The Church of the Redeemer

The Twelfth Sunday after Pentecost

August 4, 2002    

    I invite each of us to take a moment and think about the following question. “What are the things in your life that you cannot live without?”     Most likely our answers include things like homes, families, friends, cars, health, jobs, etc.  These are all things we need in order to survive.  Now take a moment and wonder, what if.  What if you became the main character in the book of Job and suddenly all that you have, your possessions, your family and your health were taken away from you.  And then, in your time of despair, your friends, the ones who you thought you could depend on, turned away from you.  What then would you have left to survive with?

            St. Paul grappled with these questions on a very intimate level after his conversion.  As I mentioned last week, St. Paul grew up surrounded by privilege.  He was both a Jew and a Roman citizen, well educated in both Greek and Jewish philosophies and at the time of his conversion he was gaining respect as a budding young Pharisee.  After his conversion, St. Paul had to let go of all he depended on for survival.  He went from being a respected scholar of the law and man of status to being an outcast.  His newly found beliefs did not go over well with his parents, and most of his long standing friends abandoned him out of fear of the consequences associated with being connected to a Christian.  And St. Paul, like many of the early Christians, suffered the indignities of being whipped and imprisoned for openly professing his faith.    

 It is through this experience St. Paul realized that it is only we who can separate ourselves from the love of God.  Even Paul struggled to maintain his obedience to God.  At every corner of his life, Paul found temptation, and struggled to accept God’s will for him, and at times, despite his best efforts, Paul fell into sin and doubt.  At the end of chapter seven, Paul discusses this very struggle with the Church of Rome. “ So I find, he writes, it to be a law that when I want to do what is good, evil lies close at hand.  For I delight in the law of God in my inmost self, but I see in my members another law at war with the law of my mind, making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members.  Wretched man that I am!  Who will rescue me from this body of death?  Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!  So then, with my mind I am a slave to the law of God, but with my flesh I am a slave to the law of sin.”

Through Paul’s struggles and tortures, he came to a new understanding as to why there is human suffering.  As a Jew, Paul understood human suffering to be the result of God’s punishment for our sins.  In the early writings of the Prophets, we find Israel losing sovereignty of the Promised Land as a result of her failure to obey God’s command.   In the book of Job, Job’s friends consistently ask him what sin he has committed to bring on God’s punishment.  This was the only way they could explain why his life had shifted from being blessed to being cursed.  And in the Gospels, the Pharisees ask Jesus what sin the parents of the blind man had committed to bring upon them the curse of having a blind child. 

 As a Christian, Paul now understands human suffering as evidence that creation is still in the process of being transformed. To the Church at Rome, St Paul explains their suffering with the following words, “I consider the sufferings of the present time are not worth comparing with the glory about to be revealed to us.  For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the children of God; for the creation was subjected to futility, not of its own will but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and will obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God.  We know that the whole creation has been groaning in labor pains until now; and not only the creation; but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly while we wait for the adoption, the redemption of our bodies.”

Paul was able to make this major shift in understanding because he knew that Christ’s sacrifice on the cross gave to the world what it needed most, a bridge to permanently link humanity with God.  Through his studies of Torah, Paul knew there was a chasm that stood between humanity and the full experience of God’s love for creation.  This gap or chasm was created at the time of the fall, when Adam and Eve consciously disobeyed God and ate from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.  Since that time, the Bible chronicles God’s attempts at bringing humanity back into unity with him, only to be foiled by our own desires to fall into sin.  Through Christ, the chasm that was formed at the fall has been permanently bridged, and because of Christ, Paul is able to tell the Church at Rome what the good news of the Gospel means for each of us.  And that is, once we find the love of God, there is nothing in the created order that can take God’s love from us.  “For I, writes St. Paul, 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 separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

The struggle that St. Paul found within himself is the same struggle that we find in our hearts.  And we, like Paul, wish to find his confident faith so we can obey God’s will for our lives. However, what separates St. Paul from most of us is, in the words of a friend of mine, when it comes to being a Christian, St. Paul “gets it” in a way that we don’t.  There are very few in history who have “gotten it” as St. Paul did.  In recent times, the likes of Dietrich Bonhoeffer are discussed as closest to St. Paul. And again, he only got it when pushed into a situation of suffering on behalf of Christ.

So does that mean we all have to suffer in order to “get it”?  In all honesty, suffering helps and there is no doubt that the Gospel message was written to an audience of those who found themselves the outcasts, or the oppressed of their societies. And it is true that Christ stated that it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter heaven.  However this does not mean that the 90 per cent of American Society can’t “get it because we live in relative affluence to the rest of the world?  Let’s hope not! What it does mean, is, it’s harder for us to understand and to experience the conviction that St. Paul expressed in relation to God.  Convicted faith does not have to be born from suffering; it can be born from self-reflection.  We can each begin by giving serious thought to the question I began today’s sermon with.  What is it in your life that you do not think you can live without? 

    This week, I would like to challenge us to actually take the time to make out those lists of things that we hold near dear, that we are convinced we could never live without.  Then let’s make a second list, for this list, write down those things in life that define who we are. Finally, on both lists, cross off everything that can be taken away from you due to natural or economic disasters.  And, what you would lose if you lost your health or your ability to articulate your thoughts. Then look at your paper and accept that the only thing left that cannot be taken from us through death, or life, or angels or rulers, or things present, or things to come, or powers, or height, or depth, or anything else in all creation is but God’s love for us through Christ and then give thanks for the fact that God’s love for us is always constant.  Because as St. Paul concluded, “If God is for us, who can be against us!”     Amen

The Rev. Craig R. Swan

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