Musings

The lectionary text for Sunday, November 23^rd came from Jeremiah 23.  It regards shepherds that lead the people astray.  We do not have to look too deeply into the North American church to discern that we have not done well in heeding this warning.  Our disobedience as pastors who have not “tended the flock” but rather sought our own ends – is plainly described as our engaging in evil doings (see Jeremiah 23:2).

I have just finished reading a book that has been around for a couple of years by Tim Alberta, who has written for a few well-known publications.  He writes not as an outsider, but as one who has grown up in the evangelical world. 

His book, The Kingdom, Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism (2023), is a behind the scenes uncovering of what has diminished the evangelical world since Jerry Falwell, Sr. and the Moral Majority of the mid-1970s.  The conclusion I draw from reading Alberta is that the temptations of prosperity, influence and power, the ones Jesus rejected (see Matthew 4), are precisely the ones that we, by and large, grasp with both hands and wholeheartedly embrace for the sake of advancing the “evangelical” cause politically and economically.  Salvation is in service of a political agenda, rather than the mission of God.

As I noted, the temptations of prosperity, influence, and power are the ones that Jesus rejected.  He was being offered a seemingly more glorious and less painful way to accomplish his mission. In Matthew 4, after Jesus’ baptism and commissioning, he is sent into the wilderness by the Spirit where he is tempted by Satan.  It is clear from the Gospels that Jesus’ mission in taking on our humanity is to reveal the nature of God’s love for us by loving us (John 3:16-17), to re-create humanity and to restore relationship with God and with one another, overcoming the principalities and powers that entrap humanity through the spectacle of the cross and the overcoming of death by resurrection.  These temptations were meant to shift his focus away from his mission, to shift the focus upon himself, his own glory (being rescued by angels), his own prosperity (turning stones into bread), and having influence and power (through false worship) for the purpose of being worshiped for meeting the material needs of people (see John 6 for an example of this), rather than being one who has come to serve (see John 13) and bring salvation.

Jesus knew that giving allegiance to anyone or anything else besides his Father in heaven, would lead him to present a different gospel (a false gospel) that would not demonstrate God’s passion for restoring humanity.  In rejecting these temptations, Jesus’ life, ministry, crucifixion and resurrection reveal a Gospel that is sadly no longer clearly expressed in many North American churches, and as a result our allegiances are placed elsewhere rather than to Christ Jesus.

Alberta, citing Russell Moore, makes clear of where or to whom our allegiance is to be given: “If the gospel is true, that means the gospel in not a means to an end. It’s not a tool to excite nationalistic passions, or to form social bonds, or to teach civics.  The gospel is the announcement that God has raised the crucified Jesus from the dead and seated Him in the heavenly places at the right hand of God as the heavenly ruler of the cosmos.  If this is true, then every other allegiance is subordinate.” (The Kingdom, The Power, and The Glory, pp. 212,213)

Indeed, those who are disciples of Jesus have political influence, do shape society, yet not by giving into the temptations that present themselves as the only way, the easy way, nor by giving allegiance to the principalities and powers, but rather in giving allegiance to Jesus we seek to live as he lived/lives, embracing the way of Jesus by loving and serving, giving of ourselves and empowering others, confronting the ways of the world which bind and imprison humanity, ways that continually focus on a preoccupation with ourselves, ways which continually foster creating divisions and not being able to love our enemies. 

Living in the way of Jesus does not come about through yielding to temptations of prosperity, influence, and power, but rather yielding, to what can only be expressed as a powerlessness, which indeed is the only kind of power that can truly set humanity free. 

Indeed, Jesus presented a different paradigm for those who give allegiance to him and seek to follow him.  Tony Campolo in The Power Delusion: A Serious Call to Consider Jesus’ Approach to Power states that Jesus “. . . glorifies powerlessness in a world that worships power.  He offers meekness to those who teach aggressiveness.  His message is foolishness to those committed to a lifestyle that prefers power to love.  What is sad is that the most flagrant failure to understand the call of Christ to relinquish power, to discover strength in weakness, and to prefer meekness and love to domination and control, should occur within the body of people who claim to be his followers” (p. 31). 

Jesus’ way of leading in ways that do not exemplify coercive power or control is well illustrated by Robert Farrar Capon in The Parables of the Kingdom when he talks about right and left-handed power.  He indicates that right-handed power is “direct, straight-line intervening power” (p. 18), “logical and plausibility-loving” (p. 20) which God chose never to use again since the flood (cf. Genesis 8:21) and “since Noah, God has evidently had almost no interest in using direct power to fix up the world” (p. 18). 

Though right-handed power is good for doing day to day things like eating, taking a shower, working, it has a limitation.  “If you take the view that one of the chief objects in life is to remain in loving relationships with other people, straight-line power becomes useless” (p. 19).  Though we use straight-line power to rescue a child from on-coming traffic without it causing a broken relationship, relationships are not built through right-handed power.  In any relationship, “the whole thing will be destroyed unless you . . . simply refuse to use it” (p. 19).

Left-handed power “is guided by the more intuitive, open, and imaginative right-side of the brain.  Left-handed power, in other words, is precisely paradoxical power: power that looks for all the world like weakness, intervention that seems indistinguishable from nonintervention.  More than that, it is guaranteed to stop no determined evildoers whatsoever.  It might, of course, touch and soften their hearts.  But then again, it might not.  It certainly didn’t for Jesus; and if you decide to use it, you should be quite clear that it probably won’t for you either.  The only thing it does insure is that you will not – even after your chin has been bashed in – have made the mistake of closing any interpersonal doors from your side” (p. 20).

“Which may not, at first glance, seem like much of a thing to insure, let alone like an exercise worthy of the name of power.  But when you come to think of it, it is power – so much power, in fact, that it is the only thing in the world that evil can’t touch” (p. 20).

Such left-handed power, as Farrar Capon describes, is the way of servanthood, the way of the cross that stands in paradox to the way of power of the principalities and powers.  The disciples wanted the other kind of power, right-handed power, power that controls (see Mark 9:33ff); too many church leaders lust for such right-handed power as well. Yet, such right-handed power, is not the power of Jesus, is not the kind of power that brings about new creation and brings about a restoration of humanity in relationship with God and with one another. 

Though there are a growing number of pastors and church leaders who are discovering that yielding to temptations of prosperity, influence and power, do not serve the purposes for which God had originally called them, there are still too many who readily still embrace those that say they support the purposes of God, yet live and act in ways that actually subvert the ways of God.  As we consider this and reflect upon the way of Jesus in our lives, we need to ask ourselves whom we choose to serve and to whom we give allegiance.