Help us, O Lord, to live with your cross at the
center of our lives. Amen.
If someone asked you to define who God is, what would you say? As our culture becomes more and more secular, this isn’t a hypothetical question. It’s something that we, as people of faith, ought to have considered. Who do we say that God is? Most responses to that question are rooted in a sense that God is Almighty; that God is powerful in a way that we are not. So we might say that God is unlimited whereas we are finite, or God can control or do anything while we are so limited in our abilities, or God is all-knowing and we are ignorant about most things, or that God is eternal and we are running out of time. And when people talk about what God has done, power is generally rooted in very big things such as God being the creator of all that is, or God being the one who separated the waters at the Red Sea, or God showing up with booming thunder and flaming fire on the mountaintop, or God watching over all things.
But
this week’s Collect gives us a different way of thinking of God’s power. The
prayer opens with “O God, you declare your almighty power chiefly in showing
mercy and pity.” Mercy and pity – certainly a different way of thinking about
power. At St. Luke’s, our identity statement begins with the invitation to
“come and see the difference Christ makes,” and a different way of viewing
power is probably a holier and better way.
Mercy
and pity – these are load bearing words when it comes to theology as they carry
so much meaning and connect so many ideas. What it boils down to is that God’s
power is most clearly and fully seen through redeeming love and compassion. God’s
power is not what we so often think of when we think of people who are
powerful. Power, in human terms, is usually about being able to make people do
what we want them to do, being strong enough to push people or nature around,
or having the resources to do whatever we wish. But God’s power is seen in love
and compassion.
It’s not power over, but
rather power with and power for. God’s power is that God sees our brokenness
and responds not with disappoint but rather compassion. And then from the
abundance of Divine love, heals us not because we have deserved it or earned
it, but because this is what love does – love works to make all things well.
This is a very different sort of power. When we see this sort of power, we
might not even recognize it as power – we might think it’s a sign of weakness,
vulnerability, softness. We might say “Isn’t that nice, but that sort of power
doesn’t get anything done, that kind of power doesn’t work in our
everyone-for-themselves world.”
And, yet, I think most of
us would say that we spend too much of our time pursuing power in one form or
another and not as much time as we’d like building loving relationships. We
recognize that what we need in our society is not more people pursuing power,
but more people pursuing love. So even though we might be tempted to dismiss
mercy and pity as signs of weakness instead of power, intuitively, we all know
that there has to be a better way. And, as St. Paul puts it in a passage we’ve often
hear at weddings – the most excellent way is that of love.
The reason why it’s so
important for us to know that God’s power is chiefly shown in mercy and pity is
that it frames what we think about God, how we pray to God, and what it means
for us to say that we are striving to become a church that follows, looks, and
acts like Jesus. If we think God’s power is about might, strength, or forcefulness,
then we end up with a twisted view of God. We’ll start to see God as someone
who is capable of fixing all of our problems like dementia or cancer in our
loved ones, a war in Ukraine, greed on Wall Street, stinginess in our hearts,
or addiction and depression in our friends. If God’s power is rooted in the
ability to fix our problems, and our problems continue, it leaves us with three
bad conclusions. One – that God knows about our problems but chooses to let us
continue suffering either because God isn’t as nice as we think or that God has
decided that we don’t deserve to be helped. Two – that God doesn’t know about
our problems, meaning that God is either aloof, doesn’t care about us, or is
ignorant of our suffering. Or three – that God can’t do anything about our
suffering, meaning that there is something out there that is more everlasting
and enduring than God, which would mean that we really shouldn’t call God “god”
anymore.
These three deficient
conclusions are the foundation of how a lot of people relate to God. Some see
God as a demanding, punishing, judgmental deity who is never satisfied with us
and demands our good behavior as the prerequisite for blessings. Others,
generally those who have been through difficult trauma and loss, might see God
as a capricious and nasty being who would not do well on a performance review
for the job of overseeing all things. And the most common argument against belief
in God is that, if God is real, then why is there so much suffering? A
misunderstanding of power leads to antipathy, apathy, or atheism.
And it’s not just those
outside of the Church who see God through the lens of one of these A-words:
antipathy, apathy, and atheism. The Church has become infected with a sort of
blindness to what God is up to. We’ve grown too focused on metrics that measure
worldly power, like budgets and attendance. We talk about the benefits of faith
and what we “get out of Church” as if God were here to serve us. We
compartmentalize God to the realm of the spiritual, which really doesn’t have
much of a place in our scientific and modern world, and segregate God from our
politics, economics, and ethics. We hope that Jesus will make a difference at
our deaths, but the difference that Christ makes in our life is ignored. We
have little, if any, expectations that God is up to anything in the world,
perhaps so that we can be comfortable with the idea that God doesn’t expect
anything out of us. A flawed view of power leads to an incomplete picture of
God which leads to an impoverished faith.
But if mercy and pity, if
love and compassion, are the chief ways that we understand what power is truly
all about, then we are able to embrace and be embraced by the difference that
Christ makes. The place that we see power that is truly almighty is in the
Cross of Jesus Christ. St. Paul, writing to a Philippian church that has
questions and conflict, urges them to “let the same mind be in you that was in
Christ Jesus.” In other words, stop trying to be right, or correct, or in
charge – but have that same mind that led Jesus to the Cross, have a mind fixed
on love, humility, mercy, and pity.
In the passage that we
heard from Philippians, St. Paul quotes from what scholars believe is an early
creed and hymn of the Church. This might be the most ancient piece of Christian
doctrine and writing in existence. This hymn talks about the power of Jesus on
the Cross in the same sort of terms that the Collect does. It’s not a power
like the world’s version of power. Power is not something to be exploited and
used over and against others for our own gain, rather power is to be used for
pursuing love.
And so Jesus emptied
himself, creating space for Divine to act in him. So many of us live very full
lives. Our calendars are full, our to-do lists runneth over, and our attention
is occupied by so many things. We live in a culture in which we are accountable
for every moment. A lot of people reported feeling upset with themselves for
not embarking on some major self-improvement efforts at the start of the
pandemic. Remember when we were all quarantined. A lot of people thought they
should use that extra time to organize their closets, learn a new language,
read a bunch of books, or take up a new hobby. How crazy we are! Imagine people
that lived through the Plague – do we think they were worried about
self-actualization? No, they were worried about survival.
We overfocus on making
the most of our opportunities, on being effective, on always showing progress with
the result that there is little, if any, space for Spirit to work in us; little
time to show mercy and pity to others. When’s the last time we made space in
our calendars to listen for God’s voice? When’s the last time we were awake and
didn’t touch our phone for an hour? When’s the last time didn’t worry about
being productive but only focused on being? I’ll be honest and tell you all
that since I’ve come back from sabbatical, I’ve been going about a hundred
miles an hour, and that’s on the slow days. So I took an hour this week, closed
my office door, turned off the lights, lit a candle and some incense and gave
myself the space to think and listen for the Spirit. Was I productive? Not
particularly, at least in terms of worldly power. But it was probably the best
thing I did all week. How does modern life prevent us from making space for
God?
As
we’re launching our annual stewardship, which is the church’s way of saying
“fundraising,” campaign, it’s also a good time for us to think about how we
make space in our budgets for God and the Church. As you review the stewardship
materials which are on their way to you in the mail, consider the pledge card
as an invitation to make space in your finances for God to do something
amazing, both in terms of our relationship to money and in terms of the
thriving of this beloved community of St. Luke’s.
So
often we think of power as about taking space – the most powerful people often
have the biggest offices, the biggest bank accounts, the biggest entourage, the
biggest houses, the biggest seats in first class. But Jesus shows us that true
power, that love, mercy and pity, aren’t about taking up space, but making room
for others.
And
in that space where Jesus emptied himself, the love of the Father and the grace
of the Spirit filled him with a love that led to the Cross, the place where
God’s mercy and pity made known to all the world. On the Cross, we see the true
might of weakness, the true force of vulnerability, the true strength of love. The
result being that when we come to that day on which we can say that all has been
made well “every knee will bend in heaven and earth, and every tongue confess
that Jesus Christ is Lord.”
God
wants nothing more than to fill you with this sense of being seen, being
forgiven, and being loved. The Cross of Jesus shows us that God is not
disappointed with us nor is God waiting for us to get our acts together.
Instead, God meets our mistakes with mercy and our suffering with pity. We
might not be given a solution to get rid of all our problems, and even if all
of our problems vanished tomorrow it wouldn’t take us long to create new ones,
but rather God loves us with a love that is more everlasting that our deaths,
deeper than our griefs, more beautiful than the ugliness of Sin. This is the
Good News that Jesus shows us from the Cross: that God has met our brokenness
with infinite and perfect mercy and pity, which we call “love.” And with that
love at the core of our identity and purpose, our lives become full of the
blessed, bountiful, and beautiful difference Christ makes.
