Nor Anything Else

 

Nor Anything Else

for

First Congregational Church, United Church of Christ

Bellevue, Washington

July 30, 2023

 

Scripture: Romans 8:38-39

 

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

 

I don’t know about you, but one of the things I love about church is the way it can be a refuge, a shelter in a world that often seems to be filled with nothing but storms. Storms of violence. Storms of hate. Storms of injustice. Storms of environmental degradation. The world can and, frankly, usually does, seem simply overwhelming in the ways it falls short of Jesus’ vision of the realm of God. The ways it falls short of a world of peace and of justice attained through creative nonviolence that would follow if we all truly lived the ways of nonviolence and justice for each and every one of God’s people—and that truly is every single human being anywhere and everywhere.

I can’t possibly mention every way in which our world falls short of the realm of god. After all, we don’t have all afternoon here, but here are a few of them. In our country today hatred and violence are rearing their ugly heads in ways they haven’t, publicly at least, in a long time. We Americans seem to think that violence is the way to solve problems. Personal problems and world problems. White Christian nationalism is perverting our sacred Christian faith into an instrument of hatred and oppression. The largest Protestant denomination in our country, the Southern Baptist Convention, disparages, diminishes, indeed even dehumanizes women with its policies of male domination in the church, the home, and the world. People calling themselves Christians call for, and indeed enact, hateful legislation against the bodily autonomy of women and against God’s people of alternate gender identity and expression. Scientists have been warning us for decades about the perils of climate change. Yet we’ve sat on our hands and done nowhere near enough to address the climate crisis we’ve helped create. And now the world is paying the price of our inaction.

So I have to say that there are an awful lot of people in the world I find it impossible to love. And I am sorely tempted to think that God doesn’t love those people either. I mean, how can God love people who commit horrific acts of violence against others of God’s people? How can God love people whose hearts are filled with hate not with love? How can God love people who degrade God’s good earth through their greed and unconcern for others? How can God love Vladimir Putin? Left to my own devices I would never be able to figure out how God could do that.

Indeed, left to my own devices, I couldn’t even figure out how God could love even me. I’m far from the worst person who ever lived. All of you are far from the worst people who ever lived. In fact, we’re all good people who try to do our best in the world. But none of us is perfect. We’ve all made mistakes. I know I sure have. I think Paul was right when he said that all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. Romans 3:23.

But here’s the great good news: We people of faith are never left to our own devices. We have the Gospel of Jesus Christ as our aide, our guide, our backup in everything we do. There are many facets to the Gospel of Jesus Christ, but they all come down to one thing. They all boil down to love. The love of God for God’s creation. The love of God for every one of God’s people—and all people are God’s people. The love that we see made human in Jesus Christ. The love Jesus calls us to show for each and every other person and even for ourselves. The love of God that truly does pass all human understanding.

Now, I know that I certainly have my favorite Bible passages. Perhaps you have yours too. Here’s one of mine. It’s Isaiah 55:8-9: “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my says, says the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.” It’s never right to reduce God to a human way of being. God’s just a whole lot bigger than that. God transcends our human ways of doing things absolutely. I think far too many of us forget that truth far too often.

And there’s one more biblical passage that means more to me than do any others. It is for me the Gospel in a nutshell. Everything else flows from it. Everything else is commentary. We’ve already heard that passage this morning. It’s Romans 8:38-39. Here it is again:

 

For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.

 

Amen! Was it providence that my favorite passage in the Bible was in the lectionary for this morning? Who knows. In any event, this passage is Paul at his finest.

But I have to ask myself, and I have to ask you: Do we really understand these verses? Do we really understand how radical they are? They say that nothing, absolutely nothing, can separate us from the love of God, and we have to understand Paul’s “us” as meaning everyone who ever was, is, or ever will be. Can anyone really believe that nothing in all creation can separate anyone from the love of God? I mean, just think of that parade of horribles with which I began this sermon. None of that separates anyone from the love of God? Really?

The question arises on a personal level for most of us too. We all make mistakes. At some point in their lives everyone does things they should not have done and not done things they should have done. We’ve all said things we should not have said and not said things we should have said. Can we really believe that God loves us anyway? I mean, I can’t say I always love myself all that much. It’s easy to think that God feels the same about me as I sometimes feel about myself, and love does not always describe that feeling. Can Paul really be right when he says that nothing in all creation can separate us from the love of God?

Well, yes he can; but how he can probably needs some explaining. For us humans, love is usually (though mercifully perhaps not always) conditional. We may fall in love, but we can also fall out of love. Almost all of our human relationships are reciprocal. In the musical Chicago the character Mama Morton sings a song in which she says, “Got a lit tle motto. Always sees me through. You do one for Mama, she’ll do one for you.” And there is of course there the necessary implication that if you don’t do one for Mama, she won’t do one for you. That’s how it is with us humans almost all the time. Doesn’t God function the same way? When we screw up, when we sin, doesn’t God feel something toward us other than love? How can God possibly love absolutely every human being who has ever lived or ever will no matter what like Paul says God does?

To answer that question I want to go back to that favorite Bible passage of mine that I gave you a minute ago, Isaiah 55:8-9. There the prophet has God saying “my thoughts are not your thoughts, and my ways are not your ways. My thoughts and ways are as much higher than yours as the heavens are higher than the earth.” One of the most common mistakes Christians (and I suppose others) make about God is that we make God too small. We make God too human. Of course we can relate to God person to person, and I certainly hope that all of us do. But it is true at the same time that God utterly transcends our ways of being human. We are finite. God is infinite. Our love is finite. God’s is infinite. Our love, mostly at least, is conditional. God’s is perfectly unconditional.

It has to be unconditional because God utterly transcends our ways of being. The great good news of the Gospel of Jesus Christ is that no matter what you may have done wrong in your life, God loves you unconditionally. No matter what you may do wrong in the future, God will love you unconditionally. We all know the tragedy of the way Christians have told some people that God doesn’t love them because of some aspect of their humanity. Perhaps some people claiming to be Christians have told you that God doesn’t love you because you’re gay, or divorced, or have doubts about your faith, or for some other alleged reason.

Well, folks that just isn’t true. I don’t mean to suggest that God loves you despite anything about your humanity or your life. Not at all. “Despite” has nothing to do with it. God loves you absolutely. Unconditionally. No matter what. Why? Because each one of you is a beloved child of God. So am I, hard as I sometimes find that to believe. Everyone is. Always. No matter what. God can love absolutely everyone unconditionally precisely because God is so much more than human, so far above our petty human ways of being.

And, my friends, that is the best news there ever was or ever could be. We are all fallible, mortal creatures. There’s no way we can earn God’s love. Saints of the Christian tradition have known that truth for millennia. The great good news is that we don’t have to.  God’s love is always there for every one of us. God is always there with us whether we’re aware of God being there with us or not. God is always there with us loving us in a way that simply transcends human understanding. God is always there with us, and God can be our rock and our solace when we are in despair, in deep grief, or in any other human emotion or situation.

Our problem is never that God isn’t there. Our problem is often that we don’t open ourselves to God’s loving, healing, saving presence with us. We don’t turn to God for the help God is there to give us. Sometimes we’re so convinced that we don’t deserve God’s love that we can’t believe that God loves us. We’re wrong about that, and that’s our failure not God’s.

Now, God’s unconditional love for us doesn’t mean it’s OK for us to go do just whatever we want without worrying about whether it’s right or wrong. See, once we really get it how much God loves us and everyone else, we can do nothing but respond to God’s love with love. At the very least, we can try to do that anyway. God forgives human sin, but human sin still hurts God. It still disappoints God. How can we, whom God loves so much, want to do anything to hurt and disappoint God? Paul puts it this way: “How can we who have died to sin go on living in it?” Romans 6:2. The answer is: We can’t, or at least we’ll do everything we can not to. God’s love is not permission to do whatever we want. It is a call to live as best we can the way we know God wants us to live.

Neither does it mean that a church has to include absolutely anyone. Christian churches are Christian. God loves people who aren’t Christian and calls us to love them too. But a Christian church has every right to remain Christian and not include people who adhere to some other faith or to no faith at all. God loves people who disrupt the working of a church and calls us to love them too. But that doesn’t mean a church has no right to insure the safety of its members and the effective functioning of its various expressions. So once again, God loving everyone doesn’t mean anything goes.

So, friends, the next time life gets tough (and if it hasn’t been or isn’t now, it will be sometime), let’s do what the great Joseph Campbell suggested we do. Take the scales from our eyes. Open ourselves to the reality of God’s unshakable presence and solidarity with us, God’s love of us no matter what. Let us open ourselves to God’s infinite, unconditional love for each and every one of us, and for everyone else, personally, just as we are, no matter what we’re doing or what’s happening in our lives. “For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.” Thanks be to God! Amen.