Wonder-working power

As the month of May gives her last gasp, the rainy season here in Tanzania seems to wane, shrugging off her watery cloak for a garment of crisp air and sunshine. Now comes winter, the cold season, which still seems mild to us. We occasionally pull on a sweatshirt first thing in the morning now, before the day warms up, but the Tanzanians bundle up as though they really did expect snow. As our family walked around the block one evening this week, we were joined by one of the night guards, who chatted with us about his family and education and Jesus. The air was cool and inviting, and our children were running around in short sleeves, our small daughter in a sleeveless dress. But the guard was wearing a heavy winter jacket on top of his uniform, plus a winter hat that left only his face exposed, and he remarked with some concern over the lack of warm clothing on our children. We nodded and smiled and bid him goodnight and walked home marveling at how even weather can be a personal experience.

This last week in May also marks the beginning of Ordinary Time, that vast span in the church calendar between Pentecost Sunday and the beginning of Advent. It seemed fitting to me this year, the arrival of ordinary time just as we say goodbye to a month of family visitors, a month of special trips and meals and the excitement of sharing our lives here with people we love. Now we head back into ordinary time, back to small family, back to a life that seems more normal than it ever has before. My tall daughter glances around the breakfast table and says, “I’ve missed this,” and I think, “Me, too.” There’s something comforting about ordinary time:  the rhythms and rhymes of a day, known, familiar, expected.

I am also keenly aware that I cannot go through even an ordinary day on my own strength. I am weak and weary right now, a bit off-kilter, and the deep ruts left in the dirt roads after the rains jar me as we travel over them. But I remember that Pentecost precedes Ordinary Time, and I know this is how it must be. At Pentecost, the indwelling of the Holy Spirit infused not only the dramatic explosion of language and prophesy among the disciples of Jesus, but all the days that came after, the ordinary unfolding of lives that were forever different. In my weakness and weariness, I need this unfolding of courage and wisdom. I need new strength and power.

I have been thinking about power recently, about power structures and how being a stranger in a strange land changes the balance of power. All of my life I have been a person of privilege, born into a family and a race and a nation that gave me the right to talk and to be heard, to be educated, to have paths of recourse. And so when I encounter even small incidences of injustice here, I feel frustrated and powerless. I was walking home from the grocery store with my three children in tow, and a Tanzanian guard, who had moments before opened a side gate to let another man pass through, refused me passage, ignoring my pleas and forcing the children and me to walk back around the shopping complex to the main vehicle gate. And then my good husband and I were driving in a nearby town when we mistakenly went the wrong way down a one-way street. We were immediately accosted by a man in plain clothes who demanded that we go into some office and pay money to remedy our mistake, who was relentless and unmerciful and likely just hoping for a bribe. In both scenarios, I felt angry and ignorant as well, unsure how to respond. Do I argue? Do I offer money? Do I just turn around and leave? The power structures are unclear, and I am surprised at the way it rattles me, not to know who has the authority and what rights I have or why I am being asked to behave in a certain way.

And I have thought about Jesus, about his interactions with power structures, about how he who could rage at injustices against the poor and vulnerable kept silent in the face of the powerful men who unfairly condemned him to death. The same night that the disciples brandished swords in the Garden of Gethsemane, Jesus bent down and did something remarkable. The apostle John writes, “Jesus knew that the Father had put all things under his power, and that he had come from God and was returning to God; so he got up from the meal, took off his outer clothing, and wrapped a towel around his waist” (John 13:3-4). Did you catch that? Knowing that the God of the angel armies had given him infinite power, Jesus chose to… wait for it… wash the feet of his friends. The sign of the power at work in Jesus was this perfectly ordinary action, this act of love so bewildering that the disciples never saw it coming.

Perhaps this, then, is the Pentecost power I need in my Ordinary Time. I need the power that sent Jesus to the cross, the strength to bend down and serve my friends as well as my enemies, my children as well as the disgruntled guard down the road. I need the power given to me by the blood of Jesus and by the gift of his Spirit—for this, dear friends, is indeed a wonder-working power.