GOD’S POWER AND THE GODS OF POWER

Rev. Dr. Kathy Fuson Hurt

FBC, June 8, 2008

Scripture: Psalm 66:1-12

 

 

     Most of the churches here in Granville take turns providing Sunday afternoon worship services for residents of the Kendal community who are unable any longer to get out and attend their home churches. Last Sunday First Baptist was scheduled to lead the Kendal service, so I arrived that afternoon with some scripture readings, prayers, and reflections for a service that may be attended by any number of residents with varying capacities for participation. 

 

     In the time of providing this service, I have discovered that regardless of which residents attend, the favorite part of the experience seems to be the singing of hymns. Kendal has a collection of hymnbooks that feature all the old standards, and we usually spend at least half our time singing whichever hymns the residents choose. Last Sunday, I noticed a theme in the hymns being selected: all of them were about power, the power of God, the power of Jesus to save, to create, to rescue and restore, to judge, to right wrongs. “O Worship the King,” “Rock of Ages,” “Jesus Saves,” “Leaning on the Everlasting Arms, safe and secure from all alarms”: these hymns, along with others of a similar nature, were the favorites selected last Sunday.

     Which made sense, given the lives the persons attending the service are leading these days. Unable to get out, to make choices about how to spend their time, to walk, to drive, to make plans, to get dressed alone, to do all those things which those who live independently do most days without challenge: with lives increasingly limited by age and diminished abilities, it made sense that the residents would especially want to sing hymns about God’s power and the help we receive from that power. Anyone who is vulnerable and dependent is likely to be particularly aware of the presence or absence of power, in themselves, in others, in the Sacred.

 

     The hymns the Kendal residents showed a fondness for last Sunday are not hymns we typically sing here on Sunday mornings. In fact, hymns or scripture readings or sermons or discussions about God’s power tend to be curiously missing in liberal congregations as a rule. Political power, social and economic power, powers of oppression and injustice: those varieties of power show up regularly on Sunday mornings as favorite topics for consideration. But God’s power is a trickier matter. Perhaps the issue is the implied helplessness of humans that accompanies discussion of the God’s power; we cherish the image of ourselves as capable, autonomous creatures well equipped to manage our lives, so calling on the power of God to rescue us is not an avenue we are likely to need, thank you very much. And if mention is made of God’s power, it is likely to be part of an overall critique of the misuse of power in the world generally. As long as we are knocking social and political powers, we may as well knock God’s power while we’re at it, criticizing that part of church tradition which used the image of a powerful God to make us feel small and worthless, to keep us in our place and toeing line.

 

     But I believe we lose something important when we sidestep the notion of God and power. How is it possible to talk of experiences of grace or healing without reference to God’s power to provide those experiences? What about times in our lives when we feel the sort of vulnerability and dependence that the Kendal residents know on a daily basis: how much comfort do we miss out on if images of Everlasting Arms and a Rock of Ages, images of strength and support in the sacred, are not part of our spiritual vocabulary? John Calvin noted that our images of God and of self are inextricably connected, so that how we image God reflects on how we view ourselves, and vice versa. If God has been stripped of all notions of power, what result does that have on our own self images?

 

                                                (Psalm 66, 1-2, 5-7, 8, 12)

 

As you listen to these typical Biblical images of a powerful God, assisting the chosen, vanquishing enemies, sustaining creation, what responses do you notice in yourself? What assumptions are you making about the meaning and intent of such images?

 

     Theologian Daniel Migliore, in a study of social and spiritual understandings of power, points to three common cultural misconceptions of God and power, “gods of power,” that are translated into problematic behaviors. The most common of these misconceptions Migliore terms “sheer almightiness,” which he associates especially with patriarchal views of God and describes as a kind of brutal, unfeeling control, an ability to smash through obstacles, and a propensity for righteous violence. “True divinity is known by its capacity to deliver a knockout blow to any opposition” (Migliore, The Power of God and the gods of Power, p. 25). A God with this sort of power is valued for an ability to get any job done by any means necessary. And this God is particularly called on as the friend and patron of nations, including our own, who want to mimic the behaviors of such a God and employ power in similar ways.

 

     A second misconception Migliore identifies is what he calls the “captive power” of God, in which God functions much like a genie in a bottle, answering to our beck and call, granting our desires provided we follow through on certain expectations God has of us (p. 27). This version of God sounds much like the God I heard about growing up in the Baptist churches of my childhood, and still sounds like the God envisioned by preachers of the prosperity gospel. Our relationship with God, so this version goes, is a contractual one: we do our part, and God will do God’s part—which means we are basically in control of God, hence the image of a captive power. The captive God is an appealing one if you have ever wished you had a genie in a bottle to serve you; it is also a God that ultimately inspires contempt for being servile.

 

     Migliore’s last misconception of God’s power is the “inept or indifferent” God, a deity incapable of managing divine responsibility and thus the cause of all that goes wrong in the world, or else a deity who has lost interest in the world and withdrawn so far as to become lost to view, out of contact (p.29). I sense this image of God lurking around the edges of many liberal churches, where in a goodhearted effort to make God seem less judgmental and more approachable have come up with a God who is a work in progress, just like us, and hence cannot be faulted when things go awry, or in the churches that have succumbed to Parker Palmer’s “functional atheism,” where God is mentioned in passing but all that happens unfolds with little or no recognition of any sort of involvement on God’s part.

 

     Almighty Superhero God, God in a Bottle, Inept God, Why Bother God: with these images to draw on, it is no wonder that simply dismissing any consideration of power as an attribute of God is our default choice, for who would want a God that looked and acted like any of these? We are better off sticking with our images of God as creative spirit, God as love, and letting the notion of a powerful God disappear from our spiritual vocabulary.

 

     But nature abhors a vacuum, especially a spiritual vacuum, and when we drop out of discussions of God’s power, we cede the arena to those who want to promote the God of the war on terrorism, the God who blesses us with big cars and big bank accounts, and miss the opportunity to offer a viable alternative, a way of envisioning divine power that does not bully or support empire or function as an ATM machine but comes with a different sort of power that would further, not limit, our spiritual imaginations.

 

     The problem with usual discussions of power, including God’s power or lack thereof, is that power is assumed to be synonymous with control. If I am powerful, then that means I get to have things my way, to move people and events about as I please, to make things happen as I want them to happen and not be surprised by the unexpected or thwarted by the uncooperative. Having things my way is having control—but it is by no means the same as having power. For power has no need to have things my way, since it is not threatened by surprise or thwarted by lack of cooperation. If I am powerful, as opposed to being controlling, then I act from the fullness of who I am, bringing all of myself into events and relationships, sometimes asserting, sometimes yielding, giving myself away. When power is envisioned this way, instead of being mistaken for control, then power begins to look a lot like love in action—and love, as scripture repeatedly observes, is the most powerful force of all. The psalmist was careful to link images of a powerful God with images of a caring God, a God whose awesome deeds include a concern that our feet do not slip, that we have a wide place to stand. To affirm that God is powerful is not to affirm that God bullies or grants wishes, or that God runs the universe with an iron hand so that everything works just right; it is, rather, to affirm that God is love. Everlasting Arms are not arms that pound us into submission, but arms that embrace, arms that are powerful precisely because they embrace everything, everyone, without exception.

     The month of June has been designated Torture Awareness Month by the National Religious Coalition Against Torture. Our church will be joining this effort to raise awareness and inspire action through displaying a banner throughout the month and hosting a film and discussion on the events at Abu Ghraib prison. In many ways, it seems astonishing that such awareness raising could be necessary: why would anyone, anywhere, in this country, condone torturing another human being? Yet we have, and intense debates continue about the appropriate uses of torture as a tactic for obtaining vital information. That torture has now entered this country’s arsenal points to the degree to which we have become infatuated with security, believing that somehow it will be possible to reach a point where we cannot be threatened, where our security is inviolable. And obtaining that kind of security, it seems, depends on our freedom to exercise power whenever, however, we deem necessary. Ultimate power then is evidenced in torture, for torture takes all power from another, and removes all limits of power from me.

 

     But this again is power misunderstood, power confused with control, control that promises security if it can only be extended far enough. That we now are willing to discuss terror as a viable option suggests that we have bought into the illusion that total control, which would bring total security, is possible and desirable. And in doing so, our country shifts from being a powerful nation to a controlling nation. A powerful nation can change the world for the better; a controlling nation can only foster ever greater fear, ever more resentment.

 

     Perhaps through this month-long awareness we can reclaim some of the true meaning of power, power as the capacity to be fully who we are, to give ourselves away, power as a manifestation not of control but of love. And along with preaching about the dangers of control that pretends to be power when it is anything but, we might also examine our own lives where control has misplaced power, and ask God—the God who is all-powerful, whose power is most apparent in love—to bring that power to bear on all of us, individually, collectively, as a country, and show us how we might have less controlling, more powerful lives, lives that point every moment to the transformative power of love.