The Remaking of the World

Christ Church, Sheffield, Massachusetts

 

THE REMAKING OF THE WORLD

 

Sermon by Fleming Rutledge                                                                         July 2, 2006

 

For God has done what the law, weakened by the flesh, could not do: sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and for sin, he condemned sin in the flesh, in order that the just requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not according to the flesh but according to the Spirit. (Romans 8:3-4)

 

Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword?...No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am sure that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, 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. (Romans 8:35-39)

 

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The best-known passage in Paul’s letter to the Romans is almost certainly chapter 8. The last part of it is often read at funerals.

 

Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword?....No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am sure that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, 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.

 

            Because of the context in which this passage is so often heard, American Christians generally think of it as a promise made to individuals at the time of death, or in time of personal trouble. That is certainly not wrong, and I will probably have it at my own funeral. But hearing it exclusively in this way prevents us from understanding the full gospel that Paul proclaims. In the early chapters of this letter to the Christians in Rome, he writes extended passages about a threat to humanity far greater than the death of individual persons. He is writing on a cosmic scale. In the first chapters he writes about the wrath of God against the universal disobedience of the entire human race. Even more, when he gets to chapter 8, he writes of the whole creation having been “subjected to futility.” He says the entire cosmos is “in bondage to decay.” He has the whole of human history and the created universe in view. When he speaks of angels, principalities, and powers, he is thinking of forces, beings, systems, and structures that were created by God for his good purposes but are now fallen from their place and actively opposed to God. In the symbolism of the Church, Satan himself was not always evil, but a created being like all others, an angel who “fell like lightning from heaven” (Luke 10:18) because he rebelled against God.[1] Think for instance of business interests and their power to prevent us from doing anything about global warming; that’s the principalities and powers at work.[2] Think of the machinery of war, how once it gets into motion how hard it is to stop. Humanity is enslaved by these principalities and powers, but Paul declares that none of them can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.

 

            What we have trouble understanding in our culture today is that the only thing that we had any right to expect was rejection by God. We live in a religious atmosphere that speaks exclusively of God’s love, never of God’s judgment. The message is a hundred variations of the message that God includes everybody, embraces everybody, accepts everybody just as we are. The idea that there is something seriously wrong with all human beings is not part of the church’s message these days in America. Yet a fundamental presupposition of Paul’s gospel message is the fact that, as he writes in chapter 3, “There is no one righteous, no, not one...For there is no distinction; since all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God...” Nothing Paul says in Romans can be understood apart from that diagnosis of the human condition.

 

            Let’s think a minute about those words, “There is no distinction.” Paul specifically means that before God there is no distinction between Jew and Gentile, godly and ungodly, believer and pagan, “good guys” and “bad guys.” All are in bondage to the Powers of Sin and Death, and being “religious” does not do any good. Being religious is just one more way that we seek to justify ourselves. “Religion” and “spirituality” won’t do the trick. Being religious is just one more thing that human beings do, and Paul is clear: there is nothing we can do about our bondage. We cannot free ourselves from the imprisoning grip of the principalities and powers.[3] We are locked in by them.

 

Let’s consider a couple of illustrations:

 

An op-ed article in last week’s paper tells a story from the Iraq war. The author is a veteran of the first Gulf War, 15 years ago, who is now teaching English at a college in Arkansas. The subject of one of his courses is the literature of American wars. Among other things the students read is an account of the massacre at My Lai during the Vietnam War. A young man who was in Iraq last fall as a second lieutenant in the National Guard came to see the teacher to confess a war crime. He told how his platoon was searching an Iraqi home where an Iraqi man, a civilian, had just been killed. The dead man’s brother was sobbing uncontrollably for his loss. The young American lieutenant yelled, “Would somebody shut him the f--- up?”

 

The English professor continues, “That was his crime. The young man wept as he told the story. I think he realized that he had crossed a line. I think he realized how easily such an outburst can become a shove or a slap, a poke with a rifle muzzle or a kick in the ribs, a gun butt to the head. This [young lieutenant] was no weakling; he had risked his life for his men. I respect him immensely for owning up to his remorse and, in the process, in his own small way, raising the standard for wartime behavior.”[4]

 

            A few days later, a letter to the editor responded to this with another story. The letter-writer’s father, a World War II veteran, had told her of an incident in his company during that war. A fellow soldier snapped and shot a 12-year-old German girl because she was giggling.[5] The letter does not say, however, if the soldier was remorseful afterwards.

 

Returning to the young lieutenant who yelled at the distraught man whose brother had just been killed, we can say that his tears of repentance are the sign of the Spirit at work in him. This is what Paul means when he says earlier in the chapter:

 

For God has done what the law, weakened by the flesh, could not do: sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and for sin, he condemned sin in the flesh, in order that the just requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not according to the flesh but according to the Spirit. (Romans 8:3-4).

 

That sounds complicated, so let’s try to simplify it:

 

1)      All human beings are under the power of Sin.[6]

2)      The Law (the commandments and teachings of God) cannot save us from our worst instincts—like mistreating civilians in wartime.

3)      Since the Law was impotent, God performed a uniquely potent deed to accomplish what the impotent Law could not; he sent his Son to enter into combat with Sin.

4)       Because of what God has done in Jesus Christ, the good commandments of God are grafted into our hears by the Holy Spirit. That’s what was happening to the young lieutenant as he confessed his sin.

 

But now what of the heartbroken Iraqi? What man would sob uncontrollably like that? He must have loved his brother very much. Perhaps he was a beloved younger brother, or a revered older one. But were they insurgents? Suppose they were, does that mean they have no right to mourn for their dead? These are big questions.

 

            When we send young men off to war we expect them to do terrible things in our name and keep quiet about it later. Stories about World War II veterans who never talked about what they saw or what they did continue to crop up sixty years later. “He never talks about it,” a wife will say. Why is this? Deeds in wartime, it is believed, are just too horrible to talk about. This is true of many other aspects of life as well. Active alcoholism is not discussed by the family; everyone plays an elaborate role to cover it up. Children grow up never knowing that their parents or grandparents were embezzlers or drug dealers or worse. At their funerals people get up and talk about what great guys they were; I have seen this personally many times. When something like this is brought out into the light, then the Spirit of Christ can do his redeeming work.

 

We are accustomed to thinking almost exclusively about good guys and bad guys. The men in Guantánamo must be bad guys or they wouldn’t have been put there. American soldiers are good guys; it’s assumed. We were in the airport the other day and a number of Army men in their desert camouflage uniforms came through. They were greeted with prolonged applause. I heard one mother say to her young children, “They’re heroes.” But once you really know a person from the inside, you know that these lines are not so easily drawn. When we read about prisoner abuse in Guantánamo or Iraq surely we must think about who it is that is doing the abusing. In a significant sense these American soldiers are victims too. The young men and women in Iraq who have committed atrocities have lost their bearings, or perhaps never had any bearings to speak of, and they suffer from a lack of strong, principled leadership. Anyone in a combat zone is vulnerable to the dark powers; sometimes the participants in war crimes are the victims and sometimes they are the perpetrators, and sometimes we can’t entirely tell which is which.

 

            Paul says in Romans that there is no human way to sort all this out. We are all of us truly lost creatures, powerless over the Law of Sin and Death, which grabs us at any moment when we least expect it. Who is more to be pitied, the man who lost his brother or the man who lost his cool? Who can say? Only God can sort it out. That is what he has done in Jesus Christ.

 

For God has done what the law, weakened by the flesh [human nature], could not do: sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh [human nature] and for sin, he condemned sin in the [human nature of Jesus], in order that the just requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not according to the flesh [sinful human nature] but according to the Spirit.[7]

 

            This is the context for Paul’s extraordinary promise at the end of Romans 8. When he asks, “Who will separate us from the love of Christ?” he isn’t just thinking of death with a small “d.” He is thinking of Death as an annihilating Power that rules over us even now, in life, with Sin as its sinister cohort. He means the whole complex of forces that throw humanity off course, that pervert our best instincts and distort our best efforts. He means the consequences of disobedience, the result of rebellion against the purposes of God—in other words, the judgment of God. And as he has already made clear, that judgment was due to every human being without distinction.

 

So now listen again to the climactic verses:

 

If God is for us, who is against us? He who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all, will he not also give us all things with him? Who shall bring any charge against God’s elect? It is God who justifies; who is to condemn? It is Christ Jesus, who died, yes, who was raised from the dead, who is at the right hand of God, who indeed intercedes for us...

 

It is God who justifies. We don’t need to justify ourselves and indeed we cannot, so we can just stop trying. It is God who justifies; it is Christ Jesus who died, who was raised, who sits at the right hand of God where he intercedes for us. Can we get our minds around this picture? Our Lord himself who died for us is the one who pleads our case against the accusing Powers.

 

            “Who shall bring any charge against God’s elect?” Who are God’s elect? It might seem obvious. But it is not so obvious. The last line of the Psalm we read earlier in our service was, “The desires of the wicked will perish.”[8] Who are “the wicked”? Who is this who has wicked desires? Who is a hero? Who is a villain? Who is a victim? Who is a perpetrator? The lines shift. Who determines the worth and the destiny of each person? Each of us here in the church this morning can probably think of someone by whom we would not want to be judged.

 

Only one Judge counts. “Who is to condemn? It is Christ Jesus who...intercedes for us...” Only one Spirit counts. Only one Spirit can do the work of righteousness in us, and that is not the generic New Age spirit but the Holy Spirit, the third person of the blessed Trinity, who is at work in us who wait upon the Lord, at work in us to meet the just requirements of God’s own commandments.

 

And what of the cosmos? What of the creation? How will it be freed from its bondage to futility and decay? Here is the great promise: Only one Victor will remain on the field when Sin and Death are overcome for ever. He is the Lord of all. “If God be for us, who shall be against us? Can these things be against us: tribulation, distress, persecution, famine, nakedness, peril, sword? Can we be conquered by these things? Paul gives the signal of triumph: “No! In all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us.” Through Christ we win an overwhelming victory.[9]) through him who loved us.” No, this is not about individual deaths. This is about a whole world of Death which has been undone in Christ. The language of conquest fits the battle imagery Paul favors. We have implacable enemies without and within. Christ did not just offer himself as a sacrifice. He fought and won a battle against everything that would destroy us. That is why Paul is able to say that he is certain that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor war, nor pandemics, nor terrorism, nor global warming, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Jesus Christ our Lord.

 

Nothing in all creation can defeat the redemptive purpose of God for all his creatures. The Iraqi man and his dead brother and the young German girl and the soldier who killed her, none of these, none of you, none of us is beyond the reach of the One who has conquered. Each of us plays a  part in bearing witness to his triumph. The repentance of the young lieutenant as he made his confession is a small sign, very small but very significant, that God will be victorious over all that is wrong, and in the meantime he has done his part to raise the standards of wartime conduct. Make no mistake, all of us are in a war against the principalities and powers, but we fight on the winning side.

 

There is no vision in all “religion” as vast as this. This is not about one person here and one person there dying and going to heaven. This is about the conquest of all that is out of joint in the world, and about the Spirit working through each of us to give out our own small signals that the future belongs to God. This gospel of Jesus Christ is about the remaking of the entire creation according to the purpose of the One who called it into being in the beginning and will bring it to fulfilment in the End.

 

And so now unto him who reigns upon the throne be all glory, might, majesty, dominion and power now and for ever. Amen.