The Power in Powerlessness - GBC Bulletin Column #46

This past week I was able to meet and speak briefly with Oscar-winning make-up artist Roy Helland, who for over thirty years has done the hair and make-up of actress Meryl Streep. On the set of Suffragette, in which Streep plays political activist Emmeline Pankhurst, I mentioned to Mr. Helland that a favourite film of mine (for which Helland won his Oscar) is The Iron Lady, in which Streep becomes former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. Emphasis on the word former – as Helland told me, ‘it wasn’t about that [Thatcher’s government]. It was about what happens when people who had power, no longer have it.’

Whatever a person’s political affiliations, that is a poignant message, and one strikingly depicted in the film. Streep’s Thatcher is no longer a leader in the free world, but a lonely woman battling dementia in the present who looks back on the tragedies and triumphs of her past. In a flashback, she tells husband-to-be Dennis that she won’t live “remote and alone, doing the washing-up in a kitchen” and she “cannot die washing up a tea-cup.” The film ends with Thatcher remote, alone, and doing the washing-up in a kitchen. She is washing a tea-cup.

The same theme of the powerful being made powerless runs throughout Scripture and is a reality also borne out in church history. Indeed, there are some who might look at England’s churches in their present state and perceive them to be no different from Streep’s Thatcher. London comes second (to Moscow) on a list of European cities that are less than 2% evangelical. Once missionaries were sent from London, now they are sent to London. The powerful days of the Puritans, the early Baptists, Whitefield and Wesley’s Methodism, the eighteenth century missions movement, the Clapham Sect’s political reforms, and Spurgeon’s pulpit have faded and are but memories - if even that - in the dementiac mind of British Christianity. We are frail.

Scratching the surface of perception to find reality, I believe that frailty is not only our present weakness but our future strength, because it reminds us that ‘the surpassing power belongs to God’ (2 Cor. 4:7). When we cease revelling in the triumphs of Christians past, and learn to rejoice through our trials in Christ present, when we no longer are eaten up by the misery of our smallness, but are lifted up by magnificence of God’s greatness, when we who once dared to have power have it no more but now boast in our weakness, then we are strong because we’ve heard the voice of Jesus saying “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness” (2 Cor. 12:9). We don’t have power, but we trust in God who does. Whatever our fragility, we can proclaim the good news of Jesus on earth knowing that one day we will praise his glorious name in heaven with a vast multitude he has saved through the faithful witness of his people. Our powerful God has everything under control – ‘he gives power to the faint’ (Is. 40:29)! We don’t have to die washing tea cups.

This was printed in the worship bulletin of Grace Baptist Church (Wood Green) on 30 March 2014.