Real power is in the love we show

Tutu, in that talk to fellow preachers, said that like many preachers, he had only one sermon. His was, “God loves you.” The challenger was in the implications.

God loves you. Then what? For followers of Tutu, and Beni for that matter, it meant standing for justice.

And that brings us back to Bobby, JR, and Jock, the characters in the Texas soap opera. Real power, it turns out, is not something you take away from others. It may be even something you give them, by showing another way.

By their active nonviolent resistance — a challenging option — the protesters, boycotters and survivors of apartheid had shown those opposed to them, and to the world, another way.

Theologian Walter Wink, an advocate of active nonviolent resistance, wrote about the “powers that be” that through institutional violence dominate the world as it is. (Think of Pilate and Herod and the occupying powers of Rome.)

But domination of the powers that be, that exert power over others, cannot last in the face of the force of love.

As the Apostle Paul wrote, “God put [his] power to work in Christ when he raised him from the dead and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly places, far above all rule and authority and power and dominion.” And that power can be “at work in us, that is able to accomplish abundantly far more than all we can ask or imagine.” (Ephesians 1:19-21, 3:20)