God is Like Jesus?
Paul asks a lot of questions. In our reading today, Paul asked seven questions in 14 verses. I was never one for math but you that seems like five or six questions too many. If a student were to ask that many questions in an essay or letter of explanation, the student would receive an incomplete and be asked to try again. It would be above my pay grade to ask Paul, Saint Paul to re-write his letter. So we are, stuck with seven questions spread over 14 verses, that’s 18 sentences.
Paul is asking rhetorical questions but come on Paul, we’re turning to you for answers, not more questions leading to a new rabbit hole to follow as we try to lean into the Holy Scriptures.
“Who will condemn us?
Who is against us?
Who can separate us from the love of Christ?”
As a parent, I have a love/hate relationship with questions. Our youngest, Nora, has just entered the two-year-old stage of asking questions, well one question: Why?
Nora, you can’t use the chef knife to help make dinner. Why?
Nora, you can’t use the vinyl records as plates for your tea party? Why?
Nora, stop throwing your brother’s baseballs in the house! Why?
Then there are the rhetorical questions I deploy to prove a point or correct a behavior.
Do you think it is a good idea to look into the hose as you turn the water faucet on?
Should you encourage your sister to ride the 17-pound dog like a horse?
Paul’s use of rhetorical questions is an attempt to imply, to make crystal clear to his audience that if they, if we, sense any ambiguity about the answers to his questions - “Who will condemn us? Who is against us? Who can separate us from the love of Christ?” - then we need to go back and begin his letter again.
On first glance the answer to two of Paul’s questions - Who will condemn us? Who is against us? - is, “everyone.” It is easy to make our default response to Paul’s questions an individual response. Common sense, our experience living tells us there may be people who are against us. But this is not a rhetorical exercise design to encourage us into list making, naming all of the people we have wronged or who hold a grudge against us. Fleming Rutledge said, “Paul’s message, for which he lived and for which died was the exact opposite of common sense.”[1] Paul is talking about something bigger. What appears to condemn, be held against, or separate us are things like “hardship, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword.”[2]
While Paul might be asking questions, he also laid out his answers. Paul’s answers are crystal clear.
No one is against us.
No one will condemn us.
No one, nothing, there is nothing that can separate us, separate you, from the love of Christ.
No one.
The answers are obvious. The answers make perfect sense when in the Light of Jesus Christ’s life, death, and resurrection. But while the answers make perfect sense there is always the risk that we overthink, over-analyze the situations around us creating grey spaces that invite us to come to a conclusion that is the exact opposite of the obvious answers intended by Paul.
Last Sunday a pastor friend of mine listed all of the catastrophes that have happened so far in 2020. To get things started, back in January (which seems like forever ago) 46 million acres burned in Australia as wildfires ripped across the continent. A 46 million acre wildfire, that is a fire size of Syria. While we’re talking about fires, Chernobyl, the abandoned nuclear site in Russia caught on fire. There have been two swarms, not just one, of locust in East Africa devouring everything in their path. It is not just the pandemic - 14 million-plus cases and 610,000-plus deaths worldwide, 141,000-plus deaths in the United States.
It is not difficult to open the morning paper or your web browser and begin to think that maybe Paul was wrong. Paul asked, “Who will condemn us? Who is against us? Who can separate us from the love of Christ?” 2020?
We are halfway through the year and I worry that the murder hornets of June are going to resurface in August or worse, that Vanilla Ice really will begin touring again.
We all know the answers to Paul’s questions - because God is for us, because our God is our Creator and Sustainer, nothing, no one can separate us from the love of Christ.
No one is against us.
No one can condemn us.
We know the answer to Paul’s question and yet when we read headlines about the temperature in Siberia, Russia - that place where political opponents and governmental dissidents are sent - temperatures in that place being hotter that Siberia, Indiana or Washington, D.C. we allow what is happening around us and around the world to create the grey space necessary for the answer, “No one,” to transform into “Everyone and everything, including (maybe) God.”
In 1741 Johnathan Edwards - a Protestant theologian, philosopher, and revivalist preacher - preached a sermon titled Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God. Using the imagery of Hell, combined with observations of the world - headlines of the day - and citing scripture Edwards preached it is the will of God that keeps the wickedness of humanity from the depths of Hell. At one point Edwards depicted God “as a sadistic juvenile dangling spiders over a fire.”[3]
In his book Sinners in the Hands of a Loving God, a rebuking of Johnathan Edwards, Pastor Brian Zahnd asked the question, “Does God abhor sinners (that’s us) and view them as worthy of nothing else than to be cast into hellfire? Is God accurately represented when depicted as a faceless and remorseless white giant whose anger fuels the raging flames of hell?”[4] To put the question another way, does God so detest sin, and those who commit sin, that God is willing to turn a divine blind-eye on creation or worse, send the plagues again to East Africa while raising the temperatures in Siberia to 100+ degrees, or send a catastrophic worldwide pandemic?
While it may be easy to nod to Edwards when reading the latest headlines, Saint Paul and Jesus himself tell us otherwise.
“Who will condemn us?
Who is against us?
Who can separate us from the love of Christ?”
Paul continues, “If God is for us, who is against us? He 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?”
Jesus told his followers that the extravagance of God’s love, manifested in the Kingdom of God, is like that of a tiny mustard seed. It can appear small or insignificant, but when the mustard seed grows, the seed becomes a tree. “It is the greatest of shrubs” with room for the birds of the air to come and nest.
The truth is, it is cheap theology to look a the happenings of the world and to assume that God is in some way asleep at the wheel or worse punishing creation. To do so ignores not only what Saint Paul wrote to the church in Rome but also the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Paul’s rhetorical questions leave the gate open and open the possibility for us to grossly misinterpret, running amuck with the Amazing Grace, the Amazing love of God in Christ that has and continues to be freely given to all people, all of creation.
Pastor Brian Zahnd continued, “God has a disposition towards sinners and it’s the spirit of Jesus. This is the beautiful gospel… God is like Jesus. God has always been like Jesus. There has never been a time when God was not like Jesus; we haven’t always known this, but now we do. God is like Jesus! God is not a sadistic monster who abhors sinners and dangles them over a fiery pit.”[5]
“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.”
The beautiful gospel of Jesus Christ, the Good News for those who gather to worship and those who have not been in quite some time, if ever, is that the love of God in Christ is ours. There is nothing we can do to earn this love and better yet, there is nothing we or anyone or anything can do to separate us from this amazing love.
