will not comment on the bomb there or the great WWII out of ignorance on events before my time, other to say that it no doubt had very tragic consequences on a lot of innocent peoples, and on our soul as a global community.  Surely the far reaching and long term effects on those in that part of the world are still not fully known.  Never before have we had the power for such wide spread devastation with the one simple flip of a switch on the bomb door of a solitary plane. 

            What I will comment on is that we should work to ensure that it never happens again.  Last month a group of 95 prominent scientist (including 32 Nobel Laureates) signed a petition encouraging the U.S. to reduce our nuclear stockpiles from about 6,000 bombs to 1,000. And in case that low number scares you, rest assured that it is certainly more than enough to exterminate life on earth many times over.  Our Nuclear stockpiles helped us coin the word “overkill.”  These prominent scientists also requested the elimination of missile systems that can be fired and reach their targets in mere minutes, systems that are devastatingly quick when time might be needed for cooler heads to prevail.  We still have 1000 warheads on Minuteman ICBMs, and many hundreds on Tomahawk Cruise missiles and the dreaded Peacekeeper missile, which can deliver 10 Nuclear Warheads at once to different targets.

            You see, the problem with awesome power is the possibility of the egregious abuse of such power.  The annals of history are full of stories of such cruelty.  It has been said that the definition of evil is the abuse of power. The abuse of power is possible whenever someone who has power over others, or has the capacity to impose his or her will on those others and does so to coerce or force subjugation. Power is indeed seductive and it is easily abused.  Power may be the ultimate high.  Power makes us feel important, sometimes more so than we really are. Maybe that is what haunts me so about those pictures of Hiroshima.  Maybe it was the abuse of power.  I have heard the explanations that the bomb saved many lives by ending a war that the Japanese would never end, but who knows. 

I do know however, how easy it is for the powerful to abuse power.  The evening news is full of examples worldwide; just watch the news tonight through that lens.  And power can be a major distraction to doing what is just. Power can become all-consuming, and you end up oppressing the people rather than helping them.        And you in the end become powerless over your own need for power.  What you are feasting on is really your soul.

But when is power ever good?  Certainly it can be for great good when we affect change and empower the helpless.  Power is the asset that gets things done.  And power comes to us all in many forms, which bring us to our lectionary text today on this Pentecost Sunday.  Today’s text is all about power. 

On that first Pentecost the disciples and others were all accord and in one place.  Suddenly, with the sound of a mighty rushing wind the Spirit entered the room, and it then divided into tongues of fire, and a tongue sat over each one of them. It was then that all pandemonium broke loose.  Those there begin to speak in other languages.  Those who witnessed their behavior thought that they were drunk with wine, but Peter stood up and set the record straight.  He preached that just as God had said that he was pouring out his spirit upon them and they were prophesying, seeing visions and dreaming dreams.  Then that same Peter who tucked his tail and ran just days earlier when they had arrested Jesus, stands up in front of the same type of crowd and preaches the gospel of Jesus Christ boldly and with power.  The text goes on to say that 3,000 people became people of the way and the church was born, and it expanded rapidly from that point on.  Endued with power, indeed!  That is what Pentecost is all about, that is what we celebrate here today.

And now, 2,000 years later there is no arguing the fact that the church is indeed powerful.  Or is it?  It certainly is big.  No doubt the modern church has incredible assets and resources, just look around.  There may be over 1300 churches in central Arkansas, many with million dollar budgets, fantastic facilities, many baptisms, and many hold prominent sections of real estate.  Most are part of larger denominational structures that contain thousands or even millions of people and billions of dollars literally across the globe.  There have been some charitable programs sponsored locally by the churches here, and some general all around do good-ing.  But have we as Christians been powerful enough to affect the kind of change that Peter was a part of on the day of Pentecost?

I am not so sure that we have.  It seems to me that in many arenas we as a church and we as Christians are helpless.  We are helpless as a church to really impact society’s great problems.  We have not solved hunger; we are helpless to solve homelessness or even have figured out a way for adequate housing for very many families nor have we made any great impact on poverty.  Heck, we are mostly not interested in solving those kinds of problems.  We don’t even have the power to get along with each other. 

We are helpless in this town of 1300 churches, as we are in the top five in murders and violent crime per capita every single year. We have low graduations rates, even lower percentages of those who graduate college, and are near the top of the list in teen pregnancies– so we will not be honoring the youngest mother with a corsage today or any other day (although we have no unusually young mothers), it is a dangerous practice here in Arkansas.

Brian McLaren in his book Everything Must Change (Thomas Nelson, 2007) asks the question this way: “Why hasn’t the Christian message made a difference commensurate with its message, size, and resources? What would need to happen for the followers of Jesus to become a greater force for good in relation to the world’s top problems?  How could we make a positive difference?”   All of these are outstanding questions.  We have been helpless to impact our world because all too often we have practiced religious escapism and made the Kingdom of God totally about something in the future.  We are only concerned with getting ourselves and people to heaven all the while our religion is shielding us from the hell that is the world for so many around the globe.  We have been and remain helpless to influence our planet relative and in proportion to our great assets as Christians.

In fact, we sometimes are part of the problem.  When we are more concerned about our own institutions than we are about service and mission, we become the problem.  I was at Steve’s house for the “night with the mayor” recently, and I listened to the mayor’s well-thought out plan to help the homeless and maybe remove the stigma of Little Rock being the meanest city in the country on the homeless.  The mayor has a good plan– he has a great place and he has some good resources.  But he also has something else, a petition from 2500 people who don’t want the solution anywhere near them, even though it is at least a mile away.  These are good Christian people at a large Baptist Church who signed the petition, led by the pastor.  Ironically, the church already sits in a rough part of town.  I think I would be more concerned with the Crips and Bloods who are across the street every night dealing drugs and women than an occasional homeless person walking by on the way to the shelter.  Not only are we not part of the solution, we often perpetuate helplessness.  So how much power does the church really have?

It is also true that we also are helpless in our own lives to affect change.  I am not just talking about our helplessness to do what we know is good for ourselves such as losing weight, stopping smoking and sticking with an exercise regime. But we are helpless and we can’t make much headway into living the simple gospel message of love, forgiveness and reconciliation.  We don’t have a clue as to how to love our neighbor as ourselves– shoot half the time we don’t love ourselves, so no wonder we are helpless.   We go to great links to understand what the Bible says and we won’t walk across the street to do what the Bible says to do– and that is the problem in a nutshell.  Love your neighbor.  Period.  Love your enemies. Period.  They will know you are my disciples not if you can quote scripture, not if you fight the lottery, not if you protect the sanctity of marriage, not if you bomb an abortion clinic, not if you go to church every time the doors are open, not if you support all the church programs, but if and only if you love one another as I have loved you. Its right there in scripture, look it up.

I too have felt personally helpless several times this past week.  I sat at the funeral of a friend, the wife of a mentor who had battled tough cancer for three years.  And she truly fought the good fight and ran the good race, but I felt small and helpless in the big scheme of life and death.  I felt helpless as another minister friend’s wife died of cancer the same day, his second wife in just a couple of years to die from the cursed disease.  I felt helpless as I talked to a man whose baby had died some years earlier from an accident involving a baby sitter.  His wife left him shortly thereafter, and he has spent serious time in psychiatric facilities since.  He told me that he could not believe in God, a God who would let this happen– no way.  As he say crying begging me for some insight, I sat helpless not knowing what to say.  I noticed a tattoo on his forearm of a crown of thorns, circling a heart with cross- shaped nails piercing it.  His daughter died 23 years ago; she would have been 23 this month.  Why me, he cried.  I was helpless.

I also sat helpless as one of my chaplains’s shared a story with me of a lady with three kids, whose house that she was renting from a slum lord was condemned, and she was pitched out on the streets, and there is nothing that she can do about it because she has little power.  There is nothing that will be done to the powerful slum lord, and there are not many who are willing to help her.  We instead often prefer to sooth our consciences by blaming the victim.

I cannot explain why we are not about love but are about war.  I cannot understand why we hate in Jesus’ name. I am helpless to affect change and to get its message across.  I am helpless to leave this place with little more than a pricked conscience and a slightly ruffled shirt to do anything but look forward to lunch at a good place to eat.  How many problems will I drive by and ignore once again?  I am helpless.

            I think maybe the key to the helplessness issue is understanding that on this day of Pentecost we were endued with power.  True power is not the ability to coerce and subjugate others, but is the ability to empower others to affect change.  And it seems to me that is where Christianity falls short.  We have not changed the world, at least in the sense that we need to.  We are all too helpless.  Indeed, we have worn this point out this morning. 

But there is something else we should point out as well.  While we may be helpless, we are not powerless.  Pentecost is about the Good News that while we seem helpless, we are not powerless.  God gives us what we need to be empowered, to change the world.

            Those first disciples were not any different than us.  They followed Jesus without understanding of what he was up to and without knowing why they were following him half the time.  They were inept at times, afraid, and helpless.  When the going got tough, they got going. But not on this day.  On Pentecost, everything was different.  They were endued with power—the power of God. And in the end, these same incompetent disciples rocked the world for Jesus Christ.

            On this day of Pentecost we celebrate the fact that we have been given power as well.  On this day of Pentecost, our excuses for not changing the world are in vain.  On this day of Pentecost we realize that we have everything we need already to impact our planet.  On this day of Pentecost we have nothing less than God Almighty, the Beginning and the End, the Alpha and the Omega, the Bright and Morning Star empowering us to make a difference.

            You see we might be helpless but we are not powerless.  It is up to us to realize that on the day of Pentecost God gave us the spirit of power; he gave us the Holy Spirit.  Wherever we go, God Almighty goes with us.  Whatever battles we fight, God is at our side.  Whenever we get to our can’t, we now get to God’s can.  Whenever we are most helpless, we are blessed with God’s power.  And if you don’t think so, look what happened to those disciples.  Look at the birth of the church. Witness the power to change. 

            Pentecost is about the power to change the world, and if we don’t walk out of here and do just that, then this is the most wasted Sunday on the church calendar.  And we will forever be stuck in a cycle of helplessness.  But to find God Spirit in our mist is to find the power that one single solitary person can make a difference to a hurting world full of problems.  And that my friends, is the Good News of the Day of Pentecost. Thanks be to God! Amen.