PEOPLE'S CHURCH OF DOVER

Psalm 62:6-14                                                                                  Power Belongs to God
Sermon September 6, 2009:  People’s United Church of Christ, Dover, DE:  The Rev. Dan Griggs

          This will be the last sermon in my summer series on lines from the Psalter in the Book of Common Prayer.  I have more lines on a list, and we may come back to them in the future; but for now we’ll end this series with a Labor Sunday view of the power of God.

This is a message of good news.  It means that you reside in God’s care.

          When my brother, Dick, was a teenager he used to spend every summer with our grandparents on the farm.  All his adult life he treasured those memories of plowing with mules, cutting and stacking hay without a mechanical hay-baler—a boy could build his muscles and get ready for the high school football season doing that.  The fact that our grandfather farmed in the 1940’s the way his grandfather farmed in the 1860’s meant real physical labor.  Dick milked cows, learned how to manage a team of hennies (not many people know what a henny is anymore[1]).  He learned our grandfather’s linguistic skills—it was said that neighbors a mile away could hear him using his best Anglo-Saxon to the mules:  my brother became an expert in Anglo-Saxon.  But as a city boy Dick didn’t quite understand everything that happened, or every use of physical force by his mentor.  Dick thought that there was a destructive power our grandfather was using, and he prided himself on bringing that destructive attitude back home—to the football field, and also to the family.  He called it “mean.”  Our parents never bought that—they had known Bigdaddy a lot longer, understood his ways a lot better, and realized that this “meanness” was from within Dick, not from the farm. 

          You see, that’s part of the trouble when we try to understand the word “power.”  Does it mean force, or authority?  Does it mean “meanness,” or summoning the strength to do something that’s physically or emotionally hard?  We say that elected officials have “power,” but what we mean is “authority.”  Now in a culture like Nazi Germany the word “power” was more appropriate:  the German people not only voted to give Adolf Hitler government “authority,” but they ceded to him immense “power,” believing that he would power Germany back from the embarrassment and cost of losing World War One.  So when we talk about “power,” we need to be aware that it’s something different and something more than “authority.” 

          We see power in our military, in an employer, in the way an institution works when it starts running over people because it no longer serves but rules.  Along the Monongahela River in Pittsburgh there are miles and miles of coke ovens, steel mills, railroad tracks:  it all has a distinct smell I’ve never smelled anywhere else—the smell of raw power harnessed for heavy industrial production.  Of course, most of that is all gone now—our steel comes from overseas.  U. S. Steel has lost its power. 

          And going to school in Pittsburgh I was taught about the power of the unions in that city and across America through most of the last century.  Labor Day came about as a national holiday precisely to honor union workers in steel plants, auto plants, tire factories, truckers and stevedores, coal miners and seamstresses—the people whose sweat and muscle came to represent American power in an earlier time. 

          Nowadays we say “knowledge is power.”  And even more than knowledge, we see that secret knowledge is power.  And then there is the power that flows through two or three one-inch cables, a three-inch pipe and a five-inch water line that supply power to your home:  the sum total of power that makes our homes habitable can come through a hole in the wall six inches in diameter.  Is that “power”?  I think I prefer the way my brother thought of “power”    over this technological dependence we live with today. 

          When the psalmist sang “power belongs to God,” he had something specific in mind.  Throughout the early history of ancient Israel the people turned again and again to worship the rain-god Baal, as if Baal had the power to make their crops grow.  And there in Jerusalem sat the king of Israel on the divine throne with an army at his command—power.  In the towns, several times a week the older men would gather at the town gate and people would bring their arguments (their lawsuits, we would call them) for the elders to decide:  and they had the power to decide.  And all the psalmist had to do was walk up the street to the temple and he would see the power of wise age, and the power of wiry youth all around him.  And I dare not forget the power of women to take a space and make it comfortable to the eyes as well as to the flesh; and a woman’s power to bring new life into the world.  But what the psalmist saw all around him was that neither the rain-god, nor the king and his army, nor the elders at the gate, nor age nor youth, nor child-bearing women have the power of the cosmos.  There is a sense of power that pervades all these and surpasses them, and that is what the psalmist is singing about:

          After I’ve listed all these other kinds of power, the psalm feels a little weak, don’t you think!  All this visible power, and now a song about God?  How can religion take care of everything else?  How can I say, as I did earlier, that you reside in God’s care? 

          In fact, these words begin to sound a little bit like wishful thinking, like what Sigmund Freud would call “projection,” and Karl Marx would call “the opiate of the people.”  Modern culture says that life is tough, so we invent an invisible deity to whom we can pray and feel better.  Isn’t that what a technological culture has decided we’re doing in this room?

          Allow me to reframe what I mean when I say that you reside in God’s care.  We call God a king and talk about “the kingdom of God,” but we know that God isn’t really a literal king—it’s a metaphor.  If God is not a high sovereign who exercises arbitrary, capricious domination over the world and all of us who are in it, but rather—if God, the real God, is the ground of all being which indwells all things, and in which all things subsist—if that’s a bit closer to the reality of God, then what can we say? 

          Using the philosophical language of ancient Greece, the Apostle Paul preached a sermon in Athens in which he said things that point in the direction I want to go.  He said:[2]

 

          That ground of being we call “God” is present in and through everything, and everything subsists in God, so then the line in the psalm “power belongs to God” means that you are anchored in God’s care, you dwell in God’s benediction—in life and in death, in destruction or in rescue, in what you perceive as a blessing or in what you perceive as a curse, when you have and when you lack, when you are attracted and when you are repelled, when you see and when you are blind, when you love and when you hate:  you reside in God’s care.  And all these opposites become relative:  the absolute    is the unity of all things in the ground of being. 

          So we must speak of “power” from a whole new vista.  Because you reside in God’s care, you can possess the power of peace.  Dwelling in God’s benediction, you can discover the power of servanthood to neighbor.  Anchored in God’s depths, you behold the power of the incarnation in the life, teachings, suffering and eternity of Jesus; and you yourself can incarnate something of that love.  Because you reside in God’s care, you have access to the power of your humanity—which is why God wanted you here. 

          So let institutions be what they are.  Let kings and armies act the part.  Let the wise give answers, the old teach wisdom and the young glory in their strength.  But “power belongs to God”—even these small manifestations of power belong to God.  And you reside in God’s care.

AMEN