Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
July 24, 2005
Scripture:
Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.
Those of you who have been regulars here for a while have heard me say on many occasions that my favorite verses in all of Scripture are Romans 8:38-39. In the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible they read:
For 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.
Those verses show up in the Revised Common Lectionary every three years on this Sunday, the tenth Sunday after Pentecost. So this past week, as I began preparing for today, it was clear that I would preach on those verses. They speak to me so profoundly that I can’t not preach on them. For me they are the Gospel in a nutshell. They are foundational for my faith and my life. They express my faith concisely and powerfully as no other brief statement in Scripture does. So I set out to write a sermon for today on these verses.
When I did, however, I quickly ran into a problem. As I began unpacking them, it quickly became apparent to me even more than it had been before that these two brief verses are so rich, so dense, so packed with meaning that there is no way I could even scratch the surface of them in one brief sermon. So I made a decision. We’re in summer, and summer in the church is often a time to do things a bit differently, to try new things, to experiment. If what you try works, that’s great. If it doesn’t, you can go back to the way you did things before in the fall, when all of your people who have disappeared over the summer return-or at least you hope they do. So I decided that over the next six Sundays I will preach five sermons on these two verses, taking a different aspect of them each time, exploring it, turning it over and around, seeking to delve more deeply into its meaning. It will take six Sundays for these five sermons because on August 21, four Sundays from now, when I would otherwise preach the last sermon in this series, we will celebrate our centennial. I’ll do something different on that Sunday. Otherwise, for the rest of the summer, you’re going to get more of Romans 8:38-39 than you probably ever thought you wanted. There will be five sermons because it seems to me that these two verses break down into five major subjects. I will give a sermon on each of these five. The first and most fundamental one, and the subject of this sermon today, is: God.
We use the term God a lot. We praise God. We give thanks to God. We pray to God for ourselves and for others. We ask God’s blessing on ourselves, our loved ones, our nation, and our world. Sometimes we violate the third commandment and take God’s name in vain. We talk about God so much that you’d think we’d know what we mean by the word. Yet how often do we really stop to think about what we mean when we say God? I know that some of you do and that some of you have some pretty good ideas of what you mean by God; but I imagine that there are others of you who more or less take the meaning of God for granted and don’t give it much thought. And that’s OK. You don’t really have to give it much thought I suppose, but I sort of have to. It’s part of my job to think about such things and to share my thoughts with you. So here goes.
Let me begin by telling you what I most definitely do not mean by God. I do not mean what many of us probably grew up believing the word God meant. With John Shelby Spong, a prolific writer and the former Episcopal bishop of New Jersey, I do not think of God in what Spong calls "theistic" terms. Spong has made quite a name for himself by rejecting what he calls the "theistic" God and most everything that tends to follow from that conception. By the theistic God Spong means "a being, supernatural in power, dwelling outside this world and invading the world periodically to accomplish the divine will." This is of course Christianity’s traditional conception of God. God is "a being," the Supreme Being perhaps but still a being, an entity or person, outside of us and of the world, who somehow presides over the world and over us, who can and does intervene in the affairs of the world and in the lives of its people, directly causing things to happen or not to happen. The simplistic version of this conception of God is the old man in the sky, seated on a cloud perhaps, or on a throne in a physical heaven waited on by angels. This conception of God has produced some magnificent art. I think first of all of Michelangelo’s The Creation of Adam, in which a God who is definitely an old man reaches out his hand to touch Adam’s outstretched finger with the touch of life. It’s great art. It’s even pretty good mythology-and I mean that as a positive thing-but ultimately it is inadequate as an image of God.
Here’s why. There’s a definition of God that comes from medieval scholastic theology-it’s from Anselm of Canterbury, if I remember correctly-that says that God is "that greater than which nothing can be imagined." Think of something. Anything. If you can imagine something greater than the thing you thought of, then what you’ve thought of isn’t God. It’s pretty easy to imagine something greater than an old man in the sky, so according to this understanding that old man in the sky of our childhood fantasies and Renaissance art isn’t really God. He isn’t that greater than which nothing can be imagined.
A more modern way of saying essentially the same thing comes from Paul Tillich, the greatest theologian of the 20th century. Tillich named as God that which is truly ultimate. God is that beyond which there is nothing. God is that which is beyond anything we can imagine. God is that which is beyond all of our conceptions of God. Tillich said that true God is the God beyond God, by which he meant that no human conceptions of God can begin to capture who or what God really is. So God is not literally a person because a person is a created being, and that which is beyond created beings is more ultimate than created beings. Whenever we ascribe any characteristic to God, we have to remember that while we may have captured some truth about God, or better some truth about the way we humans experience God, God in Godself is beyond all of our images and characterizations.
God is that greater than which nothing can be imagined. God is that which is truly ultimate and thus is that which is beyond all of our conceptions of God. These are some ways of taking about who God is, but they’re awfully abstract, aren’t they. To some extent that’s unavoidable because making God less abstract by assigning characteristics to God necessarily limits God and therefore cannot capture the truth about God. Still, there are some valid ways of thinking about God that can help. One famous statement about who God is comes again from Paul Tillich, who famously said that God is the ground of being. That’s pretty abstract too of course, but let me share with you a couple of experiences of God may make the idea of God as the ground of being a bit less abstract.
Often as I stand upon the earth and become aware of the feeling of solidness beneath my feet, of the feeling of permanence, of me and the whole world being held up firmly and reliably, I am filled with the sense that it is God who is holding me and everything else in being, that sustains my existence and all existence, that holds me and the whole world safe and secure and assures our being. It’s an image of God as my ultimate support, the true ground on which I stand, the ground of my being without which neither I nor anything else could continue to exist. It’s a wonderful feeling. It’s a wonderful experience of God as the ground of being.
Another image that is very important to me comes from my late wife Francie as she faced the premature end of her life from cancer. I’ve shared it here before, but it’s worth repeating. At a time when things could hardly have been worse for her, she had a vision of being held tenderly in God’s hands and of being safe there. One way to understand that vision is that Francie saw that God is the unfailing ground of her being that will ultimately sustain her in life and in death. Yes, in the image God had hands, a human characteristic; but that’s a symbol of who God really is, the source and ground of our being, of our very existence.
And Paul says that this ground of being, this ultimate reality that is beyond all of our images and our imaginings is that from which nothing, absolutely nothing, can separate us. Think about what that means. We can seem so small, so insignificant. We can seem so temporary, so transitory in this life that all of us will leave some day. It is easy for us to seem to be what that old song from a few decades ago that is now being used in a Subaru television commercial says we are: "Dust in the wind. All we are is dust in the wind." And in our Bible verse this morning Paul tells us that God, the ultimate reality, the power behind the existence of the universe, that greater than which nothing can be imagined, will never separate from us. God, even God, is always connected to us, always in solidarity with us. That ultimate truth, that ultimate reality of which we can never truly conceive, will never let us go.
And that’s the best news that there ever was or ever could be. That is news that would absolutely transform our lives if we would ever allow ourselves truly to believe it. If we would ever truly entrust our lives and our soul’s eternal fate to that truth there would be nothing we couldn’t do. Nothing would frighten us. No obstacle would look insurmountable. We would never be discouraged because we would believe in life’s limitless possibility, and failures wouldn’t be failures but merely turns in the road. That’s because it is God, even God, from which absolutely nothing at all can separate us. Paul’s right. Believe him. Trust his truth, for it is God’s truth. Nothing in all creation can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. Amen.