But there are other, deeper ways of feeling powerless. Yesterday, Paul and I visited in an office with two African-American men in their seventies as we waited for my sister to finish her appointment. My sister actually began the conversation with them by mentioning the horror of Charlottesville and White Supremacism. My husband mentioned that he is eighty, and that he remembers driving through Maryland when he was young and seeing the water fountains marked "white only " or "colored only." One of the African American men, Tom, reminisced about being twelve in Alabama and Georgia. "When we went to town," he said, "and walked down the street, if a white person started walking on the sidewalk on our side of the street, we automatically went to the sidewalk on the other side of the street. That was what was expected of us."
"That must have broken your heart," I said.
He shrugged. "I didn't think about it much then. We got used to it."
Yes, so often we get used to feeling powerless. Powerless to escape the prejudicial attitudes and laws inflicted on us by our society and even by our churches. Our society equates admitting powerlessness with being weak. Our society neatly divides humanity into the Powerful and the Powerless, and disdains, even works to eliminate, those whom they've chosen to be the Powerless. The chosen characteristics that a person needs to have in order to be judged Powerful include being rich, being healthy, being "productive," being "normal," often being male, and often also, being white. These also, according to some, seem to be the characteristics that determine whether or not we please God, because some believe that being poor, ill, not "normal," or sometimes even being female, is a mark of God's disfavor or lesser favor.
Society considers it a victory if a class of the Powerless is eliminated. Witness Iceland's recent jubilation that they had virtually eliminated Down syndrome from their midst. Our own U.S. CBS rejoiced with them. A recent news story on The DailyWire mentions
"Actress and pro-life advocate Patricia Heaton, whom everybody loved on Everybody Loves Raymond, took heavy shots at CBS for their abysmal report on Iceland's miraculous cure for Down Syndrome — abortion — which CBS undercut by using soft words like "eliminate" instead of "murder."
"As noted by John Nolte earlier, the CBS report contained hauntingly coded language — using words like "disappear" and "eliminating" — when referring to Down Syndrome, as though the genetic condition was being slowly and naturally eradicated. They were either intentionally prevaricating, or woefully ignorant of, the fact that Down Syndrome is being exterminated via the murderous enterprise of abortion.
"Since prenatal screening tests were introduced in Iceland in the early 2000s, the vast majority of women — close to 100 percent — who received a positive test for Down syndrome terminated their pregnancy. While the tests are optional, the government states that all expectant mothers must be informed about availability of screening tests, which reveal the likelihood of a child being born with Down syndrome. Around 80 to 85 percent of pregnant women choose to take the prenatal screening test, according to Landspitali University Hospital in Reykjavik.
"Heaton hit CBS with some raw truth about the meaning of the word "eliminate" in this context. She tweeted 'Iceland isn't actually eliminating Down syndrome. They're just killing everybody that has it. Big difference.'"
A friend of mine, Patrica Dyer, a Pediatric Nurse Practitioner, said of Heaton's comment:
"She's spot on. Whenever we look at US statistics on mortality and morbidity (death and disability/illness) of our newborns we must also look at what counts into the statistics. If those other countries are killing the babies before they are born they do not count into those statistics. Societies are often said to be judged on how we treat our weakest. Let's not go back to the pre-Judeo-Christian era of judging the value of people based on how productive they can be in society. To God we must look a bit confused - we advocate for inclusion and accommodation yet we kill those people who might need that accommodation. The value of a child should never be determined by the desires of the parent."
I wonder why these parents are opting for abortion? Is it because they don't want the inconvenience and work of caring for a special needs child? Or have they "bought into" society's judgement that only those who meet society's predetermined standards for Power and Perfection deserve to live? Do we forget that those families which have children with Down syndrome are depressed by these abortions of Down syndrome children - because of what their almost-parents will be missing. They'll tell you that their powerless Down syndrome child has the power to give them joy, perspective, and make them better people!
Right now the United States - which also has high percentages of women opting to abort children with Down syndrome - is self-righteously condemning the New Nazi Movement, but at the same time society is endorsing much of Nazi ideology about Perfection, Power, who should live and who should die. While we know that the Nazis considered the Jews, African Americans, and gays and lesbians to be inferior and thus to be eliminated, their ideas expanded far beyond these groups. Wikipedia notes
"In Nazi Germany, the idea of creating a master race resulted in efforts to "purify" the Deutsche Volk through eugenics; its culmination was the compulsory sterilization or the involuntary euthanasia of physically or mentally disabled people. After World War II, the euthanasia programme was named Action T4. The ideological justification for euthanasia was Adolf Hitler's view of Sparta (11th century – 195 BC) as the original Völkisch state; he praised Sparta's dispassionate destruction of congenitally deformed infants in order to maintain racial purity. The Nazis began to implement "racial hygiene" policies as soon as they came to power. The July 1933 "Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring" prescribed compulsory sterilization for people with a range of conditions which were thought to be hereditary, such as schizophrenia, epilepsy, Huntington's chorea, and "imbecility". Sterilization was also mandated for chronic alcoholism and other forms of social deviance. An estimated 360,000 people were sterilised under this law between 1933 and 1939. Although some Nazis suggested that the programme should be extended to people with physical disabilities, such ideas had to be expressed carefully, given the fact that some Nazis had physical disabilities, one example being one of the most powerful figures of the regime, Joseph Goebbels, who had a deformed right leg."
Do we forget that God chose to enter our world as a frail, limited human being, that God chose to take on the flesh of a weak infant child, a Jewish child? Yet this child, whose parents had to rush out of their country as refugees to escape persecution, was forever both Divine and Human. The absolute Fullness of God was enfleshed in Jesus! Jesus' glorious Divinity is revealed in and through the Humanity of the Incarnation.
And Who is God revealed to be? Certainly not proud, or caught up in worldly ideas of fame or perfection. God reveals through the words and actions of a fragile, powerless Jesus that God is humble, a Lover of Peace and Justice, a God Who serves us, a God Who cares for the poor, the ill, the hungry, thirsty, and naked, a God Who is Love. In God-in-Jesus, true Power is revealed to be what society considers weakness and Powerlessness! We are saved indeed, but not by deeds of military might, not by a King Jesus Who slaughters the sinful opposition with his "terrible, swift sword", but by a criminal Jesus, a naked Jesus, a suffering, poor Jesus, dying a shameful death on the cross. This powerless Jesus is then raised in glory, given new life, and we receive new life through him and in him.
Bradley Jersak, in "A More Christlike God," reminds us "If it hadn't been for the humble life and gruesome death of Christ, I doubt we would have pictured God's Messianic King as a slain lamb or a peasant so familiar with donkeys. Apparently wealth and might weren't foremost in God's priorities for self-revelation. But God did communicate exactly what he wanted to reveal about himself, and he did so in Jesus, using images we doubtless would have avoided."
Through his humble, pain-filled, loving acceptance and forgiveness of all human beings - and all of us put him to death - Jesus redeems humankind. Jesus forever reverses who is Powerful and who is Powerless. Jesus forever reverses who is Perfect and who is imperfect, for Jesus says that God is most pleased with a humble sinner, a Publican, who kneels in the back of Church, admits who he is beneath his facade of perfection, and asks God's forgiveness. God forever loves the sinner who bows his head and humbly acknowledges his weakness and frailty. God forever stretches hands of love to the poor, weak, addicted, criminal, sick, special needs, not conventionally "normal," and also the "non-productive" ones whom society forever dismisses as the Expendables.
Basking in, warmed by, the saving, healing love of God, we can admit that we are powerless and "imperfect." We can count on God Who is Love to assure us that we are forever valued and loved, absolutely precious. When we open trusting hearts to God, we are always empowered by God's love, God's vision, God's spiritual gifts.
How counter-cultural can we be? If we can only humbly admit to ourselves and to God how really powerless we are, how confused, how caught in patterns of emotional and spiritual frailty, God will reach out to us and empower us with God's Love. For God's nature is Jesus' nature; God is humble, loving, forgiving, a Servant King. It doesn't matter how powerless we feel, for if we reach out to God, God's power will shine forth through our weakness. God's love will bring all things to the good in us. Society's estimate of us and who we are does not count at all in the eternal scheme of things. God wants only the sacrifice of our hearts - and for us to see that, in His eyes, No-one is useless, powerless, imperfect, or expendable. Therefore - NO-ONE should seem useless, powerless, imperfect, weak, or expendable to us!