Romans 8:35-39
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? 36 As it is written, We are being put to death all day long for your sake. We are treated like sheep for slaughter. 37 But in all these things we win a sweeping victory through the one who loved us. 38 I’m convinced that nothing can separate us from God’s love in Christ Jesus our Lord: not death or life, not angels or rulers, not present things or future things, not powers 39 or height or depth, or any other thing that is created. (Common English Bible)
“With Sighs Too Deep For
Words: Verse-by-Verse Through Romans 8,” Week Five
For
two days in June of 1944, the US Navy’s Fifth Fleet engaged in a massive
air-and-sea battle with the navy of the Empire of Japan in the Philippine Sea,
near the Marianas Islands and just above the Marianas trench—the deepest area
of the seabed of the Earth’s oceans.
Basically, it’s the reverse Himalaya mount range: just as the Himalayas
represent the highest peaks on earth, the Marianas trench contains the deepest
points on earth, including the deepest point on earth: the Challenger Deep,
sitting nearly 36,000 feet below sea level (if you’re trying to compute that in
your head, it’s nearly seven miles).
Far
above the Challenger Deep, in the air above the sea and ocean, the American Hellcat
fighter planes achieved such a decisive victory over the Japanese Zeros that Japan’s
ability to conduct large-scale air-and-sea operations was basically ended.
While
those planes were flying at a much lower altitude than ours do now, imagine a
plane flying over the Challenger Deep today—for instance, Concorde, when it was
in active use, would keep a cruising altitude of 60,000 feet, so high that
passengers could see the curvature of the earth. And the U2 spyplane (not the band) has an
even higher operating altitude of 70,000 feet.
From
70,000 feet in the air to over 35,000 feet underground—and what Paul says to
us, in such beautiful, vivid poetry, is that nothing, absolutely nothing, in
that 105,000 feet of earth’s biosphere in which our existence is lived out,
could ever possibly be enough to separate us from God’s love!
This
is a sermon series that has amazingly taken us all the way to Advent—otherwise
known as the Christmas season—which starts *next Sunday* (holy cow!). Of course, we’ll be talking about the Christmas
story beginning next Sunday, but we’re not quite there yet, and we still have
Thanksgiving to celebrate this Thursday!
In that spirit of not only looking at what we have to be thankful for
but also what cause we have to be loving and to experience such great love,
we’ll be taking on a verse-by-verse treatment of the eighth chapter of Paul’s
letter to the Romans. Why this
particular chapter? Well, for one thing,
it simply has been a while since we’ve had a series on Paul or his letters, and
much like the USDA’s ubiquitous (when I was a kid, anyways) food pyramid, I
strive to provide a balanced preaching diet for y’all; I’m like a spiritual
lunch lady, doling out the religious Sloppy Joes.
However,
Paul is also a very dense, sometimes esoteric, theologian, especially in
Romans, but when it comes to actually talking about the nature of God’s love,
Paul’s prose genuinely begins to soar, and we’ve spent these last four Sundays
reading through his elated words about the Holy Spirit, its fruits, and the
ways in which it intercedes for us in our moments of weakness and
selfishness. Last week, we thematically
moved on to the Spirit’s relationship not just with us as individuals, but with
all of creation, with “sighs too deep for words,” as the New Revised Standard
Version translates verse 26, from which this series got its title, and today,
we arrive at the start of Paul’s conclusions to all of these different things,
and he covers a ton of ground in doing so!
This week, we arrive at the end of the chapter, and one of Paul’s most
famous passages in all of his letters. It
is famous for very good reason—it provides as great a possible sense of hope
and wonder in the greatness and fullness of God’s love that it is scarcely
equaled to, really, anything that I might be able to say about it.
But
I’ll try to. And hopefully Paul isn’t
like Yoda and thinks, “Do, or do not.
There is no try.”
Paul
is like Yoda, though (and I cannot believe that I am using Star Wars as a segue
here…) because like Yoda, Paul is very much on the lam, as it were, from those
who would do him harm. Recall that Paul
spent significant parts of his own ministry imprisoned, and that he was
eventually martyred, and it’s much easier to see the sort of danger that Paul—and
a great many other early followers of Jesus—really were at the hands of the
Romans and their collaborators among the Judean leadership.
Knowing
this crucial piece of context makes understanding Paul’s inclusion of a verse
from the 44th Psalm (Ps. 44:22) that says, “We are being put to death
all day long for your sake; we are treated like sheep for slaughter.” It comes from a psalm that is clearly of
lament, one that, if you read in its entirety, outright questions God and
wonders how God could be asleep in the midst of such pain.
This
is a critical question for Paul—he has just spent this entire chapter outlining
the ways in which the Holy Spirit intercedes on our behalves, and yet our own lives
are not always protected. It is the sort
of question that gets asked after the Paris attacks, or the Beirut attacks, or
the Kenya attacks.
And,
frankly, should be a question that is still being asked, not just because of
the attacks but because of our response to them, towards the refugees from the
Syrian civil war. In terms of sheer body
count, they are experiencing the equivalent of the Paris attacks every single
day; it is small wonder, then, that they are fleeing. A war between Bashar al-Assad and the Islamic
State is a war where you desperately want both sides to lose, but guess who
also loses? The people in the middle.
Just
as the early church was facing down the threats Paul is laying out here, in
laundry list fashion, so too are the Syrian refugees right this second. Trouble?
Yep. Distress? Check.
Harassment, danger, the sword?
All of them.
And
after being attacked, after seeing attacks like these, fear is an entirely
natural reaction in the purest sense of the term: fear is in our nature as
humans. But fear is not supposed to be
in our nature as Christians. And let me
be clear here: the trials, terribly difficult trials that I know many of you
face, and whose difficulty is real, in so very many ways pale in comparison to
the trials these men, women, and children are suffering, facing, and
experiencing.
If
we are meant to show the love of Christ to all people—not just our tribe—then
spiritually, we cannot afford to separate refugees from the love of God,
especially when it is already so difficult a process to even arrive here in the
United States as a refugee—a process that generally takes a minimum of a year,
often two or more, all the while you must still find a way to live and provide
for your family day-to-day.
So,
can we be as the church in Rome is meant to be, as Paul is exhorting them to
aspire to? To cast aside these things of
hurt and pain for ourselves and others—the distresses and the troubles and the
famines—and finally, at long last, “win a sweeping victory through the one who
loved us?”
All
the way back in June of 1944, our Navy won us a great victory, flying planes
high in the air over the deepest place on all the earth, a victory in the
greatest, most terrible war that was ever fought in all of human history.
Can
we—dare we—seek such a victory again, not in military terms, but in terms of
life, of freedom, of uncut, unadulterated human flourishing?
Because
were we to do so, then we would, I absolutely believe, be living out this
powerful, poetic, profound dictum upon which Paul ends this chapter of his
letter to the Romans, that there is indeed nothing, not angels or rules, not
present things or future things, not powers or height or depth, or anything
created, in such a manner so as to completely change the world.
Let
us begin, then. With all of the vigor
and strength that comes with following the eternal God who came to earth in the
form of Jesus Christ.
May
it be so. Amen.
Rev.
Eric Atcheson
Longview,
Washington
November
22, 2015
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