Sermon: Nothing Between Us and Love

Text: Romans 8:18-25; 35-39

Date: May 29, 2005

Rev. Dee Eisenhauer, Eagle Harbor Congregational Church

What, then, are we to say about these things?

That’s also a verse of the eighth chapter of Romans, a kind of all-purpose question. Whether or not Saint Paul intended it, the question brings into sharp momentary focus one of the dilemmas of being human in difficult times. What, then, are we to say about these things? We creatures who are the only species gifted with speech are sometimes stunned into silence by what we see.

I spent many more hours than I had expected to preparing a reading of war casualties. Groping around in cyber-space for names, I found more than I wanted to see. There are photographs of the U.S. soldiers who have been killed. I spent some time looking at the picture of Elise Golsan’s young friend J.P. Blecksmith who was killed in combat in November. Elise used to baby-sit him when he was a youngster in California. It’s not hard to picture these young men and women posing in their uniforms as children in baseball caps or barrettes. Then there are photographs of Iraqi children who have been wounded. One little one looks at you from the computer screen with just one eye, the other one lost to a vicious bit of shrapnel. There are stories of when and how assorted journalists and contractors lost their lives on the mean streets of Baghdad or Basra. Pictures of gutted, flaming cars sending up plumes of black smoke.

What, then, are we to say to these things? We may indeed be tongue-tied as we survey the chaos in a bullet-riddled corner of the planet. We may not know what to say, if anything. Conflict there has a pale reflection here in conflict over how to speak about it. Passionate pleas to support the troops and respect the sacrifices they make collide with equally passionate appeals for more peaceful solutions to global disputes. In a church like ours, love for each other makes us hesitant to speak lest words cause a tear in the fabric of our community. I feel deeply, as I know you do, the pain of people leaving our fellowship over differences in deeply held convictions about how Christian faith applies to such real-life matters as war and peace. What are we to say to these things? Often we choose to say nothing.

That may seem like the wisest course of action; certainly it is the path of least resistance. Yet there is a price to pay. It hit home with me again last weekend when I attended the forum on religion and politics in the public square which our church co-sponsored with a number of other groups, including the Interfaith Council. There was a period for questions and answers after the speeches were made. One of the questions scribbled on an index card by someone in the audience stabbed at me: “Why has the religious community been silent in the face of the Abu Graib prison abuse scandal? Where’s the outrage?” I felt convicted by that question. Would anybody know that I was incensed by such degrading treatment of prisoners by our agents in Iraq? I don’t think I said a word about it publicly. Does my silence imply my consent? Ought I to repent of being tongue-tied in the face of such meanness, even if I was quiet for the sake of peace in our family of faith?

What, then, are we to say about these things? It’s no light question.

Since we are the creatures entrusted with the gift of speech, it seems like poor stewardship not to use it. The reading of a few of the names of the dead in our current war on this Memorial Day weekend is one way to choose speech when silence is more comfortable. To name names of the dead of other tribes besides our own is one way to give expression to the universal love of God. The reading of names, perhaps, accomplishes nothing. But it does say: We notice. We lament. We regret. Maybe that’s not nothing. Maybe it strengthens our compassion for the human family, to remember that a number (as in 18 Ukranians are among the soldiers killed) also has a name. Yuriy. Oleksandr.

I believe lament is important. I wonder if we rush into wars too quickly because we have not, as a people, taken time to lament lives lost. We skip a step if we proceed immediately to lionizing fallen heroes without dwelling on the pain of loss. It contributes to the amnesia we seem to fall into after each war ends. What are we to say? It’s essential that we speak our conviction that each life is precious.

Speech in service of lament is necessary. But that is not all people of faith are called to say. As inarticulate as we may feel, it is our responsibility to speak faith over the chaos of human events. Speak faith. Name the name of God. Say what we, in spite of our completely inadequate language and understanding, think is going on here theologically.

I’m so grateful for Paul’s words to the Romans written so many generations ago. “We know,” Paul says, “that the whole creation has been groaning…” Groaning. But not just any groaning, which might as well be fruitless moaning and whining. Groaning “in labor pains until now.” Groaning in labor pains is a world apart from moaning about how awful everything is. Pain still hurts, sure, but at least in labor something’s getting born. That’s the assurance Paul the theologian is offering the suffering Christians of his day. God is at work through the incarnation of Christ redeeming the world, liberating the world from “its bondage to decay.” We have a well-grounded hope that something besides the suffering that grabs our attention is happening. N. Thomas Wright says in a commentary on Romans that Paul is opening up the invitation to the Christian to live within the horizon of God’s new creation. In his words, “This great project, the global and cosmic dimension of salvation, has begun with the resurrection of Jesus, and will continue until the whole world is transformed under the just and healing rule of God’s children.” Christian live in the overlap between the old and new creations.

We don’t just sit on our hands and wait around for the new creation to be complete. Creation is to be renewed, not abandoned. Since that work has begun in the resurrection of Jesus, “it will not do simply to consign the present creation to acid rain and global warming and wait for Armageddon to destroy it altogether. Christians must be in the forefront of bringing, in the present time, signs and foretastes of God’s eventual full healing to bear upon the created order in all its parts and at every level…Christians must be in the forefront of bringing, in the present time, signs and foretastes of God’s healing justice to bear upon the world that is still full of corruption, injustice, oppression, division, suspicion, and war…Christians must be in the forefront of bringing signs and foretastes of God’s fresh beauty to birth within the world, signs of hope for what the Spirit will yet do.”[1]

A simpler way of saying that might be to remember that it ain’t over till it’s over (was that Yogi Berra?). We have to keep looking for, and expressing in word and deed, signs of the new creation being born. We keep hoping for what we do not see, which is God’s world healed and brought to harmony. The fact that we don’t always see it doesn’t mean it isn’t coming.

Meanwhile, we remember that nothing can come between us and the love of God. “Who will separate us from the love of Christ?” Paul asks. Not no one, not nothing, not nowhere. No matter how much of a hash we make of our personal or global life, nothing will separate us from the love of God. Remember that. It’s important.

It’s so important I want to hear you say it. Who will separate us from the love of God in Christ? Will hardship? No. Will distress? No. Will persecution separate us? No. Will famine? Nakedness? Peril? Sword? No! Nothing. Nothing between us and the love of God.

As we stumble and mumble together in the life of faith, I hope that we will live out this promise not just in the vertical dimension of life—that is, between us and God—but also in the horizontal dimension. We don’t always know what we are to say about what’s going on in the world or even in our own living rooms. But we’re in this together, thank God. I hope we will have nothing between us except the love of God. So that nothing will separate us from the love of God that dwells between us—not race, not gender, not income level, not sexual orientation, not politics—nothing. We will not be unanimous on any issue, but we can be a foretaste of God’s healed and redeemed world if there is nothing between us but the love of God. I believe that community is something God longs to bring to birth, and we may be its midwives, even while we each give voice to our deepest convictions and questions.

For today, listen again to an expression of one of Paul’s finest convictions which offers hope even on a day of lament: “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.” So it is, and so may it be.

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[1] Wright, N. T. Romans Commentary, New Interpreter’s Bible, Volume X Nashville: Abingdon, 2002, p. 605-06