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Sunday, July 27th, 2008
Proper 12A/ Ordinary 17 A/ Pentecost +11
Romans 8:26-39
Theme: God’s Love as Unstoppable Force
“26Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words. 27And God, who searches the heart, knows what is the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God. 28We know that all things work together for good for those who love God, who are called according to his purpose. 29For those whom he foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, in order that he might be the firstborn within a large family. 30And those whom he predestined he also called; and those whom he called he also justified; and those whom he justified he also glorified.
31What then are we to say about these things? If God is for us, who is against us? 32He who did not withhold his own Son, but gave him up for all of us, will he not with him also give us everything else? 33Who will bring any charge against God’s elect? It is God who justifies. 34Who is to condemn? It is Christ Jesus, who died, yes, who was raised, who is at the right hand of God, who indeed intercedes for us. 35Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Will hardship, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? 36As it is written, “For your sake we are being killed all day long; we are accounted as sheep to be slaughtered.” 37No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. 38For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, 39nor 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. ”
“We.” He used the word ‘we’. Right there at the beginning of the passage, in verse 26. The VERY first thing he says, of course, is ‘The Spirit helps us in our weakness’ – that is all good and well. But then he comes out and says “WE” don’t know how to pray as we … in today’s English, we’d be more likely to use the word “should”. The proper form is ‘ought’, but there you have it.
Let me remind you, this is Paul, the apostle, some would say the architect of the church – not the foundation, but the architect – the one person who is singly responsible for the spreading of the Gospel throughout the Roman Empire. I should probably qualify that, shouldn’t I? The person with whom we are most familiar – through his writings that are preserved in the New Testament, and who is best known as being one of if not the first missionary to the gentiles.
And here he is admitting that he doesn’t know how to pray. I know, sometimes people use the ‘we’ form in order to not come across as too preachy, or to not appear as though they are setting themselves on a higher level of understanding than the people being spoken to. But Paul doesn’t seem to be doing that here. He keeps using the first person plural pronoun in the discussion throughout the rest of the passage – he HAS been using it up to this point, and continues to use it later. Compared to other writings, he doesn’t seem to have any trouble in using the second person ‘YOU’ – just browse through his letter to the Galatians, or the Corinthians. No shortage of ‘You’s’ there! No, it seems pretty clear Paul is talking as much about himself as he is about any of his readers.
His point is that, beyond a certain point, we are incapable of expressing what is in our hearts and in our souls when we approach God in prayer. We have had those moments, all of us have, I suspect, where we begin to voice a prayer and our words become sobs. Tears and cries replace dry, closed eyes and formed words. There is an admission of the fact that when it comes to communicating with God, we can go far with our own words and thoughts, but there is a more elemental, a purer, a more profound communion that takes place between the Holy Spirit dwelling in us and God.
In the next verses, Paul SEEMS to be changing the subject – twice – first we hear ‘All things work together for good for those who love God, who are called according to his purpose’, followed immediately by what again, seems to be a tangent at best – the discussion about God’s foreknowledge, predestination, calling, justification, and glorification.
Six weeks ago, at the end of our joint Vacation Bible School with Farnham Baptist Church, Rodney Morrison, the Pastor there, and I were talking about what the summer was shaping up to be, and I mentioned that I was starting in on a series that would last several weeks and take us through the letter of Paul to the Romans. He looked at me and smiled and asked how I was going to handle the predestination passage. I made a joke about maybe being sick that Sunday, and we laughed, but he came back and said “you ARE going to have to deal with it at some point.” And you know what? He’s right.
I think the word is scarier to us than anything else. The phrasing Paul uses, and the TENSE used – the past tense – gives all the impression that Paul is talking about something that has been established and set in stone and is unchangeable.
The first thing that needs to be said is that Paul is speaking in a way that is trying to define God, or God’s activity. By definition, human language – whatever language – is ultimately inadequate to the task of speaking of God. We are finite, God is infinite. We are limited in our knowledge, our perception, our understanding, and our capacity of conceptualization when it comes to God. And God is none of those. I would suggest that we need to be reminded of that as a type of disclaimer before delving into this or any other in depth conversation about what God is about the business of doing.
That having been said, and understanding God to BE infinite, all knowing, and all powerful, it should likewise be understood that God does, in fact, know who will choose to follow him and who will not. That is primarily due to the fact that God is not limited to a linear experience of time – in other words, God does not experience time sequentially, like we do. For us, fifteen seconds ago is in the past, now is in the present, and fifteen seconds from now is in the future. God is outside time – beyond it, above it, unbound by it. To an observer within the timeline, it would almost seem to be the case that, in translating that understanding that God knows who is going to believe in him and follow him back into “linear time speak” (so to say) we would say ‘he knew from the beginning of time, he knew before we ourselves did’ which is accurate, but can be misunderstood. Yes, from our perspective, God DID know from the beginning of time what the end of time would look like, but the key phrase is “FROM OUR PERSPECTIVE”. WE add the sequential element to that thought. In God’s time, God just knows, period. There is no timeframe because time does not exist in eternity.
I believe Paul is expressing the fact that there are those who will choose to follow Christ and live for God, who will make a difference in this world for the Kingdom of God, who will eventually pass from this world to the next, and be glorified with Christ in heaven – regardless of what suffering they go through in their lives here on earth. The heart of his argument here is what comes at the conclusion of the passage – beginning in the very next verse – verse 31.
The question he poses in verse 31 connects what has come before to what comes after. First, He’s presented the idea that the Spirit helps us in times of weakness and that he intercedes on our behalf with “groans and moans too deep for words”. Second, he summarizes the fact that our salvation is, in fact, a “done deal” – something God already knows. And here he gets into the third part – what, if anything, can separate us from the Love of God? The short answer is: Nothing, but I like the way Paul says it much better, because that is what is CAUSING the Spirit to intercede for his brothers and sisters reading his letter in
38For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, 39nor 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 what does this mean for
I’ll pose it to you as a question: what are we? If we take these verses to heart, we could be either conduits or dams of God’s love. The first providing a channel through which the love of God flows freely, the latter being a bottleneck for it, keeping it from spreading across the world and who knows, probably changing it into something resembling the coming
Just as nothing can keep us from the love of God, nothing can keep us from doing that – absolutely nothing.
Let’s pray.
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