The power of love works differently than the power of status. In this episode, Amy Julia shares stories of powerlessness in the midst of this pandemic, and she talks about how we will only feel increasingly powerless if our identity comes from achievement or social status. But if we understand our identity as given to us by God then we can enter into seemingly hopeless situations with the power of love.
Show Notes:
Philippians 3:1-11
A Good and Perfect Gift: Faith, Expectations, and a Little Girl Named Penny
Connect with me:
Thanks for listening!
The power of love works differently than the power of status. In this episode, Amy Julia shares stories of powerlessness in the midst of this pandemic, and she talks about how we will only feel increasingly powerless if our identity comes from achievement or social status. But if we understand our identity as given to us by God then we can enter into seemingly hopeless situations with the power of love.
Show Notes:
Philippians 3:1-11
A Good and Perfect Gift: Faith, Expectations, and a Little Girl Named Penny
Connect with me:
Thanks for listening!
Note: This transcript is generated using speech recognition software and does contain errors. Please check the corresponding audio before quoting in print.
1 (2s):
Hello. And welcome to season two of the love is stronger than fear podcast. I'm your host, Amy Julia Becker, and each week we're going to take a look at current events, AKA the Corona virus. And we're going to consider a small portion of Paul's letter to the Philippians. Paul wrote this letter under adverse circumstances, and he wrote about how to know joy, peace, hope, and love. Not by denying the hardship of the moment, but by knowing God in the midst of that hardship, I hope that reading the Bible in our current moment of uncertainty and turmoil will help us to turn away from fear and toward love.
1 (48s):
Thank you for joining me.
2 (53s):
Hi friends. I want to start this episode by talking about three stories that have come to my attention this past week. All from friends and family members. The first is my friend, Patricia, my friend Patricia lives down in Richmond, Virginia, and her mom, Susan is in a nursing home, which is to say her mom is in a place that has been hit hard by the coronavirus. That's true of this particular nursing home, but actually of just the nursing home population across the United States.
2 (1m 24s):
People in nursing homes are very vulnerable to the effects of the coronavirus because of their age and underlying health conditions. But then the actual situation of living in close proximity and having people go in and amongst these different rooms, visitors coming in and out, all of it makes it, uh, like a Petri dish in a bad way for this virus to spread. But as a result of that in order to try to keep residents in nursing homes, safe Patricia's mom, Susan has been essentially locked in her room for almost two months.
2 (1m 59s):
So she is experiencing a deep and profound sense of isolation and loneliness. And Patricia is powerless to do anything about it. She's talked to the director of the nursing home. She's read articles and researched what might be possible in terms of providing human contact for her mom. She called me last week and she said, you know, my mom has not felt the warmth of the sun on her face in two months, and there's no end in sight to this story.
2 (2m 36s):
And I just feel so powerless. I also talked to my dad last week and my dad is actually at home most of the time due to a series of back injuries that he sustained. And so there's a woman who comes to our house and cuts his hair. And as it turns out, this woman who is an immigrant from Columbia and lives, public housing in the town where my dad and mom live had gone back to Columbia to visit her family, uh, right as this epidemic was spreading.
2 (3m 9s):
And so she got stuck there in Columbia. Meanwhile, her husband contracted the coronavirus and died. And so my dad has been spending hours and hours and hours on her behalf in two different ways, trying to help her get back to the country, back to her home, back to her apartment, back to her daughter, back to dealing with her husband's estate. And he's also been trying to help her to claim her IRS check, pay the rent, make sure that she's able to come back into her American life safely and with enough financial provision to continue to survive.
2 (3m 52s):
He's been on the phone for hours a day and my dad is not an aggressive man, and he's not a pushy or showy man, but he is someone who has a high level of education. And he worked in Manhattan for decades and he ran his own firm and dealt with high leveled people. And he still has felt powerless to help this woman. Similarly, as those of you, who've been listening to me over the past couple of weeks now in our family, we've been trying to find out what would it take in order to address some of the inequities in education here in our state of Connecticut?
2 (4m 28s):
What would it mean to try to get everyone at Chromebook? What would it mean to provide digital access to the internet for all the kids in the state of Connecticut or even just in our local community? Could we set up tutoring online for kids who need it? Is there a way to help? And this past week I bumped into some laws that say, you know what, actually, you can't raise private funds for anything that a school budget is legally mandated to provide.
2 (5m 2s):
They have to come from the school district that they are a part of. I'm sure there are reasons for these laws. And I'm sure that they seemed like a good idea at the time. But the fact that I, in a wealthy town with a wealthy property tax base cannot raise money for a less wealthy town nearby. And as a result, the kids in my town like my daughter have internet access, have Chromebooks and have teachers who are trained in how to use those devices and the town next door, where there again is less of this financial provision through a school budget.
2 (5m 43s):
They don't have those things that feels really unjust to me, but I also feel powerless to do anything about it. So I want to talk in this episode about the hope that we can find in the midst of powerlessness, the hope that we can find that is based, not on exerting the power of status, the power of achievement, the power of effort, or the power of control, but rather the hope that we find in entering into powerlessness and in addressing powerlessness with a hope and a God who makes all things new.
2 (6m 24s):
I'm going to read as usual from the book of Philippians we're in chapter three, and this is Paul writing to a fledgling Christian congregation many years ago. And he says, finally, my brothers and sisters rejoice in the Lord to write the same things to you is not troublesome to me. And for you, it is a safe guard. Be aware of the dogs, be aware of the evil workers, be aware of those who mutilate the flesh for it is we who are the circumcision who worship in the spirit of God and boast in Christ Jesus and have no confidence in the flesh.
2 (7m 1s):
Even though I too have reason for confidence in the flesh, if anyone else has reason to be confident in the flesh, I have more circumcised on the eighth day, a member of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew born of Hebrews as to the law, a Pharisee as to zeal a persecutor of the church as to righteousness under the law, blameless, whatever gains I had these, I have come to regard as loss because of Christ.
2 (7m 33s):
More than that, I regard everything as loss because of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus, my Lord, for his sake, I have suffered the loss of all things, and I regard them as rubbish in order that I may gain Christ and be found in him not having a righteousness of my own, that comes from the law. But one that comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God based on faith, I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the sharing of his sufferings by becoming like him in his death.
2 (8m 13s):
If somehow I may attain the resurrection from the dead. So in this passage, Paul starts off really by trying to explain to the Philippians why, if they are Gentile Christians, which is to say people who are not Jewish, they don't need to be circumcised. Uh, they don't need to go through any of the rights that people would need to go through in order to become Jewish. So he's talking about circumcision as a result of that. Like, no, you don't need to be circumcised in order to become a Christian, but really what he's talking about is identity.
2 (8m 47s):
What does it mean? How do you identify yourself as a Christian Jews were able to identify themselves in various ways, including circumcision, food practices, worship practices, how do you identify as a Christian, but Paul, before he explains how you identify as a Christian, he says, here are the other ways we understand identity. And it turns out that sociologists have kind of broken down the ways that Paul talks about to understand identity and they have two different categories.
2 (9m 19s):
One is a scribed identity. So it's, it's kind of ascribed to you given to you by your culture. So the ascribed identity that Paul demonstrates is that he is a member of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin. So he didn't do anything in order to get that identity. He was just born into it in America. We also have ascribed identity. So my ascribed identity as a white woman with educated, married parents, all those things were just given to me when I was born, I did nothing to earn them, but then we've also got achieved identity.
2 (9m 60s):
And Paul gives us his achievements as well. He says he was a Pharisee, which means he was someone who studied rigorously and applied the Jewish law to his own life. And to other people with that same rigor, he then goes on to say he had zeal and persecuted the church and was blameless as far as the righteousness under the law. So he achieved through hard work, all of this other type of status that he didn't have from what was ascribed to him.
2 (10m 32s):
So these are the two different types, right? There's a scribed identity and there's achieved identity. And Paul is saying, I have both, I've thought a lot about these things in my own life. And as we look at the demographics of America and of the people around the world and people I come in contact with and we have these descriptions and we often use the word privilege, which as many of you know, I've written a book about as well, uh, to describe race and class and gender and ability. Um, and again, it's an ascribed status where you haven't done anything to earn it, but if you are white in America, there are opportunities afforded to you and advantages you gain just because of who you were born to or not because of anything you've done.
2 (11m 16s):
Of course, we also have achieved status here in America. We often call it the meritocracy, which is this idea that you, if you work hard, you will gain a place at the top. If you are a hard worker and you go to the right colleges and you get the right awards and degrees and the right jobs, you'll make the right amount of money and you'll be able to provide those things for your own children. And you will enter into the ranks of the top of our society.
2 (11m 48s):
Not only based upon your birth, not even primarily based upon your birth, but based upon your achievements. There's lots to say about the ways in which the meritocracy is not just about hard work and in fact, overlaps in significant ways with ascribed status. That's a podcast for another day. But the point is we can see just as Paul had reason to say, look, my identity, both the ascribed identity and the achieved identity, it's impeccable. I have it all.
2 (12m 19s):
And there are people here in our country who can say the same things and of course the opposite as well. And I know for me as a white educated affluent person, I have gained favor in the eyes of our world here in the United States because of both my ascribed and achieved identity. And yet when I try to bring those aspects of my identity into a situation that involves suffering, that involves injustice, that involves inequity.
2 (12m 55s):
I often find that it actually doesn't help. I confront a sense of powerlessness in me and I wonder why isn't this working? Why aren't my achievements and my gains working in this situation, Paul goes on here to say, yeah, I've got it all. And whatever gains I had, I have come to regard as a loss because of Christ, the ascribed identity, the achieved identity, all or a loss.
2 (13m 35s):
He even goes on to call them rubbish. He's suffered the loss of all things. And we don't even know what that means. We certainly know he's lost status because of becoming a Christian. It's certainly possible that he lost money possible. He even lost family, almost certain that he lost friends and colleagues. He says he considers everything as loss because of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus, my Lord.
2 (14m 5s):
So Paul's identity has changed. It's changed from being given to him by his birth, into Judaism, being achieved by him, through his hard work. And instead his identity comes through faith in Christ through the knowledge and here he's not talking primarily about intellectual knowledge, but about that full self knowing and being known by Christ Jesus, my Lord, as many of you know, our daughter, penny has down syndrome and I've done a lot of thinking and writing about penny over the years, I wrote a book called a good and perfect gift.
2 (14m 45s):
Now almost 10 years ago, about what it took for me to receive her as a gift. And really what it took for me was a change in identity and a change in how I understood identity. I was a Christian when penny was born and I would have agreed with Paul's words in this passage. And yet when I looked at my life, what I realized is that for most of my life, what I believed is what I achieved equaled my identity.
2 (15m 16s):
So having gone to prestigious schools, having worked hard in those schools, having the expectation that when I walked into a room, people would think good things about me, which often came because I had blonde hair and white skin and a body that did not cause anyone to wonder about my abilities because of my physical presence and my achievements. So both my ascribed and achieved identity, I thought that told me who I am.
2 (15m 53s):
And as a result, it was a little bit of a shaky foundation because if I couldn't achieve anymore, or if for some reason I wasn't considered worthy based on my ascribed identity any longer than my identity started to crumble. And that's what happened when penny was born because human beings, mothers are so deeply identified with their children. And so for me to identify deeply and profoundly with a child with an intellectual disability meant that I no longer could rely on achieved or ascribed status in order to know who I was or in order to know who she was.
2 (16m 35s):
And the beauty of recognizing over time, how little those things actually mattered, especially in comparison to the truth that I was a beloved child of God as was my daughter a broken, limited, vulnerable, gifted, beautiful child of God. And that, that identity of being invited into the family of God in Christ for that to be my identity was utterly transformative to how I see myself and how I see the world.
2 (17m 12s):
And I believe something similar has happened to Paul. So our, our culture, if I had a whiteboard right now, I would be writing this on the board, says what you do, and then imagine an arrow leads to who you are. But what the Bible says is who you are, leads to what you do. So our actions of hard work or of mural, moral purity, or of love or care or sacrifice, it comes out of who we already are and not the other way around.
2 (17m 52s):
So our culture says what you do equals who you are, but Jesus says who you are, leads to what you do. And Paul has come to a new understanding of who he is, and he wants the Philippians to understand who they are in Christ because that changes everything. And Paul lays out here that it is through faith in Christ. It's not through achievement and it's not through birth. It is through faith in Christ that we receive this identity in Christ.
2 (18m 26s):
We have been separated from God through sin, both personal sin, but also just a cosmic fall cosmic separation that exists in the world. And Jesus comes to overcome that separation, to achieve union with God and to invite us into it, to give it to us out of love and not out of merit. So if we have faith in Christ, if we have a new identity that is not based on what our culture says is valuable and not based on hard work and achievement, then how do we live?
2 (19m 6s):
And we come back to what Paul says at the end of this passage, I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the sharing of his sufferings by becoming like him in his death. If somehow I may attain the resurrection from the dead. So there are two aspects of this. There's the power of the resurrection, which is literally the power of new life, the same power that spoke the world into being an all of creation, the same power that raised Jesus from the dead, which is to say the generative creative, eternal, and boundless power of love.
2 (19m 42s):
So on the one hand, knowing Christ means living out an identity that knows and believes and participates in the power of love. And then also the sharing of his sufferings, knowing Christ also means becoming powerless and identifying with those who are powerless and suffering. There's a passage in Matthew chapter 25, where Jesus says to his followers, if you have fed the hungry and clothed the naked and cared for the sick and visited those who are in prison, you've cared for me.
2 (20m 21s):
That's how deeply Jesus identifies with the vulnerable and powerless people within society is to say, I am them. They are me. So for us to share in the sufferings of Christ is to identify with the powerless among us. And that begins by entering into that powerlessness. I think back to these very small and simple stories of my dad, trying to help a woman whose husband has died and who is relatively poor and doesn't have many resources, I think to my friend, Patricia, who is longing to visit her mom.
2 (21m 4s):
And I think of just us in our little house, trying to figure out what it might look like to bring education into the homes of kids who don't have it right now. There's an experience of powerlessness. And I have to say what happens to me as someone who often has power that I can use, I often can fix problems by making the right phone call or paying the right amount of money. So it happens to me when I confront powerlessness is I just want to walk away.
2 (21m 35s):
I want to go back to ignoring the problems instead of engaging them in the powerlessness of it. Instead of staying present and waiting and enduring and acknowledging the suffering. The way of love is one of waiting. One of enduring, it's one of not controlling and not always being able to fix. And yet it is also one of hopeful anticipation.
2 (22m 8s):
Again, we're talking not about the power of reason or the power of achievement, but the power of love and the power of love is that which we have through hope in the God of resurrection, of new life, of bringing forth, what was dead into fullness of life. I don't know how that is going to happen when it comes to the education system in our country.
2 (22m 39s):
I don't know how that's going to happen when it comes to Susan in her loneliness and her isolation and the thousands upon thousands of other men and women who are suffering in that way in nursing homes, in prisons, in other communities right now, I don't know how it's going to happen for my dad's friend, who he's trying to help. And I know that entering into the suffering is really only possible based on identifying with Christ and with not just the suffering, but the power of the resurrection, not just the power, less ness, but also the hope, but here's what I do now.
2 (23m 22s):
And here's where I want to leave things today. One that an identity based upon a scribed or achieved status will ultimately fail us, whereas an identity based on the beloved status that we have been given as children of God will never fail us. It based upon the love that existed before we were born and before creation was even spoken into being, it's a love that will always remain.
2 (23m 56s):
And it's a love that we have been welcomed into and are invited into in Christ. And then the second thing is that when we have faith in Christ, when we are rooted and established in that love, we can enter into both the powerlessness of the sufferings of this world and the powerful love that is expressed through resurrection, hope we can enter into and stay with and wait with and weep with those who are suffering, even as we can also continue to look for the God of new life, to bring resurrection, to bring it when it comes to education to bring it, when it comes to medical care to bring it, when it comes to economic and racial injustice, we can look to that, God of hope to resurrect the dead all around us.
2 (25m 4s):
So that's my prayer. That's my prayer for myself. That's my prayer for so many of us is that we would enter into the powerlessness and be found in Jesus. I'd love that. It's like, we're not even finding Jesus we're being found in him. Like we're already there. We just didn't even know it, that we would be found in Christ. And that from that place of ultimate belovedness security and status that comes from that, belovedness that out of that identity, we would be brave enough to enter into suffering and hope and hope and hope for the resurrection that is to come.
2 (25m 51s):
I finished recording this, and then I realized I wanted to say one more thing. And that is that there's power in suffering with one another and there's power in relinquishing, our sense of control. And I think that's the invitation here. And it's an invitation that those of us like me, who've had a scribed and achieved status have often, even as Christians not understood the power of the cross and the power of the resurrection all comes down to the power of love.
2 (26m 28s):
I'm going back to first Corinthians 13 love is powerful, but it is powerful in such a different way than human power. It's powerful through kindness and patience, gentleness, perseverance. It's powerful by not insisting on its own way, by always forgiving by always hoping by always remaining faithful and true.
2 (26m 58s):
That's the power of God's love to us. That's the power of God's love through us. And so it looks hopeless and powerless to try as a person with status in our culture, to engage with suffering and vulnerability. And yet it is there that the power of love of God's love promises, promises to bring hope and light and truth and new life.
2 (27m 31s):
I don't know how that's going to happen. I really don't, but I do know that that's where I want to live. That's where I want to be. And I am grateful to be involved, to be invited in this little, little slice of God's journey of love among us. I hope you are too.
1 (27m 55s):
Thanks again for tuning in to the love is stronger than fear podcast. If you enjoyed this podcast, you can find more resources at my website, Amy, Julia, becker.com. And if you found today's episode helpful, please share it with friends and take a minute to rate and review it wherever you find your podcasts. See you next week.