Sermon 07242011 – Romans 8:26-39
Separation and Attachment
One of the foundational doctrines in Buddhism is the Four Noble Truths. They go something like this: Life is full of suffering; Suffering comes as a result of our attachments to people and things; To stop suffering one must stop being attached; and to stop being detached, you must follow the Eightfold Path, sort of the ultimate set of ideals in Buddhism. But the long and short of it is that life is full of suffering because of attachments. So, when bad things happen to us, we suffer because we’re attached to ourselves. When bad things happen to other people, we suffer because we’re attached to them. So the Buddha says that we can free ourselves from suffering by detaching from the world and from the people in it.
I think Paul would agree with some of that teaching. In this passage and throughout Romans, he discusses how to live is to experience suffering, and to live as a believer was to experience it even more. Even when Scripture doesn’t say it, you can hear the suffering of God’s people in their groans and their sighs. Throughout Scripture, that’s how God decides to show mercy and help the Israelites, is when he heard their groans and their sighs, and you hear some of that language in Paul’s letter today.
Sometimes, you’re persecuted. That was the situation of Paul’s readers. That’s why Paul’s letters are always encouraging believers to take heart in the face of suffering, to remain hopeful that they would be freed by God in the days to come. That’s why Paul speaks in this passage of “trouble or hardship or persecution or famine or nakedness or danger or sword.” That’s why he gives that quote, “For your sake we face death all day long; we are considered as sheep to be slaughtered.”
Sometimes, we groan in suffering just because bad things happen and we are attached to things in our lives. Places possessions, even people – a lot of times we suffer precisely because we love people.
Yesterday 91 people including many children were killed by a gunman in Norway. That country is reeling over the shock. In our own community, just last week, there was much grieving and sorrow over the passing of our brother Peanut into the next life. These events are tragic because we care about the people involved. We are attached to them, even the ones we don’t know, in a fundamental human way.
It’s the same reason it hurts us when we see the suffering of the oppressed, when we see people going hungry, or relatives grieving over the loss of loved ones. In short, we suffer because we care. We care about people, and we care about things in the world because they affect people, and it causes us pain. In that way, Paul and Buddha agree.
Paul’s readers lived in a world where Christians were persecuted. Jews and Christians alike had been kicked out of Rome a few years earlier, and the church was underground. The church members reading Paul’s letter were in a rough time, and so were their friends and neighbors. People had reason to feel in despair.
And the scope of the problem was so big that they felt overwhelmed. When things are that bad, what do you say when you bow your head to pray? What do you bring to God when you look around and realize that the world you live in, the system that you participate in every day, hurts people? That by the very act of living in this world, by buying and selling and working and voting, you become a part of a sinful world? How do you come from that world outside and pray inside your home?
Especially remembering that we’re responsible for it too. We’re all flawed creatures, whether we try to follow God or not. Between the world we live in and the combined weight of all our faults, things don’t look so good, for Paul’s readers or for us today… What can you say to God?
Paul gives us a hint right there in verse 26: “The Spirit helps us in our weakness. We do not know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us through [wordless groans; sighs too deep for words].” Even when the problem is so huge, so deep and twisted around inside of us, that we don’t know what to say or think about it, but the Spirit of God gets the message through our sighs, through the groaning of our hearts. We don’t have to know the words. We just feel what we feel, and we express ourselves to God. Ultimately, the greatest prayer that we can pray is, “Lord, you know me and you know my heart. You have promised that you will be faithful and that things will work out for the good of those who love you. Your will be done.”
We know all the right answers. We know that “in all things God works for the good of those who love him.” We know that, as Paul says, we are called, we are justified from the evils that come from within us and around us, and we are to be glorified in the resurrection.
But it’s hard for us to deal with nonetheless. People struggle with this. Buddha’s Four Noble Truths and his Eightfold Path encourage us to detach from ourselves and from the world, to escape and to separate. Now, don’t get me wrong, I admire so much of the Buddhist philosophy, and I think it can be a beautiful way to look at the world. But I think here that Paul has it right, and Paul says that it is not separation that saves us, but continuing our attachment.
The whole point of the book of Romans is to encourage the idea that faith in Christ, saves us, and to encourage us that there is hope even when we are helplessly rooted in our own sin. To keep throwing ourselves into the world and loving people and getting attached, even when it poses us harm, even if it feels impossible, because God did it for us. If being a Christian is being a student of this perfect teacher Jesus Christ, to try and follow in his footsteps and see the world the way he did, then our job is to get ever-more attached. To tie ourselves tightly to other people, to hurt when they hurt and to rejoice when they rejoice.
It is togetherness, not detachment, that is at the heart of the Christian message. We love because God loves us. We are attached to people because God has attached himself to us, in the person of Christ and in the movement of the Holy Spirit. And what Paul wants to remind us of today is that that attachment never leaves us. God knows, you, God has called you, God justified and glorifies you because God deeply and unchangingly loves you.
So Paul says, Yes, you will suffer. To the Romans, he says, Yes, you are suffering even now. But ultimately, none can bring charge against you, because God is with you. You don’t have to have all the answers, because God is with you. And even in the midst of your deepest despair, God will not leave you. And Paul says, “For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.”