June 3, 2007 | 6:30 p.m. Vespers

Triune Faith, Triune God

Martha Langford
Pastoral Resident, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 8
Romans 5:1–5

It stuck in my head. I read this passage, and as often happens, a word or phrase leapt out in what one might claim was God-given inspiration. I made it all the way to verse 2, and there it was. As a new seminary graduate and neophyte pastor, I’d love to claim it as some sort of profound insight. I’d like to, but I won’t, can’t really, because you see, what leapt into my head was the 1988 REM song “Stand,” which stuck. “Stand in the place where you live, now think about direction, wonder why you haven’t before.”

It would be easy to blame the confluence of last week’s event for this phenomenon. The National Memorial Day concert brought together a strange mixture of pride in those who have taken their stand in battle for our country with a growing cry for peace and the recognition of war’s cost in terms of personal suffering.

With the strains of patriotic song still echoing, I reflected that we live in a country that was born from a stand against royal tyranny. That our national identity is nurtured in remembering events like the Boston Tea Party, where American colonists dumped fortyh-five tons of British tea into Boston Harbor to protest unfair taxation. Such patriotic stands led to revolution and to the founding of our nation.

We are shaped by this remembered heritage. Even as our congress sought ratification of our infant country’s new constitution, they were already working to amend it. First added among this Bill of Rights was the freedom of religion, speech, press, and peaceable assembly, along with the right to petition the government. We live and breathe the glorious right to stand up and have been called to make that stand ever since—often with fist in the air.

As I read Paul’s words, I wonder about our stand, about our Christian stand, in this place where we live.

In this passage, Paul reminds us that we have made and continue to make our stand on the grace of God alone. He reminds us that grace comes to us through Jesus Christ, whose faithful life, obedient death, and wondrous resurrection are the conduit by which God restores humankind to live in relationship with the divine.

He reminds us that we grasp this grace through faith, which God nurtures in us through the work of the Holy Spirit. As Karl Barth puts it, “By faith we attain the status of those who have been declared righteous before God. By faith we are what we are not” (Epistle to the Romans, p. 149).

It’s a cosmic makeover: the triune God has recreated and continues to re-create us into people who can anticipate, with joy, standing in God’s presence. Paul’s confidence is not the boasting of a choir of braggarts, but the rejoicing of a chorus of believers, transformed by the grace of God. We live in this hope, hope in the power of God to make us what we are not and to give us peace.

Last Sunday’s concert—the music, the setting, the dramatic testimony of veterans and their families—resonated with a cry for peace. OK, I cried like a baby through much of it, but think of it: peace as an end to war, peace as an end to suffering, peace as our modern age knows it.

Paul tells us that through the reconciling work of Jesus Christ, we have peace with God. This peace goes beyond the peace of our modern age. This peace encompasses the Jewish concept of shalom, which goes beyond the end of warfare into material prosperity, “total well-being and harmony” (James Dunn, Word Biblical Commentary: Romans 1–8, vol. 38A, p. 262).

In this light, boasting in the hope of sharing the glory of God seems fitting and right, a natural extension of the peace and reconciliation that God provides for us.

Peace, prosperity, well-being, and harmony.

Yet Paul’s next words come with the violence of a sucker punch: “not only that,” he says, “but we also boast in our sufferings.”

From my inner being I want to cry out, aren’t suffering and peace incompatible? And I am anxious at Paul’s words that place our suffering—synonymous with oppression, affliction, tribulation, and distress—alongside our shalom with God.

What was it that caused Paul to link righteousness and suffering? You see, in ancient times, righteousness was demonstrated by prosperity, while suffering demonstrated some defect in one’s relationship with God. Think about Job, who is prosperous and well-regarded by his friends until he is afflicted with material and personal losses. His friends come and—in the name of being helpful—try to get Job to confess his sin against God.

And there are voices in our modern age that still connect “sin and suffering” as “cause and effect”: people who regard diseases such as AIDS and natural disasters such as Hurricane Katrina as God’s punishment for people’s sexual conduct; people who regard the terrorist attacks on New York’s twin towers to be God’s indictment of our country’s morality. And in all self-righteousness, linking sin and suffering has too often given the church an excuse to ignore, with ungodly blindness, the world’s suffering.

Paul calls us beyond that. He looks at the realities of the life in which he stands and in which the Christians around him stand and articulates a new connection: “suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope.”

This is not suffering for sin’s sake, and this is not suffering for suffering’s sake. This is the productive struggle against all those things and allegiances that would keep us from living as faithful, obedient followers of Christ.

And the good news: Paul assures us that we do not struggle or suffer in vain. God gives us both a sustainer and comforter—the Holy Spirit—through whom God’s love is generously poured out into our hearts. And if in the course of our suffering we can only cry out, “My God, my God, why have your forsaken me?” we are still calling on the one God who loves us, the one God whom alone we worship and serve.

Ralph Waldo Emerson writes,

A person will worship something, have no doubt about that. We may think our tribute is paid in secret in the dark recesses of our hearts, but it will out. That which dominates our imaginations and our thoughts will determine our lives, and our character. Therefore, it behooves us to be careful what we worship, for what we are worshiping we are becoming.

Suffering, endurance, character: these are the birth pangs of new life in Christ. For Paul, “the whole process produces hope because . . . it is itself the process of salvation, the process whereby God recreates humanity in [God’s] own image” (Word Biblical Commentary: Romans 1–8, p. 265).

This evening we will remember God’s love poured out for us. We will gather at the Lord’s Table and remember the central event that shapes our identity as Christians. We will break the bread and pour the wine and speak the words, and then we will share in the feast, the feast set for the world by the love of Christ.

All the while we will remember that the grace in which we stand is God’s gift to us. All the while we will remember that it is God alone who re-creates us into what we are not and gives us a new life lived in God’s shalom. All the while we will remember that we carry that peace alongside our struggles to live into new life.

And as we remember that place where we stand and that place where we live, let us also remember to open our fist and hold out our hand in hope to a world that suffers and struggles without it.

Let us pray:

Help us, O God, to love as Christ loved. Knowing our own weakness, may we stand with all who stumble. Sharing in his suffering, may we remember all who suffer. Held in his love, may we embrace all whom the world denies. Rejoicing in his forgiveness, may we forgive all who sin against us. Give us strength to serve you faithfully until the promised day of resurrection, when with the redeemed of all the ages we will feast with you at the table in glory. Amen. (Book of Common Worship 129)