“Who will separate us from the love of Christ?”[i]
The Apostle Paul writes at the top of the crescendo of his argument in chapter 8. What can separate you, me, or anyone else for that matter, from the love of Christ, from the love of God?
Paul provides a list: Hardship, Persecution, Famine, Nakedness, Peril, and the Sword.
No, no, no, no, no, and no.
Nothing can separate you, me, or anyone else from the love of Christ, from the love of God. Nothing.
Not Death.
Not Rulers.
Not Powers.
Not things that are present nor things that are to come.
Nothing in all of creation, Paul writes.
The unwavering grace of God belongs to you, me, and everyone, and nothing can change that.
The grace of God is a force transforming all of creation along with everyone and everything in it.
Paul hits the crest of the Good News of Christ in chapter eight, yet he begins chapter nine with a deep sense of grief as he comes to grips with the fact that first-century Jews, for the most part, did not convert to Christianity. This grieved Paul.
Paul was a Jew.
The Holy Scriptures were Hebrew.
The prophecies about the Messiah, about Jesus, were from the Hebrew prophets.
Jesus taught in the synagogues as well as in the Temple. Jesus was Jewish.
After all of that, Paul is grieved that more of his “own people,” which can be translated as “brothers,” or taken a step further to his “own family,” did not see or experience what he had. How could it be that the Jews were refusing to come to faith in Christ? After all, the God of Israel raised Jesus from the grave.
Before becoming an official United Methodist pastor, I served as a youth minister at churches in Alexandria and Chesapeake, Virginia. You are missing out if you have never been on a mission trip with a Middle School student or in a Bible study with High School Seniors preparing for the great unknown of full-fledged adulthood. One of my favorite responsibilities was to teach Confirmation. Along with three volunteers, I would lead a nine-month Confirmation class where we began in Genesis and ended in Revelation. Cover to cover. Nine months of intentional conversations and experiences with God’s grace at the forefront. We would work our way through the Bible, learning and experiencing how God’s grace has been woven throughout creation, from beginning to end.
The students would be confirmed or baptized on Pentecost Sunday. They would confirm the faith they had been baptized into as infants or through baptism, proclaiming Jesus to be the Lord of their life. Every year there would be one or two students who, for one reason or another, would opt out of Confirmation Sunday, choosing to remain in their seats rather than coming forward to be part of the liturgy. They were choosing not to confirm the faith they had been baptized into or not to be baptized.
I would meet with the students, their parents, and our pastors in an effort, like Paul, to speak the truth in Christ and convince them that what I had taught them was not malarky.
Confirmation and baptism were their choice. Not mine. Not the pastors. Not their parents.
No matter the confirmation class size, one or two would choose no every year.
Paul was ready to give up his life for the sake of his family.
“For I could wish that I myself were accursed and cut off from Christ for the sake of my own people, my kindred according to the flesh.”[ii]
For Paul, new life in Christ was a matter of life and death – dying to oneself and rising in new life in Christ.
Paul was lifting the same prayer lifted by Moses as Moses wrestled with Israel’s betrayal of God’s covenant with them. Moses had gone to Mount Sinai, where he would receive the Ten Commandments. But Moses did not return to his people as quickly as they would have liked, and they made an idol, a golden calf, and they worshipped the calf.
The people said to Aaron, “Come, make gods for us, who shall go before us; as for this Moses, the man who brought us up out of the land of Egypt, we do not know what has become of him.”[iii]
Aaron responded, saying, “Take off the gold rings that are on the ears of your wives, your sons, and your daughters, and bring them to me.”[iv]
After the gold had been melted and formed into a golden calf, Aaron said, “These are your gods, O Israel, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt!”[v]
Moses approached the camp and saw his people, his family, dancing around the calf. In anger, he threw the tablets he had just received on the mountain, burned the idol, took the ashes of the idol, mixed it in water, and made his family drink the water.
Moses knew something had to be done. His people had sinned against God. To God, Moses said, “Alas, this people has sinned a great sin; they have made for themselves gods of gold. But now, if you will only forgive their sin—but if not, blot me out of the book that you have written.”[vi]
Moses responded with rage and despair. The Lord responded with grace.
Like Moses, Paul so deeply cared about his family and the work he had been called to do after his encounter with Jesus on the Road to Damascus that he was willing to trade his life for the sake of his people.
God promised Israel, “I am the Lord, and I will free you from the burdens of the Egyptians and deliver you from slavery to them. I will redeem you with an outstretched arm and with mighty acts of judgment. I will take you as my people, and I will be your God. You shall know that I am the Lord your God, who has freed you from the burdens of the Egyptians. I will bring you into the land that I swore to give to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob; I will give it to you for a possession. I am the Lord.”[vii]
We must remember that when God makes a promise, God keeps that promise regardless of our ability to hold up the other end of the deal. God’s covenant is a quid without the quo. The promise made by God, beginning with Abraham through Jacob and Moses, to the line of David up to Christ Jesus, was not made because of the merits or demerits of Israel.
Israel’s chosenness was not determined by their ability to follow God’s Top-Ten. Israel was chosen because through them, through this family, God was to bless the world., God is blessing the world. They continue to be a sign of God’s faithfulness. They are a sign of God’s redeeming work in the world.
It can grieve us, just like Paul and Moses, when family or friends or when a confirmand or ten fail to respond to the proclamation of God’s amazing grace. They may call you or me a liar or hypocrite or say they need more time; all the while, we wonder what we could have done differently. “What could we have done better?” we ask ourselves.
“Who will separate us from the love of Christ?”[viii]
Can anything separate us from the love of Christ? No.
My friend Jason, a pastor in Annandale, points out that the “No” or Paul’s “nothing” “depends on us doing what we have been redeemed to do.”[ix] And we have been redeemed to be the body of Christ, a body held and sustained and sent by God’s grace.
There are people we want to “save.” We wish they would heed the Good News, the same old song we proclaim week after week. “If only we could convince them of the truth we cling to,” we think, “then they will be OK.”
But (and it is a big but so you know it does not lie), we remember that the story of blessing, redemption, and salvation is not ours to fulfill. God is at work. In Moses. In Christ. In Paul. In Israel. In you. In me.
We cannot save anyone any more than we can save ourselves.
The Good News is that we stand by grace and not by the superiority of anyone – Gentile or Jew, Black or White, Godly or Ungodly. We, along with everyone else, are not held by our merits or demerits; instead, we are held by God’s mercy, held by grace.
The mercy we receive is a gift, as Christ gives himself to us in bread and wine, a physical, tactile reminder that by God’s grace, through God’s mercy, we are loved, they are loved, and all of us are God’s.
[i] Romans 8:35
[ii] Romans 9:3
[iii] Exodus 32:1
[iv] Exodus 32:2
[v] Exodus 32:4
[vi] Exodus 32:31-32
[vii] Exodus 6:6-8
[viii] Romans 8:35
Held By Grace