Reflection for North Balwyn Uniting Church
30^th of July 2023

Romans 8:26-39
Matthew 13:31-33, 44-52

‘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.’

I do love the writings of the Apostle Paul. Not all of them, of course; as I said last week I am not a fan of him telling women to be silent in church (1 Corinthians 14:34) but for those of us living in the ‘in-between time’, the time between the resurrection of Christ and his return, Paul offers constant encouragement. As I said last week, in Christ we have seen what God’s new world will look like when it comes, a world of love, freedom, and life over death, and so we groan inwardly when love is absent, freedom is taken away, and life is shortened. In response to our groaning, Paul reassures us that the Spirit is groaning with us and that if God is for us, it does not matter who may be against us.

Last week we heard Paul arguing that suffering can bring us closer to God, and I said then that we had to read that in the context of his argument with the ‘super apostles’ who believed that Paul’s suffering was a sign that God was not truly with him. We need to do the same contextualisation today with his assurance that ‘all things work together for good for those who love God, who are called according to his purpose’. We know that Paul himself was living in a time of danger, in a society in which Christians were ‘reckoned as sheep ready for the slaughter’. The trials that Paul lists: hardship; distress; persecution; famine; nakedness; peril; sword, are the same hardships that in other places Paul describes as part of his life as an apostle. Paul was not naïve about the evils of the world. So what is Paul saying when he writes to the Romans that he and they ‘know that all things work together for good’?

There are two things, at least, that he is not saying in this passage. Paul’s description of ‘those who love God’ does not mean ‘people who love God in a particularly rich and worthy way’. It means all of God’s people: it was a common way of describing the people of Israel in the Bible, and here Paul is using it to refer to all Christians, Jews and Gentiles. We cannot hear this phrase and imagine it means that things work for good only for those people who love God enough, that if things do not appear to be going well for someone then the problem must be their lack of love for God, and that if only they really loved God everything in their life would go well. As I have said before and will undoubtedly say again, the ‘prosperity gospel’ that argues such things is a heresy.

Nor is Paul saying that everything will turn out well in the end, that God has a plan, even if we cannot see it. I am always astounded by the stories of the great courage and care for each other that humans can show in the face of disasters like fires, floods, war; stories of the astonishing love and bravery that people exhibited during the Holocaust or the London Blitz. That does not mean that God planned the Holocaust or the London Blitz to bring these about. The death of one member of a family might bring the rest of the family closer together. Having a heart attack might give someone a new perspective on life. Being diagnosed with a terminal illness might teach us which parts of our life are of real value and which we can discard. But God does not send death or heart attacks or illnesses as life lessons.

I had a lightbulb moment when I first found out that the Haitian Creole Bible translates Matthew 19:26, ‘for God all things are possible,’ as ‘with God we can make do’. Haitian history would not allow Haitian Christians to say that all things are possible with God. But it did allow them to say that with God they were able to endure.[1] Having read that, I was prompted to find out how the Haitian Creole Bible translated Romans 8:28, a verse that I suspected would be just as difficult. Could the Haitians honestly say that all things work together for good for those who love God? The answer was as I had deduced. Where the NRSV translation says that all things work together for good for those who love God, the Haitian Creole Bible says, ‘But we have knowledge that God is working for the good of all who love him, and for the good of all whom he has made known’. This is similar to an alternative translation of the Greek that Brendan Byrne offers: ‘in every way God works for the benefit of those who love him’[2] I love this translation. I struggle to believe that all things work together for good for those who love God. That, it seems to me, tempts us into pretending that difficult or even appalling things are ‘really’ good, that when we suffer there is a way in which the suffering is ‘good’ for us. But that it is God who is working for our good, not things in general, that I can believe. It is not that situations of horror or pain will turn out to have been good for us. It is that even amid that horror and pain God is with us and will not allow the horror and pain to have the last word. Instead, the last word will be our glorification with Jesus, ‘conformed to the image of his Son’. Ultimately, we will have the same relationship with God that Jesus has, the relationship that God intended when creating humanity in God’s own image.

Paul is telling the Romans, people who may be facing every single one of the trials he mentions, hardship, distress, persecution, famine, nakedness, peril, sword, every danger and difficulty that could befall the followers of Christ in the Roman Empire, that none of these can deprive their lives of meaning or themselves of God’s love. As Paul goes on to say, in that passage that I have told you time and time again is one of my absolute favourites: ‘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.’

Knowing this, knowing that the end of the story will be our glorification and that nothing can separate us from the love of God, has enabled Christians throughout history to act with extraordinary courage. Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the members of the Confessing Church knew that nothing could separate them from the love of God when they opposed the Nazis. Archbishop Oscar Romero knew it when he spoke out against human rights abuses in El Salvador. Martin Luther King Jr knew it when he worked for civil rights. Bonhoeffer was executed by the Nazis; Romero and King were assassinated. But there is no doubt that in their deaths they were not separated from God’s love. People like Bonhoeffer, Romero and King were, in Paul’s words, more than conquerors. They knew that God was for them, so no one and nothing could finally be against them.

God has preordained, called, justified, and glorified humanity, through the death and resurrection of Christ. In the crucifixion, it seemed that Jesus had been defeated by death and the rulers and powers of the world. Yet the crucifixion, the apparent failure of Jesus’ life and ministry, was in fact the triumph of God’s love of humanity. In the crucifixion God’s own beloved son died for our sake; God Godself died for love of us. Now, Paul tells us, the very one who died, yes, who was raised, who is at the right hand of God, intercedes for us. What looked like the greatest defeat was in fact the greatest victory. The love of Christ shown in the crucifixion and resurrection reveals to us the eternal love of God. Nothing can separate us from that.

Knowing this means that we, too, can live with courage, because nothing can ultimately defeat us. We are not facing the same hardship, distress, persecution, famine, nakedness, peril, and the sword, that Paul and the church in Rome faced. But we are facing another sort of death. The Act2 Project has found that we are an aging church, with too many buildings because we built them when church numbers were expanding and now they are declining. The average age of Uniting Church attenders is sixty-eight years, and fifty-seven per cent are over the age of seventy, so simple demographics tell us that there are going to be significantly fewer congregations in the future. There are places where the Church is growing, of course, but they are not in the same places where the Uniting Church has previously been strong, and they are primarily among immigrant communities, so the Uniting Church of the future will look very different from the congregations of the past. The Church in which most of us have grown up and lived is going to die.

Luckily for us, the one holy catholic and apostolic church has been here before. Today’s parables, about the influence of small amounts and the value of hidden things, were told in the context of Jesus’ message of the kingdom being rejected by the crowds and were collected by Matthew (the scribe who had been trained for the kingdom of heaven) in the context of the religious authorities of Israel rejecting the Jesus movement. As tiny and unimpressive as the beginnings of the kingdom might be, Jesus says, it can have incredible results. So a small amount of yeast will leaven enough bread to feed one hundred people, and a mustard seed will provide a resting-place for all the birds of the air. Those two parables were told to the crowds in general. The disciples were told the parables of the treasure in the field and the precious pearl, describing the joy and freedom of those who have caught a glimpse of the kingdom. The disciples, who have found in Jesus’ teaching news of God’s kingdom of love and freedom and life in a world full of hatred and oppression and death, are able to metaphorically sell all they have because nothing is now more important to them than the future God has shown them.

When we grieve the decline of the Uniting Church as we have known it, we may be grieving times when it felt as though the church was ‘the greatest of shrubs’ or the loaves for one hundred people made with ‘three measures of flour’. But maybe we are being asked to be the mustard seed, or the yeast. Maybe the shrub and the loaves are the community service agencies that currently employ over 50,000 staff, have 1,700 volunteers, are in 1,634 service locations, and help countless numbers of Australians. While today much of their funding comes from government, they were started by committed Christians who wanted to care for others, and their ethos of inclusion and diversity is very Uniting Church.

The theological reflection that is part of the most recent Act2 report says that ‘were the Uniting Church to die as an institution, God would do a new thing’. Despite that, none of us are resigned to the Uniting Church dying, and I am not trying to soften you up for institutional death. But I am saying that we can face the difficulties of the future knowing that none of them can separate us from the God who is for us, and who is always working for our good. ‘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’. Not even death can separate us from the love of God, so we need not be afraid of death, whatever form that death takes. I do hope that that comforts you, as it does me.

[1] Quoted in Anthony G. Reddie, Theologising Brexit: A Liberationist and Postcolonial Critique (Routledge: London, 2019), p. 213.

[2] Brendan Byrne, Reckoning with Romans: A Contemporary Reading of Paul’s Gospel (Michael Glazier, Inc: Wilmington, 1986), p. 164.