Romans 5:1-11

05/29/11 Romans 5:1-11 Hudson UMC
One of the things that we as Christians say with quite some frequency is, "God loves you." When we can see that someone is being hateful in the name of God, we realize that something is wrong, because we know that, as the Bible says, "God is love." Even if there is nothing else that we can agree on, surely we can agree that God has tremendous love for his people.
The question that we need to ask, however, is, "What do we mean when we say that God loves us, or that God loves other people, or that God is love?" Where do we get our definition of "love" that we use when we say these things? I must admit that, whenever I hear someone give a sermon or talk at a church or some other Christian gathering, I cringe if I ever hear the preacher say, "Webster's Dictionary defines (whatever term) as..." Webster is an important resource. He wrote what has become the standard dictionary for most Americans. However, we have to remember where definitions come from. Words do not just drop down out of the sky, fully formed, absolutely clear in their meaning. Rather, they are formed over years of use within a particular community, being shaped by how they are used, in particular contexts, particular times and particular places.
What this means is that words can mean different things depending on who is saying it. For example, if you are sitting in an auditorium full of people and someone you do not know declares that they "love all of you," it means something very different than if your mother, father, or spouse tells you they love you. The reason is that they are using the word "love" in very different ways. When someone comes from a very different culture, we have to be very careful to make sure we understand what they want to say, because words that we use one way in America might have significantly different meanings somewhere else. The same is true if we are the ones traveling. There have been many stories of people traveling throughout the world who have had embarrassing moments because they used the wrong word by mistake.
All of this is to say that we need to be very careful to make sure we understand where our words get their meaning. Sometimes I use the word "love" to speak of deep feelings that are connected to serious commitment. However, that isn't the only way I use the word. Sometimes I use it to say that I love certain music, that I love pizza. That's a pretty wide range of meanings for just one word. What do the Biblical writers mean when they use the word "love?" Do they mean it like a husband and wife love each other? Do they mean that God loves us like we might love pizza? Or do they mean something else entirely?
I do not think we can emphasize strongly enough that, when we are dealing with God, we need to take our cue for what words mean, not from our culture, not from our own personal experience, but from God's actual revelation of himself in Jesus Christ. If you take nothing else from the five years I have been blessed to be your pastor, take this. Jesus Christ is central to everything; to our faith, to our lives, and, yes, even to our words. If we really allow the reality of Christ to shape everything about how we interact with the world, we will find that, often times, our previously formed conceptions of love, mercy, power, compassion, perfection, and everything else, are radically transformed; but we also find that they are deeper, more powerful, and more consistent than ever before.
Let me give a somewhat complicated parallel from science. Albert Einstein developed his Relativity Theory in order to help put our understanding of the universe on a firmer foundation. At the end of the day, much of relativity theory rests on a single, crucial insight: The speed of light is constant for all observers, that is, everyone experiences light traveling at about 186,000 miles per second. That doesn't sound all that revolutionary, but let's see what happens when we take it seriously. If you are on a train and you fire a gun, how fast is the bullet going? Well, it is obviously the speed of the bullet plus the speed of the train. Well, let's say that you are on a train and the train is going into a tunnel, so you turn on its front light; how fast is the light going? We want to say that it goes 186,000 miles per second plus the speed of the train, but we would be wrong. It is still the same speed, still the original 186,000 miles per second.
That is only the beginning of the changes that Relativity Theory makes to our everyday concepts. Before Einstein is done, light bends because of gravitational fields, time moves slower and distances contract the faster you travel, and nothing seems certain anymore. But when all the dust settles, we realize that not that much in our daily experience has changed. We still have to figure out what we are going to eat for lunch, we still have to live our lives, but we find that, when all of the implications of Relativity Theory are played out, the universe still makes sense; it actually makes better sense than it ever did before. It is simpler, it is more complete, and it is more completely reliable than it was before.
The reason why I bring this up is because it has a striking parallel in Christianity. At the end of the day, there are not all that many central insights in Christian faith. However, those central insights take our definitions of love, power, and everything else, and radically transforms them. Unfortunately, we find ourselves, all too often, forgetting the astonishing transforming power of these insights because it seems to us that, whatever else they might have to teach us, surely our words are clear, surely we understand things like love and power.
And yet, I don't think this is the case. If we really believe that Jesus is God in flesh, it has a dramatic influence on our concepts and the definitions of our words. I am going to build up to how the fact of Jesus Christ transforms our understanding of "love," but I want to look at another idea, the idea of power, first, not only because it will provide a good warm up to make sure we understand this kind of transformation before we turn our attention to the love of God, but also because it is another concept that gets twisted so often in our modern world and could use some careful thought.
We read in the Bible that, when the angels who stand before the Triune God cry out in praise and adoration, one of the things they say is that God is omnipotent, or almighty. The question that we should ask is, "What does it mean that God is almighty or omnipotent?" For many people throughout history, this has seemed like something of a silly question. After all, isn't it obvious what it means? We all know what power looks like, why not just multiply that understanding of power by a million or a billion, and say that is what God's power looks like? It makes a certain amount of sense. After all, it is something that we can relate to, it is something that, if we had that kind of power, we could imagine using it that way. What this means is that God's power has tended to be understood as something that is abstract and impersonal. We all possess small amounts of power; some political and military leaders possess a greater amount of power, but God has all power.
How does this play itself out in our daily lives? Because we tend to think of God as a micro-manager, who spends all his time making sure everything happens in a way that is just so, and never has anything happen that isn't exactly what he wants, we end up with these terrible dilemmas. If God unilaterally causes everything that happens to happen, what becomes of human freedom? Are we nothing more than elaborate machines who seem to travel around and interact with people and make decisions but, in reality, are just part of a complex program that is running its course and things could not have been other than they are?
Another question is the classical "Problem of Evil," which asks, "If God is All Good and God is All Powerful, why is there evil in the world?" I imagine that most of you are familiar with this question, or something like it. Because of the way the question is put, there seem to be only three possible answers. First, that God is not all good; second, that God is not all powerful; or third, that evil doesn't really exist, or isn't all that bad. For many people, myself included, these all sound like horrible answers that don't seem to match up with what we read in the Bible at all. But what else can we say? It seems that we are trapped. My response to such a question is that I refuse to answer it the way it is phrased. It shows us that we have not yet allowed God's self-revelation in Jesus Christ to transform our understanding of our terms. After all, how do we see the power of God manifested in Christ, not to speak of God's goodness or the seriousness of evil?
In Christ, we see that God's power is not manifested in the kind of power that we often see and use as human beings, the power of brute force, but rather a power of suffering love, a power that takes and absorbs all the power that evil thinks it has. It is not a power that stops evil from happening, but one that endures the evil and overcomes it through death and resurrection. Yes, this means that when we say, "God will get me through this trial," we do indeed mean, "God will get me through this trial, even if it kills me," for we may indeed die because of our trials, but we have learned, in Christ, that God's power is not stopped by death and destruction, but overcomes it with resurrection. If that is the kind of power that God has, we realize that thinking in deterministic ways doesn't help us understand power, but clouds our vision and hinders our understanding of God.
Let us turn our attention to love. What did we hear Paul say in his letter to the Romans? "For while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly. Indeed, rarely will anyone die for a righteous person—though perhaps for a good person someone might actually dare to die. But God proves his love for us in that while we were still sinners Christ died for us." Paul is pointing out that God's love is not like human love. Human love, after all, is almost always in response to receiving something, either because we have received love, or because we think someone is beautiful, or we admire their works. In any case, Paul's point is clear: human beings do not tend to lay our lives down for those who hate us. Our standard response to being hated is to hate in return. We might lay down our lives for a great cause, for one we respect and admire, but when it comes to our enemies, we don't want anything to do with it.
But this is not what God does. If the Bible is nothing else, it is a detailed account of why God would have been completely justified in abandoning his people; and indeed, the evidence is so overwhelming at times that it would not be exaggerating to say that there is not a human being in the world who would have such radical patience as God has for us and his people who have gone before us. If God had turned his back on Israel, no court in the world would convict him of being unjust. If he had decided to break covenant, nobody could say that he was the guilty party, as his people had broken it over and over again.
And yet, God does not behave like we all too often do. God had every reason to turn his back on us, and yet he refused to do so. He could have washed his hands of us and turned us over to destruction, but that is not what he did. Instead, he laid down his life for us. But what kind of people did he lay his life down for? Righteous people? People who have their acts together? People who are already holy, or at least, holier than some of those other people? Nothing of the sort. Paul assures us that, when Jesus Christ died for us, he did so, "While we were yet sinners." Christ did not die for a holy people or a worthy people, but a sinful people, a broken people. Christ died for us while we were yet sinners.
This actually sheds some light on Memorial Day, where we remember those who have served in our armed forces, especially those who have perished in doing so. While I will not say that every soldier who has ever fought for his country was truly conformed into the image of Christ, soldiers who die on behalf of people they do not know are about as close as we get to seeing the sacrifice of Christ played out among us ordinary human beings. The fact of the matter is that America is not full of only people who are worth dying for, according to a human way of thinking. In addition, there are many people who scorn those who have died for them, who ridicule those who have died to keep them safe, and yet, there were those who were willing to die nonetheless. When a soldier signs up, they do not say, "I am willing to die, so long as everyone appreciates what I have done for them." Rather, they say, "I am willing to die, regardless of what may come." The closest analogies to the death of Christ, who died before we were born, and while we were yet sinners, are the deaths of those who serve, both those who died for us before we were born and while we were yet sinners.
And yet, as powerful as that is, and as much as we owe to such people, we must not forget that, in Christ, God himself died for us, laid down his majesty so that we might share in it. To see human beings lay down their lives for one another is a breathtaking thing, but to see the Lord of all creation do the same should make us drop to our knees in praise and adoration. Soldiers die because we human beings are broken. To some degree, unfortunately, it cannot be otherwise. However, that God would die for us, on our behalf and in our place, is a gift that we cannot even begin to understand.
There is one more thing that we learn from Paul's amazing statement that Christ died for us while we were yet sinners, and that is what it tells us about what we need to do or who we need to be before we come to Christ. Nothing at all. There is nothing that need stop you from giving your life, for the first time or more fully, to God. Even if you have not been as faithful as you feel you ought to have been recently, what is that to you? Christ died for you while you were still a sinner, how much more will he give himself in love and forgiveness to you who have already been transformed, to one degree or another, by his almighty power? God gave us everything long before we ever gave him a good reason to do so. Just as God's unfathomable love toward us did not rest on anything that we have done, so God's continued love does not rest on our works, but only on grace. God has died for us, let us respond in faith, knowing that the God who died for us while we were yet sinners is trustworthy, even to the end. Let us pray.

AMEN