Tenth Pentecost
Romans 8:26-39
Walt Carlson was a very distinguished 70 year old. He had the calm, professional presence of a man able to deal with people. Beautifully fitted suit, perfectly groomed salt and pepper hair and a warm smile all conspired to make you want to accommodate whatever request he had. He was one of our favorite lectors at Bethlehem Church. Not only was he one of those people whose vocal cords reach all the way from their throats to their heals so you think perhaps scripture is coming from heaven itself but he really worked at reading the lessons. So when he came back to the sacristy to let me know that he was there and ready to read lessons my guard was down. "Oh by the way pastor Christine, I'm not going to say this just this way it's written. In the lesson he was to read Jesus addresses the crowd, the disciples and I suppose us by saying "My little children...." For Walt it was embarrassing to be called "my little children," so he was going to say "My friends" instead. Walt hadn't approached me with a question, he wasn't asking permission but he was respecting me enough to let me know his intention. At 26 years old and new to the church I let it go. I could have made a case for scripture being sacred, that we just don't willy nilly go changing it to suit our preferences. That had after all been a hot scholarly issue when I was in seminary, a time when God, father son and spirit was becoming God, creator, redeemer and sustainer, and I was well versed in the various tenets of the argument. I could have gone into how translations are done and why and how supreme care must be taken in our word choice and integrity. I could have but I let it go. I didn't want to. I wanted to say to Walter the retired businessman, to Walt the well read and accomplished professional, to Walt the in charge, confident and assured person that Jesus did indeed want to address him as "My child". That was after all the very point--that in the eyes of Jesus we don't have to be the pulled-together, secure, confident people that we present to the world. Precisely because Walt resented being called little child was why Jesus needed to address him that way. Like Walt, I think we often have trouble admitting our weaknesses, our fears indeed our very helplessness.
Frankly I think Walt and the young apostle Paul would have gotten along very well together, both strong, self assured and confident of their own ability. The older wiser Paul came to know something far better, something that is brilliantly shared in Paul's letter to the Romans and particularly in our lesson for today.
This is a lesson it's easy to get lost in. Certainly volumes have been written about each verse and Paul never known for his brevity often uses twenty words where one would do. Yet the sheer power of his images has sustained the faithful for generations and so we are challenged to grapple with this text.
He says basically three things in this lesson:
First: The spirit prays for us when we cannot.
Words are such feeble vehicles of expression and yet so often they are all we have. We muck around to "say the right thing" thinking that it's words that are the problem when in reality the issue is making sense of our feelings, our hopes our dreams our desires our thoughts. Our human relationships are so often characterized by confusion and misunderstanding, how much more might we expect the relationship we have with God to be difficult. What Paul assures us of in this passage is that a benevolent God desires to understand and embrace us so when we can't come up with the words or sort out the feelings--God knows. "Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness, for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words. And God, who searches the heart, knows what is the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God."
She sits at the bedside wondering. What do I pray for? Life that is wracked by pain. Death that I am not ready or prepared for. Miracles. What in the midst of a confusing and complicated situation do I want for the one I love?
I can not forgive he says. I know I should forgive but I cannot. I do not even want to be able to forgive. Am I evil? I am unfit to address God?
In the messiness of life, in the struggle and complexity of our experiences what comfort it is to know that a loving God sends the Spirit to pray when we cannot. That a loving God does not hold our weakness against us but addresses us as "my child."
Just as God allows us to be present so Paul's second affirmation about God is similar. God is involved in the struggle that is human life and that in this struggle God continues to strive and to work for the good.
"We know that all things work together for Good for those who love God, who are called according to his purpose."
Personally I believe that this particular verse has been used as one of the most abusive passages in all of scripture when in fact it should be one of the most comforting. Reciting this text some have suggested that God is like a great playwright determining the next scene in our human drama. Horrible things may happen in that drama, genocide, war, famine, natural disaster, personal tragedy but we should be comforted, they say, that in the end everything will turn out all right. Some few people find comfort in a God who they think orchestrates and manipulates all of life. For some few it is a comfort to be a tiny cork tossed to and fro
Personally I believe God has given us respect enough to be participants in our existence-to have free will, to be able to choose between possible courses of action and yes allows us freedom to make bad choices that may have horrible consequences. But in this God does not dessert us but calls us forth to a new future. God's continuing activity in the world is that of creator; offering at each moment ever new possibilities and opportunities.
God does not determine the past but rather lures us and all creation into the future. The theologian Peter Hodgson captures this notion of providence with the metaphor of sailing. As any sailor knows, wind does not push the boat, but rather creates a vacuum behind the sail which pulls the boat forward. When one ponders that image for a moment it becomes clear that God's power, imaged as such a vacuum, can be understood as the power of the powerless. The power of God is revealed in Christ, who became incarnate in the world, shared our finitude, died on a cross, was raised by God from the dead, and is the one to who draws the fear and reality of nothingness and death--the seedbed of prejudice and bigotry--into God's own self (God's history) thus, "contradicting and resisting its annihilating power" as a power which cannot have the last word. God's power, in other words, is the power that lures us forward into wholeness and life. 2
Such solidarity leads to Paul's final stirring question, "Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Will hardship, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword?" and Paul's final affirmation, "No in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us." Paul goes on to say "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." What a curious list. Certainly we wouldn't expect that angels, and height and life would separate us from God's love....But perhaps it is just these positive things that create in us a sense of our own power and invincibility--
God desires to call us "my Child". God will compensate for our weakness, God will pull us to a new and hopeful future, God will make us conquerors over all the powers of life-- through Jesus Christ .
Amen