Powerlessness

Holy Trinity Sunday
May 22, 2016

O Lord our Lord,
  how majestic is your name in all the earth!—
 2you whose glory is chanted above the heavens out of the mouths of infants and children;
  you have set up a fortress against your enemies, to silence the foe and avenger. 
 3When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers,
  the moon and the stars you have set in their courses,
 4what are mere mortals that you should be mindful of them,
  human beings that you should care for them? 
 5Yet you have made them little less than divine;
  with glory and honor you crown them.
 6You have made them rule over the works of your hands;
  you have put all things under their feet:
 7all flocks and cattle,
  even the wild beasts of the field,
 8the birds of the air, the fish of the sea,
  and whatever passes along the paths of the sea.
 9O Lord our Lord,
  how majestic is your name in all the earth! – Psalm 8

1Therefore, since we are justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, 2through whom we have obtained access to this grace in which we stand; and we boast in our hope of sharing the glory of God. 3And not only that, but we also boast in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, 4and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, 5and hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.- Romans 5:1-5

Every spring we get a few ants in our home and here at church. I get it, things are warming up, the water floods out their homes. They’re hungry and we have food in our house. This year has been particularly bad. After seeing a stray ant or two or ten, I had put out some traps. But then I came home one day to find that they had discovered something they liked in our trash and invited all their friends over for a party. I honestly didn’t think twice about killing them. In theory I believe all of God’s creatures have value. When those creatures want to live in my trash can, theology goes out the window.

But I can’t help but think about those ants when I read today’s psalm. “What are mere mortals that you, [O God whom we cannot even describe], should be mindful of them, human beings that you should care for them?” I can’t help but think that the gap between myself and God is larger than the gap between those ants and myself. And what pests we must be sometimes when we seek out garbage instead of that which is life-giving. And what kind of God would care about such powerless creatures? We may have the capacity to get together and do significant things, but ultimately we are powerless to solve the biggest problems we face and ultimately powerless to save ourselves from death.

Through the fine work of researchers and doctors we have a lot of cures and a lot of treatments for a lot of diseases – much that can be done to hold ailments at bay and provide relief from symptoms. But finally there is much we don’t know, diseases that we cannot reverse, and many we know who experience the decline of their own or their loved ones’ bodies. We ultimately do not have that kind of power over our bodies.

Today we are being invited to share additional resources with ELCA World Hunger, a wonderful program that has done incredible work to reduce hunger in our own country and around the world. They have worked with local communities to develop programs that give short-term relief and set up long-term change. We can do something, even many things to fight hunger, but the problem is more than we can fix today and more perhaps than we can fix our lifetimes. It’s easy to feel powerless to transform such a fundamental problem in our world.

We are also powerless to control others, too. We cannot always change the mind of our political opponents, whether in the presidential elections or in local debates. We cannot always convince nations to engage peacefully nor make our friends and neighbors act the way we wish. We cannot dictate the outcome of collaborative endeavors by asking everyone to bend to our own will, no matter how hard we try, and, I say this because most of us have tried, that includes church, too. We confront every day in big and small ways our powerlessness against so many things.

And perhaps most of all we feel powerless as ants to explain how God is at work in all of this. On this Trinity Sunday we are called to stand in awe of a mysterious God whom human language cannot adequately describe. We are powerless to name fully the God who created us, the God we gather to worship every Sunday, the God to whom we pray in our moments of feeling most powerless in the face of suffering.

If we listen to Paul’s words, this powerlessness, this suffering, leads to hope: “Suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint.” Except…when it does disappoint – when suffering isn’t redemptive, when endurance just leaves you exhausted, when character is dismissed as meaningless, and hope dwindles. I don’t want to take issue with Paul, especially after we spent two recent sessions of our adult forum wrestling with Paul’s writing and rediscovering the ways he turns empire upside down for the sake of the gospel. But I can’t help but pause when he so neatly wraps things up like that.

Suffering can do this. Suffering can produce endurance, character, hope. People all the time find a way to make the best of the things that befall them. We love stories of people pulling together after natural disasters, families drawing closer as they stand together in the face of illness, people who overcome poverty to become great artists or civic leaders. It happens all the time. But we know, too, that not every story wraps up into a happy ending. Not every story ends in human triumph. Sooner or later every story ends with our powerlessness to cheat death.

And we are back to our question, why is it that God cares for us, these little powerless creatures in comparison to the creator of the universe? And I could almost get it if God simply did God’s very best to help us, if God ran around trying to fix all our problems, if God simply took pity on us because of our powerlessness. If God picked up every last one of our little ant-like selves and carried it outside and gave it something natural to eat and dug a little hole for the colony to live in. That would be the right thing for the more powerful to look out for the less powerful. If more of us lived that way on a consistent basis it would go a long way in transforming the world.

But that is not primarily what God does. The mystery we celebrate today is one of a relational God, a God who has the capacity to pour God’s self out. We celebrate today our frequently failed attempts to describe a God who has not simply helped us, lent us some power to deal with the things we are not powerful enough to do. What we celebrate in the mystery of the Trinity is a God who is capable of choosing to become powerless with us. Not simply to be kind to a tiny, mortal creature, as I might choose (or not choose as the case may be) to be toward a tiny insect, but God chooses to become that tiny, mortal creature.

This day is about the mystery of a powerful God who took on our powerlessness. And there I think is the key to what Paul is trying to tell us. Suffering does not produce endurance, endurance character, and character hope because we transform it, because we find the power we need to persevere, to hold on to hope in the face of the worst life can throw at us. Hope is the end result because God has chosen to suffer with us, to take on our powerlessness to become the tiny mortal creature. Hope is the end result because God endures that feeling of powerlessness in solidarity with us. God’s willingness to take on our character, our powerlessness, is what finally leads to hope.

This is God’s promise to us. That in everything we endure, and perhaps especially when we feel absolutely powerless to change the things that cause us the deepest grief and pain, that God is there. That God chooses to be there. That God chooses to be with us and in us. We cannot always explain how, but we come to this table bringing our hope or our longing for hope or even our having given up on hope that we might touch and taste God’s being poured out, God’s choosing powerlessness to be with us in suffering and in so doing be the hope that is more than we can ever muster on our own. Amen.

-Pastor Steven Wilco