1 I waited patiently for the Lord;
he inclined to me and heard my cry.
2 He drew me up from the desolate pit,
out of the miry bog,
and set my feet upon a rock,
making my steps secure.
3 He put a new song in my mouth,
a song of praise to our God.
Many will see and fear
and put their trust in the Lord.
4 Happy are those who make
the Lord their trust,
who do not turn to the proud,
to those who go astray after false gods.
5 You have multiplied, O Lord my God,
your wondrous deeds and your thoughts toward us;
none can compare with you.
Were I to proclaim and tell of them,
they would be more than can be counted.
6 Sacrifice and offering you do not desire,
but you have given me an open ear.
Burnt offering and sin offering
you have not required.
7 Then I said, “Here I am;
in the scroll of the book it is written of me.
8 I delight to do your will, O my God;
your law is within my heart.”
9 I have told the glad news of deliverance
in the great congregation;
see, I have not restrained my lips,
as you know, O Lord.
10 I have not hidden your saving help within my heart;
I have spoken of your faithfulness and your salvation;
I have not concealed your steadfast love and your faithfulness
from the great congregation.
11 Do not, O Lord, withhold
your mercy from me;
let your steadfast love and your faithfulness
keep me safe forever.
– Psalm 40:1-11, NRSVue
Psalm 40 makes very specific claims about power, and from whom it stems: perhaps surprising to those currently holding the reins of authority in the United States, but the psalmist boldly claims that no human holds any of their own power, for all power emerges from the underlying and inherent power of the Divine.
What is this power of the Divine anyway? For starters, the psalmist paints a picture of a Divine whose deeds are so mighty, so innumerable, so powerful, that nothing in existence can compare to them (Psalm 40:5). Nowhere, nobody, and nothing is outside of the reach of the Divine’s power, not even the most desolately deep pit (Psalm 40:2). The power of the Divine can offer salvation to not only individuals (v. 1), but to entire communities (Psalm 40:10). The latent power of the Divine not only completely transforms individual people (Psalm 40:3, 7-8), it can be utilised by those people to then transform entire congregations (Psalm 40:9).
Yet, this is a power tempered by – and infused with – mercy, love, and compassion that seeks the safety of individuals as well as communities (Psalm 40:11). This power of the Divine is in relationship with humanity, but acts independently of human action, requiring no payment and certainly no quid pro quo (Psalm 40:6). The power of the market is nothing in the face of Divine power, as none can buy access to this power, demand its presence and action, or even “weave” rambling incoherence in the face of it.
Any other claims to the contrary are mere human pride, and constitute the idolatry of worshipping a false god (Psalm 40:4).
Of course, this is an ontological claim about the foundational aspects of both human and Divine nature, not the practical realities of human existence where we all utilise power in various ways throughout our daily lives. Fundamentally, power is simply the ability and capacity to act and exert some sense of control.
Unless, that is, you’re someone with the temerity, the sheer audacity, to live in a state whose majority didn’t vote for the “correct” candidate (and “correct” political party, of course). For that unforgivable offence, the proper punishment must be to lose access to the most basic services needed for daily life – those obviously extraneous luxuries of food and shelter – as punishment for their transgressions.
Since July 16, 1945 – the first test of a nuclear device anywhere, named (offensively, yet ironically) the “Trinity” test – humanity has had access to the power necessary to strip the earth of everything necessary for not only their own existence, but that of every other living thing on the planet. (Not that we’d give anything else the opportunity to object to their destruction, let’s be honest.)
We can – and have – used the power of our technological advances to not only inaugurate mass extinction events for entire species, but to terminate entire ecosystems. We can – and have – destroyed massive bodies of water simply to serve the temporary needs of a political ideology – or even worse, the profound ephemerality of the almighty business cycle. Shareholders can apparently only see time in three month sections, after all.
Who cares about the astonishing beauty and extraordinary fecundity of the Gulf of Mexico (or the mighty Orinoco River delta in Venezuela, while we’re at it) when the inexorable logic of the market (and brazen, craven human greed) demands oil to flow unabated? Drill, baby, drill: the pelicans and crawfish will just need to adapt.
That’s not a big deal, of course: it’s not like we need water for our existence or anything.
Power is thus inherently a delicate and deliberate dichotomous dance between declaration and discipline, where those capable of exerting power over themselves and others recognise not only the vulnerability of their own access to power, but also the inherent vulnerability of human existence: everything breaks, disintegrates, or dies – eventually. No one can exercise their body enough, amass enough wealth, accrue enough access to power, or gerrymander their way out of the human condition. None have enough access to power that the foundational reality of existence – that of absolute interdependence and vulnerability – ceases to inexorably exert its own continuous power.
It’s almost axiomatic at this point: eventually, we all need others, leaving cooperation, humility, and patience the only lasting realities of human access to power. If the last few years have taught us anything, it’s that power can abandon any of us, at any moment – even and especially on a debate stage, in full view of the entire planet. We all forget this lesson at our peril.
What is brute physical force in the face of the terrifying power of the microscopic? We didn’t tame the pandemic with the might of our military, the strength of our will, or the fervent passion of our ideology: instead, a global coalition of scientists, doctors, and nurses, combined with the seemingly quotidian heroics of parents, teachers, and kids, all cooperating together, created the situation where microscopic weapons could exercise their power against the tiniest of enemies.
On that note, I hope that it doesn’t surprise you that I emphasise the heroics of kids. Not only did we deploy our kids on the front lines of the school masking wars, at least in the United States we continue to deploy our kids on the front lines of the gun rights wars. Think this through: Americans send our kids off to schools every. single. day. full of the knowledge that at any moment, at any school, in any town, in any state, a boy (and let’s be honest, it’s nearly always boys and men committing mass shootings) could enter their kid’s school and decide to open fire at anyone, for any reason.
In the most bitter of ironies, the only reason why school shootings dipped during the pandemic was because so many students weren’t actually in school. On top of all of that, kids have no capacity to exert the power to protect themselves because the law requires that they attend school! Add onto that the fear of contracting a deadly disease and the pernicious ubiquity of online bullying, and it’s unconscionable that we don’t praise the bravery of our kids every morning.
What is true bravery: hiding behind the illusion of power offered by brawn and bullets, or continuing to walk the same halls each day, powerless to stop someone marinated in the toxicity of masculine grievance from exerting the cowardly power of metal triggers over vulnerable human flesh…and doing it anyway? I’ll choose the bravery of a ten-year-old nonbinary kid over that of any soldier every time. Courage exists because of vulnerability, not despite it – and any soldier who has ever seen combat would agree that bravery without fear is hubris.
And completely, utterly stupid.
Yet, this understanding of power as simply brute force has now become the official policy of the United States, where the strong are expected to rule over the weak, the rich are expected to grab that cash with both hands and make a stash, and alliances only serve the interests of the nation with access to more military and economic power. This is ostensibly the United States, of course, as it is based on the assumption that American power is eternal, somehow, something built into the very fabric of the nation and not simply the accrued agglomeration of temporary circumstance.
Stephen Miller, the architect of current US immigration policy (or, more accurately, mass deportation policy) stated so in the most explicit terms, in response to critique of the current US policy of kidnapping, expropriation, and extortion towards Venezuela. It’s instructive, I’d argue to read his actual words:
“The United States of America is running Venezuela. By definition, that’s true…we live in a world in which you can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else, but we live in a world, in the real world, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world that have existed since the beginning of time…this is sort of foundational. The United States is using its military to secure our interests unapologetically in our hemisphere. We’re a superpower. And under President Trump, we are going to conduct ourselves as a superpower.”
Yet, again, this prideful boasting aggrandisement is actually based upon an absolute misunderstanding of power in the “real world”: in reality, the American capacity to exert power is vulnerably dependent on a spiderwebbed global order itself built upon cooperative agreements between sovereign nations, where the limits of American force are strengthened by the active and willing participation of others. American military power still depends on alliances, while American economic power utterly depends on the willingness of others to build their own economies on the seemingly stable foundation of the US dollar.
The true power undergirding the American myth of might, therefore, is mainly reputational: the world allows the US to have the power it claims because of the belief that the United States is both capable of exerting power effectively, and (for some) the belief in the US as an effective arbiter for democracy and individual rights. Whether this belief is accurate matters less than the fact that it is believed to be true.
What happens if the current administration tosses aside the entire superstructure of alliances holding NATO together simply because their greed demands the accession of Greenland and all of its sweet, sweet natural resources? What happens if the nascent genocide of trans people in the US continues unabated, or even (as is more likely) expands and metastisises? Will US allies continue to bolster US power?
If current trends continue, the answer is very likely no. The entire world could be facing the stark reality that the US is far closer to an authoritarian dictatorship than a democracy – and we all know how effective the authoritarian urge to simple brute force is over the long term. I mean, just ask Nicolas Maduro.
Speaking of people crying from out of desolate pits, mired in inescapable bogs, the psalmist reminds us that all access to power is temporary, depends utterly on patient cooperation, and stems entirely from deep roots in the Divine. Any other claims to power are prideful idolatrous worship of the false gods of violence, dominance, patriarchy, and permanence.
Psalm 40 asks us what kind of God we worship, reminding us to choose carefully: who’s more likely to incline to us, hearing our desolate cries? The god of Christian Nationalism (the idol of brute power), or the Divine of vulnerable interdependence? I know who I’m going to be praying to in the small hours.
