Inseperable Love 7-30-23
Inseperable Love - Grace
Ps 139: 129-136; Romans 8:26-39
Ps 139:129-136
Your decrees are wonderful; therefore my soul keeps them. The unfolding of your words gives light; it imparts understanding to the simple. With open mouth I pant, because I long for your commandments. Turn to me and be gracious to me, as is your custom toward those who love your name. Keep my steps steady according to your promise, and never let iniquity have dominion over me. Redeem me from human oppression, that I may keep your precepts. Make your face shine upon your servant, and teach me your statutes. My eyes shed streams of tears because your law is not kept.
Romans 8:26-39 – The Message
Meanwhile, the moment we get tired in the waiting, God’s Spirit is right alongside helping us along. If we don’t know how or what to pray, it doesn’t matter. He does our praying in and for us, making prayer out of our wordless sighs, our aching groans. He knows us far better than we know ourselves, knows our pregnant condition, and keeps us present before God. That’s why we can be so sure that every detail in our lives of love for God is worked into something good. God knew what he was doing from the very beginning. He decided from the outset to shape the lives of those who love him along the same lines as the life of his Son. The Son stands first in the line of humanity he restored. We see the original and intended shape of our lives there in him. After God made that decision of what his children should be like, he followed it up by calling people by name. After he called them by name, he set them on a solid basis with himself. And then, after getting them established, he stayed with them to the end, gloriously completing what he had begun. So, what do you think? With God on our side like this, how can we lose? If God didn’t hesitate to put everything on the line for us, embracing our condition and exposing himself to the worst by sending his own Son, is there anything else he wouldn’t gladly and freely do for us? And who would dare tangle with God by messing with one of God’s chosen? Who would dare even to point a finger? The One who died for us—who was raised to life for us!—is in the presence of God at this very moment sticking up for us. Do you think anyone is going to be able to drive a wedge between us and Christ’s love for us? There is no way! Not trouble, not hard times, not hatred, not hunger, not homelessness, not bullying threats, not backstabbing, not even the worst sins listed in Scripture: They kill us in cold blood because they hate you. We’re sitting ducks; they pick us off one by one. None of this fazes us because Jesus loves us. I’m absolutely convinced that nothing—nothing living or dead, angelic or demonic, today or tomorrow, high or low, thinkable or unthinkable—absolutely nothing can get between us and God’s love because of the way that Jesus our Master has embraced us.
Prayer – Still speaking God, share once again with us that there is nothing, absolutely nothing that can separate us from your love. So much of our everyday realities shout at us that we are not good enough, that we don’t measure up, that somehow we are less than. May your good word for today remind us that as your beloved there is nothing we can say, do, think or anything else that can separate us from your never-ending love – amen.
A friend and minister colleague of mind, Maggie Henderson, recently shared a story with me. She is the pastor at Old First Presbyterian in San Francisco. She told me a few weeks ago she had a Sunday off and attended historic Glide Memorial United Methodist Church at the corner of Ellis and Taylor Streets in San Francisco’s seedy Tenderloin District. Glide UMC stepped into the national limelight in 1963 when it hired Cecil Williams, a young African-American, as their pastor. Across the years Williams had boldly proclaimed God’s unconditional acceptance to a spectacle of radical and radically disenfranchised groups including a Hookers Convention, the American Indian Movement, the Black Panthers, and of course, the city’s considerable gay community. In 1964, Williams founded the Council on Religion and Homosexuality, long before the beginning of the gay rights movement.
Maggie shared that during that Sunday she was moved by one song that the Glide Ensemble sang, the refrain of which captures Paul’s words from Romans for this week: “God will take care of you.” Maggie said the Sunday she worshipped at Glide was the weekend of Gay Pride Weekend with its extravagant parade. She said that as she stood among thousands of people on Market St and watched the parade, she could only think how far she had come from the little town in North Carolina where she grew up. It was hard to relate to something so far removed from her own personal experience.
It’s is not hard to relate to experiences of exclusion, indifference, disenfranchisement, hate, humiliation and separation, and the longing to believe that God is really and truly for you. Every human being has experienced those times, each in their own way. The genius of Glide has been to pro-actively stand at the swirling vortex of almost any and every form of human pain, violence, despair and hopelessness that you can imagine – homelessness, unemployment, HIV-AIDS, psychiatric disorders, racism, substance abuse, and the like, standing there proclaiming without equivocation, “God is for you!” Their free health clinic, a meal program that serves over 1 million meals a year, job training, and 50 other ministries underscore their commitment to that pastoral proclamation – “God is for you and there is nothing that can separate you from God’s love.” God’s inseperable love known as grace
Our passage this morning contains Paul’s famously debated comments about God’s election, foreknowledge, calling and predestination. But instead of theological speculation about who is excluded by these mysteries, Paul’s clear interest is pastoral assurance about who is included in God’s love. His message is uncompromising – “nothing in all of creation can separate you from the love of God.” Each time I read this page I personalize my own list of things that can’t separate me from God’s love – parents, children, my boss, work colleagues, foolish choices, bedeviling sins, public failure, private disappointment, anxieties, school, bad decisions, and on and on it goes. Paul remains adamant in his belief, and perhaps even in mine and yours – nothing can separate us from God’s love and grace.
If we think about Paul’s own faith journey we realize that his unequivocal language isn’t pious cliché, not mere metaphor, but a deeply held conviction out of his own experience. Paul encountered brutal treatment, constant harassment, and strong opposition most everywhere he went – and to be honest with you I’m not the greatest fan of Paul even today as I preach from one of his letters. Paul reckoned that he and his followers were likened as sheep to a slaughter, public spectacles, dishonored fools, vagrants who were hungry, thirsty, homeless and in rags – in other words, lower than pond scum or whale poop. And through it all, Paul remained steadfast in this belief that even those challenges and difficulties didn’t, couldn’t, separate him from God’s love, from God’s grace.
Paul’s asks the question – who shall separate us from God’s love? Shall collapsing towers, AIDS, anthrax, secularism, unemployment, depression, terrorist plots, divorce, cancer, miscarriages, infertility, suicide bombers, handguns, a half-crazed administration, the religious right, or addiction? Paul says, ‘in all these things’, the everyday realities of life that threaten us, that make life unhappy, dicey and difficult. And notice that Paul doesn’t say that we are more than conquerors over all these things, as though to say that if we are faithful enough, these difficulties will never come our way in the first place. Rather, Paul says we survive these things by going through them, by being in them. We aren’t spared the pain of the world, rather we get to survive smack in the middle of this life’s worst realities, all the while knowing that God’s love and grace are the glue that keeps us together.
As we hear our passage this morning, we need to see assembled before Paul a long line of people who represent typical folks in his day and since. Standing before Paul and coming up to him one by one, folks have things to ask. And in hearing Paul’s pastoral response, we need to perceive not just some flowery words, but a compassionate word to deeply pained questions – a word of grace and love.
And so for a young man who needs drank so much he now needs a new liver comes to Paul and asks, “Does my liver failure separate me from God’s love?” And Paul says “NO!” A man in a wheelchair rolls up and asks, “Does my disability separate me from God’s love?” And Paul says “NO!” A just widowed woman who senses the reality of death so keenly her body aches with the grief of it all asks, “Does my dear one’s death separate me from him or me from the love of God?” And Paul says “NO!” A young lady whose clinical depression means she may spend the rest of her days tethered to a vial of Prozac asks, “Does my depression separate me from the love of God?” And Paul says, “NO!” A young adopted son shuffles up shame-faced, eyes downcast as he mutters, “Am I such a bad person that I am separated from God’s love?” And Paul says, “NO!” Finally before this goes on and on,
Paul says, “Listen everyone! Even in your most broken and wounded form; there is nothing in ALL OF CREATION that can separate you from the love of God. That covers everyone, everything, every conceivable situation you could ask me about. YOU ARE LOVED JUST AS YOU ARE!” Take a look around as you leave today, every single person you see, no matter their ethnicity, beliefs, language they speak, every single person you see is loved by God, just as you are, just as I am, just as we all are.
Frederick Buechner shares the story of a day as he was walking through Central Park a middle-aged African-American woman came toward him on the path. Just as she passed him, she spoke these words, “Jesus loves you.” In a calm everyday voice as if she were saying good morning, she said, “Jesus loves you” just like that. Buechner says he was so caught off guard that it wasn’t until she was lost in the crowd that he realized what she had said to him and wondered if he could possibly ever find her again and thank her and say, “Yes. If I believe anything worth believing in this whole world, I believe that. He loves me. He loves you. He loves the whole damned pack of us.”
In our messy lives, in our messy, mixed up, turned-upside down realities, we think, just because the world has inflicted it upon us, that we have to be good, we have to be perfect, we have to succeed, we have to perform, we have to be the best, in order to be loved by God and others. The still-speaking God reminds us this morning through Paul’s words that above all things – we are loved – and that is the good news of the gospel – and loved not just the way we turn up on Sundays in our best clothes and on our best behavior and with our best feet forward, but loved as we alone know ourselves to be, in our weaknesses, in our brokenness, in our shabbiest ways just as much as in our strongest and gladdest. We come together as people who do our very best to believe that just maybe this gospel is actually true. The God who is in Jesus loves each and every one of us no matter what the cost because that is the innermost secret of God’s nature – grace and love.
In the long run, whether we call on God or not; God will remain deeply and steadfastly present and in love with us. What is both Good and New about the Good News is this wild claim that Jesus didn’t simply tell us that God loves us even in our messes, but that God wants us to love each other and to love God the same way. And if we let God, this still-speaking God will actually bring about this unprecedented transformation in our very well loved hearts – thanks be to God – amen.