The Power and the Glory
“For God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power, love, and sound judgment”
2 Timothy 1:7
Our problem with power is diagnosable. We’ve plucked a few verses from the Bible and constructed intricate hierarchies of power around them. Despite our Lord and Savior demonstrating and teaching on what real power and authority look like, we have over-weighted the writings of apostles who were dealing with unique issues in ancient contexts. We’ve done this because we have been afraid of what will happen if we don’t have predictable control over our institutions, over others, and even over ourselves.
What we’ve managed to accomplish, as my brilliant husband pointed out in his commentary on my last post, is to make our churches, families, and organizations look much more like the oppressive hierarchies of this world than the upside-down Kingdom of God which Jesus preached and modeled. After all, it’s much easier to construct an artificial hierarchy, like the one Bill Gothard did in his now infamous IBLP teachings (see picture below), than to allow the Spirit of God free reign in our communities.
Notice how this is a top-down approach to power and interaction with God, copied perfectly from the systems of hierarchy we see in the world. The Kingdom of God, though, is one we each carry within us. Umbrellas aren’t needed when the Living God’s home is inside of a person.
We haven’t realized it, but at least part of why we over-control is a deep-rooted fear that God’s agenda may compete with our own. This is evidenced in many ways, such as our reactions when a woman demonstrates inarguable Spirit-giftedness for certain types of ministries we’ve deemed off-limits for her. Or in our responses to a child who grows up and questions all that they’ve been taught, feeling called by God into new perspectives and approaches. Or in the way we acknowledge – or not – victims who cry out about the damage their souls, minds, and bodies have incurred in our systems of hierarchy that were supposed to protect. In these moments, we have a clear choice before us. We can either look at the evidence reality is presenting us and access humility enough to let it change us:
A woman is Spirit-filled and demonstrating clear godly leadership that would benefit the entire community.
A grown child is inviting us into another way of looking at things, an expanded view from a fresh perspective.
A human made in God’s image is reporting that they are injured by the logical outworking of the doctrines we’ve built.
Or, alternatively, we can recoil in disbelief because we can’t hold the possibility that the way we’ve been conditioned to read the Bible, or the way we’ve been taught to see ourselves and others, has been skewed toward keeping power in the hands of those who have always had it.
For some, even reading that last sentence can be inflammatory. And that says it all, really.
If we want to get at the root of our problem with power, if we want to rescue the gospel of Christ from the abuse and neglect which has too often been associated with its message, we must learn to accept and welcome a simple, but world-shaking truth:
Where the Spirit of the Lord is there is freedom (2 Corinthians 3:17).
Or, as the late spiritual theologian and linguist, Eugene Peterson, translates this portion of scripture:
“Whenever, though, they turn to face God as Moses did, God removes the veil and there they are – face to face! They suddenly recognize that God is a living, personal presence, not a piece of chiseled stone. And when God is personally present, a living Spirit, that old, constricting legislation is recognized as obsolete. We’re free of it! All of us! Nothing between us and God, our faces shining with the brightness of his face. And so we are transfigured much like the Messiah, our lives gradually becoming brighter and more beautiful as God enters our lives and we become more like him” (2 Corinthians 3:16-18).
God is an Empowering God
“But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come on you, and you will be my witnesses.”
Acts 1:8
God did not create us with free will, in God’s own image, and then provide us God’s own Holy Spirit, for the purpose of taking our agency, our intelligence and intuition, our voices, and then subordinating us to rigid human hierarchy.
On the contrary, God has always been in the business of empowering us for an interactive life of ministry in an ever-changing, complex world (Ephesians 3:20). This life of constant interaction between us and God is made possible by an uncontainable, and uncontrollable (John 3:8) Holy Spirit who helps and teaches each of us all things (John 14:26). In fact, this power is a gift – our treasure – intended to draw the world to God through its unique beauty and miraculous outcomes (2 Corinthians 4:7).
Each one of us – every man, woman, and child -- has been endowed with power from God and that power is meant to be a blessing to the world, to shine light in darkness, to open blind eyes, and to bring freedom to the captive. Our power has a sacred job to do and that’s why we can’t blindly hand it over to others based upon strict human hierarchical systems. We must steward our power as apprentices of Christ. And He supplies us with just the beautiful, honoring, and effective example we need to learn how to cultivate and wield the precious gift of our power.
God-given authority is destabilizing…and that is the point!
From Genesis to Revelation, the Grand Narrative of God presents a destabilizing motif of God exalting the lowly, the second-born, the outcast and alien, the unexpected one, and the weaker one over and above the strong, wise, natural leaders of the world. It’s no surprise, then, how Christ embodies this destabilizing motif in His life, teachings, death, and resurrection. A point He underscored time and again is that the lowly, weak, meek, scorned, and downtrodden are the “greatest” in this new Kingdom economy He was ushering in. Moreover, He emphasized through His teachings and His embodied example that true power, authority, and leadership would be found by becoming a servant to all.
Not by becoming an umbrella of so-called Divine authority and protection. Not by standing in as a divinely-appointed intermediary between those “under” us and God.
But a servant.
Why would God write this motif in human history? Why would God want to physically, emotionally, and spiritually demonstrate this to us through the life of Christ?
Simply because destabilization — not white-knuckled control — is the entire point! The incarnation of Christ, in which God birthed Godself into the world through a vulnerable woman of lowly status; the life of Christ in which God made Godself dependent upon humans for sustenance and protection; the death of Christ in which God made Godself vulnerable to betrayal, scorn, and murder — all of it was to destabilize the “powers and principalities” of this world-order.
“Brothers and sisters, consider your calling: Not many were wise from a human perspective, not many powerful, not many of noble birth. Instead, God has chosen what is foolish in the world to shame the wise, and God has chosen what is weak in the world to shame the strong. God has chosen what is insignificant and despised in the world—what is viewed as nothing—to bring to nothing what is viewed as something, so that no one may boast in his presence.”
1 Corinthians 1: 26-29
We don’t earn or receive our power through our gender (i.e. maleness), our parenthood, our godly marriages, our sexual purity, or any other human-created, culture-bound way. God endows us all – plain old, ordinary, nothing-special us -- with personal power, intelligence, agency, and intuition. Then God provides the power and presence of the Holy Spirit within us by making a home inside of us. And God does so because God is underscoring an important message for the world:
You have a way of doing things that is broken, dis-integrated, and passing away. My ways are different; they are based on love, shalom, wholeness, goodness, justice, humility, and honor. These are the eternal ways. Come, learn how good they can be for you and the world.
The Way Forward is Beautiful
In our attempts to insulate our communities from the corruption of this world, we have stumbled head-long into creating oppressive hierarchies which mimic the world precisely. Yet, we have the power to reverse course and cultivate communities comprised of servant leaders who are creating beauty, meaning, and love together.
I know I promised a three-part series but, because this topic is important, I want to make sure I’m doing my best to articulate the way forward with at least as much zeal as I’ve used to diagnose the problem. Next week’s post will outline my ideas about how we can move forward together to steward our power as our Lord taught us.
Until then, I leave you with these powerful words from spiritual philosopher and educator, bell hooks, and from the Apostle Paul, who would most likely be outraged at how his letters to ancient churches have been used to control, harm, and prevent people from living in the fullness of an interactive life with God:
“For this reason I kneel before the Father from whom every family in heaven and on earth is named. I pray that he may grant you, according to the riches of his glory, to be strengthened with power in your inner being through his Spirit, and that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith. I pray that you, being rooted and firmly established in love, may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the length and width, height and depth of God’s love, and to know Christ’s love that surpasses knowledge, so that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.” (Ephesians 3:14-18)
“To build community requires vigilant awareness of the work we must continually do to undermine all the socialization that leads us to behave in ways that perpetuate domination.”
– bell hooks, Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope, 2003