Christ's Power

We are following the theme of strength, how much we need strength, how hard it is to come by when we most need it.
 
Christ’s power is that he has no power.
 
When you have no recourse left, at the end of the road, but to lift your eyes to the hills and ask, where on earth am I going to get help, where on earth will I find any more strength to go on, you will be faced with a choice.
 
One kind of choice is to clutch at any straw—assert your power any way you can to survive.
Daily life buries in the world’s wake myriad such decisions—it is the way of the world, and no one in the world would begrudge you, certainly not when the evictions start rolling in earnest.
 
Another choice is to summon up your lifetime relationship to God, who ultimately will not let your foot be moved or allow the sun to smite you by day nor the moon by night. This poetic language of Psalm 121 is to say, you can depend upon God, not for rescue, but to be your inner strength.
 
Though Samson was a strong man, in the natural sense, his real strength arose from his dedication to God—he was singled out from birth to fulfil a divine mission. In the story this morning about Samson’s first “feat of strength,” Samson tears the young lion apart which attacked him—it was out of self-defense, but this was not the purpose of God’s gift to him—Samson misused that power. When we learn from the rest of the story that God’s mission for him is to eliminate the Philistines, we understand that many of Samson’s other feats are wanton showing off.
 
Although it was his conventional strength that got Samson into trouble, as his story unfolds, it was his inner strength that got him out, in the mortal fashion that it finally came to be—when, after a long captivity, he finally pulls down the temple roof onto 3000 of the enemies’ heads, and upon his own. Whence cometh my help, whence cometh my strength?
 
We can be pretty sure this was Jesus’ plea in Gethsemane, in Pilate’s custody, on the Via Dolorosa, at Golgotha. Such was the question Jesus was asked by his captors when they jeered for him to ask his God to rescue him. Of course, Jesus couldn’t be rescued, much as obviously he would wish.
 
What strength did Jesus have? Jesus’ strength was that he had no strength—he lived his whole life in right relation to God, from which he gained all the strength he would have or need, come what may. A name for that strength is “love,” which is a puny word next to the reality, but we will use it anyway. Jesus embodied, and lived, perfect love, which is to say he lived knowing and accepting the ways of the world and loving it as it is.
 
The perfection of Christ drives some people crazy—what was perfect about him was his love.  We don’t know much about other aspects of his life and don’t need to. But his perfect love was plain to see, although this love has seemed intolerable to bear for certain other people throughout history. For them, it hasn’t been enough just to ignore Christ; it was necessary to deny Christ’s love, to repudiate it and to crush others to disprove it.
 
I do not speak of the Jewish response to Christianity, because what they rejected was that Jesus was the Messiah. Atonement for Jews results from public confession, contrition and reform, for which Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, was ordained by the everlasting mercy and lovingkindness of God.
 
I refer rather to the very different instances in history when Christ was denied through explicit inversions of Christ’s love.
 
An example? Like the Black Mass of the Middle Ages. When every symbol in the Latin Mass was turned on its head, Christ’s perfection was not being ignored, it was denied through performances of its opposite.
 
A modern example? The Dracula cult movies in which every part of the Christ story is mirrored negatively in the actions of the vampire—as when Dracula seeks a continuous resurrection through an unholy love sealed in the blood of the victim. The love of Christ repels the vampire—this love must be manifestly denied with the assertion of its opposite. In the Dracula story, good and evil are emblematically inseparable—there is great good and great evil, but which is which? 
 
Because it’s the difference between evil that looks good, and evil that looks evil. We know the Devil when we see him—ugly, grotesque, threatening, maybe with horns and a tail!
 
On the other hand, in the gothic world, evil is appealing, seductive, slightly but not totally mysterious, and always mistaken for the good which we desire—Dracula’s powers bring captivity not freedom, his kind of love brings restlessness not peace.
 
Let me give you a more contemporary example of an inversion of Christ’s love—QAnon and other conspiracy theories which abound in this world today and are very worrisome. They warn that your real enemy is the government you depend upon, which harbors innocuous looking villains, like Hilary Clinton who “runs a child sex ring.”
 
Adrienne LaFrance, the Executive Editor the Atlantic wrote in the June issue, “To believe in Q requires rejecting mainstream institutions, ignoring government officials, battling apostates, and despising the press,” and I would add—to believe in Q, by implication, requires denying the love of Christ. QAnon transforms nonexistent dangers into visible enemies where none exist, the antidote for which being armed preparedness. Conspiracy movements invent enemies to fear, which, if they actually existed, Christ would exhort them to respond with love.
 
It inverts Christ—just calling someone an “enemy,” and it is the first step toward false self-empowerment, grasping at the straw of natural strength. In the ultimate inversion, Q followers embrace the evangelical Christian vocabulary—apocalypse, conversion, redemption through violence.
 
LaFrance continued, “QAnon marries an appetite for the conspiratorial with positive beliefs about a radically different and better future, one that is preordained.” Abandoning conventional morality, it nevertheless adopts a para-Christianity as cover for the assertion of power over the imagined enemy. Suspicion and paranoia, vilification of the enemy, have taken possession of many Americans and replace what Christ offers as our only strength.
What is it about love that makes some people so angry?
 
We know, as the gospel shows us, perfect love casts out fear. But the fear exhibited by conspiracy theories reveals some need they have to deny love, for psychological reasons unknown—we struggle to understand where this phenomenon comes from. Disappointment with life’s imperfections and with love’s imperfections might have its origin in love lost. Something clearly converts their strengths into energies unmanageable and violent toward an unknown and unfulfilling end.
 
The pain of a love lost may drive them to punish the world through scapegoats like immigrants, Jews and blacks—but the only thing punished is themselves.
 
At least in gothic literature and movies like Dracula, the emotions get worked out, as Aristotle theorized, through the catharsis of the fictional drama—but in the conspiracy theories, they will not find catharsis, only self-immolation by the very power they misdirect upon others. These are the disillusionaries into whose hands America is increasingly falling.
 
Now it’s finally time to tell you the full definition of that overused and under-rated word “Love.”  The meaning of “Love” is that it is a synonym of Jesus. Look and see for yourselves, the gospel shows that normal human strengths are at times unequal to the forces of evil.
 
The gospel is for us when we have reached our limit, as when Jesus looked down from the cross at the jeering crowd and said “Forgive them for they know not what they do.” The gospel is for us when we have reached our limit, when we raise our eyes to the hills in desperation.
 
The New Testament was written for desperate circumstances, not for those who have security and want more. The strength of Christ is that he has no strength.
 
We, who remain in possession of Christ’s love, can proceed with courage and joy into God’s turbulent world without fear.
 
Amen.
 
-Rev. Richard Chrisman