Fairhaven UMC

So, lots and lots of people. This is true of Christians. It’s of people who are non-Christians or people who used to be Christians. Lots of people have a big problem with the Apostle Paul. And it’s not uncommon for Paul to be seen as the root of basically all that’s wrong with the church across history and today. Anything bad, we can point to a letter in Paul and be like, what? You know, there’s accusations of that’s where the sexism comes from in the church, homophobia, collaboration with tyrants and empires, the toleration and support of slavery that the church has participated in throughout history.

The same way that it’s popularly understood that there’s this violent and irrational God of the Old Testament compared with the loving God of the New Testament, which is officially a highly regarded heresy, by the way, and is not true the more familiar you get with the Bible. There’s often understood the same way to be Jesus’s gospel and Paul’s gospel. There’s one that Jesus’s gospel is nice and it’s comforting. It’s uplifting. It’s justice-oriented. And then you have Paul’s that’s mean and exclusive. This is not the case. This is just not the way it is.

And first, I would point to our gospel reading from this morning, from Matthew. We have the good, familiar parables in there, the mustard seed, all that, the yeast. But the one that we don’t often hear preached about is this parable from Jesus where he describes the angels going out and separating the evil ones from the righteous ones at the end of the age, throwing the evil ones in a burning fire where they’ll weep and gnash their teeth. That’s Jesus. Jesus is not universally this cuddly figure that we have in Sunday school artwork and it’s wrong to equate the way that Jesus loves us with this kind of squishy niceness anyway. And on the flip side of that, nor is the Apostle Paul this unkind, neurotic, well, he might be neurotic, but exclusionary guy that he’s caricatured to be.

And we’ll get to the text itself of Romans 8 shortly, but it’s worth understanding the background of what we’re hearing today. We’re jumping right into the middle of a letter here. And Romans, naturally, is a letter written by Paul to the Christian community of Rome, the capital of the greatest empire in the world. Rome is the center, the seat of the known world at this point. And the Roman church is a predominantly Gentile church. There’s not a lot of Jews present, at least anymore, in the church in Rome. And already, 25 or so years after Jesus has ascended, Christ followers in Rome and everywhere else exist in great tension with the world around them.

And fascinatingly, Romans is the only letter that we have from Paul that was written to a church that he did not personally establish. Paul’s relationship with the Romans is mainly through letters. It’s through this letter, as far as we know so far. And so all that he’s writing here is pretty brave, because as he writes this letter to the Romans, he’s daring to claim this spiritual, this pastoral authority over them, despite having even never met them face to face. This is like the church at Fairhaven getting a letter from another pastor who’s writing, you know, this is what you need to understand about the gospel. That’s brave. It’s bold.

And he opens the book of Romans by telling the Romans why he’s writing. In chapter 1, he says that his proclamation of the gospel, of good news, is intended to strengthen them. That’s why he’s writing. He wants to help them establish their belief. He wants to help them send down deep roots. And in the words of Romans 16:26, he says he wants to help them grow into the obedience of faith. And so all of this, this background, means that he’s not bringing them something new. He’s building up a faith that they already have. The seeds have have been planted and he’s offering his care, his wisdom, and nourishing them. He’s seeking to build up this church full of people he’s never met, that’s under immense pressure in a really key, important place.

So why does all this matter? Well, this letter is pastoral care because Paul is, after all, best understood as a pastor, maybe a bishop. And this letter is theology for people who already know Jesus and are seeking to grow into him more fully. And so if that’s who this letter is for, that means it was good for the Romans and it’s good for us because we’re in that same situation. This letter isn’t for people who don’t know about Jesus. It’s to drill down for those who already do. And I think it’s helpful to think about it as evangelism for people who have already been evangelized. And that’s a really profound concept, I think, once you start thinking about it.

It reminds us that we’re always in the process of converting to Christ, of being converted by Christ, of becoming more Christian, better disciples. In Methodist terms, this is called sanctifying grace, which means that salvation is not just this one-time transaction, gets us pardoned from hell, and then we move on. Salvation is this ongoing therapeutic process, this lifelong process of healing, of restoration. And we need, like the Romans, we need the good news articulated to anews throughout our lives, speaking to wherever we are and where we have been. And that’s part of what the church does for each other. That’s why we don’t just read the book at home alone. We’re living it out, understanding what the life of Jesus means to us in community, together. We speak it to each other. That’s what a sermon is for, is proclaiming the good news again and again to where we are in life.

And chapter 8, where we end up this morning in Romans, offers one of the most poignant expressions of that good news in all of Scripture. And what Paul offers here to the Romans, what he offers to us, is this deep, eternal reassurance and comfort. And it’s not abstract. It’s emerging from really real struggle and pain that Paul has experienced and that the Romans have experienced. And so virtually all of the agonies, the threats that Paul has written about here in chapter 8 are things he’s already experienced on behalf of Jesus Christ and on the church.

And so whenever Paul writes here, “Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Will we be separated by trouble or distress or harassment or famine or nakedness or danger or sword?” He’s not asking that as a rhetorical question. He’s asking that as somebody who can say with confidence that he knows the answer firsthand. Paul has not had it easy. He’s not speaking in abstraction, writing from some comfortable office about other people’s pain and what Jesus means in the midst of it. He’s not given an ivory tower sort of witness as to what Jesus can do. He can speak credibly as a witness to the power of the Spirit to carry God’s people through their lives. And by the time he writes this letter, he hasn’t faced the full brunt of the sword yet, but he will. Within 20 years after writing this letter, he’s martyred under Emperor Nero. He’s beheaded for his preaching, for his ministry, under one of the worst persecutions of Christians.

And so Paul’s vision here is of this life of faith under fire. And he offers us a zoomed out view of what it means to be a Christian. He gives us a bigger picture to help us understand what’s happening in our lives when we feel isolated in our worst moments. He’s putting us all in the bigger picture. Whenever we feel like we don’t know what we’re doing, whenever we don’t feel like we know what God’s doing, that we’re alone, that everything we’re attempting is just this pointless pain and tribulation that’s irredeemable. Paul tells us to remember that the Holy Spirit is with us always in ways that we cannot begin to understand. Paul writes that the Spirit comes to help our weakness. Even when we don’t know what to pray, and that happens so often for me, more than I like to think about, whenever we don’t know what to pray, Paul says the Spirit prays for us.

And the Spirit doesn’t try to put that into some clean, nicely packaged memo for the Father. God doesn’t need these articulate, careful, point-by-point prayers. No, Paul says the Spirit pleads our case with unexpressed groans. The Spirit, which is God, God groans in pain on our behalf when we are in pain. God feels it so deeply that God is groaning in pain. And there’s no situation where this isn’t the case, regardless of how it feels in the moment.

Again, Paul pulls us out, and he offers words of profound reassurance here. We know, he says, that God works all things together for the good of the ones who love God, for those who are even called according to his purpose. And this often gets kind of misstated, I think, this word of reassurance, and it gets turned into kind of a cheap “everything happens for a reason” kind of saying. We’re tempted to say that sort of stuff to each other when someone else is hurting and we don’t really know what to say: “Everything happens for a reason.” Paul’s not really saying that. Paul does not say that suffering is good, that God is behind our suffering and is doing it for a reason. That is not anything that’s being said in this passage. But what Paul is saying here is that God is able to work within it, within the suffering, through it, despite it, in such a way that we can be made more like Jesus, conformed to the Son, he says.

And this is one of our greatest Methodist foundations, too. John Wesley spoke often of the notion of Christian perfection. Perfection being a verb and not a noun. And it’s this idea that we can cooperate with the Spirit day by day until we’re turned to pure Christ-like love, not just in heaven, but here on earth, that we can cooperate with the Spirit so fully that we can live like Jesus in the world. And Jesus himself serves as the example here of the kinds of transformation that God works, of suffering and darkness into light and goodness. The crucifixion, I don’t think you can possibly read the Gospels and think, the crucifixion was a good thing. That’s not the point. But God was able to turn it into a good thing. He was able to turn the cross, this evil device of torture, of injustice, into a sign that death and hell are conquered and powerless. It’s not that the crucifixion became good, it’s that the outcome was transformed by God.

And God does this kind of alchemy, almost. Whenever we hand to God the most painful, most meaningless, blackest things we face in our lives, God transforms it into gold. The timetable might not be the one we like. It might not be instant. We might not see it now. It might be eternal on that kind of timetable, but it’s transformed, and the cross becomes this sign of life. And here we get to the peak of Romans 8, when Paul asks another rhetorical question. He says, “So what are we to say about these things? So what? What does all this mean?” And he answers with another question: “If God is for us, who is against us? He didn’t spare his own son, but gave him up for us all. Won’t he freely give us all things with him?”

And this is the primary point here, the single greatest takeaway in Romans 8 of this discussion of who God is and the meaning of our lives, of our faith, of our suffering, of our effort: God is for us. God is not some cold-hearted judge who’s carefully weighing out our actions to see if we have earned enough to be rewarded with heaven or, oops, condemned to hell. That’s not what God does. Instead, Paul says it’s God who acquits his people. Not only is God not prosecuting us, God’s not a prosecutor, but Jesus is our defender, pleading our case, Paul says, to the Father who’s already waiting to declare us innocent anyway. Again, God is for us, and we can know this because he gave up his Son so the cross of suffering could become this place that salvation comes from.

And Paul moves through this chapter, and he moves towards that final rhetorical question here: “Who will separate us from the love of Christ Jesus our Lord?” And we know the answer before he even begins this list. He knows that he’s built up that we know the answer. But it’s worth pausing to hear it again and notice something. These few verses, particularly verses 35 through 39, they’re a common text at funerals. I use these all the time. “Who will separate us from Christ’s love? Will we be separated by trouble or distress or harassment or famine or nakedness or danger or sword? As it is written: We are being put to death all day long for your sake. We are treated like sheep for slaughter. But in all these things, we win a sweeping victory through the one who loved us. I’m convinced that nothing could separate us from God’s love in Christ Jesus our Lord. Not death, nor life, not angels, nor rulers, not present things, nor future things, not powers, nor height, nor depth, or any other thing that is created.”

And whenever I read this text, particularly at funerals, I always get tripped up in the middle, where Paul seems to take this quick, hard left turn. And he says, “As it is written, we are being put to death all day long for your sake. We are treated like sheep for the slaughter.” That line, Paul quotes it from Psalm 44. It always feels to me like it’s interrupting the flow of the thing. We have this buildup of all this hope in Christ, and then we get, “we’re being sent like sheep to the slaughter.” And I’m almost tempted to skip it, especially in the context of a funeral. Everyone around in that room really needs to hear a word of hope, and here we have this little sharp line. This chapter consists of assurance after assurance of the faithfulness of God, of a fierce proclamation that God is for us, and then comes that really dark little line.

And what are we supposed to make of that? The biblical scholar Susan Eastman, who I learned pastored down the river in Aliquippa for a time, which I think is interesting, she suggests that what we see here in that line is an acknowledgement of bitterness, that the good news doesn’t always go down easily, that it doesn’t always feel all that good in the moment. Paul, again, is writing to very persecuted Christians, and he’s writing to all of those who struggle then and who struggle now following Jesus in a world where that’s not easy. They know they’re facing pain for your sake, talking to Jesus, and they are feeling that pain. They know it is because they are following Jesus. They’re choosing this hard life of faith, and they’re suffering because of it.

And Susan Eastman says that when this tone clashes with the surrounding assurance of the goodness of God through it all, she says, it’s as if the cry of the oppressed suddenly interrupts a beautiful liturgy, which is exactly what it feels like at a funeral. She continues that to hear this tension is to begin to know that divine love does not silence the pain of those who suffer unjustly, but allows it to be expressed in its raw anguish. We can know that God is good while also not feeling it all the time. We can be aware that God will turn our suffering to gold while rightly hating that we’re in a position to suffer at all. And there is room for that. Just as there was room on the cross when Jesus quoted a psalm and Jesus cried out to God, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” God’s love can hold that. It’s big enough to hold our anger, our bitterness, even Jesus’ certainty on the cross that he has been abandoned; God can accept that twinge of bitterness in the midst of faithfulness.

But Paul doesn’t leave us there. He keeps going. Even in the bitterness, even in the pain, he moves forward after that line and he says, “I’m convinced that nothing can separate us from God’s…” And these hostile powers, these rulers, they transcend space and time. Paul was talking to a certain group of threats, of rulers and struggles, but they’re different wherever we find ourselves. We see in our current day authoritarian regimes. We see policies that target vulnerable people, airstrikes in war zones, domestic violence in the home, gun violence on the streets. Paul didn’t really experience most of those things, but the promise is universal. Worldly powers can destroy buildings, they can kill people, but they still can’t cut the love that connects us to God in Christ.

And something important about the way that Paul speaks here is to notice the way he speaks really expansively and without condemnation here. The way that he is writing is not as a critique of individual human beings as units and sources of evil. Paul could have named names. It was very clear who was doing the prosecuting, the persecuting, who was making Christians’ lives miserable, and who was standing against the kingdom of God. But he doesn’t. His proclamation here is against powers and rulers of death and of the forces of darkness. And that means that Paul understands here that in the big picture, Emperor Nero is not the enemy. This guy that’s going to kill Paul, that persecutes the church, that feeds Christians to lions, that burns down his capital city—Nero’s not really the problem. The sin that binds Nero is the problem.

God is for us, Paul says, and that means that God is just as much for the persecutor as the persecuted as long as they’re willing to lay down their hostility towards the kingdom of God, to love him and to hear the call to God’s purpose. Paul would know that better than anybody else. It’s not about the individual. It’s about the sin that holds them back.

And so the gospel from the apostle Paul to the church in Rome and to us is good news beyond what we could imagine or hope for. It comes from one who knows suffering, speaking about a God who knows suffering to a church full of people who have lived lives of pain and, in many cases, persecution because of their faith in Christ. But in all these things, Paul says, we win a sweeping victory through the one who loves us. Our world, our souls continue to groan too deeply for words. Rulers and powers rage. We feel that we’re at great heights and depths that keep us from seeing God. But God is for us. In life, in death, we are confident that we are held by love that won’t let us go.

In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen. Amen.