A Fourth Church Sermon by Joyce Shin

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October 19, 2008 | 6:30 p.m. Vespers
A Service of Remembrance and Hope
in Observance of Domestic Violence Awareness Month

A Promise Written into Creation

Joyce Shin
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 121
Romans 8:31–39

Even though preaching is always a communal event, it can at times feel more like a solo activity. I really appreciate being in this good company tonight. I appreciate not only the opportunity to lead worship together, but also the occasion to take part in the important witness that the persons with me in the chancel and other women in our congregation provide—not only on this Sunday dedicated to domestic violence awareness, but all year long—to the good news of God’s faithfulness to us in the midst of broken relationships. I thank you for your compassionate and prophetic ministry among us.

The passage from scripture that I read this evening expresses the Apostle Paul’s heartfelt confidence in God’s faithfulness to humanity. It comes at the end of eight chapters in which Paul has put forth his argument that history reveals God’s original intention in creating the world. Thus far in his letter to the church in Rome, Paul has argued that God’s action in Christ is not only consistent with God’s faithfulness throughout the history of Israel, but is the fulfillment of God’s purpose from the beginning of creation. As Paul understands it, there is a divine purpose embedded in creation, and history is the unfolding of this divine purpose.

If we want to understand God’s purpose for creating the world, according to Paul we must take a good look at history. In arguing this, Paul wasn’t making an academic point. He knew how personally hard this could be. All the Jews of his day probably knew how painful some memories can be. Through their rituals and the reciting of Torah, they routinely recalled intimately the troubled past that their ancestors had undergone. The Old Testament, which makes up the Hebrew Bible, recounts hardship, persecution, slavery, sin, and despair. It is quite amazing that the Israelites who recorded the history as we have it in the Old Testament did not gloss over or paint a rosy picture of or leave out the painful parts of their history.

About fifteen years ago, I had a special friendship with a Jewish woman, who at that time was in her late nineties. She had survived the Holocaust, and in her quiet way she was for me a witness of resilient faithfulness to humanity. Though she had seen the darkest side of humanity, she nevertheless maintained faith in the goodness of persons. In one of the many memorable conversations I had with her, she told me that sometimes she thought forgetting things might not be so bad. Partly joking with me that her memory wasn’t as sharp as it used to be, she was also partly serious about how some memories can be extremely painful and have no constructive value. Given that she had witnessed the Holocaust, I imagine that it would seem better for some memories to be buried and remain buried.

I imagine this to be the case for persons who have experienced domestic violence in their lives. When our life histories include physical, sexual, and emotional abuse, what good could it do to remember the past? Could any good be worth all the pain that such memories cause? Yet psychologists who have specialized in healing both those who have been abused and those who have abused others tell us that confronting these experiences is necessary, though not sufficient, for healing to happen and wholeness to be restored.

Though I am not trained in the important therapeutic work of counseling, from a biblical and theological perspective this makes profound sense to me. As Christians we have inherited from the ancient Israelites a history in which past experiences, no matter how painful, are not left out of the story that God’s people tell. Furthermore, we have inherited from ancient Israel a prophetic tradition in which prophets convict God’s people, pointing out the ways in which they have not only fallen short of but also betrayed and broken their covenants with God and one another. Knowing our history in its entirety is a necessary step for moving toward healing.

From our religious perspective, however, it is not only a necessary step; it is also, thank God, a possible step. Uncovering those experiences that we have put into the dark recesses of our minds is possible, because when we place them in the context of God’s abiding faithfulness, as difficult as it is, we can bear to incorporate them into our histories.

I don’t think that the ancient Israelites could have told their story as they did without knowing that generation after generation God remained faithful to them. Throughout the history of Israel, God was a covenant-maker and a covenant-keeper. To Noah, Abraham, Moses, and then to King David, God established the covenant: “I shall be your God, and you shall be my people.”

Every covenant God established was a revelatory event for the people of Israel. For Christians the central revelatory event is the covenant established by God in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. To sum up the argument that Paul put forth in the first eight chapters of his letter to the church in Rome, Christ is the fulfillment of the covenant God made in the beginning, for it is in Christ that God fulfills his promise to be faithful to the whole of creation.

In a book entitled The Meaning of Revelation, American theologian H. Richard Niebuhr wrote about how the church has understood itself through the ages in terms of a story consisting, for the most part, of statements about events that have happened to it. Like the ancient Israelites, Christians have always confessed their faith by telling the story of their life. The revelation Christians have experienced in Jesus Christ is of critical significance for the story that Christians tell about themselves. The event of Jesus Christ, Niebuhr would say, is revelatory because, first of all, it brings to light all that has happened in one’s personal and communal history. In other words, it calls forth from our memory even those events that we have forgotten or tried to keep buried. Second, it makes the past intelligible. Whatever was forgotten, neglected, or buried—whatever failed to make sense before—through revelation can make sense. Though “our buried pasts are mighty,” Niebuhr would say, “there is nothing in our lives, in our autobiographies and our social histories that does not fit in” (The Meaning of Revelation, p. 114).

Over the years I have taken seriously the perspective of my good friend: that some things are better forgotten than remembered. At times it has challenged my understanding of the gospel, which a professor once captured when he said that a high theology of salvation is always accompanied by a deep recognition of our sinfulness. At times it has challenged my understanding of the sacrament of communion, which my colleague John Boyle reminds us wouldn’t be necessary if there were no violence in the world. Hearing the scripture lesson this evening, I am moved by Paul’s expression of confidence in God’s abiding faithfulness to humanity.

That throughout history God is a covenant-maker and a covenant-keeper tells us something about God’s original purpose for creating the world. It tells us that God desires us to be in faithful relationships with him and with one another. God created us with the capacity for receiving and giving love, for trusting in and being loyal to one another. By virtue of these capacities, we were created in the image of God.

Whenever we celebrate the covenants of marriage and baptism, we acknowledge that the promise of God is embedded in us. This is not all that happens, however. In officiating wedding ceremonies, I often remind the couple that in making their marriage vows to one another they are modeling their relationship after the relationship between God and God’s people. Exchanging vows, they are promising to be faithful to each other. In doing so, they are not only living out the holy capacities with which they were created; they are also becoming a new creation. As they stand before me with their hands joined and rings exchanged, I often assure them that they are not the same as they were before, that in them God is doing a new thing, and that in years to come, God will continue to reconfigure, reshape, and transform their lives into something greater than they have ever been.

Domestic abuse, whether it happens between partners or between parents and children or between siblings, is a violation of the promise that God has written into creation. It is a perversion of the image of God that inheres in each person and that our covenants of marriage and baptism are meant to seal.

Our history as God’s people tells us, however, that nothing can sever us from God. God’s faithfulness will be steadfast. And we can proclaim, alongside the Apostle Paul, “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.”