The power at work within us

 

Ephesians 3: 14-21
New Ark United Church of Christ, Newark, DE
July 28, 2024

Poster with red background and white letters: "How would you live if you knew there was enough love to go around?" God is still speaking, United Church of Christ

Before November, I will be repeating this phrase: It should not be political, it should not be partisan to want to save democracy from the grip of fascist White Christian Nationalism, IRS rules be damned. The separation of Church and state was not established solely to protect the Church and other faith traditions from the overreach of government but more importantly to protect the government from the control of religious fanaticism. And the Church not only has something to say about that but it must also stand in the way of religious fanaticism manipulating our government.



With that being said, since the president made his announcement, this week has been a roller coaster of emotions for many people. Foreboding and uncertainty. Anger and frustration. Anxiety and doubt. Hope and exhilaration. Feelings such as these have power and release a great deal of energy that can also be harnessed.



Within hours of the vice president announcing her candidacy for president, 44,000 Black women assembled on Zoom to organize and raise funds, to the tune of more than $2 million dollars. On Monday night, 56,000 Black men gathered on a call to do the same, raising over $1.2 million dollars. In the first 24 hours, the campaign raised over $81 million. Wednesday evening, South Asian women hosted their own call with 9,000 attendees raising more than $260,000, and over 400 Latina women gathered, raising over $110,000.



Thursday evening some were on multiple calls to action. There was a call for young voters with more than 4,000 users registered. The Human Rights Campaign hosted a call for LGBTQ+ folx, HBCU students, and allies, with 20,000 participants raising over $300,000.



And then there was the one that broke Zoom. Close to 200,000 White women overwhelmed Zoom’s webinar capacity capped at 100,000 participants, some of whom were ushered onto YouTube to livestream the gathering. Engineers at Zoom adjusted the limit to 200K and congratulated the organizers for having the most registrants in history. In 90 minutes, over $2 million dollars was raised—that’s $22,000 a minute. As of today, that call has raised over $11 million dollars and the campaign as whole has raised over $200 million in one week. Next up, tomorrow night is a call entitled “White Dudes for Harris”. I cannot wait to see what happens there.



What made that White women’s call truly history-making was the admission of White women remaining silent in the face of racism and patriarchy and relying on the work of Black women to save all of us. In the suffrage movement leading to securing a woman’s right to vote, us White women showed our slip by not securing the vote for ALL women. That is our hand in White supremacy and in how we got to where we are now. The excuse that has always been given is “Oh, that’s too big an ask, to secure your rights as well as mine”, a shortsighted self-interest that limits our imagination and we can no longer allow for that.



“Now to God—who by the power at work within us, is able to accomplish abundantly far more than all we can ask or imagine”. This past week has shown us there is a power that is indeed at work within us and what we are capable of imagining. In his introduction to the letter to the church in Ephesus, Eugene Peterson wrote, “What we know about God and what we do for God have a way of getting broken apart in our lives”, between belief and behavior, being able to live into our full humanity. What we know about wholeness, justice, and love and what we do for them has a way of getting broken in this world. There is hardly an aspect of human living that isn’t in need of healing.



And so Paul, or someone writing in Paul’s name, prays for this fledgling church and others who read this circulating letter that they would be strengthened in their inner being with power through the Spirit, that Christ would live in their hearts through faith, that is, that Christ would be beloved within them. To be beloved is to live within someone’s heart. And to love Christ like that is to welcome love’s power and strength in us. To not only welcome such love but to also comprehend, to understand, to know with every fiber of our being the breadth and length and height and depth of unlimited, unmerited, unconditional love that goes beyond what we know and is itself a mystery.



It is this love that knits together what we believe and how we behave. It is this love that needs to fuel our imaginations. Not our love for power or money or security or self-interest. Which is why this movement of White women, this mobilization of money is also regarded with caution and some suspicion. There were women contributing $25K, $50K to create matching funds that would not make a dent in their day-to-day life.



Why not leverage these funds for a ceasefire in Gaza and an end to apartheid? Why can’t we raise money like this for the family of Sonya Massey? Or to pay for the 9 million lead service water lines that need replacing in the U.S.? Or to build accessible, affordable housing? Will us White women commit to learning from and supporting the work of people of color and invest in their communities or is this all performative, we continue to protect our own comfort, and go back to business as usual? Comprehending the depth of this love means also acknowledging when we have limited and abandoned our commitment to such love and repairing the harm done.



There is a whole swath of this nation that is fueling their imaginations and their prayers and their political campaigns with fear, anger, hatred, bigotry, and a desire to control that which they refuse to understand. And the truth of it is, none of us has true moral integrity. We’re all compromised by our own bias, self-interest and preservation. We’re all scared of what the future holds for humanity and for the earth and her creatures. We have all made peace with what does not give peace. Poet and ex-con Reginald Dwayne Betts reminds us “we all standing on the wrong side of choices”.



I believe that it is love that has to come first and it has to come from us, for ourselves. It’s hard to love the world, to love our neighbor, to love our enemy, when we deem parts of ourselves to be unlovable or others deem parts of ourselves to be unlovable because of their own ignorance and pain and bad theology. It’s hard to love the world when we love our security too much because we fear there is not enough. And it is love that is the greatest power at work within us. Unbelievably it was author Dan Brown who wrote, “Love is not a finite emotion. We don’t have only so much to share. Our hearts create love as we need it.” I believe that’s what Jesus was able to do.



But it is also easier to create that love, to believe in that love, when we have enough to eat, a safe place to live, when we have access to community that has our backs, when we share our power. And yet we humans have the ability to multi-task; it doesn’t have to be one before the other. We can save democracy even as we pressure our leaders to change hearts and minds about aiding a genocide. We can learn to love ourselves even as we confront our implicit bias and love of comfort. We can have compassion for someone even as we refuse to take any more of their b.s.



In the words of Methodist minister and author Ted Loder:

Come, Lord Jesus,
expand me,
by your power, life-generating as the sea
to accept
and use my power
to do something I believe in
and be something more of who I mean to be
and can be;
to inspire me to dream and move,
sweat and sing,
fail and laugh,
cuss and create;
to link my passion with courage,
my hope with discipline,
my love with persistence;
to enable me to learn from difficulties,
grow in adversities,
gain wisdom from defeats,
perspective from disappointments,
gracefulness from crises,
and find joy
in simply living it all fully.
Release me through your power
to be a powerful person, Lord. Amen.

Benediction – enfleshed.com

May we rage
May we weep
May we love
May we mourn
May we dream
May we dance
May we organize
May we get each other free
Go with God, who holds it all
and is not afraid