THE POWER OF THE PRINCE OF THE AIR

THE POWER OF THE PRINCE OF THE AIR

            As we shift from Black History Month to Women’s History Month (and the Season of Lent) this week, I am reminded of the depth of racism and patriarchy in all of us.  I didn’t notice many men posing on Sunday night at the Oscars and showing us their bodies, but I did notice the attempt to sneak in the white oriented “LaLa Land” as best picture over the black oriented “Moonlight.”  These forces of racism and patriarchy were the main conduits of Donald Trump’s victory in the presidential election of 2016.  There were, of course, other factors, but these were the driving wheels.  Why?  Why do these powerful forces persist in our individual and communal lives?

            There are many explanations, but the one that makes the most sense to me is a Biblical one.  In the beginning of the 2^nd chapter of the Letter to the Ephesians, the author uses an intriguing phrase as she talks about how tied up and tangled up we are in sin.  The author says that we are “following the power of the prince of the air” (vs. 2). Growing up, I heard this in individualistic terms (drinking, lying, lust, stealing, etc.)  As a young adult, I was mystified by the meaning of this phrase, which seemed to me to be a primitive remnant from the early church.  Thanks to authors like Walter Wink and Dorothee Soelle, I have shifted to understand this concept also in communal and sociological terms, and now it seems profound.

             I received the sins of racism and patriarchy (and many others) long before I realized that I was receiving them, and I received them from people whom I loved, people who were good and decent people.  I came to believe in these powers, and because they came to me from trusted sources, they worked themselves deeply down into my soul and into my imagination.  So, this idea of the “power of the prince of the air” turns out not to be such a primitive term after all.  It speaks to me of the air that we breathe – we have to breathe air in order to live, but also in that same life-giving air,  we breathe all kinds of pollutants into our bodies that cause us pain and sickness.  This is why these powerful forces remain so difficult to get rid of in our lives – we have “breathed” them in, and they have become part of the fabric of our lives and our imaginations. 

            If you are wondering what in the world I am talking about,  I want to share a story from one of my African-American ministerial colleagues as we close out Black History Month. I was once part of a team in our Presbytery that asked people to share stories about how race had impacted their lives.  We videotaped them (that shows how long ago it was!), and my colleague shared this story during his testimony.  The Reverend Lonnie Oliver was one of three African-American students to integrate Hampton High School in 1963 in Virginia (yes, the same Hampton of “Hidden Figures”).   Lonnie was an athlete and a scholar, and he played sports there.  His family had always emphasized to him that he was a child of God and that no definition from the racist culture in which he lived could change that definition.  He remembered getting his first test scores from a class early that fall.  He asked two of his white football teammates what their test scores were, and when they told him their scores, he said he felt a jolt in his own heart, a jolt like an electric current running through him.   He had made higher scores than them.  He did not brag about it, but he noted internally that he had not expected to have higher test scores than white students.  He testified that he was stunned because he did not know the source of this internalized inferiority, the idea that because he was African-American, he could not possibly score higher than white students.  My sense is that the source is the “power of the prince of the air.”  Lonnie had “breathed” it in, and it acted independently of his and his family’s will.  I am not suggesting here that there is a personal being called the “prince of the air” (or the Devil), but I do believe in this concept of our absorbing the communal perceptual apparatus, an apparatus that comes to dominate our thinking and our perceptions of ourselves and of the world.  These are very difficult to change, but change them we must, and fortunately for us, we have the grace of God and other prophetic voices who come into our lives to remind us that we are all children of God first and foremost, not matter what the world tells us, or what we tell ourselves.  Let us listen for those voices in these difficult days.  The Reverend Lonnie Olver is now one of those voices, and we give thanks for his ministry and his journey!

If you’d like to read more on this idea of the sociological and theological dimension of the “prince of the power of the air,”  here’s a place to start:  “The Powers” by Walter Wink, and “Jesus of Nazareth” by Dorothee Soelle.