Go Switch!!!!

I have been getting constant calls recently from a company called “Go Switch” looking to find the cheapest energy companies with the cheapest rate. Full time electricity, full time power is not something I got used growing up in Lebanon. Even now full time electricity is rare with power only available few hours a day. Generators fill the gaps if you can afford membership. Even one must calculate how many amps you have and what must you switch off when you decide to use the A/C on a hot day. Home grown accountants are a must, when you have to work out if you can have a kettle, microwave and a fridge running at the same time.

Our world hungers for power. Individually we yearn for power. We all need it. It is an essential human need. The question is who is our supplier? Which energy company are we subscribed with? Which energy company do we trust our life to? Does it supply short term or long term power?

It is hard when you observe what is trending in our world not to taken back by our hunger to dominate and enforce power over others. Our need to control people, situations, our future is essential but has been much abused. The kind of power is that of dominating and possessiveness.

But this is precisely unlike the power of the cross, the power of God’s love. This is the kind of power that Paul was talking about to the Jews and Greeks. He says that the “Jews demand signs and Greeks look for wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified: a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those whom God has called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God.”

Today more than ever we struggle with this “Christ crucified” power. We think it’s weak, foolish, a stumbling block and a waste of time. They thought that before Christ and we think that now. As if the Christ event meant nothing. As if the nakedness of the Cross was weakness and shame and not transformative.

The Old Testament was filled with stories about the People of God straying away from the path connecting to a different power source and the prophets are sent to reconnect them back after much suffering to the source of all Life, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.

In the New Testament we have Jesus who continually challenged his disciples to connect to the source of all power, to the father. He Himself at his most troubling hour wanted what the Father wanted. In absolute radical trust he abandoned himself the the Father’s love despite the earthly voices reminding him at the very last minute to “save himself” and loose trust in the Father.

How fitting is this for us today. In the face of many voices telling us to retaliate, to face evil with violence, to be tougher, to ask for harsher punishment, longer sentences, to lock them up, to destroy the enemy with precise bombing and to annihilate the “other”. Even for us Christians who are the followers of a Crucified Messiah, we ask of how must we respond to the enemy who is persecuting us?

I am sounding a pacifist, maybe I am. I believe in the right to self defense and I understand to face evil in a broken world, the “Just War” theory has its place. I am just not sure and in fact convinced that the vast majority of the violence and the root of war had nothing to do with these concepts and are really about corruption of power and greed. It is ultimately about our lack of trust in the power of God’s love and the Cross.

Simply, we are weak, not because we are not violent enough or tough enough, we are weak because we don’t trust in the power of real love. A lack of trust that patient love is transformative. That if you love patiently and heal the wounds of others that radical change will take place.

That the real medicine for our injury is the energy of love and mercy. The others even if we need to use them are only short term and some of them have detrimental side effects.
Let us all hope that in our daily lives we switch and trust in the love of God. We do that in the small everyday decisions. But that needs practice. We can only do that if we continue to meditate on the Person Of Christ. He is Our leader and helper. We need to contemplate the face of Christ, his life, ministry, prayer and cross. Then contemplation moves to action. Slowly, slowly we make the switch.

Blessed are we if we go against our instincts to retaliate and trust in the power of God’s love for indeed we would receive our rewards and we will be truly living as children of God.