The Vulnerable God
The Vulnerable God
January 25, 2026
Minister: Rev. JT Smiedendorf
Readings: Philippians 2:5-8
Download a printable PDF of this sermon here.
CENTRAL FOCUS:
That Jesus, the Teacher and Crucified One, shows us a God of Vulnerability as much as or if not more than a God Almighty. This translates to an understanding of God as with humanity in our suffering.
“Let the same mind be in you that was[a] in Christ Jesus,
6 who, though he existed in the form of God,
did not regard equality with God
as something to be grasped,
7 but emptied himself,
taking the form of a slave,
assuming human likeness.
And being found in appearance as a human,
8 he humbled himself
and became obedient to the point of death—
even death on a cross.”
These are the words of our ancient tradition.
May the Living Word of God in Scripture be alive within us, among us, and beyond us.
This is an extraordinary morning indeed. These are extraordinary times. It is good to be together in such times. Being together and feeling our feelings, praying our prayers, and looking to our faith for wisdom and strength seems like a good thing to be doing. This is so that our discernment of a faithful response and our presence amidst our responses remains guided and empowered by Divine love, the kind of Divine love that is stronger than death and stronger than the forces of violence.
Let us say again clearly that our faithful response is not one of violence; it is one of sacred resistance to the violence that is being perpetrated on our community. I do not know what all of our tactics should be, what they will look like, but I do know that as a community of faith, they must be informed by our faith, by our understanding of the Divine Mystery of who God is, of what God is about. I would like to explore that first with a couple of brief stories.
Sarah was a bright 40-something, an energetic force of life, joyful and creative, seeking joyful creative goodness for the Early Learning Center children she loved and served. She was the Director of that center, which was a partner to the church I was serving. Working with the children of the ELC, she was aglow when singing to them and telling stories. Then, within weeks, what seemed like a back injury led to a further diagnosis of metastasized cancer, Stage 4. Within a month, she died.
I could tell a similar story of “beloveds suddenly gone” about Renee Good or about Alex Pretti, the two people that ICE has killed in our city. They, too, were living lives of parenting and of nursing one moment, and then they were gone.
These are stories of vulnerability.
This current vulnerability story of ICE in the Twin Cities is immediate and ongoing, isn’t it? We are in that story now. We as Plymouth staff even had to discuss yesterday whether it was safe enough to gather in person in worship today. You might even have a sense of this story in your body as an altered state of vigilance or anxiety of some sort. Like me, you may also feel heartbreak, sadness. When I heard yesterday of Alex Pretti’s death while home in Colorado leading a retreat, the tears came quickly. It is, of course, OK to feel these feelings. In order to meet this moment faithfully, we will need to keep our nervous systems regulated. In order to do that, we will all need to keep feeling our feelings, and to keep breathing fully.
This morning, I would like to tell other stories, to be in other stories with other endings—Hallmark endings. Many of us have stories of vulnerability in our lives where the life we long for or expect or count on is lost in some way; life-challenging and life-taking illness, unwanted undeserved misfortune, damaging addictions or unmanaged mental health conditions. We are all, in the Twin Cities and in this nation, in a collective story of vulnerability—an ominous, tragic story of American history, human history.
Stories and experiences of vulnerability for me generate questions of faith: Where is God in this? Is God not on duty? Is God derelict in the duties of an Almighty Loving Deity? What the hell is the matter with God anyway, letting all this happen? Is God asleep at the wheel as life and history drive off the road?
Our call as a community of faith is to engage the whole mystery of life, to be with even these vulnerability stories and moments meaningfully, to trust that somehow God is present and that we can respond in a life-giving way. Here’s where theology matters. Bad theology will cause and accentuate the pain and confusion of such moments. Bad theology gets you a God not worth believing in. There is the possibility, the invitation, this morning to be in-formed—formed within, by our sacred stories in these extraordinary times in such a way as to help us respond faithfully.
As I felt the pain of Sarah’s death and the deaths of Renee and Alex, I’ll ask those questions about where-is-God only if I reference God as Almighty, and if I expect that somehow being a person who claims faith guarantees safety and all the good things I want or want for others or for the world. With experience and study, I have come to understand that our imaging and naming of God so frequently over the years as Almighty and omnipotent, though terms of respect and perhaps even wonder, can carry a cost. This naming can keep us from recognizing the Presence of the Vulnerable God who is with us in the midst of our vulnerability, even now in the midst of this vulnerability.
The Latin vulnus, from which we get the English word vulnerability, means, literally, ‘wound.’ If we take seriously the incarnation of the Divine in a little child born in an animal stall, of the Divine accused of hanging out with the wrong crowd, of the Divine who was wrongly executed in the fashion reserved for the worst criminals, then we had best know that we have a Vulnerable God, one who lives in and with the vulnerable, one who bears sacred wounds.
More than that, we have a God who calls us to be in solidarity with the vulnerable and, in some significant way, to be vulnerable ourselves. On an interpersonal and intrapersonal level, most of the growth I see and experience invariably involves allowing some vulnerability to be expressed and exposed to the Grace of God, often mediated by others expressing empathy and Grace in their witness to us.
That means there is something off the mark, sin-full if you will, about any quest for invulnerability, especially for those with means and resources, with privilege and power. This applies to individuals and to nations. Decades ago, former Harvard Divinity School professor Sharon Welch wrote a masterful book entitled A Feminist Ethic of Risk in which she critiqued the nuclear arms race and its underlying understanding of responsible action as control and guarantee. Simply put, the quest to eliminate all vulnerability in relationship to nuclear rivals through deterrence actually led to an increased risk of nuclear catastrophe as we sought to ‘weaponize’ our way out of any risk with an amassing of weapons of mass destruction. It’s interesting that the name for this military approach is called mutually assured destruction. M-A-D. It is madness indeed.
Said Professor Welch,
“To the extent that we still cling to the ideal of omnipotence—of a sovereign God or an all-wise, always successful father—we are trapped in our own role as oppressors, expecting a level of ease in action impossible in an interdependent world.”
It matters how we image and name God.
What is called Operation Metro Surge is a similar kind of madness of accumulating mass numbers of weaponized personnel to invade a city, to attempt to be omnipotent in pursuit of the illusion of creating invulnerability. Operation Metro Surge is an attempt to absolutely control the situation and eliminate any sense of vulnerability and eliminate the potential anxiety that goes with that vulnerability. Whether personal or governmental, any attempt to manage our anxiety to eliminate any sense of vulnerability with control and power over others is the antithesis to the life and teachings of Jesus. It is the way of King Herod.
Vulnerability is a scandal to those who hold power as control, as power over others, to those who wish to ‘win’ by domination. Domination is the power teaching of the patriarchy. This is not to say that power cannot be life giving. All those who have sought change in their own lives and change in their societies would tell you they needed power. But what kind of power?
Here is the ‘both/and’ paradox: We cannot have true life-giving power without vulnerability.
Building a wall around our hearts, our neighborhood, or around our country will not lead us to life nor to God. There is such a thing as trying to be too safe or seeking to be in complete control. That will take us away from Love and justice and healing.
The part of the letter to the church at Philippi that we read this morning expresses what inspired many in the early church: the image of Jesus as fully in touch with Divine power and affirmation using that power in humble vulnerable service, even to the point of risking his life for the purposes of Love. This is self-emptying (kenosis in Greek), emptying the baggage of the ego-self and its projects of perfect security to make room for God, room for a Greater Love than the small self.
Today, the invitation of faith is to engage the image of the Vulnerable God who hung out with the vulnerable marginalized and was vulnerable himself. When we do that, we are never alone on the hospice bed or on the streets, never so afraid of the Other that we attempt to dominate, denigrate, imprison, or eliminate them.
If we remember the image of the Vulnerable God, we are given courage to let down our personal defenses enough to be more fully known, and enough to receive others more fully. We are locating ourselves not in the compulsion to be a victim, but in the faithful choice to not victimize or dominate others as we express a commitment to resist the way of violence and heal the tear in the fabric of our interdependence.
If we remember the image of the Vulnerable God, we will no longer need to be in bondage to, nor need to idolize, invulnerability through walls and weapons, warrantless searches, and pepper spray. We will not go the dominating way of King Herod. We will instead discover the humble power of love and connection that builds bridges not walls, that brings people together in healing and faithful actions for justice, and that opens us to deeply and fully receiving the Grace and Good News of God.
Let us keep faith in the strange power of Love that we see in the Vulnerable God—a power stronger than death, stronger than the threat of death, stronger than King Herod.
AMEN