Sermon Illustrations on Power
Background
Don’t Try to Hug Jesus and Step on His Feet
To paraphrase St. Augustine: If someone comes hug, kiss, and honor you, but steps on your bare feet with hobnailed shoes, you’ll still complain. So will God complain when those who honor him with their words while oppressing the poor.
Adapted from Charles Spurgeon, Feathers for Arrows (1870)
Life’s Greatest Trap
Over the years, I have come to realize that the greatest trap in our life is not success, popularity, or power, but self-rejection. Success, popularity, and power can indeed present a great temptation, but their seductive quality often comes from the way they are part of the much larger temptation to self-rejection. When we have come to believe in the voices that call us worthless and unlovable, then success, popularity, and power are easily perceived as attractive solutions. The real trap, however, is self-rejection.
As soon as someone accuses me or criticizes me, as soon as I am rejected, left alone, or abandoned, I find myself thinking, “Well, that proves once again that I am a nobody.” . . . [My dark side says,] I am no good . . . I deserve to be pushed aside, forgotten, rejected, and abandoned. Self-rejection is the greatest enemy of the spiritual life because it contradicts the sacred voice that calls us the “Beloved.” Being the Beloved constitutes the core truth of our existence.
Henri J. M. Nouwen, Life of the Beloved: Spiritual Living in a Secular World (Crossroad, 2002).
Power, Love, & the Model of Christ on the Cross
If power is the ability to get things done, to change circumstances and people, then this takes us to the heart of the Christian understanding of power: it is the power of self-sacrificial love and service. There is nothing more powerful than this. Love can soften the hardest of hearts, the most rigid minds, the stoniest of souls.
Love can do what naked force cannot. When we are loved we are able to change. When we are unloved we dig in our heels and refuse to budge. Love is the most powerful force in the world. And it is on cross that we see the most dramatic, powerful and profound act of love: the love of God that voluntarily took all human shame and failure onto himself in the person of his Son.
Playing with Chemistry Sets
On the whole, I do not find Christians, outside of the catacombs, sufficiently sensible of conditions. Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats to church we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping god may wake someday and take offense, or the waking god may draw us out to where we can never return.
Power is for Service
The way most of us serve keeps us in control. We choose whom, when, where and how we will serve. We stay in charge. Jesus is calling for something else. He is calling us to be servants. When we make this choice, we give up the right to be in charge. The amazing thing is that when we make this choice, we experience great freedom. We become available and vulnerable, and we lose our fear of being stepped on, or manipulated, or taken advantage of. Are not these our basic fears? We do not want to be in a position of weakness.
Maxie Dunnam, The Workbook on Spiritual Disciplines (Nashville: Upper Room, 1984), p. 101.
The Shadow Side of Church Growth
The disgraced megachurch pastor Mark Driscoll once described his church’s growth by saying that there was “a pile of dead bodies behind the Mars Hill bus.” As if that wasn’t bad enough, he added, “and, by God’s grace, it’ll be a mountain by the time we’re done.” Though Mars Hill would close not too many years after Driscoll spoke those awful words, his remarks map quite neatly onto a post-Trumpian evangelicalism that has left behind its first love and instead embraced a gospel of power and wealth. And there is indeed a mountain of bodies in its wake. Many of them are known to me.
…It is about the broader question of how we build flourishing communities shaped by the truths taught in the Christian faith. The goal is not merely to see the faith passed on to our children but also to see others enter the community and similarly be nourished and in time drawn to Christ themselves. And much of that has to do with the question of place, home, and the daily practices that shape those places.
Taken from: In Search of the Common Good: Christian Fidelity in a Fractured World by Jake Meador Copyright (c) 2019 by Jake Meador. Published by InterVarsity Press, Downers Grove, IL. www.ivpress.com
The Truth about Power
Here is what we need to discover about power: it is both better and worse than we could imagine…It is the one swift stroke of the machete that opens a coconut for the honored guest. It is a source of refreshment, laughter, joy and life—and of more power. Remove power and you cut off life, the possibility of creating something new and better in this rich and recalcitrant world. Life is power.
Power is life. And flourishing power leads to flourishing life. Of course, like life itself, power is nothing—worse than nothing—without love. But love without power is less than it was meant to be. Love without the capacity to make something of the world, without the ability to respond to and make room for the beloved’s flourishing, is frustrated love.
… Yet it is the way of our world that the very thing that makes us fully human at our best is what most truly corrupts us at our worst. Power at its worst is the unmaker of humanity—breeding inhumanity in the hearts of those who wield power, denying and denouncing the humanity of the ones who suffer under power. This is the power exercised by the money lender, by the police who ignore or protect him, by the officials who would rather not confront him. This power ultimately will put everything around it to death rather than share abundant life with another.
Taken from Playing God: Redeeming the Gift of Power by Andy Crouch Copyright (c) 2013 pp.24-25 by Andy Crouch. Published by InterVarsity Press, Downers Grove, IL. www.ivpress.com
Two Gods on My Side
The Athenian general and politician Themistocles eventually alienated a large number of Greek City-States that came under their rule in the late 6thand early 5thcenturies B.C. With his fleet of ships anchored off a small island, he sent a message to one such vassal state, saying he had two powerful gods on each side of him that would compel them to pay up-Persuasion and Force. The leaders of the small island sent back a message that said they had two equally powerful gods on their side-Poverty and Despair…
Stuart Strachan Jr.
Stories
The American Cincinnatus
I am always intrigued by how few Americans know the account of what has been called the most important unknown moment in American history and the single most important gathering ever held in the United States: the incident in which America’s most noble Cincinnatus refused the title of “George I of the United States” offered him by the Continental Army in Newburgh, New York, toward the close of the Revolutionary War.
After the decisive victory over Lord Cornwallis at Yorktown in 1781, the army had moved into quarters near Newburgh to wait for the peace settlement. But without the war to concentrate on, various states had failed to meet their obligations to the army, and the Continental Congress had grown remiss in paying the soldiers to whom it owed its success.
In many cases payments were years in arrears, pensions were in question altogether, and the soldiers feared that Congress would simply disband the army and default on its promises. Not surprisingly, the camp had become a breeding ground for bitterness in which talk of treason and sedition was rife.
In short, in 1782 the American Revolution had reached the stage
characteristic of many republics and revolutions at which a dangerous vacuum of power had built up.
The obvious way forward was for a strong man to step in and stop the slide toward chaos by wresting the situation to his will-as Julius Caesar did in Rome, Cromwell in England, Robespierre in France and Lenin in Russia.
All those men did, but not George Washington. Letters and signed and unsigned papers began to circulate through the camp, stirring the restless dissatisfaction, as did whispering that the only solution to the “weakness of republicks” was a military dictatorship and that there was only one man fit for such rule. But the first commander in chief would have none of it.
When one of his own officers, Lewis Nicola, wrote to him saying that they would be better off with him as king, he flatly turned the thought aside: “Be assured, Sir, no occurrence in course of the War, has given me more painful sensations than your information of there being such ideas existing in the army as you have expressed.”
Taken from A Free People’s Suicide: Sustainable Freedom and the American Future by Os Guinness Copyright (c) 2013 by Os Guinness. Published by InterVarsity Press, Downers Grove, IL. www.ivpress.com
The Emperor and the Whipping Boy
In 1987 director Bernardo Bertolucci released the film The Last Emperor to raving reviews. It was based on the autobiography of the last living emperor of the Manchu dynasty in China, Henry Aisin-Gioro Pu Yi (before its fall to the communists in the 1950s). Eventually the movie would be hailed “the most honored film in 25 years,” including nine Academy Awards (Oscars).
And while the story tells the riches to rags story of Yi’s life, from spoiled child emperor to imprisoned and tortured detainee after the revolution to his final seven years as a gardener in a Beijing Park, what is perhaps most interesting, at least for our sake, is one account towards the beginning of the film.
At this point, Yi is surrounded by the trappings of an imperial power. 1,000 eunuch servants exist to fulfill his every whim. At one point, Yi’s brother asks him what happens to him when he makes a mistake? The emperor responds, “when I do something wrong, somebody else is punished.” To demonstrate this, he picks up an ornate jar and smashes it on the ground. Immediately a servant is taken and beaten for the action of the emperor. It is, in a sense, a true version of the famous “whipping boy” story.
Why is this so interesting? Because it gives us a perfect contrast, the perfect opposite to what Jesus does on our behalf. From the world’s perspective, it is the poor and marginalized who are to bear the brunt of the world’s pain and blame. It is the unnamed servant who receives the punishment in this account, not the emperor. In the Christian story however, it’s just the opposite. The king takes the punishment on our behalf.
Stuart Strachan Jr., Source Content from The Last Emperor, Columbia Pictures, 1987.
The Emperor Has No Clothes
Nakedness is the subject of one of the most famous folk parables of power: Hans Christian Andersen’s tale “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” A vain emperor is visited by two “weavers” who promise that their fabric is not only exquisitely beautiful but also, shall we say, revealing: “clothes made of this cloth had a wonderful way of becoming invisible to anyone who was unfit for his office, or who was unusually stupid.”
Spotting a chance to both acquire a new set of clothes and discover which of his subjects and ministers are unfit, the emperor commissions a magnificent set of clothes from the swindlers. One after another, beginning with an “honest old minister” sent to check up on the work in progress, the emperor’s most trusted advisers, and then the emperor himself, visit the weavers. Seeing nothing at all on the loom, and stricken with the thought that their foolishness and unfitness might be revealed if they admit they cannot see the cloth, all of them, right up to the emperor himself, carry on with the pretense right up to its logical and ridiculous conclusion: Then the minister of public processions announced: “Your Majesty’s canopy is waiting outside.” “Well, I’m supposed to be ready,” the Emperor said, and turned again for one last look in the mirror. “It is a remarkable fit, isn’t it?”
The waiting crowds, too, go along with this awkward game, until a little child says, “But he hasn’t got anything on!” Soon the whole town is crying out, “But he hasn’t got anything on!” And in folk memory, or at least the way I most often have heard the story told, that little child’s inconvenient truth telling puts the foolish pageant to an end. But not in Andersen’s own version, which ends rather differently: The Emperor shivered, for he suspected they were right. But he thought, “This procession has got to go on.” So, he walked more proudly than ever, as his noblemen held high the train that wasn’t there at all.
Andersen’s story is a veritable catalog of insights about power and the human condition.
Taken from Playing God: Redeeming the Gift of Power by Andy Crouch. Copyright (c) 2013 pp.100-101 by Andy Crouch. Published by InterVarsity Press, Downers Grove, IL. www.ivpress.com
Golf and Power Dynamics
George Bush Sr. (41) enjoyed the game of golf, even if he wasn’t necessarily very good at it. Following his presidency and his return to private life, he began to notice something: It’s amazing how many people beat you in golf once you’re no longer President.”
Source Material from Clifton Fadiman, Bartlett’s Book of Anecdotes.
Religion: Instructions without Power
One Sunday morning a number of years ago my wife piled the children into the family car to come to Sunday school and worship. When she turned the switch to start, the engine wouldn’t even grunt. The battery was completely dead.
After lunch, I went to a nearby service station and related my problem to the attendant. He went back to speak to the station manager who was under a car on the grease rack. The attendant came back with this helpful offer, “Sure we can take care of it. Bring it on in.”
Now isn’t that the trouble with a lot of religion? You get instructions, but you don’t get power. You get good advice, but you don’t get the strength to carry it out. My friends, good advice without power is bad news.
B. Clayton Bell, Sermon: How Do You Catch the Wind? Quoted in Mark Galli & Craig Brian Smith, Preaching that Connects, Zondervan.
Lifting the Rock
One day a father decided to take his son to play at the local park. The boy quickly gravitated to the sandbox and found himself mesmerized by the colors and textures surrounding him. After a short time, he began digging around to see what treasures might reveal themselves to him.
As his hands plunged under the sand he discovered something rather large, and having pushed enough of the sand away, realized it was a large rock. Instantly he knew he needed to move that rock, no matter how big it was. This rock was the obstacle to his dreams of a sandbox clear of all extraneous matter.
So the boy tried as hard as he could to move the rock. He pushed and pushed and pushed, and finally he was able to get it to the edge of the sandbox. But the next step would be the hardest. How could he get it over the edge? Again the boy pushed and pushed until his energy was completely fried. The rock’s stuckness matched the boy’s feelings of the situation. Eventually he started to sob.
The boy’s father watched all this, and just when the meltdown began, the father went over to his son and began to comfort his overtaxed, dejected son.
“Why didn’t you use all the strength available to you to move the rock?” the father asked.
The boy was confused, “I did daddy, it’s just too heavy.”
“No son,” you didn’t. You didn’t ask me to help.” And at that, the father lifted the rock with a single hand and tossed it out of the sandbox.
Original Source Unknown, adapted by Stuart Strachan Jr.
Not a Single Note of Joy
Months of struggle, of strategy, of sacrifice all paid off in a landslide victory for President Richard Nixon in 1972. On election night his aide Charles Colson was in the place he had always wanted to be. The picture Colson draws of that night contains three figures: chief of staff H. R. Haldeman, arrogant and sullen; Nixon, restlessly gulping scotch; and Colson, feeling let down, deflated, “a deadness inside me.”
Three men at the power pinnacle of the world, and not a single note of joy discernible in the room. “If someone had peered in on us that night from some imaginary people in the ceiling of the President’s office, what a curious sight it would have been: a victorious President, grumbling over words he would grudgingly say to his fallen foe; his chief of staff angry, surly, and snarling; and the architect of his political strategy sitting in numbed stupor.”
The experience is not uncommon. We work hard for something, get it and then find we don’t want it. We struggle for years to get to the top and find life there thoroughly boring. Colson writes, “Being part of electing a President was the fondest ambition of my life. For three long years I had committed everything I had, every ounce of energy to Richard Nixon’s cause. Nothing else mattered. We had no time together as a family, no social life, no vacations.” And then, having in his hands what he had set out to gain, he found he couldn’t enjoy it.
Taken from A Long Obedience in the Same Direction: Discipleship in an Instant Society by Eugene Peterson Copyright (c) 1980, 2000 by Eugene Peterson. Published by InterVarsity Press, Downers Grove, IL. www.ivpress.com
The Power of Privilege
In January 1999 I was flying on Saudi Arabian Airlines from Mumbai, India, to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, and then onward to London. I arrived at the Mumbai airport to find a long line. Perhaps seventy-five people were waiting to check in, and nearly every one was an Indian man with a very small suitcase…Like all lines in India, this one was packed closely together, and we were all sweating in the mid-day heat.
But I was fairly sure the plane would not take off without us, so I was in no great hurry. As the single ticket agent checked in each traveler at the far-off counter, I prepared myself for a long wait. I had been in line for under five minutes when the agent came out from behind the counter, walked down the line until he came to my spot, and said, “Come with me.”
When you’re several thousand miles from home and an airline agent says that, you obey…So I followed him, up to the front of the line, past all seventy-five Indian men with their suitcases…Without another word he took my passport, examined it, printed out a boarding pass, and said, “You may go.”… When I realized that I had just been singled out and effectively ordered to cut in line, I was shocked, not to mention embarrassed. I felt a momentary urge to make a small speech…
“I didn’t ask for this!…Flushed with surprise and embarrassment, I could not detect the slightest surprise or discomfort in that line of men. It gradually dawned on me that not only were they not surprised that I had been ushered to the front of the line—they had expected it the moment I arrived. They knew about something I was only beginning to understand: the power of privilege.
Taken from Playing God: Redeeming the Gift of Power by Andy Crouch Copyright (c) 2013 pp.24-25 by Andy Crouch. Published by InterVarsity Press, Downers Grove, IL. www.ivpress.com
The Showdown Between Ambrose & Theodosius
In the Christian faith, we frequently take for granted how radically Jesus evens the playing field. No matter your wealth, your position, let alone your race or gender, all of us are equal in God’s eyes. No one is given special status or access to God over another. The Roman emperor Theodosius had to learn this the hard way. Theodosius established Christianity as the official religion of the Roman Empire, but that did not automatically make him a saint. When, after massacring thousands of citizens in Thessalonica, Ambrose, the Bishop of Milan refused to offer him communion.
In fact, Ambrose personally confronted Theodosius at the door of the church saying, “you cannot enter here with hands soiled by human blood.” Theodosius cunningly responded that if he was guilty of murder, so was King David, the man supposedly “after God’s own heart.” Ambrose’s response was equally as cunning: “You have imitated David in his crime, imitate him in repentance.” Eventually, Ambrose was able to get Theodosius to promise not to execute anyone sentenced to death until forty days had passed, and he was to perform penance before being admitted to communion.
Stuart Strachan Jr., Source Material from Roland Bainton, The Church of Our Fathers, 1941.
A Son That Ruled All of Greece
At one point in his career, Themistocles was overheard saying that his young son ruled all of Greece. When his talking companion asked him to explain, he said, “Athens holds sway over all Greece; I dominate Athens; my wife dominates me; our newborn son dominates her.”
Stuart Strachan Jr.
Thomas Aquinas on Peter’s Wealth
An old joke can sum up the failure nicely: It’s said that Thomas Aquinas was once brought into a great city where he was to meet the pope. He saw huge churches, clerics in ornate garb, and great armies lined up to defend the church’s rule. And as he took all this in, the pope looked at him and said, “No more can St. Peter say ‘silver and gold have I none,’” referencing the story in Acts 3 where Peter says those words to a lame man begging to be healed.
“Indeed,” responds Thomas, “but neither can he say, ‘rise, take up your bed and walk.’” In the years since World War II the American church has consistently chosen to chase power, prestige, and mainstream status. We have gained all of those things. The tragedy, of course, is that those are the very things that Jesus warns us about so frequently in the Gospels.
A movement designed to obtain power and prestige and status will end up where Jesus predicted it would and where the American church has ended up. Modern American Christianity was never intended to produce morally upright people given to sacrificial love of neighbor. If it were intended to do that, we would not continue to restore discredited, unrepentant leaders to roles of authority within the movement.
Taken from: In Search of the Common Good: Christian Fidelity in a Fractured World by Jake Meador Copyright (c) 2019 by Jake Meador. Published by InterVarsity Press, Downers Grove, IL. www.ivpress.com
Two Gods on My Side
The Athenian general and politician Themistocles eventually alienated a large number of Greek City-States that came under their rule in the late 6thand early 5thcenturies B.C. With his fleet of ships anchored off a small island, he sent a message to one such vassal state, saying he had two powerful gods on each side of him that would compel them to pay up-Persuasion and Force. The leaders of the small island sent back a message that said they had two equally powerful gods on their side-Poverty and Despair…
Stuart Strachan Jr.
The Ways of Power
“You are so wise and powerful. Will you not take the Ring?” “No!” cried Gandalf, springing to his feet. “With that power I should have power too great and terrible. And over me the Ring would gain a power still greater and more deadly.” His eyes flashed and his face was lit as by a fire within. “Do not tempt me! For I do not wish to become like the Dark Lord himself. Yet the way of the Ring to my heart is by pity, pity for weakness and the desire of strength to do good. Do not tempt me! I dare not take it, not even to keep it safe, unused.”
In J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, the wizard Gandalf is the embodiment of true wisdom, but his wisdom may appear foolish—as when he refuses to take the ring of power. Gandalf is powerful, yet his is a power found in weakness. Other characters reject Gandalf’s way, believing that the only way to truly defeat the enemy is by wielding the ring. But in the end they are unmasked as fools. Their eyes can see worldly power, but they are blind to the power of wisdom. As with Middle Earth, so with our world. Two ways of power are presented to us. Only one is the true path of wisdom.
Who Said That?
During his years as premier of the Soviet Union, Nikita Khrushchev denounced many of the policies and atrocities of Joseph Stalin. Once, as he censured Stalin in a public meeting, Khrushchev was interrupted by a shout from a heckler in the audience. “You were one of Stalin’s colleagues. Why didn’t you stop him?” “Who said that?” roared Khrushchev. An agonizing silence followed as nobody in the room dared move a muscle. Then Khrushchev replied quietly, “Now you know why.”
Today in the Word, July 13, 1993.
A Triumphal Procession
Two thousand years ago, triumphal processions were massively popular. It was, in all likelihood, the only chance most people would have to see the leaders and heroes of the day.
For the Romans they took the form of a ritualistic event known as the Triumph. Triumphs were given only in special circumstances, usually when a general, or later, an emperor, had achieved a massive military victory. These processions had to be approved by the Senate before they could take place. Over time, these triumphs became more and more stylized and each became bigger and bigger.
They would usually involve a retelling of the great battles the leader had won, including theatrical re-enactments. They would display both those they defeated in battle, including all the trappings of the vanquished culture, and the great booty they had looted following their victories. For example, when they defeated Carthage, they displayed their foe’s war elephants. And when Titus’s triumph was celebrated, they displayed ornate objects from the destroyed Temple. And the captives would be publicly slain.
This tradition frames how we see Palm Sunday: how Jesus both works with and undermines the culture of triumphal processions.
Jesus rides on a donkey. The choice of a donkey is interesting. Jesus is intentionally choosing this humble beast to say something of his kingdom. It is a rebuttal to the kind of Messiah the people expect. His kingdom would not be led by force… like Rome’s or Herod’s.
But Jesus’ kingdom is very different…and it’s all topsy-turvy. This is the kingdom that Jesus has been preaching about in village after village. And this kingdom threatens those who have power: Pharisees, Sadducees, and Romans. He is a ruler, very different from the Herods and Caesars of his day, not to mention the Napoleans or Hitlers of more recent years. His kingdom is a humble kingdom. His kingdom is built, not on power, coercion, statecraft and power-bargains, but on the eternal love of the Father, whom he desperately wanted his people to experience.
Stuart Strachan Jr.
A Messianic Procession in 1936
Just about 80 years ago, a crowd gathered on a humid August day to commence what was to be an unparalleled event for its time. Hundreds of thousands of spectators, police officers, and soldiers gathered for an event so spectacular, so colossal, it almost seemed to come out of a fairy tale rather than real life. Some six continents and 49 countries were represented, with most guests, especially the athletes wearing clothing with their own home flag represented, either on their person, or as they waved their flag for the crowd to see.
But the most obvious flag, the most conspicuous flag that day, was by far, the Swastika. It was draped anywhere and everywhere there was room. For this was the 1936 Olympics, hosted in Berlin. And while most of the athletes were present, the main attraction that day was not the athletes who would compete for medals, but the one who would preside over them, Adolf Hitler.
At 3:18 p.m., according to the author Daniel James Brown, “Adolf Hitler left the chancellery in central Berlin, standing upright in his Mercedes limousine, his right arm lifted in the Nazi salute. Tens of thousands of Hitler Youth, storm troopers, and helmeted military guards lined his route from the Brandenburg Gate through the Tiergarten and out to the Reichssportfeld. Hundreds of thousands of ordinary German citizens had massed along the way, leaning from windows and waving flags or standing twelve or more deep along the street, again using periscopes to get a glimpse of Hitler.
Now, as his limousine passed, they extended their right arms in the Nazi salute, their faces upturned, ecstatic, screaming in pulsing waves as he rode by, “Heil! Heil! Heil!” At the Maifeld, where the U.S. Olympic team members stood, the athletes began to hear the distant sound of crowds cheering, the noise slowly swelling and growing nearer, then loudspeakers blaring, “He is coming! He is coming”. “He is coming! He is Coming!” Chilling words aren’t they?
And I would argue not just because we know what leadership under Hitler would bring to the modern world, but also, the messianic overtones that we hear in the shouts of Hail! And He is coming. I could not help but compare this scene to the day we celebrate as Palm Sunday…the day Jesus entered into the Holy City, not standing on a Mercedes, or even the ancient world’s equivalent, the chariot, but rather he came on a donkey.
Stuart Strachan Jr. Sermon: “Witnessing to the Light”, June 2015. Source Material from Daniel James Brown, The Boys in the Boat: Nine Americans and Their Epic Quest for Gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympics, Penguin Books, 2014.
Analogies
Don’t Try to Hug Jesus and Step on His Feet
To paraphrase St. Augustine: If someone comes hug, kiss, and honor you, but steps on your bare feet with hobnailed shoes, you’ll still complain. So will God complain when those who honor him with their words while oppressing the poor.
Adapted from Charles Spurgeon, Feathers for Arrows (1870)
The Emperor and the Whipping Boy
In 1987 director Bernardo Bertolucci released the film The Last Emperor to raving reviews. It was based on the autobiography of the last living emperor of the Manchu dynasty in China, Henry Aisin-Gioro Pu Yi (before its fall to the communists in the 1950s). Eventually the movie would be hailed “the most honored film in 25 years,” including nine Academy Awards (Oscars).
And while the story tells the riches to rags story of Yi’s life, from spoiled child emperor to imprisoned and tortured detainee after the revolution to his final seven years as a gardener in a Beijing Park, what is perhaps most interesting, at least for our sake, is one account towards the beginning of the film.
At this point, Yi is surrounded by the trappings of an imperial power. 1,000 eunuch servants exist to fulfill his every whim. At one point, Yi’s brother asks him what happens to him when he makes a mistake? The emperor responds, “when I do something wrong, somebody else is punished.” To demonstrate this, he picks up an ornate jar and smashes it on the ground. Immediately a servant is taken and beaten for the action of the emperor. It is, in a sense, a true version of the famous “whipping boy” story.
Why is this so interesting? Because it gives us a perfect contrast, the perfect opposite to what Jesus does on our behalf. From the world’s perspective, it is the poor and marginalized who are to bear the brunt of the world’s pain and blame. It is the unnamed servant who receives the punishment in this account, not the emperor. In the Christian story however, it’s just the opposite. The king takes the punishment on our behalf.
Stuart Strachan Jr., Source Content from The Last Emperor, Columbia Pictures, 1987.
Lifting the Rock
One day a father decided to take his son to play at the local park. The boy quickly gravitated to the sandbox and found himself mesmerized by the colors and textures surrounding him. After a short time, he began digging around to see what treasures might reveal themselves to him.
As his hands plunged under the sand he discovered something rather large, and having pushed enough of the sand away, realized it was a large rock. Instantly he knew he needed to move that rock, no matter how big it was. This rock was the obstacle to his dreams of a sandbox clear of all extraneous matter.
So the boy tried as hard as he could to move the rock. He pushed and pushed and pushed, and finally he was able to get it to the edge of the sandbox. But the next step would be the hardest. How could he get it over the edge? Again the boy pushed and pushed until his energy was completely fried. The rock’s stuckness matched the boy’s feelings of the situation. Eventually he started to sob.
The boy’s father watched all this, and just when the meltdown began, the father went over to his son and began to comfort his overtaxed, dejected son.
“Why didn’t you use all the strength available to you to move the rock?” the father asked.
The boy was confused, “I did daddy, it’s just too heavy.”
“No son,” you didn’t. You didn’t ask me to help.” And at that, the father lifted the rock with a single hand and tossed it out of the sandbox.
Original Source Unknown, adapted by Stuart Strachan Jr.
Power, Love, & the Model of Christ on the Cross
If power is the ability to get things done, to change circumstances and people, then this takes us to the heart of the Christian understanding of power: it is the power of self-sacrificial love and service. There is nothing more powerful than this. Love can soften the hardest of hearts, the most rigid minds, the stoniest of souls.
Love can do what naked force cannot. When we are loved we are able to change. When we are unloved we dig in our heels and refuse to budge. Love is the most powerful force in the world. And it is on cross that we see the most dramatic, powerful and profound act of love: the love of God that voluntarily took all human shame and failure onto himself in the person of his Son.
A Reminder of the Paradox of Christian Power and Authority
When you go into one of the great basilicas of the late Roman empire and you see a mosaic of Christ enthroned at the far end, you’re looking at the place where the emperor would sit. And the emperor would be sitting there either dressed in his armour or in cloth of gold with a diadem around his head.
So you’re looking to the throne, but who’s on it? This rather curious and disreputable wandering teacher. So you have a bit of a paradox in visual form there. The person who holds the emperor’s authority in cosmic terms isn’t just another soldier or administrator in uniform, but a philosopher, a sage.
So something’s being said there that is on the edge of paradox. It’s been suggested, quite credibly, that some of that tradition of representing Jesus borrows from the ways in which late Classical art used to depict Plato the philosopher or Homer the poet. So it’s a poet, a philosopher, it’s a wordsmith who’s sitting on the throne.
Article: “Rowan Williams & Neil MacGregor Discuss Faith and Visual Imagination,” The Telegraph, 2013.
The Transfer of Energy
In physics, power is defined as the transfer of energy. In a light bulb, for example, electricity is transferred into light and heat. A 100-watt light bulb is more powerful than a 60-watt light bulb because there is more energy transferred. The same is true in leadership. It is a leader’s ability to transfer their authority to others that actually gives them their power.
Simon Sinek, What Leaders Can Learn From Mandela’s Selflessness and Sacrifice.
Playing with Chemistry Sets
On the whole, I do not find Christians, outside of the catacombs, sufficiently sensible of conditions. Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats to church we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping god may wake someday and take offense, or the waking god may draw us out to where we can never return.
Thomas Aquinas on Peter’s Wealth
An old joke can sum up the failure nicely: It’s said that Thomas Aquinas was once brought into a great city where he was to meet the pope. He saw huge churches, clerics in ornate garb, and great armies lined up to defend the church’s rule. And as he took all this in, the pope looked at him and said, “No more can St. Peter say ‘silver and gold have I none,’” referencing the story in Acts 3 where Peter says those words to a lame man begging to be healed.
“Indeed,” responds Thomas, “but neither can he say, ‘rise, take up your bed and walk.’” In the years since World War II the American church has consistently chosen to chase power, prestige, and mainstream status. We have gained all of those things. The tragedy, of course, is that those are the very things that Jesus warns us about so frequently in the Gospels.
A movement designed to obtain power and prestige and status will end up where Jesus predicted it would and where the American church has ended up. Modern American Christianity was never intended to produce morally upright people given to sacrificial love of neighbor. If it were intended to do that, we would not continue to restore discredited, unrepentant leaders to roles of authority within the movement.
Taken from: In Search of the Common Good: Christian Fidelity in a Fractured World by Jake Meador Copyright (c) 2019 by Jake Meador. Published by InterVarsity Press, Downers Grove, IL. www.ivpress.com
The Truth about Power
Here is what we need to discover about power: it is both better and worse than we could imagine…It is the one swift stroke of the machete that opens a coconut for the honored guest. It is a source of refreshment, laughter, joy and life—and of more power. Remove power and you cut off life, the possibility of creating something new and better in this rich and recalcitrant world. Life is power.
Power is life. And flourishing power leads to flourishing life. Of course, like life itself, power is nothing—worse than nothing—without love. But love without power is less than it was meant to be. Love without the capacity to make something of the world, without the ability to respond to and make room for the beloved’s flourishing, is frustrated love.
… Yet it is the way of our world that the very thing that makes us fully human at our best is what most truly corrupts us at our worst. Power at its worst is the unmaker of humanity—breeding inhumanity in the hearts of those who wield power, denying and denouncing the humanity of the ones who suffer under power. This is the power exercised by the money lender, by the police who ignore or protect him, by the officials who would rather not confront him. This power ultimately will put everything around it to death rather than share abundant life with another.
Taken from Playing God: Redeeming the Gift of Power by Andy Crouch Copyright (c) 2013 pp.24-25 by Andy Crouch. Published by InterVarsity Press, Downers Grove, IL. www.ivpress.com
Humor
Golf and Power Dynamics
George Bush Sr. (41) enjoyed the game of golf, even if he wasn’t necessarily very good at it. Following his presidency and his return to private life, he began to notice something: It’s amazing how many people beat you in golf once you’re no longer President.”
Source Material from Clifton Fadiman, Bartlett’s Book of Anecdotes.
A Son That Ruled All of Greece
At one point in his career, Themistocles was overheard saying that his young son ruled all of Greece. When his talking companion asked him to explain, he said, “Athens holds sway over all Greece; I dominate Athens; my wife dominates me; our newborn son dominates her.”
Stuart Strachan Jr.
Thomas Aquinas on Peter’s Wealth
An old joke can sum up the failure nicely: It’s said that Thomas Aquinas was once brought into a great city where he was to meet the pope. He saw huge churches, clerics in ornate garb, and great armies lined up to defend the church’s rule. And as he took all this in, the pope looked at him and said, “No more can St. Peter say ‘silver and gold have I none,’” referencing the story in Acts 3 where Peter says those words to a lame man begging to be healed.
“Indeed,” responds Thomas, “but neither can he say, ‘rise, take up your bed and walk.’” In the years since World War II the American church has consistently chosen to chase power, prestige, and mainstream status. We have gained all of those things. The tragedy, of course, is that those are the very things that Jesus warns us about so frequently in the Gospels.
A movement designed to obtain power and prestige and status will end up where Jesus predicted it would and where the American church has ended up. Modern American Christianity was never intended to produce morally upright people given to sacrificial love of neighbor. If it were intended to do that, we would not continue to restore discredited, unrepentant leaders to roles of authority within the movement.
Taken from: In Search of the Common Good: Christian Fidelity in a Fractured World by Jake Meador Copyright (c) 2019 by Jake Meador. Published by InterVarsity Press, Downers Grove, IL. www.ivpress.com
Two Gods on My Side
The Athenian general and politician Themistocles eventually alienated a large number of Greek City-States that came under their rule in the late 6thand early 5thcenturies B.C. With his fleet of ships anchored off a small island, he sent a message to one such vassal state, saying he had two powerful gods on each side of him that would compel them to pay up-Persuasion and Force. The leaders of the small island sent back a message that said they had two equally powerful gods on their side-Poverty and Despair…
Stuart Strachan Jr.
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