Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
July 31, 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.

In the verses that are the focus of this five part sermon series, Paul tells us that nothing in all creation, not even death itself, can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. Last week we focused on God. We learned that God isn’t a person, or an entity, or even a being but rather that which is truly ultimate, that which is greater than anything we can imagine, that beyond which there is nothing. We used phrases like ultimate truth, ultimate reality, the ground of being, and the power behind the universe to try to get at what we mean by the word God. The point was that it is even this incomprehensible God from whom we cannot be separated, and I was even so bold as to suggest that the fact that even this God will never let us go is very good news indeed.

But is it? Does it necessarily follow that God’s refusal ever to be separate from us is a good thing? I mean, what if this God who will not let us go is not benevolent? What if this God is evil? What if this God wishes us harm? If any of that were true God’s inseparability from us would hardly be good news, would it? If that were the case God’s ubiquitous presence with us wouldn’t be good news but would be very bad news indeed. And that’s not as far-fetched as it might sound. Many religions, like Hinduism for example, have among their many gods deities of destruction whose will toward humans is anything but benign. One of the two gods of Zoroastrianism is an evil god. While no contemporary monotheistic religion has an evil god, it is not all uncommon for religions to see at least some aspect of ultimate reality as evil.

Yet I don’t think we have to go that far afield to find a god whose inseparable presence with us is not exactly good news. Our own Judeo-Christian tradition has within it images of God that are hardly comforting; and it just isn’t true that those images are restricted to the Old Testament, to Hebrew Scripture. They appear in both Testaments of our Christian Bible. Certainly in Hebrew Scripture there are discomfiting images of God. I think of the God of the Hebrew prophets who, on the one hand, demands justice for the poor, the vulnerable, and the marginalized but who, on the other hand, judges with severity and punishes with wrath that inflicts further suffering even on those same poor, vulnerable, and marginalized ones in God’s zeal to execute judgment against the nation’s unfaithful elite. Yet that God of wrath doesn’t hold a candle to the God of the Book of Revelation, who saves only a few chosen people and sends plague after plague upon the earth in the final days, killing most everyone unfortunate enough then to be alive. I don’t know about you, but if that’s who God is, I’d want everything in all creation to separate me from that terrible deity.

That, I think, is why Paul didn’t say simply that nothing in all creation will be able to separate us from God. He put qualifiers on the word God in these magnificent verses. One of them was the phrase "in Christ Jesus our Lord," and we’ll look at the two parts of that phrase in the next two sermons in this series. The first qualifier, however, and the one I want to look at today is the phrase "the love of." That from which nothing can separate us isn’t just God, it is the love of God. This phrase is really what makes Romans 8:38-39 good news. Let’s take a closer look at it.

The key point is that this God, this unfathomable, ultimately unknowable ultimate reality and source and sustainer of our existence relates to us not in wrath, not in judgment, not in indifference, and certainly not in hatred, but in love. God loves us, and it is precisely this love of God from which we cannot be separated. That my friends, is very, very good news indeed.

It’s good news, but what exactly does it mean? Love, after all, is a vague term. It can have lots of different meanings, so many that it seems at time that the word has lost its meaning altogether. We use it in many different ways in our ordinary, everyday language. Someone will say: "Girl, I just love those shoes! Wherever did you get them?" Personally, I love strawberry ice cream and orange sherbet. In this sense we use the word love to mean "like a lot," or even just "to find pleasant or attractive." I’m sure we could all think of many, many instances in which we’ve used the word love in this way.

We apply the word to different family relationships as well. I love my parents, I love my children, I love my wife; but my relationship with each of these people is very different even though I use the word love to characterize all of them. In our personal relationships, the word love can have many shades and nuances.

Among us love often refers to an emotion. We "fall in love," which can mean, especially among young people, nothing more than that we’re infatuated with a person or that we find a person physically attractive. This kind of love is an emotional rush, a sense of euphoria, a mania almost that clouds our judgment and makes us do foolish things. It’s a lot of fun; but I believe that the principal reason for the high divorce rate among us is that our culture sells us on the idea that this emotional infatuation is what love really is. It never lasts; and when people have no other understanding of love, they believe that they no longer love their partner when this feeling fades.

None of this is what Paul means by his phrase "the love of God." To try to get at what Paul actually meant by the phrase, it helps to look at what Paul actually wrote rather than at its English translation. Paul used the word "agape," and that Greek word, unlike our English word love as it is used these days, has a quite precise meaning. Greek actually has several words for love. One is filia, the root of our word filial, which means brotherly. Another is eros, the root of our word erotic, which means love as the life force within us. Then there’s agape, the word Paul uses here. It is interesting, and I think a bit disturbing, that agape is the one Greek word for love that isn’t the root for any English word. O well.

One source I consulted (Strong’s New Concordance) says that agape means love in the moral or social sense, which is pretty vague itself it seems to me. The best source, however, for the meaning of agape is Paul himself and specifically Paul’s great ode to love in I Corinthians 13. He uses the word agape there too. In that great passage Paul has this, among other things, to say about agape, translated as love:

Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

Love never ends.

I Corinthians 13:4-8a All of that is agape, the kind of love that is the love of God from which nothing can ever separate us.

We usually think of Paul’s anthem to love as being about the ideal of human love, and it is. I have a little homily on it that I’ve used at several weddings that I’ve performed. But the word Paul uses for love in I Corinthians 13 is the same word he uses in Romans 8:39 to designate the love of God, namely, agape. Listen to these verses again modified this time to refer to the love not of humans but of God:

God’s love is patient; God’s love is kind; God’s love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. God’s love does not insist on its own way; God’s love is not irritable or resentful; God’s love does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. God’s love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

God’s love never ends.

This is God’s love, the love that will not let us go, from which nothing in all creation can separate us.

What is this love, this agape, of God really about then? One thing is for sure. It isn’t a mere emotion. It doesn’t mean that God has warm, fuzzy feelings toward us all the time. Rather, this love of God is the way in which God is in relationship with us. It is the way God relates to us. And what do all of those beautiful phrases of Paul’s come down to? They all come down, I think, to the fact that God’s love for us seeks not what God wants but what we, God’s beloved, want and need. Remember: God’s love does not insist on its own way. God’s love bears all things. In love God puts our welfare first. The great German Catholic theologian Hans Küng expresses this thought with the phrase God’s cause is our cause. Küng says about the way God relates to humans in love: "God wills nothing for himself....God wills nothing but man’s advantage, true greatness and his ultimate dignity. This then is God’s will: man’s well-being." (Male exclusive language sic)

That understanding of God’s love, my friends, is revolutionary. It says: God doesn’t need our praise and worship but wants them only to the extent that engaging in them is good for us. It says: God doesn’t demand moral behavior from us because God wants us to obey certain arbitrary laws. God wants behavior from us that fosters our welfare, not God’s; and that of course means not our individual welfare only or even primarily but the welfare of all humanity.

And God’s love, God’s agape, all comes down to this too: God isn’t a distant, wrathful judge just waiting for us to mess up so he (God imaged this way is always he) can condemn us to hell. Rather, God is present with us always, being patient, not insisting on God’s own way in our lives, bearing all things with us, hoping all things for us, enduring all of our mistakes without every giving up on us or separating God’s holy presence from us. And most of all it means that God’s love never ends. God’s patience, forbearance, endurance, and hope for us never end. Never. No matter what.

And once more I say to you: That my friends is the best news there ever was or ever could be. It is God, even God, who never leaves us; and that God is present to us in love, indeed as love. Not some mushy emotional love but a strong, vibrant love that wants only what is best for us, that sustains us, holds us, inspires us, and gives us peace, courage, hope, and joy. 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.