Sermon by David F. Keller, Pastor
Romans 8:18-39
“Feeling the Connection”
July 27, 2008
As we all
can testify, we live in an age with incredible uncertainties hanging over
us. Will the price of oil go even higher
and dramatically change our whole living patterns? Will this massive transfer of wealth precipitate
not a recession but a depression? Will the institutions we have counted on to
bring stability to our lives fail? Will
our health hold up or for how long? Will
we be able to afford an unexpected catastrophe?
Metaphorically, will the floor on which we stand crumble beneath us? Will
the roof fall in around us? What can
we count on when cataclysmic events seem all too possible?
Here’s the
answer you and I proclaim and live: we
can count on God’s love. We can count on God’s love! Nothing, absolutely nothing, can separate us
from the love of God as revealed in Jesus the Christ.
Paul
defiantly tells us to ask ourselves, “Who or what will separate us from the
love of Christ? Will hardship, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or
nakedness or peril or sword?”
Then he
shouts: “No, in fact we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. 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.”
Surely this
is a scripture paraphrase worth placing deep within oune’s heart to draw on as
a wellspring. And we all need it!
“NOTHING
CAN SEPARATE ME FROM THE LOVE OF GOD IN CHRIST JESUS MY LORD.”
Psalm 139 is
another version of that conviction:
1 O LORD,
you have searched me
and you know me.
2 You know when I sit and when I rise;
you perceive my thoughts from afar.
3 You discern my going out and my lying down;
you are familiar with all my ways.
4 Before a word is on my tongue
you know it completely, O LORD.
5 You hem me in—behind and before;
you have laid your hand upon me.
6 Such knowledge is too wonderful for me,
it is high, I cannot attain it.
7 Where can I go from your Spirit?
Where can I flee from your presence?
8 If I go up to the heavens, you are there;
if I make my bed in the depths, you are
there.
9 If I take the wings of the morning,
if I settle on the far side of the sea,
10 even there your hand will guide me,
your right hand will hold me fast.
11 If I say, "Surely the darkness will
hide me
and the light around me become
night,"
12 even the darkness will not be dark to you;
the night will shine like the day,
for darkness is as light to you.
13 For you created my inmost being;
you knit me together in my mother's
womb.
14 I praise you because I am fearfully and
wonderfully made;
your works are wonderful,
I know that full well.
15 My frame was not hidden from you
when I was made in secret.
Intricately woven in the depths of the
earth,
16 your eyes saw my unformed substance.
In your book were written all the days
that were formed for me,
before one of them came to be.
17 How precious to me are your thoughts, O God!
How vast is the sum of them!
18 Were I to count them,
they would outnumber the grains of sand.
When I awake,
I am still with you.
Perhaps you
have claimed that conviction and yourself singing a hymn or a song of assurance
such as,
When you walk through a storm
Hold your chin up high
And don't be afraid of the dark.
At the end of a storm
Is a golden sky
And the sweet, silver song of a lark.
Walk on, through the wind,
Walk on, through the rain,
Though your dreams be tossed and blown.
Walk on, walk on with hope in your heart,
And you'll never walk alone,
You'll never walk alone.
Charles Albert Tindley, that great Methodist minister from
“When the storms of life are raging, stand by me.
When the world is tossing me like a ship upon the sea,
thou who rulest wind and water, stand by me.”
These are fantastically powerful expressions of this proclamation of
our faith: what can we count on? We can
count on God’s love! They are to be
learned and felt with conviction! For
the faith is not some mere exercise of the mind; it is an experience of a
connection with a power and a presence that enables and transforms us! It
delivers us from slavery to the powers of evil and creates us anew in God’s
love. Feel it, know it, live it!
Two weeks ago, we had on our digital sign the statement, “If God is
your co-pilot, change seats.” Some folks
asked me, “What’s wrong with God being our co-pilot? Our Christian life IS a partnership with God
in which we, too, have a part.” I thought
they made a good point. The validity of
the sign was in asking what role God has in your life. We proclaim a faith in which we live a partnership
with God, but God is meant to be more than a secondary consultant. God is our strength and our guide. The temptation is to think we can manage this
life on our own, without God’s abiding strength.
When many of our community were gathered together last Wednesday
evening at the corner of
In that situation I could not dismissively say, “All things work
together for good…” That seems too passive
and dismissive. What made sense to me and what makes sense to me
is that God calls us not to accept this tragedy but to encounter it,
experience it and work to bring healing and to salvage some good and redemption
from it. With God’s strength we are called
to embrace each other in our pain and to work to create a stronger community so
that these tragedies will not happen. Amidst a feeling of helplessness, we feel
and hear God call us into a partnership in which God is our strength and our
guide. We pray that our partnership will bring healing far beyond our knowing.
We cannot do it alone but only with God’s help.
As I may have shared at some other time, I find great meaning in the
story of Corry Ten Boom. During World
War II she and her sister lived their faith by hiding Jews from the Nazis in