A friend recently expressed to me a sense of feeling 'powerless' and it has captured my sentiments as of late. Many of the experiences we share focus on not being able to do something, not having something or having something different than what we want. In a time of crisis, the things that jump out at us are the things that are different. Because those things tend to be hard - pain, suffering, inability, lack - we disdain the crisis as an interference with our lives. It's possible though, that, rather than being an interference, those hard things are helpers: pointing us to a different way than what we have made for ourselves in daily, normal life.
In the prayer of confession from the Book of Common Prayer’s Office of Compline, prayed before bed each night, we ask God, "grant that we may serve you in newness of life." Reflecting on this, it seems odd that in a prayer of confession where we are focusing our hearts on sin, faults, and offenses, we finish by asking God for newness of life.
When my own heart is in confession mode, I tend to be focused on what's wrong with me. I come to God with my weakness, mistakes, and sins feeling bad that I have hurt him and others and not lived up to his desires for me or the desires I have for myself because of God's redemption of me. In contrast, the end of this prayer seems intent on switching my focus from self to God - from sin to salvation - from hurt to joy.
In other words, newness of life comes at just the right time: when I am beaten down. Newness of life comes to pull me out of an over exaggerated focus on my needs, my lack, my wants. Newness of life comes when I need it- when I’m powerless.
Isn’t this the good news of the Gospel? Newness of life comes. Period. It comes. We don't go get it. We can't make it happen on our own. We can't buy it, hoard it or borrow it. It's been given to us. We confess it at the end of the prayer of confession because we are confessing - saying, admitting - that we want to walk in this newness of life that only God can give.
This phrase actually comes from Saint Paul in Romans 6, in the context of baptism and the resurrected life it precedes as we continue to choose Jesus. And here we find the amazing connection between powerlessness and us: resurrection. Newness of life is the resurrected life of Jesus. We gain the resurrected life of Jesus when we give the power of owning our own lives up to God. "Grant that we may serve you in newness of life."
The same power that raised Jesus from death raises us to life. We confess and he empowers. We humble ourselves, like Jesus did, and he raises us up with a new way or option to live. Powerlessness is the door we walk through to access our future life.
In a way then, powerlessness feels good. It's a relieving recognition that we are not in ultimate control. Powerlessness removes the facade of our strength and our initiatives to do something entirely on our own, apart from God's involvement.
This question of the heart must be answered by each of us: Who do we want to have control of our life? God, who has the power and is making all things new? Or ourselves, who have limited power, and on our best days, are only seeking to make our own lives more comfortable? The exact opposite of what Jesus did.
The fact that the coronavirus and this sense of powerlessness comes during Lent is a gift to us. Of all people on the face of the earth, we Christians can see through the veil of fear that the human heart is spreading among the masses. We know God is control because Jesus was in the tomb. And then he wasn't. Now he reigns victoriously over all of creation, including in our own hearts. The same power...the same God...the same story we hear every year.
This year is different. This Easter season is different. We have before our very eyes, in our flesh and heart and mind, the opportunity to discover what newness of life is, what it is that we are asking God to give us. Every week we confess "grant that we may serve you in newness of life." Now we can sense what it is: recognizing that God is in control and we are not. And the joy that comes with trusting a good God for his plan in our lives to unfold as he sees fit.
We “know” a lot of these things from the Bible, but to understand them, we have to experience them. Isn't God good to give us a life full of experiences so that we can know him more?
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