7/19/23

This will be short because I am powerless.

I don’t know what it is about my neighborhood. . . specifically my block. The night of the terrible tornadoes some years back, driving home was scary: powerlines down along Highway 72, the devastation, glimpsed in flashes of lightning and car headlights . . .

But as I got closer to Athens, I could see a glow in the sky: Athens had power! Publix, gas stations, the big Baptist church on Lindsay Lane – all lit up like Christmas trees! I turned right on Lindsay Lane to go home and there were street lights and house lights everywhere . . .

Until my street.

There was power across the street and power behind me, but from Lindsay Lane to the interstate, the southside of Norton Drive was in darkness, including my house. 

That’s the way it is today.

The storm that came through about 5:30 yesterday knocked several massive trees down at the end of my street, and took out who knows how many power lines, so I have no idea when I’ll have power.

All I do know is that the people across the street have power, and the people on the block south of me have power.

But again, we have no power.

Walking through the neighborhood early this morning, I thought about power in the scripture. Jesus promised his disciples in Acts 1, “You shall receive power when the Holy Spirit comes upon you.” That word for power is dunamis, a Greek word that comes down to us in our word, “dynamite.” And I’ve preached  on and written about this before.

But there is a related Greek word that is found in the chapters of Romans I’ve been preaching from. In Romans 15:1, Paul writes, “We who are strong ought to put up with the failings of the weak.” The word translated “strong” in most translations is dunatos and the word most often translated as “weak” is adunatos (the “a” means “no”).

In my sermons, I talked about the weak being the Jewish believers who still held onto kosher food laws, observed holy days, and practiced circumcision. The strong were the Gentile believers (mostly, but the strong also would’ve included Jewish believers who conscientiously enjoyed the oysters).

But there’s another aspect to the strong/weak division. Dunatos and adunatos are both related to the Greek word for power, dunamis, and so can be translated as “powerful” and “powerless.”

In ancient Rome, the two terms are status terms. The powerful were people with status, like Roman senators, and the powerless were people like slaves . . . and Jews. They were people who had no power, and would most likely never achieve status, or be considered among the elite of Rome.

So Paul tells those who are not only strong in the faith but who also hold at least some status to “welcome” the weak (14:1; 15:7). Why? That word “welcome” caused me to pause when I was preaching on it. 

Why would Paul use welcome? Because it is the weak (powerless), who need to be welcomed. The act of the powerful reaching out and welcoming the weak is an act of crossing yet another human, man-made boundary, and giving to the weak who have no status the status of being equals in Christ Jesus. 

This fits in perfectly with Paul’s theme of our being one family. Just about every week I’ve quoted Paul’s words in Galatians 3:28,

“There is no longer Jew or Greek; there is no longer slave or free; there is no longer male and female, for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.”

Think about Paul’s list: the Jew, the slave, and the female, would all be in the powerless column according to the world of that day. The Greek, the free, and the male would all be in the column of the powerful. But the only status that should concern us – in fact the only status that really matters – is whether or not someone is “in Christ Jesus.”

And so the challenge for us is to think about who around us might be in that “powerless” column, and ask ourselves what we can do to welcome them, to lift them up from whatever state they may find themselves in, and help lift them to Christ. 

When you think about it, that really is powerful. To be able to point someone who has no status, who has no power, no influence, and no possibilities, to Christ and to help  them become a child of the Creator of the universe is real power . . . but it’s the same power, the same dunamis, Jesus promised us when he said “you will receive power . . . and you shall be my witnesses.” 

Praying power for you today – in every sense of the word. 

Blessings,
Pastor Terry