Bishop Greg Brewer: Do you all see these? They're little Jesuses. This is what was smiling at me when I look got up in the pulpit this morning. I'm glad he's here. There is a sense when I I encounter some of the passages of scripture that there seems to be this gap.
This gap between what the scripture declares as clearly clearly true and certainly experienced by the early church and what it is that I experience, what's actually happening in my heart and in my life. And so every time I come particularly to passages today, including the book of Romans, the Romans passage, I wanna find a way to lean in, to find a way more and more to be able to appropriate, to receive in such a way as that it makes what the scripture declares to be true to actually be the reality that is within my heart. And that is certainly within kind of what I'm feeling even right now. Because as I read some of these incredible passages by comparison, I feel like my faith is anemic, that I'm not asking the right questions about what's really going on in my spiritual life. Prayer often seems listless and worship travels that same steady road with no curves and no surprises.
Now, I have to tell you, there are plenty of people who like their worship just like that. No surprises. But it seems to me that if god is up to something, he always has around the corner that we don't expect. So, if you are one of those ones who hungers for more, then, come with me to this rugged terrain of faith that described in the passage given to us from the book of Romans. Paul writes of tested faith.
This is the kind of faith that has gone through the worst and comes out victorious. Why do we need to hear about such a strong and rugged faith? Because quite frankly, we live in a world that really doesn't want us to be that way. We live in a world surrounded by a culture that desires instead to create a world where above all, we are safe, happy, and prosperous. Those are the goals we see advertised everywhere.
After all, isn't that what we want? We want for our families and friends to be protected from danger with few emotional raw edges, please, and with a life marked by success. Who would want otherwise? But while there are indicators that there are times when we expect to be happy, safe in the arms of God, things working out the way we might have hoped. Although the testament Bible never uses the word success.
The marker for that life is according to the scriptures, a blessed life, not necessarily successful, which I prefer quite frankly because it puts the accent on who's the source of what's happening in a way that success does not. But I will say that by contrast, the description of the life that I'm describing finds little support in the New Testament. And so we're in a dilemma. In the effort to create such a life boundaried by safety, happy happiness, and prosperity, we begin discover that if we really want to pursue that, a lot is left out. You see a life with those boundaries does its best to preempt the possibility of risk, instead hoping for predictable and happy outcomes.
Outcomes. Safety as a goal is unwilling to go to the places of greatest need because it's too risky including taking the risk to look at the greatest needs that exist within ourselves. To create a truly safe life, you see, eliminates the challenge. The challenge of finding ways to serve the greater good or even in fact believing in most of the words of Jesus because you have to believe if that's what you want, you have to believe in a Jesus who will never ask you to care for anything except for people who are just like you and who have almost no vision for the state of your country or the people of Dallas County unless it's to make them all look just like you do. And those people who aspire and teach that, including some members of the clergy, wind up giving you the sense that the only people you really have to love are the people who are similar to you.
This Jesus this Jesus would never ask you to rub shoulders much less form meaningful relationships with people who are different from you, unfamiliar to you, or who live a life whose values are different from your own. Because to build a life that is safe, happy, and prosperous is to build in fact a cocoon. A cocoon that puts people who are just like each other in the same room so that what is enforced is caring about people who are just like you, including your own needs and trying not to think about people who don't fit into your room. What does this have to do with Romans? Oh, everything.
You see Paul writes to a people who in fact are Christians and are suffering and Paul writes to them as a fellow sufferer. It is important to note that the powerful words that are in this chapter are written by someone who has been in some of the worst places imaginable, suffering some of the worst things that could ever happen to any human being. There is nothing about Paul that is in any way a kind of armchair observer of life as much as it he is participant and writing down as he gets into it what is actually happening. So to the Romans, he does not blame them for their suffering. He does not chide them for being foolhardy or miscalculating the cost of the risks that they are taking.
The assumption of this passage indeed, the assumption of much of the New Testament is that hardship and suffering are a normal part of life and in fact are meant to be and can be redemptive, including the Christian life. Even if all we know of such hardship because of our own prosperity is a kind of vicarious suffering of those who feel differently than us and who know a level of pain that we do not always understand. Even then, there is a place that can break open in us that is described as compassion least of these without exception. The people whom Paul is addressing are people who are not playing it safely. They have given themselves to Christ knowing that the that it will mean difficulty and suffering.
They also know that what sustains them in their suffering, and this is really the key to the Romans passage, is the love of Christ victorious that is present no matter how deep the suffering. They have discovered that the sweetness of life is not a matter of safety, happiness, or success. The sweetness of life comes from the love of God that has been poured into our hearts. A reality that is deeper than any of our circumstances. They know that Jesus loves them and that he will never let them go.
For us, it's natural to shy away from suffering. It's not unusual because why? It's an enemy to our desire for safety. It is hard for us in part because we would rather have predictably dull life than a life that's difficult. It is a shock when we discover that suffering begins to happen to us or people who are like us.
We thought we could be immune by it if we had enough doctors, the right people connected well, all of the best knowledge that we could find, we could avoid the difficulties of what actually happens in life. But that, in fact, is not true. And so it's like cold water on our face. Itch. We are off kilter.
We did not expect this to happen to us. No matter what form it takes, it can overtake us. It can be bigger than anything we have ever experienced. And so truncate our vision and overwhelm us so that the dominant reality is what it is that we are suffering in the moment. Our suffering at points can become the lens through which we see all of the rest of life.
And so to counter the great power that suffering can have over us, Paul uses some of the boldest language found in the New Testament. Paul is making unequivocal declarations about the promises of God and in so doing, and this is important, Paul is putting suffering, hardship, and pain in their proper place. Paul writing as a fellow sufferer declares that suffering does not have the last word. Suffering does not have to occupy the center point of our lives even while we are enduring it. It really takes something to come in from the outside, speak to the reality that overwhelms us, that recalculates our vision, that it causes us to say, I'm not denying the suffering, but there is something greater going on than the pain that I'm enduring in the moment.
We don't often come to that ourselves. Sometimes we do. But more often than not, we need someone else to speak it to us, to speak into what it is that we are enduring. Someone who we trust and that's the role that Paul is taking in this passage. What does Paul declare these bold promises?
Number one, that we are not alone. The Holy Spirit is interceding for us according to the will of God. That's what Paul says in Romans. Plus even in the worst of times, God is working all things good to those who love him. Now, the way we often read that passage if things are really tough is, I guess I don't love him very much, do I?
That's not what he means. Like, that's not what he means at all. Just the opposite. What he is saying, even though we have a hard time experiencing in the moment, is that god takes the pain, the horror, and the difficulty of our circumstances and weaves it into a narrative that is bigger than anything that we can know or understand that actually works out for redemption. In other words, death does not have the last word.
Suffering does not have the last word. The glorious will of god is what has the last word. That place where there is no pain, where there is no grief, where god wipes away every tear from every eye And blessed are those who know that even in the midst of the pain that they are enduring. A number of years back, I had the opportunity to go to Northern Uganda. This was in the midst of what made headlines in The United States about a group, a paramilitary occult organization called the Lord's Resistance Army.
They would come in and pillage. They would rape. They would employ the young boys, giving them sub submachine guns to come and serve with them. Child soldiers, they were called, and they were overrunning the countryside. The government, which really didn't care very much for the tribes up in the North, they weren't true Ugandans, sort of treated them like the way some people treat people in West Virginia, like they're not real.
And so what they wound up doing was create a situation that was almost worse. What they did was that they sent military people up there, frankly admitted that they couldn't defend their villages. And so what they would create is what they described as internal displaced persons camps. So you leave everything that you know in your village. You take whatever you can carry with you, which is almost nothing, and you come into these concrete barracks and things like that.
And believe me, if the relief organizations, particularly from The UK weren't there, you didn't get anything to eat. They were the ones that were providing the food, not the government. It's it was inhumane, grotesque in the extreme. And we went up there to try to see me and some people from our church to see what it was that we could do. And I still remember sitting in one of those concrete barracks with a small family of local Ugandans, Anglican Christians.
They lost everything. And yet when I looked at them and listened to what they had to say to my astonishment, there was a kind of sweetness and peace about them that felt almost otherworldly. They said, we know that God will see us through, and they said it from the deepest part of who they were. I know they believed it. That's what Paul is trying to communicate in this passage.
To in fact, similar people who had lost much because they chose to be believers in Jesus Christ. That the reality that is with inside of us which is the presence and power of Jesus is stronger than that which we are enduring circumstances because no matter what happens to us, nothing can separate us from the love of god that is in Christ Jesus. For though we are accounted as Paul writes, boldly, rawly, in a way I wish he didn't quite frankly, as quote unquote sheep to be slaughtered. Do you remember that? In other words, he is in no way undercutting the horror of what is happening to these people.
He still says in the midst of that, we are more than conquerors through him who loves us. We discover a divine strength that we did not know that we had because god is the one who gives that strength because Jesus conquered suffering through the cross resurrection. Because the presence of the conquering Jesus is within us by the Holy Spirit and that nothing can defeat the purpose and presence of Jesus both in the world and in our lives. Jesus can make conquerors knowing that no suffering can separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus, our Lord. Now I have to tell you, that's hard.
I no way wanna minimize difficulty of what's being described in this passage because what it asks of us, in fact, is would we have the willingness to be able to extend our hand to him knowing that's all we've got? Is there the capacity that God might give us in faith that give us that could give us the capacity to continue to say yes to him even in the darkest times of our lives. That's the foundation that Paul is laying out in this passage. We are viscerally united to Christ, and no matter what the suffering and even the death, in fact, are not our final outcome. We are promised that at the very core of our world, in only only only in in the ever know, world, but who overcame death and hell, and it always has eternity in view and will in a way that I can only long for.
Actually see us home. That the in breaking of the eternal life of God is in fact just a breath away. It is his presence that never forsakes. The final words God speaks to us are the promises of eternal life where all, in fact, will be made right. And for that sake, for that truth, how could I be so shortsighted as to turn away no matter how wounded I might be.
Through all the circumstances of life, good, evil, and indifferent, God is calling us to himself, to united to be united with him who will never let us go. That union was accomplished by our salvation, but what is offered to us is a living faith that changes us at the core of our being. What we're doing here is to say, Lord, here is what I feel. This is what the promises say. Get me from here to there.
Change my heart. Open to me the things that I have closed before. Remove in some ways the pain and the fear that causes me to keep your tenderness at arm's length. I'm afraid, god. I'm afraid of being wounded, and I need you to overcome that because I cannot.
And that is what we are promised. You see, God asks nothing else of us beside our hearts. In other words, it's everything. But it is the God who woos us with his love. For love always surpasses anything else that we will ever know.
We know that love because the experience of his love is the fruit of our being rescued from sin and death. It is the smallest of seeds that the scripture speaks about in the gospel reading that can blossom up into even a tree where the birds of the air make their branches. The seeds of love is that which actually changes us from the in the deepest parts of who we are. The fruit of which we begin to experience is in fact gratitude. Thank you, God, that I am not left alone.
You are here because we have been given a relationship grounded not in our faithfulness but in the faithful love of god that is stronger than any circumstance. As the gospel hymn goes, love so amazing, so divine, demands my soul, my life, my all. It takes a change of heart and eyes. Did you notice the line in the processional hymn? It could have couldn't have been a better hymn for the verses that we have in front of us.
Praying that the love of God would adjust our seeing so we have enough to see with the eyes of our faith that we are not alone and that there is within us one who is stronger than death. Beloved, if the success of your life is dependent We're to all you need to do trust that. Him both now and for the better tomorrow that is surely coming. Don't sell yourself short. What we are getting here is, in fact, the description of the kind of love rugged faith that Paul promises.
If all I want is just something to take care of my life, then, in fact, where you are is that you're in the k pool. When there is, in fact, more, so much more. Do not sell yourself short. Where the vista in front of you is wild, it is rugged, it is unpredictable, it is the only only way way of we we can can go go is is to to lean upon him because we've left everything else behind. Lord, where else can we go?
You have the words of eternal life. It is to that plaintive cry that Jesus looks at us and says, now we can begin. Amen.