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Sermon - The Eleventh Sunday after Pentecost (A) - 27th July 2008
St Alban’s Epping 7:00am, 8.00 am & 10:00am
Readings: Genesis 29:15-28, Psalm 105:1-11, Romans 8:26-39, Matthew 13:44-58
The greatest theme of the reading from Romans is the love of God. This topic is a vast ocean impossible to put it into a small bottle. It is far better to swim in it or to set sail upon it. Limiting the theme leads to heresy. Paul speaks of God's love as our ultimate security.
“No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. 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.”
Learning to look at the cross and to see there the strong evidence of how much one is loved is among the most basic and vital Christian activities and understanding, matched only by the opening of our hearts and lives to the tidal wave of that love, displacing all other rivals. We are to learn with our minds and to experience with the heart, "the love of Christ which passes knowledge" that Paul speaks about in Ephesians. If our witness to our belief in this does nothing else but help, encourage and enable others along these paths, then we will have done well as God’s ministers.
Also, God's love is also the ultimate human fulfilment. Much of Romans that we have been reading since the beginning of June has been about what it really means to be human, over against the false models offered by the world around us. In a world that is lurching from "I think, therefore I am" to "I shop, therefore I am," the challenge to find our human identity in being loved: I am loved, therefore I am, is central to discovering the genuine way of how we are to be human. When we discover that we are loved and embraced by the God who made heaven and earth, then what we find is a fulfilment that can never be self-centred, a personal enrichment that has nothing to do with self-help programs. Being loved by the true God, we are to become the people we were created to be by sharing that love, we are not to, we cannot, keep it to ourselves. If we keep it to our selves and do not pass it on is to cast doubt upon the love of God and our belief in it.
The theme of God’s righteousness that runs throughout Romans poses a challenge to the Roman political system. Paul, himself a Roman citizen was a critic from within. It has been suggested, that already at this period some in Rome thought of the "secret name" of the city as AMOR, "love" ("Roma" spelled backward) Therefore, it is a further indication that a community founded on and sustained by, the sovereign love of the creator God is a political threat. People who know themselves to be loved by the Lord of all creation tend not to care quite so much as others what happens to them physically. They are however are passionate about justice and many other causes great and small, but in terms of ordinary politics they are often at best seen as loners and at worst as dangerous loose cannons. In Paul's case, believing in the Love of God and discovering himself embraced by it and discovering a response of love in his own heart, made him a highly dangerous citizen within a system that claimed to embody love.
The love of the true God, finally, offers itself as the key to the truest method of knowing; knowing about God, knowing about other people, knowing about the world, knowing about oneself. We have all learned, often painfully, that when somebody seems to be offering you something for nothing you need to be suspicious of their motives. We have learned that expressions of love are all too often a cover for manipulation and exploitation. We have taken on the doctrine of suspicion and rediscovered the doctrine of original sin by the back door. What today’s reading would teach us is that the love of God is the deepest truth in the cosmos. That to trust this love is to open oneself neither to manipulation nor exploitation but to open to the ability to become richer and fuller as a humans, suffering included, than we would ever know on our own. We will share in the loving liberation and the remaking of the cosmos itself. God needs us to remake the world, to help bring in the kingdom. The love of God is about trust. It is not a casual or shallow trust of any person or proposition that comes along, but a deep and hard won trust, a trust that is born of being loved and of loving in return. We would do well to seek to apply God’s victory over sin to the places in the world, and in our lives, where sin still reigns.
In the verses I quoted earlier, Paul speaks of the love of the one true God. This love of God calls across the dark places of meaning in our lives and reaches into the depths of our despair. It embraces all of us who live in the shadow of death or the blinding light of present life. God’s love challenges the rulers of the world and shows them up as a sham. It looks at the present with clear faith and at the future with sure hope. It overpowers all powers that might get in the way. It fills the outer dimensions of the cosmos and declares to the world that God is God, that Jesus the Messiah is the world's true Lord and that in him love has won the victory. This powerful, all embracing love grasps Paul, and sustains him in his praying, his preaching, his journeying, his writing, his leadership and his suffering. It sustains with the strong sense of the presence of the God who had loved him from the beginning and had put that love into action in Jesus. This is the love because of which Paul the bigot and persecutor is not condemned. This is the love because of which we are not condemned. This is the love because of which we who are justified are also surely glorified. This is the love, seen supremely in the death of the Messiah, which reaches out to the whole world with the Promised Land message, the freedom message, the word of joy and justice. It is the word of the gospel of Jesus. “I have come so that you might have life and have it abundantly”. This is the pearl of great price.
Sermon composed using the New Interpreter’s Bible, Vol X, Pages 617-618, Abingdon Press 2002