This sermon from Hilfiker seems to describe what it means to BE the Church rather than to “be activists”;  or a redefinition of “activism”;  a “think[ing] differently about our responses to these Powers confronting us”.

I suspect I’m not alone in feeling this despair, and I think I’m beginning to understand why some of us feel it.  Two years ago here, I talked with you about Walter Wink’s understanding of the Powers and Principalities.  The reality is that we’re now struggling against things that are far greater than a few ideological human beings in positions of authority.  We’re struggling against Powers that have become virtually independent of the people who compose them, and the closer we get to the struggle, the more we realize the immensity of the Powers arrayed against us.

Because my sermons tend to get depressing in the middle, let me tell you what I’d like to do, so you know what’s coming.  I’m going to talk with you about three specific Powers, “democracy,” corporations, and capitalism and try to tease out some parts of what they’ve become.  In the process, I think we’ll see why it’s easy to despair of our situation.

Then I’d like to describe to you briefly the response of three Eastern European countries—Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Poland—to the overwhelming Power that was the Soviet Union.  And finally I’d like to suggest that our current despair forces us more deeply into our faith, onto one another, and into our communities where we must begin to think differently about our responses to these Powers confronting us.

Hilfiker: Empire and the Powers

Hilfiker continues:

I hesitate to say this, but I no longer believe that we’re going to fix this democracy, or this economic system, or the structure of the corporations.  It’s gone too far.  Like the countries in Eastern Europe, like the Christians during the Roman Empire, we face temporal powers that are too strong for us.  And there’s no magic pendulum that will swing us automatically back into democracy.

So what do we do?  Neville Watson, the Australian lawyer and pastor whom many of you know, has written the following:

• We challenge the lies.  We live in truth.  We become the change we want to see.  We offer an alternative.  We lower our sights, and in living the change we wish to see in our society, we institute a fundamental break with dominant values and the conformist patterns of the system.  … It is not about being successful.  It is about being faithful.