When God Becomes Powerless

Sermon, 9/19/10. A powerful, omnipotent, God-at-the-controls: Many of us grew up with that singular etched portrait of the divine. Yet, that’s a notion more consistent with Greek philosophy than Hebrew scripture. Whatever happened to the prevailing biblical testimony of a God whose power lies in becoming powerless with and for us? …

Scriptures             Jeremiah 8:18-9:1           Luke 16:1-8a

When God Becomes Powerless

Retired Episcopalian bishop and prolific author John Shelby Spong does not strike many as one who exudes an aura of vulnerability and humility. Anyone who titles his autobiography Here I Stand … well, let’s just say no fading flower is he.

Spong is a profoundly articulate man, and his advocacy for social justice is tenacious. The word iconoclast describes him well – he is a demolisher of religious idols, seeming to relish the practice as he goes.

And yet, as a young priest, John Shelby Spong encountered a situation when his powerfully persuasive manner proved no match for the mores of a small African-American congregation he served in North Carolina while at the same time he pastored a much larger Caucasian one.

It so happens a girl yet a year of age in that congregation died, quite suddenly. She was the only child of two schoolteachers; due to the difficult delivery, a postnatal hysterectomy had been performed on the mother. So naturally, the grief of the couple was overwhelming.

Spong relates what happened at the child’s interment:

There was not just weeping at this funeral; rather, earth-shattering wailing and primeval screams filled the air. Members of the extended family would come to the grave site, take this infant out of her casket, and lift her toward the sky while their eerie sounds reverberated throughout the cemetery … it was an emotionally rending experience for me on several levels.

Dealing with the death of the child is the most difficult grief of all … This black couple made it through this trauma better than any other couple I had known. They continued their growing and creative lives. Perhaps those rituals I called primitive were more helpful, more therapeutic than the sanitized white rituals had been.¹

Lament. How lamentable it is, that this natural expression of our faith witness has become so neglected over the years. In our praise-addled and joy-addicted dominant church culture, overt expressions of lament are not only neglected, they seem to be ignored altogether.

Old Testament scholar Samuel Balentine notes that of the approximately 250 recorded prayers in the Hebrew scriptures, over half are laments.² And yet, he notes, we neglect these prayers because lament doesn’t sell. As he puts it,

In a world where the church can no longer take for granted its authority, how will a product that promotes question but cannot promise answers vie in the marketplace?

I fear that the church may have already decided this question. When institutional self-preservation becomes the fundamental criterion for selecting which ministries will be offered, the ministry of lament will probably be let go.³

If we be loathe to risk the practice of lament in the church today – resistant to express our very real sorrows in ways that may make room for a healthier, more authentic discipleship of praise and gratitude in God – how, then, are we to tolerate, much less accept, the God who laments for us? The God we encounter through the prophet Jeremiah today?

The Babylonians stand at Jerusalem’s door; a spirit of terror abounds. “My joy is gone, grief is upon me, my heart is sick,” we hear God cry out – not the prophet, we are told, but God through the prophet! “Hark, the cry of my poor people from far and wide in the land: ‘Is the Lord not in Zion?’ … “O that my head were a spring of water, and my eyes a fountain of tears, so that I might weep day and night for the slain of my poor people!”

Imagine if we had grieved the loss, say, of the Vietnam War in the way the Jewish people lamented the Babylonian captivity! What we needed for this tragic period in our history, poet Robert Bly once stated, was a president such as Abraham Lincoln to call all the people together in a defined period of mourning – to wail and beat our breasts and then … be done with it.⁴

And – of course – what if we had been provided ample time and space to grieve over 9/11? Beyond a much-publicized worship service at the National Cathedral three days after the attack, and a momentary spike in worship attendance throughout the land, we rushed headlong into worship of another form: an ill-defined War on Terror.

Many say the War on Terror was built on a lie. It’s much worse than that. The War on Terror was built on a betrayal of our trust.⁵ When we are not allowed or at least strongly discouraged to grieve the war’s losses, including the hundreds of thousands not of our citizenry … when we are even disallowed official viewing of the coffins of our dead … what trust, then, can we place in our governmental and ecclesial officials whose role it is to provide for that holy space known as lament?

To put matters on a more purely theological plane: What trust can we place in a god defined by triumph and omnipotence, versus a God who declares a holy powerlessness in solidarity with our own? A God – as Henri Nouwen once said – not interested into an ascent into popularity, but a descent into solidarity?

Such a God we encounter not only in Jeremiah, but also in Luke today. This parable – and parable I believe is best defined as a narrative that subverts, or pulls the rug out from under, the world of the reader⁶ – breaks the bond between justice and power. Instead, it equates justice and vulnerability.⁷

The manager is fired; granted, he has been dishonest with the rich master’s property. But, instead of extorting money from the master’s debtors after his firing, the manager instead curries their favor by slashing their debts, so that he – now without portfolio or apparent hope – may be welcomed into their homes. In the end, the fired manager is found out by the master … who surprises Jesus’ audience by commending him for what he has done.

If there be a moral to this parable – ever elusive of summation – it may be this: Right relationship all around trumps an accurate accounting of the debts. Like the prodigal son of the previous chapter who, honestly or no, swallows his pride and longs for lodging, all – or at least much – is forgiven. The vise-grip of Caesar’s kingdom – the “justice” of his debtor society – is subverted; it holds its power, no more. Justice and mutual vulnerability takes its kingdom of God place!

The vulnerability – the solidarity – of our God who becomes powerless. More powerful, ironically, than any nation or corporation or institution can ever summon. The notion of God becoming powerless may confound us, even though the popular idea of an omnipotent God originates with Greek philosophers and not from our Hebrew scriptures. As the colorful contemporary evangelist Tony Campolo lays it out, “The prophets of old declared their God was more powerful than all the other gods”– certainly. “But”, he adds, “they did not say that (God) was in control of everything.”⁸

The vulnerability – the solidarity – of our God who becomes powerless. There’s a difference, of course, between saying that God is – by definition – powerless, and affirming the powerlessness of a God who enters into our mourning. And yet, let us be drawn time and time again – in the midst of the dark nights of our souls and the imperial designs around us – to this foundational gospel notion: “Radical love means God is at the bottom with us, sharing our slavery. And it is precisely in that pit of powerlessness that we meet God’s empowering support.”⁹

One clear September Sunday such as this one, when our family was living in Ann Arbor, my Alcoholics Anonymous sponsor phoned me. He informed me that the previous day, in the parking lot of a popular grocery store three miles from our house, our AA friend Damon, age 38, breathed his last in a car he had borrowed from his sponsor. The cause: an overdose of heroin. In the immortal words of the folk singer John Prine about an addicted Vietnam War vet, “And the gold rolled through his veins, like a thousand railroad trains, and gave him all the confidence he lacked. With a purple heart, and a monkey on his back.”¹⁰

Actually, Damon never served in the military; “earning” a purple heart was one burden he never was forced to bear. But the monkey of addiction always loomed over him. He would shed the beast – sometimes, for years at a time; sometimes, for mere months. But its claws never let him go … that is: he could not let them go.

And yet – more importantly by far – I do not believe that God ever let him go, either. For my own consolation lies in knowing that it was not due to the power of God’s will that Damon died – by no means! To the contrary, when Damon nodded off for his final trip, it was due to the God’s powerlessness with him that he did not travel it alone.

The vulnerability – the solidarity – of our God who becomes powerless.

So that we may lament.

So that we may grieve.

So that we may trust.

… So that we may – inevitably – give thanks.

Whoever has ears to hear, let them hear.

Benediction …

Barbara Brown Taylor, an Episcopalian priest-turned-professor,

writes in her book Leaving Church: A Memoir of Faith the

following:

I do not think that I was the only one suffered from too much sun in church. One thing that had always troubled me was the way people disappeared from church when their lives were breaking down. Separation and divorce were the most common explanations for long absences, but so were depression, alcoholism, job loss, and mortal illness. One new widow told me that she could not come to church because she started crying the moment she sat down in a pew. A young man freshly diagnosed with AIDS said that he stayed away because he was too frightened to answer questions and too angry to sing hymns. I understood their reasoning, but I was sorry that church did not strike these wounded souls as a place they could bring the dark fruits of their equally dark nights.¹¹

Sisters and brothers: Need it be that way with us?

Go out into the world to lament with it, as – I trust – we do here, with one another.

Go out into the world in peace, to love and serve our servant Lord.

¹Spong, Here I Stand: My Struggle for a Christianity of Integrity, Love, and Equality (HarperSanFrancisco, 2000), p. 105.

²Balentine, “Praying East of Eden”, lecture at Union PSCE, Richmond, VA, September 13, 2007.

³Balentine, Prayer in the Hebrew Bible: The Drama of Divine-Human Dialogue (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1993), p. 293.

⁴Bly, interview with Bill Moyers, “A Gathering of Men”, Public Broadcasting Service, 1990.

⁵For a differentiation between lying and the betrayal of trust, re: the War on Terror, see George Lakoff, Don’t Think of an Elephant! Know Your Values and Frame the Debate (White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green, 2004), chapter 6: “Betrayal of Trust: Beyond Lying.” Also: See Lakoff, “Iraq and the Betrayal of Trust,” Rockridge Institute, http://www.rockridgeinstitute.org/research/lakoff/iraq-and-the-betrayal-of-trust.

⁶For this definition of parable, see John Dominic Crossan, The Dark Interval: Towards a Theology of Story (Sonoma, CA: Polebridge Press, 1988).

Many have called the first thirteen verses of Luke 16 the Parable of the Unjust Steward. Indeed, if we read and heard all of these verses as the Revised Common Lectionary proposes, his unjustness would serve as the tale’s focus. But by hearing only verses 1-8a, the subversive nature of the narrative – which, after all, defines it as parable – is separated from the convoluted and face-saving pieties of later church gloss in verses 8b-13. Also, the Fellows of the Jesus Seminar have concluded that verses 1-8a are words consistent with those of the original, historic Jesus; verses 8b-13, certainly not [Robert W. Funk and Roy W. Hoover, The Five Gospels: The Search for the Authentic Words of Jesus (Polebridge Press, 1993).]

⁷See Bernard Brandon Scott, Hear Then the Parable: A Commentary on the Parables of Jesus (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1989), p. 266.

⁸ “Questioning omnipotence”, Context: Martin E. Marty on Religion and Culture, September 2007, 39:9, Part A, p. 3.

⁹James B. Nelson, Thirst: God and the Alcoholic Experience (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2004), p.119. “Alcoholic language” speaks of “hitting bottom and surrendering,” he writes. “But now it is God (as we see the Holy One in and through Jesus) who hits bottom, who surrenders.”

¹⁰“Sam Stone”, from the album John Prine (Atlantic Records, 1971).

¹¹(Harper San Francisco, 2006), pp. 147-48.