Singing with the Frogs
Neither life nor death, height nor depth
What then are we to say about these things? If God is for us, who is against us? He who did not withhold his own Son but gave him up for all of us, how will he not with him also give us everything else? Who will bring any charge against God’s elect? It is God who justifies. Who is to condemn? It is Christ who died, or rather, who was raised, who is also at the right hand of God, who also intercedes for us. Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Will affliction or distress or persecution or famine or nakedness or peril or sword? As it is written,
“For your sake we are being killed all day long;
we are accounted as sheep to be slaughtered.”
No, in all these things we are more than victorious through him who loved us. For 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.
Romans 8:31-39
I told someone before church that as I was not planning to preach on the Genesis passage of this Sunday’s lectionary reading (Genesis 29:15-28). I hesitated to preach on it, maybe for obvious reasons: it’s a story of Jacob’s uncle Laban and his deception that leads Jacob into bigamy, one strange scene in the movie of Jacob, a life of deception. How much time do you got to unpack it?
But today’s Romans reading is one I hesitate to preach on for a different reason, because how can you improve it? “Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Will affliction or distress or persecution or famine or nakedness or peril or sword?” No, “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.”
They say explaining a joke is like dissecting a frog; you understand it better, but the frog dies. I worry that as I preach on this passage I might accidentally run over and squish one of those frogs instead of letting it sing. At risk of that, I hope you hear what I hear.
And to hear what I hear, we have to hear the rest of the song that is Paul’s letter to the Romans, not just these beautiful few bars. The other day, I watched The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly for the first time, which has some of the most memorable film music of all time. I’d heard the theme for years in Super Bowl commercials, and it was kinda annoying. But then when I finally saw the movie, and I heard not just the full songs but how they landed within the film, it was like man, now I hear it.
In the same way, you have probably heard before that God loves you, and that God is love. But there are times when we hear that, and then there are times when we hear that. For me, if we really hear what Paul has been building up to in writing this theological treatise of a letter, we may really hear God’s love. It is not simply affection, sentimentality, a greeting card, an emoji, or positive regard. It is speaking to how God relates to us across space and time, mind and body, atomic and subatomic, across the vast gulf between him and us.
Remember the pandemic when we all had to do “social distancing”? You couldn’t hang out indoors, and if you hung out outdoors, you had to keep six feet apart. I still remember a few of those hangs. And so however much you wanted to socialize, there was always that distance between you. And in some ways, that physically represented and symbolized what always was there, because no matter how much you love and live with someone, there is always some part of them that you can’t access, can’t know, can’t mindread.
And there’s always some distance between us and God. We call it “sin.” And so for much of the prior seven chapters until this apex moment of this letter, we have been hearing all about the pervasiveness of sin. As people who are in bodies on Earth, there is always some bit of sin that keeps us from being like God, from knowing Him, from doing things that fully please Him. Sometimes we outright reject and are at war with Him, much less each other. As John says, “If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.” (1 John 1:8) It can be part of our sin to be deluded that we are not sinners. And throughout Romans, Paul is meticulous in telling us a truth we can observe but often don’t want to hear. Sin is the inescapable pain of our conscious living most clearly seen in our moral imperfection. Some of our Presbyterian ancestors would call this “total depravity,” which is really just trying to say that we should never underestimate sin. There is distance between us and God if we do nothing and distance if we do everything. When we commit “sins,” that is shorthand for saying, “You have done something that creates even further distance between you and God,” like finding a crack and driving a wedge into it.
I know some of us have hangups on Paul, and we certainly can see his flaws, foibles, and sin, so when he tells us about it, we may hear him being self-righteous. But understand that to the extent that Paul exhaustively details sin, he does so to help us understand an important half of the dialectic of Christian life. In Romans 1 and 2, Paul basically says, “Look, I know you have two eyes. I know you can see that there are many people out there in the world who are basically godless and lawless, who just do whatever they feel like. But since you have two eyes and a conscience, why do you do the same? If we’re honest, deep down, we all fall short of the glory of God.” Even when we know what is right to do, we sometimes just do not do it (Romans 7), because all have “social distance” from God.
And here’s what Paul is saying, the whole film you are watching unfold, where sin seems to win again and again as the soundtrack plays: in spite of all this incredible power of sin, there is nothing sin can do to keep you from the love of God. In spite of everything that separates us, nothing will. In spite of being helpless to do anything about the distance between you and God, in Jesus Christ, God has reconciled us and said in Jesus, there is no longer distance from my love.
If we were only left with thinking about the weight of sin, it would crush us. So even though we should not underestimate sin, we as Christians can overestimate it when we do not remember the love of God shown to us in Jesus Christ is even more pervasive; if our depravity is total, his grace is even more total than “total.” Remember this, remember this. The Bible says “remember,” one of the most common commands to Israel, not as the opposite of forget, but to bring it back to the front of your mind and let it guide you. God tells his people all the time not only to “remember” the Sabbath, the peace of God, by keeping one day every week holy no matter what, but to remember who God is and that God is a savior—“I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery.” (Ex 20:2) The Passover meal is a festival of remembering God saves. And when Jesus tells us, “Do this in remembrance of me” at the table, we remember that for however pervasive, pernicious, and inescapable sin is, it has been rendered as nothing in the face of God’s love.
During the pandemic, if you were lucky, you might have had quarantine pods where you swore to each other not to get close to anyone else so you could feel at least a little bit normal (I wasn’t so lucky). With a trusted group, you would actually allow yourselves to unmask, putting your guard down and putting your life in someone’s hands to live more of how life really ought to be. In Jesus Christ, God is doing the same with us. God is inviting us to trust him. And that can be scary, even deadly, because to our old selves who prefer sin, it is death. But the trade-off is life in the Spirit and the love of Jesus Christ that is far beyond our understanding.
If you hear nothing else in Romans 8:38-39, even as you’ve heard before, just hear that God loves you. He really, really loves you. And that may be all some of us really need to hear again. And we may need to really hear it and chew on it and hear that music of his love again, especially if we have felt our trust in God waning.
If you trust the love of God is really with you, you can come to Scripture in all of its challenges, even stories of weird uncles and deceptive nephews, fearless to discover what it may find. You can sit through the ways it will challenge you and disquiet you and read you and the world around us better than we can read it. You can be formed more and more by the Holy Spirit in your walk with Jesus taking you through challenges as you learn more and more that the most important things he has given you can never be taken away. You can take his love and transmute it into love for others in a way that will shock you what you thought was possible you could do with your life.
But if you have a wounded relationship with God, which you might because you might have a wounded relationship with a church, or a Christian who treated you awfully, you might come to God with your guard up, almost looking to prove him wrong. If you are having a tough time trusting God, or finding life-saving nourishment in his Word, or trouble with Christians or the Church, you will always have plenty of material. But it will choke your faith and your trust so much that you may even forget the depths of God’s love for you, much less the love God has for all those people in the world whose sin we can become obsessed with.
But even that cannot separate us. No church or Christian can separate us. Our neuroses and theological hangups cannot separate us. Our most perfect delusions and misguided missions cannot separate us. Our favorite passages that we run the wrong direction with cannot separate us, the most challenging passages that make us swear off the Bible cannot separate us. Our worst moments and times we have most rejected God cannot separate us. Our very death cannot separate us. Not even a demon could separate us from God, nor could an angel, should an angel somehow want to do that. Nothing and nobody. This is the Gift that God is bringing us every day, and to receive it, all it takes and only takes is faith. Nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. Nothing and nobody.
You will forget this, just like the frogs. Over the winter, we forget they are there; they may have even forgotten they were there. But with the thaw of spring, they wake from their slumber and sing to us again. I remember when we first came to Vermont, driving back from Parker Pie and coming across frog after frog after frog. We got home and just listened to them sing.
When we could not bring ourselves to God, he brought himself into the world. When we could not and cannot defeat sin, he did and he does and he will. When death reigned, God died so that death itself would die. When we go astray, he calls us by name and seeks us out until he finds us, because however elaborate we could say it and however we might dissect it and not believe it, God loves you. Remember this and let it guide you. Even the frogs are singing it. Amen.
