To Show Forth Your Power... in Weakness
A reflection on the Collect for Proper 16: The Sunday closest to August 24
Today’s Collect of the Day1 is Proper 16 (The Sunday closest to August 24):
Grant, O merciful God, that your Church, being gathered together in unity by your Holy Spirit, may show forth your power among all peoples, to the glory of your Name; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
Unity is assumed
This collect’s one petition is that the Church would “show forth” God’s power among all peoples, which I’ll talk about below. But the clause before the petition caught my attention: that the Church that will show forth God’s power is “gathered together in unity by the Holy Spirit.” Initially I thought of this as another petition, as if we are asking God to gather us in unity. But it’s not part of the petition, it’s an assumption of the collect that we have indeed been gathered together in unity by the Holy Spirit.
Jesus prays that his disciples (including us) will be “one” with another just as Jesus is one with the Father (John 17: 11, 21-22). In one sense this seems like an unfulfilled prayer, and thus we need to continue to work and pray toward unity in the Church. I’m sure that’s still true, but right after this, Jesus phrases it more as a promise than a petition: “I’m in them and you are in me so that they will be made perfectly one” (John 17:23 CEB).
Because Jesus is already in us, and the Father is in Jesus, it’s going to happen: we will be made perfectly one. And in another sense, we already are in fact perfectly one, because the love of God has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us (Rom 5:5).
Our unity as the Body of Christ has already been accomplished in actuality. We don’t achieve it through our efforts, but rather we learn to recognize our unity with one another and consent to it. Part of the work we have to do is continue to wake up to the reality of our unity with one another and with God, and acting upon that unity. Just like God is the ground of our being, and is thus not able to be absent from creation, so we are connected with each other at a deep, fundamental level, despite appearances. “Union with God,” contemplative teacher Martin Laird says, “is not something that needs to be acquired but realized.”2
How God’s power is shown forth
On the basis of this essential unity, then, the petition of this collect is that the Church would “show forth [God’s] power among all peoples.” But what does it look like for the Church to do this? Over and over throughout its history, since at least the age of Constantine, the Church has made the mistake of assuming that God’s power is just like worldly, coercive power, but bigger, “up to eleven” as Nigel Tufnel might say.3 And thus we have conquered and killed in the name of Jesus, we have colonized and exploited “to the glory of God,” we have assumed we ought to be telling people what to do. What else could it mean to show forth God’s power among all peoples?
But the troubling truth is that God’s power doesn’t work like that. God’s power is shown to us through the scandalous operations of the Cross of Christ. God’s power is perfected in our weakness, not our strengths, not our control. This is why the Apostle Paul, though he could have boasted in the glorious heavenly revelations he had received, chose instead, for the sake of the church in Corinth he planted and loved, to “boast” in his weakness: the thorn in his body that wouldn’t go away (2 Cor 12:2-10). One might assume that the removal of the thorn (whatever it was) would be how God’s power would be shown forth in Paul’s life, but instead God tells Paul, “My grace is enough for you, for my power is perfected in weakness.
This message gets to the heart of the gospel: that God’s power is revealed in weakness. Jesus is crowned as king by being brutally executed on a Roman cross. Jesus saves the world by giving up his life. Jesus overcomes death by dying. It’s about life through death. It’s about power in weakness. It’s not power hidden “behind” weakness, or power “after” temporary weakness. It’s power experienced and unleashed in weakness. The cross wasn’t a necessary but temporary embarrassment for God—it was the full revelation of the radically strange way God’s power works.
This doesn’t mean God causes our “thorns”, or that a thorn is a good thing in and of itself. God isn’t gaslighting us by saying bad things are good. It means that God is present with us in our sufferings, standing in solidarity with us as us, and transforming our thorns into conduits of God’s grace and power flowing into the world. Just like the Cross of Christ, God turns an instrument of death into the means of life.
So for the Church to show forth God’s power among all peoples won’t look like “taking charge” or “kicking butt and taking names” or even “benevolently telling everyone what to do.” (This is the fever dream of Christian nationalists.) Instead it will look like walking with Jesus in the way of the cross, learning to lay down our lives for each other, standing in solidarity with the most vulnerable among us, trusting God’s power to work in such weakness. May this power-in-weakness indeed be shown forth among all peoples, to the glory of God.
Every Sunday I reflect on the “Collect of the Day” from the Book of Common Prayer. A collect is a simple form of prayer designed to “collect” the longings of God’s people and distill them into a succinct, theologically robust request. The Book of Common Prayer has a wide variety of collects for all kinds of circumstances and needs, and assigns a specific collect to be prayed on each Sunday of the liturgical year, and then at Morning and Evening Prayer throughout the following week—the “Collect of the Day.”
Martin Laird, Into the Silent Land: A Guide to the Christian Practice of Contemplation (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 10.
I just found out there’s going to be a Spinal Tap 2, and I couldn’t more pleased.
This is a rich reflection, and I hear in it your awareness that Christian nationalism has long mistaken God’s power for worldly force. That’s exactly why it is such a difficult moment to talk about ‘unity.’ The word is being twisted in public life—invoked to justify sweeping the homeless from our streets or stripping the poor of medical care. Against that counterfeit, your reminder is needed: the Collect points us back to unity already given in the Spirit, and to God’s power revealed not in domination but in weakness and solidarity with the vulnerable.
Reminds me of the passage from 2 Cor 4:
For it is the God who said, “Let light shine out of darkness,” who has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ. But we have this treasure* in earthen vessels, to show that the transcendent power belongs to God and not to us. We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not driven to despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed; always carrying in the body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be manifested in our bodies. - 2 Corinthians 4:6-10
Yes, we have a treasure inside, the literal manifestation of the trinity, the love expressed by the Father and son, face to face!
And yet this treasure is in "jars of clay," Christ's life in us revealed in our affliction, for "all creation groans..."
I understand the weakness. A number of years ago, my last year of 20 years of military service was spent on assignment away from my wife and sons. It broke and humbled us as a couple and a family, and not something we would ever want to experience again, but at the same time, formed and shaped us in a rich and deep way; we've never been the same. In our weakness, God's power was revealed.