Sermons
July 6, 2025 (Proper 9)
I’m Powerless
Luke 7:11-17
Back when Jay Leno was the host of The Tonight Show, he used to do a segment from time to time called “Jaywalking.” He would go out onto the street outside his studio and ask random passersby questions.[1]
One night, during this segment, he asked people to name any one of the Ten Commandments. He was surprised to find that a great many of the people who responded named “God helps those who help themselves” as one of the Big Ten.
Similarly, Christian pollster George Barna found that some 75% of Americans—and around 65% of Christians—believe the Bible teaches that “God helps those who help themselves.”[2]
I once heard a conversation between evangelical pastor Jim Wallis and former Fox News host Bill O’Reilly—who I think is Catholic—in which O’Reilly asked Wallis how he justified some allegedly liberal belief given that “the Bible says that ‘God helps those who help themselves.’” Maybe Jim Wallis just felt like he didn’t have enough time during the interview to point out that that’s not in the Bible and had other things he wanted to discuss, but I was sort of disappointed that he let it pass without comment. I was disappointed with both of them, honestly; O’Reilly should have known better, too.[3]
Adam Hamilton calls “God helps those who help themselves” a “one-third truth.” There is, he says, actually at least a little common sense, some actual truth, in the statement.
Imagine a person who is looking for a job. She prays every morning for God to give her a job—but she doesn’t prepare a résumé or look through help wanted listings or anything.
Or think of a couple looking to sell their house for a particular asking price. Their realtor has told them what they’re asking is too high, but they are determined. They pray that God will help them sell their house, and are disappointed that they don’t get even a nibble. Finally they decide their realtor could be right, and they lower the price to what the realtor thought was a better number—and the house sells within days.
In situations like these, yes, I think “God helps those who help themselves” is common sense. But not every situation is like these. And “God helps those who help themselves” is not in the Bible.
I’ve heard that a great many of the “familiar quotations” in the English language come from one of three places: the King James Bible, Shakespeare, or Poor Richard’s Almanack by Benjamin Franklin.
This one is from Poor Richard’s Almanack.
It has roots that go back well before the time of Jesus, but in ancient Greek literature, not the Bible. About 400 years before Christianity, Sophocles wrote, “No good e’er comes of leisure purposelessness; And heaven ne’er helps the men who will not act.”
The Bible says, in many places, pretty much the opposite. How many of the Psalms, like the one from which our responsive reading today comes, start out with someone describing how they were in a situation that was beyond their ability to change, and they called on God, and God rescued them? And over and over in the Bible, beginning in the Torah, and continuing through the Prophets and even the New Testament, we’re reminded that God is especially concerned with the welfare of the poorest and most vulnerable people among us—those who cannot help themselves.
In the Bible, those folks were often widows and orphans, as we see in today’s text from Luke’s Gospel. There was no social safety net in Jesus’ time and place, and women were generally dependent on men to provide for them. First it would have been their fathers, then their husbands, and if they lost their husbands, hopefully they had grown sons who could look out for them.
The woman in today’s story was a widow, and she had just lost her adult son, her only son. She was left utterly alone, utterly unable to support herself, totally helpless. So Jesus—whose life, teaching, miracles, death, and resurrection show us what God is like—raises her son from the dead.
These days we often look at that and recognize that Jesus performed a miracle, raising this man from the dead, showing that he has the power of God over life and death. And that’s true, of course. But of all the people who had died at that time, why did Jesus raise this particular man?
Because his widowed mother had no other help. Because God—and as the revelation of God in human form, Jesus—is particularly attentive to the welfare of those who cannot help themselves.
That’s the reason why there is a commandment in Leviticus that farmers were not to harvest clear to the edges of their fields, and not to pick up fruit that had fallen to the ground in their orchards and vineyards. They were to leave some for those who were poor and could not provide for themselves, so they could gather some food to eat.
This commandment is what saved the Moabite widow Ruth and her mother-in-law Naomi—and remember that Ruth is an ancestor of Jesus himself.
Anybody who’s worked the Twelve Steps knows that God is always ready to help those who cannot help themselves. The first three steps point this out: First, the person seeking a way out of addiction recognizes that they are powerless over alcohol, drugs, whatever; that their life has become unmanageable. Then they know and accept that God can restore them to sanity, and they call on God for help. (I’m paraphrasing really loosely here, but I think I got the gist of it.)[4]
Now as you’ve heard me say many times, if it’s true that God is especially the help of those who are helpless, then we have an assignment.
I just mentioned the Twelve Steps. It’s important to be aware that the steps are all written in the first-person plural: We admitted we were powerless…and that our lives had become unmanageable. Those who follow the Twelve Steps do so in groups, like Alcoholics Anonymous. AA is a community of people all seeking God’s help to recover from their addictions, and all supporting one another along the way. A person who is especially vulnerable to relapse can find a meeting to attend, or speak with their sponsor, or even call another person who has made themselves available to offer support in difficult moments.
I was visiting a friend of mine who is a recovering alcoholic and who has been sober for decades. While we were on our way to supper, someone called her; it was someone who knew her from AA and was in need of some support at that moment.
What if every church were a community where a person who needs help, whether it’s a prayer, or encouragement, a listening ear, or even something more tangible like a bag of groceries, could ask for it? What if everyone who belongs to a church knew they could come to the church even when their lives were a mess, and they would receive grace and support there? And what if we who call ourselves the body of Christ imitate Christ in the ways he cared for the poorest and most vulnerable of his neighbors?
Because God absolutely helps those who cannot help themselves—and God often uses us to do it.
[1] Jimmy Kimmel often does something similar during his shows.
[2] Both Russell Muilenburg, in Misquoted: Things we think are in the Bible, but are not (Anchoring Hope Publishing, 2022), and Adam Hamilton, in Half Truths: God Helps Those Who Help Themselves and Other Things The Bible Doesn’t Say (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2016), describe Leno’s segment and the Barna surveys.
[3] This conversation took place at some point in the late 1990s on Bill O’Reilly’s Fox News show, The O’Reilly Factor.
[4] I have personally never been part of any kind of twelve-step program, and a church member I knew years ago said he could tell this was the case by the way I talk about it. I apologize if I egregiously misrepresent anything, but I have found the text of the Twelve Steps to be an excellent description of a path from brokenness to wholeness.