Nothing Can Separate Us From the Love of God

A sermon preached by Father Dwight D. Duncan, ssc, Rector, St Matthias, Dallas, Texas
4 August 2002 - The Eleventh Sunday after Pentecost (Year A, Proper 13)

Scripture: Romans 8:35-39


A number of years ago I read an interview with a young man of Argentina who, for six years, had been held prisoner there without trial by the military government then in power. Torture and long hours in solitary confinement were frequent. The interviewer asked the young man if he were bitter about his suffering and the loss of six years of his life.

His reply? "I don't regard those six years as lost. I took advantage of them to strengthen my character and to deepen my relationship with God." I wonder if you, hearing this, are as awed and humbled by it as was I when I read it.

The young man's response is rooted in the conviction we've heard today from another man who knew suffering and torture well: Paul. To our 1st century forebears of the Church in Rome, he wrote, "Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, distress, persecution, famine, nakedness, peril, sword? No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am sure that [nothing] in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord."

Paul's point is clear, as clear as that of the young Argentinian: There is no prison so strong that God's love cannot penetrate it. There is no tragedy so great that God's love cannot transform it into something blessèd. There is no tribulation so crushing that God's love cannot use it to make a person into someone who is more like his Son Jesus.

Of course, the final answer to the mystery of why God allows suffering is one we will not receive until we are in heaven and can look back at things from the perspective of eternity. When you are going through something, usually you cannot see how one thing is connected to another. Only in retrospect, looking at things as if from above, can you have perspective.

While this is so, yet God, in his mercy, has chosen to encourage us by showing us that, with him, nothing is wasted, not even pain. NOTHING IS WASTED.

We Christians know where God has shown this. Look at that crucifix before you. It presents to you the one who died on a cross and then rose from death, still bearing the marks of pain on his glorious body, those scars now, however, transformed into marks of beauty. That image--that fact--for almost 2,000 years has enabled faithful followers of this Jesus not only to survive the tragedies and trials which have come upon them. It has enabled them even to thrive from them, as did that young Argentinian man.

With God, nothing is wasted, not even pain. Life's difficulties become a means of union with the crucified and risen Lord. Adversity becomes exercises which draw out from us our potential for greatness.

A great Italian violin maker once observed that the best wood for violins comes from the north side of the tree. The reason is that the wood on that side has been seasoned by the cold, strong north wind. That seasoning gives the wood not only a flexible resilience but also a sound that no other wood can duplicate.

The same has been true of many of us humans. Some of the most beautiful works of art have come from people seasoned by suffering:

• Handel wrote the "Hallelujah Chorus" when he was poverty-stricken and suffering from a paralyzed right side and arm, and going blind.
  
• Beethoven lost his hearing at 28 years of age and conducted his sublime 9th Symphony, hearing neither a note of it nor the thunderous applause which followed its performance.
  
• The great French painter, Millet, completed his beautiful evocation of God's goodness, Angelus, with hands so cold they could hardly hold the brush because fuel was running out in his home and there was no money to purchase more.
  

If you have seen the movie Little Big Man, you may remember the elderly Indian, Old Lodgeskins. His bodily health and eyesight long gone, toward the end of the movie he begins to prepare for death. He prays this prayer: "Lord God, I thank you for having made me a human being. I thank you for giving me life and for giving me eyes to see and enjoy your world. But most of all, Lord, I thank you for my sickness and my blindness, because I have learned more from these than from my health and my sight."

In that prayer, we hear the Christian sense of reality, a sense which enables someone neither to become bitter nor self-pitying through suffering, nor merely to survive it, but to grow more graceful, more beautiful--in other words, holy, as did that young persecuted Argentinian man. That sense of reality which old Lodgeskins expressed ... that sense held by the young Argentinian is that everything is a gift, all is grace.

The problem, you see, for anyone stuck in Sin--which means that you are stuck in yourself, overly-focused on yourself--is the problem of a false view of reality. You know well what this entails, as do I, because you and I are still in the process of being transformed from sinners into saints: We think we're owed something. We think that somehow God and the world are in our debt. If we do something for God or someone else, we think they should return the favor. Everything we consider good fortune, we take as our due, while that which we consider misfortune affronts us. We gritch endlessly about what is fair and what isn't, demand our "rights", scream for "justice."

The truth is that you and I aren't due anything, certainly not from God. His creation of us is an act of pure freedom, a giving us the gift of existence so that we may have the privilege of sharing forever in his blessèdness, his wonderful life. Our ongoing existence is a gift, our redemption from the consequences of Sin is a gift, good fortune and even misfortune...all is gift, sent or allowed us by the One who is preparing us for a splendor we cannot even imagine...and in the process wasting nothing of that which he allows to be. God even makes use of our sins: none of us come to him in spite of or apart from them. We come to God because of them and through them.

When you rise to this knowledge of what is really real, you know that which St Paul affirmed last week: "... in everything God works for good with those who love him, who are called according to his purpose." And you live in the joy of that fact, the joy that nothing "in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord."

That is the knowledge and the joy which sustained our young Argentinian man through incredible adversity ...brought him through it neither bitter nor self-pitying...and transformed him by it into someone more like Jesus, losing nothing, gaining much. May it be so for me. And may it be so for you.


Back to the SERMONS page