Space for God’s Power

Have you ever tried to open a jar and just couldn’t? What did you do? My first inclination, if anyone else is around, is to ask “Can you open this?” And then, if they open it right away, I tend to claim that I must have loosened it up.

It’s what we do! When we can’t do something, we are too weak to do something, we are willing to ask for someone stronger to help. But as soon as they help, we try to assert equality again.
We don’t like to be weak. We don’t like to be the weaker one.

And yet, we see over and over again in Scripture God calling weak people. Moses stuttered and begged God to send someone else to Pharoah. David was anything but kingly, a ruddy runt, the youngest – he was out in the field as Solomon asked his father if he was sure he didn’t have any other sons because God had not chosen any of the ones gathered to be anointed king – to which his dad said, “Well, there’s David.” The prophet Jeremiah objected when God called, “I do not know how to speak; I am too young.” It was their weakness that caused them to respond to God’s call, “I can’t” and that created the space for God to say “I can.”

When Jesus called the disciples, he didn’t call the brightest and best – if they had been, they would have continued in school and been disciples of one of the learned rabbis. It was the weakness of the disciples that made them good apostles. They knew that the Holy Spirit was working in them when they preached and healed after Pentecost because they had NO ability to do that before – their weakness was testimony to God’s power. They knew God transformed them, and they wanted to share that joy with everyone because they had been weak, so they understood what it was like to be a fisherman dependent on that day’s catch for food for your family, what it was like to have so little that you were willing to be a traitor and collect taxes for the occupation and then to get caught up in a system of politics and lies and to be powerless to escape it, they knew what it was like to be weak…so they had compassion for people who were going through struggles, and they were not willing to get caught up in the web of getting ahead by taking advantage again. They learned to trust God rather than insisting on their own way.

Jesus himself – God incarnate – shows us that the way we are to trust God’s will and power, to lay down our attempts at winning human victory and control – Jesus willingly dies in the most humiliating way possible, completely powerless – so that God’s power – real power – could transform the world through him.

Presbyterian pastor Graham Standish observes “that willingly weak people are making room for God by weakening their own egos.” “The way of the ego is the way of pride, while the way of the spirit is the way of humility. Becoming humble simply means not thinking too much of ourselves and instead trying to let go of our egoistic pride so that we can make decisions that are of God and not of the human need for power. It means becoming intentionally weak in the ways of humanity so that we can become strong in the ways of God.”

Martin Luther King, Jr. preached humility to allow space for God’s power in his calls for non-violent response to the discrimination and violence of white aggressors during the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960’s. He understood the impact that turning the other cheek has. “…unearned suffering,” King taught, “is redemptive. Suffering, the nonviolent resister realizes, has tremendous educational and transforming possibilities.” Choosing to be weak and allow the aggressor to strike creates an opening for God’s power to transform, to open the eyes of the aggressor to see that their violence is unwarranted and unjust.

When we are in the midst of the struggle, when we are suffering, we have to have faith to trust that God will grasp hold with power where we release our grip. That’s what Paul is testifying to in 2 Corinthians. Questions had been raised in Corinth about Paul’s authority. So, Paul boasts that someone (a few sentences later he makes it clear that it was Paul himself) had experienced some 14 years earlier a spiritual revelation that was beyond description, no words could describe his vision – paradise, where the reality of God was clear and near – and he won’t share what he heard. Biblical scholar Ernest Best, in the Interpretation Commentary series, writes that one of two things happened that forced Paul to tell them now. “Either they expected good leaders to have had ‘visions and revelations’, or Paul’s rivals laid clam to [having had] them.”

Then, Paul was afflicted, perhaps in order to keep his head from getting too big and him to believe that his experience made him specially marked by God and invulnerable to powerlessness; Paul is plagued by a thorn in the flesh. Lots of conjecture has gone into trying to guess what that thorn was, but we just don’t know more. What we know is that Paul wanted rid of it. It made him weak. He prayed over and over and over for God to remove it. It was humiliating him and impeding his ability to serve God. Finally, God did take away the thorn, and with it he received a new perspective. He hadn’t deserved the incredible vision, and he didn’t deserve the thorn. But God’s grace was sufficient, and God’s power was made perfect in weakness.
“Therefore,” writes Paul, “I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities for the sake of Christ; for whenever I am weak, then I am strong.”

This is a central paradox of faith – Jesus came to save sinners. When we admit our faults, our doubts, our failures, our struggles, our pain…when we are weak, space is created for God’s power. We go to God; we seek God’s will. Our prayer life gets stronger. When we believe we are strong, we hold onto the jar and can’t get the lid open. Whenever we allow ourselves to let down our façade of strength, of self-sufficiency, of pride, and admit our weakness and embrace humility, we hand the jar to God. We turn our burdens over, “Can you get this open?” Then, we come to know true strength.

It is not easy to let go of human ways of power – I tend to grab a bottle opener and force the edge of the lid up a bit rather than ask someone else if they can open the jar. And when we finally give in and admit we can’t do it on our own, It is not easy to resist the urge to grab the jar back when we hear the first sssp of air and act like we were strong and deserving of the credit.

Yet, God does not work through human power. Jesus taught that in order to enter the kingdom of God, we must become like children – dependent on God. The way for God’s kingdom to come, for creation to live according to God’s will is for us to follow Jesus’ example – to be strong enough to be weak, so that God can act powerfully through us.