July 27, 2014
Romans 8:26-39
There’s a small silver frame that
sits on one of my bookshelves at home.
The frame was given to my mother on her birthday by her best friend
growing up, Barbara. “Happy 60th
birthday!” is inscribed on the frame, although “birthday” is actually
misspelled. The photo is of my mom and
Barbara as teenagers. Barbara is sitting
on a countertop and mom is standing next to her with an old fashioned phone to
her ear, both dressed in 1950s casual clothes.
They are both beautiful, mom with her short dark hair, with hints of the
mom she would become 15 years later.
When mom died it was one of the mementos that I kept. I hold tight to pieces like that. Parts of her that I didn’t know much about
and wish I did.
After looking at that picture for
more than a decade, my family was traveling in California a few years ago and I
got to meet up with Barbara for dinner. We’ve stayed in touch some since mom died, and
I love having that connection to someone who was so important in mom’s early life.
Somehow that picture frame and photo
came up and Barbara was telling me the background on the photo. She and mom had been the best of friends for
many years, living near each other, sharing secrets and dreams. They had graduated from high school and
Barbara was heading off to college in Colorado.
Mom had somehow gotten a D in some class she hadn’t taken seriously –
something like student council. Because of
that D the college where she’d planned to go, some big school in Arizona, had
revoked her acceptance and she was having to spend a year at the community
college and live at home. She was really
disappointed. She had been so ready to
leave home and her mother who could be tough.
She’d just gotten her haircut from the long style she’d always had
before then, maybe trying in some way to forge a new path even though she was stuck
another year in the same place. Barbara
said it was a really rough summer for mom, and Barbara had chosen that picture,
even though it wasn’t the best one of the two of them, as a reminder for mom of
how far she’d come since that summer that seemed like the end of the world for
mom. I had no idea there was so much
going on behind the scene. And I felt
like I got to know mom a little better by knowing the story behind the photo.
I am feeling that way about Paul
today too, the writer of our reading from Romans. I’ve read all his letters and studied them in
seminary and even preached about some pieces of them. But what has always stayed with me about Paul
is my frustration at his writing style – wordy, not enough punctuation, too
much theology and not enough story – and his inflammatory style – all that
stuff about women keeping quiet in church obviously does not sit well with me,
and then there’s the “slaves obey your masters” stuff. But I feel differently about Paul today, like
I now understand a little better what lies outside the frame of the photo of
him that I’ve been looking at.
My new appreciation for Paul is
thanks to a thick and studious tome called “An Introduction to the New
Testament” by Raymond Brown. It was a
required buy for my New Testament class in seminary and certain pieces of it
were assigned to go along with scripture readings. It tended to contain all the things about
scripture that I least care about – historical context and maps and details of
Greek translation. And so while I get it
out periodically for sermon preparation because I know you guys deserve it, I
do not expect to find much inspiration there. I’m not sure if it wasn’t assigned or I just
never got to it, but for this week I read a section called “An Appreciation of
Paul.” [1] “Hmm,”
I thought grumpily, “not so sure about that.” But I read on. And the Paul I met on those pages was a
different Paul than the one I thought I knew.
This Paul wasn’t a holier-than-thou nag. He was someone who had experienced a love of
God so life-changing and all-encompassing that it went beyond his previous
imagination and became the “driving factor of his life.” His zealous mission wasn’t about theology and
keeping churches in line. It was about
trying to spread an awareness of God’s love to everyone he could. That was “the goal to which he devoted every
waking hour.”
And with that in mind, today’s
reading changed for me completely. No
longer was I stuck over words like “predestined” and “justified” and
“elect”. Words that had made me want to
argue with Paul about theology. Instead,
all I could hear was that love that he had experienced so deeply and wanted so
desperately to share.
“Who will separate us from the love
of Christ? Will hardship, or distress,
or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? … No, in all these things we are more than
conquerors through him who loved us. 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.”
This part of the Romans reading is a
common one for funerals. It’s a reminder
in the midst of what seems to be such a blatant end, in the midst of heartbreak
and confusion and loneliness, that what seems
to be is not the whole picture. For God,
what seems to be an end is not the end.
And that truth is just as true for all the other things that can feel
like endings. Growing up, growing old,
losing a job, losing a friend, doing all you can do and finding it is not
enough, being unable to follow a dream.
To be human is to experience things that feel like endings. Anyone who lives will experience pain. Anyone who loves will suffer loss. But even when things are at their bleakest
and darkest and most unbearable, God’s love is not undone.
I think Paul
was in that place more often than most people.
He lived with guilt for all the Christians he had persecuted and watched
killed. He was persecuted himself, was
the object of contempt and mockery, was beaten and imprisoned. The missteps and
infighting in the churches that he started must have often felt like one step
forward two steps back. And he had to
have sensed that he would eventually give his life to this cause. And yet Paul is unflappable, undeterred. Still shouting out with confidence to anyone
who will listen about the unstoppable love of God. Finding the strength and hope he needed in
that love to keep going. And to keep
living out that love by spreading it as far and wide as he could.
For Paul,
the love he’d found in God was what made sense of his past and gave him hope
for the future despite whatever he was experiencing in the present. That love helped him to step back and see
beyond the frame of the picture right in front of him. That love didn’t end Paul’s suffering, and it
won’t end ours. It won’t protect us from
the seeming-endings that can be so painful.
But it can change our perspective, give us a larger vision beyond what
is directly in front of us.
Sometimes I know that love. Like Paul, I have been bowled over by that
love a few times. I’ve certainty seen it
lighting up the faces and changing the voices of people around me, including
some of you right here in this room. But
most of the time God’s love is more like an understated presence that we grow
so used to we mostly fail to notice it. Sometimes
it feels like God is absent. Or maybe
worse, irrelevant.
Yesterday I picked up my oldest
daughter after her week of camp at Shrine Mont.
A Shrine Mont camp closing ceremony is a wonder to behold. All the parents who are aching for their
missed children and all the squirmy siblings are waiting in the outdoor
rock-hewn shrine when the 90 or so kids appear in the distance, singing “O when
the saints come marching in” as they step joyfully in wearing their matching
shirts.
And then there is a service,
full of joyful, movement-filled singing and of course, butt-bun bread and wine
for Eucharist. At the service the
chaplain for the camp gave a homily talking about the wonders of Shrine Mont
camp. All that the kids had
experienced. The incredible body of
caring friends that had formed. The
things they had done that they never thought possible. The kids were full of God. Swimming in God. Bursting with love of God, and certain of God’s
love for them. You could tell by just
looking at them. And the chaplain urged
them to remember that when they left the holy mountain of Shrine Mont, that
experience wasn’t gone. God was just as
surely with them, loving them, holding them up.
They were just as surely a part of the Body of Christ when they returned
to their regular lives.
I love the Shrine Mont camps and the
faith-filled fun that they offer our kids.
But what I think I love even more is that the Shrine Mont camp
experience can be a touchstone that can help the kids remember how that love
feels when they run up against something that feels like an end. When they are bullied or treated
unkindly. When they aren’t feeling
understood by their parents or teachers.
When they fail or when overcoming some obstacle feels impossible. When someone they love disappoints them. When pain and sickness and death touch their
lives. They have something to look back
on and remember.
What is your touchstone? What can help you remember that feeling of
love and inclusion and certainty and forgiveness when all else fails? Where is there in your life a piece of the
picture that can lead you beyond the frame to a sense of something deeper and
greater than what lies before you? What
can help point you to God’s love holding you fast? How can you remember in the maelstrom of
Everything Else that nothing can separate you from the love of God? Amen.
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