5 February 2006

Rev. Dr. Duncan D. Newcomer

Church of the Redeemer

New Haven, Conn.

Scripture:    Isaiah 40:21-31

The Powers of God

One of the most difficult truths for we who are Christians in America is to come to terms with how much our lives are “nut-to-bolt” with American power.  The first step in coming to terms, as a person of faith, with the power of America is to be “O.K.” with the word “power.”  And this—comfort with the word “power”—the Church of the Redeemer has. 

The very first thing I saw and felt when I met the people of this church had to do with this word “power.”  People here were, and are, eager to be powerfully present to one another, and to the world.  Call it love.  Call it intentional relationship.  Call it practicing the spirit.  Call it community organizing, whatever you name it, it’s a power and a willingness to be empowered.  And it is, here, by and large, power about goodness, not power about egos or fights.

This is unusual and a gift of the spirit to be cherished, nourished, and developed.  Most Christians in America that I have known in my life-time immersion experience make a phony and sickening “virtue” out of feigning weakness—turning the other check before they’ve even been slapped, hanging their heads, and relying on their dominant but assumed social position to protect their interests.

Most American Christians have had the luxury of not needing to look like we had power because we knew we did.  It was our secret that the powers in the world supported our way of life.  For example, I’ve never needed or wanted a gun because I have always been able to assume that a cop had one and he would use it for me and not against me if need be.  And of course that allowed me to “feel” like a pacifist or something.  People here behave neither as cowards or bullies.

But as the century begins, the millennium opens, and a new history will be shaped within this church under new leadership, where will the realities of power in life take us all, and where will the power and powers of God be made known?

I believe, and this is ultimately my calling as a preacher, to proclaim the Gospel of Jesus Christ as best as I can interpret it for our time, I believe our power as Christians will be in resistance to the power of the dominant culture.  In resistance, I believe that the power of God in our world will look more like it did in the first church than at any time since. 

Christians after the Crucifixion and Resurrection—when we were not even called “Christians”--were a small, marginalized, highly spiritual and motivated group with no power except their belief in the power of God to be like the power of the love in Jesus, shown in the life of Jesus, shown in the death of Jesus, shown in the Resurrection of Jesus, and known in the power of the Holy Spirit alive among them. 

For three centuries these people were the salt of the earth, the leaven in the bread of society and the life of love and forgiveness in an empire of military brutality and civil law.  Rome.

Anything really good in western society since then can be traced to the spirit of these Jewish-Christian beginners, and everything bad can be traced to forgetting the spirit of Christ, or to the use of brute power to enforce some secular way, or some so-called “Christian” civilization.

I’ve been reading this week, for example, how the Dutch Reformed Christians from the Netherlands took to ethnic cleansing in the Hudson River Valley between 1600 and 1640.  Clearly many were Christians more loyal to the Dutch West India Company than to their Dutch Reformed Church, much less to Christ.

Will our church be a hand maiden to such powers or to God and to Christ?  I believe we are coming to the fork in the road, and that the way of faith is resistance to the dominant culture.  There are Christians all around us who are deciding otherwise, deciding that America is the way of God’s power in the world.

Now, a lot of us have had a long and deep love affair with America.  When Martin Luther King, Jr. gave his great “I Have a Dream” speech at the Lincoln Memorial it was filled with tributes to the American Constitution as well as to the prophet Isaiah.  But on April 4, 1967, I heard him preach at Riverside Church in New York, saying “America is the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.”  A year to that very day he was killed and surely in some way for saying so.  What would he say, today, 39 years later—his life span later—about the level of violence in and from America?!

When I read the list of God’s powers as catalogues in our scriptures for this day I believe that it is Gospel preaching to say:  resistance to the world, as it is, is God’s call to power now.

I hope you find these sermon words helpful, guiding, emboldening even.  I am reminded of my father when he would say or do things hard on me that it, of course, hurt him more than it hurt me.  Not that I’m your father!  But I do find this hurtful or painful for myself because I really have loved America.

Now I did, in preparation for this sermon, think deeply on the power and the powers of God.  One thing I did was to read through each line of the four Bible readings for today to catalogue God’s power as understood and revealed through just these four passages, understanding that such would amount to just a tiny sample of what the Bible says about the power of God—just a tincture of God’s power.

And even without getting to the power to heal that Jesus shows in Mark—taking away a fever from a disciple’s mother and about to cure a leper—even without those miracle powers of God I had listed 41 powers that our Bible reveals about our God.

None of those powers would help America much with American power, and all of them could help us American Christians be powerfully resistant.

Here are a few:

God sits above the circle of the earth.  (Isaiah 40:21).

I don’t’ know what the Hebrew poets and prophets thought the “circle of the earth” was, but the image of a sitting God above—that fills me with a powerful sense of peace.  The transcendence of God, the power of God’s sovereignty, is a profoundly counter-cultural idea, even truth.

All our power is not all the power that is.  There is a power more praiseworthy than our power.  Remember Lincoln’s favorite line from Shakespeare:  “There’s a divinity that shapes our ends, rough-hew them ‘tho we will.”  Lincoln, sitting on more American power than anyone prior to him, learned to believe that, to know that!

Here are three more powers of God revealed in Isaiah that we could put together:  God brings princes down to zero nothing (my translation!);  makes rulers as if they are nothing at all; and blows rulers away like dried cut grass.

Well maybe we have and are helping God to do that;  but what would it be like to remember that God could do that to us as well, and why would God not?

God has no equal, that’s another power.  God created all that we can see and can name and number it all, not missing a one.    God lasts forever, never gets tired, gives strength to the weak—now there’s a good power—gives strength to the weak.

And, finally, a favorite of many of us here, the “chariots of fire” power of God:  He makes those who wait for Him strong, like eagles’ wings.  Strong like eagles’ wings, wings that fly through the air with resistance.

Let us soar with such strength, such power, as God gives us.

Amen.