The Truest Sentence

Edwin Estevez
Pastoral Resident, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 105:1–10
Romans 8:1–39 (selected verses)

’All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.’ So finally I would write one true sentence, and then go on from there. It was easy then because there was always one true sentence that I knew or had seen or had heard someone say. If I started to write elaborately, or like someone introducing or presenting something, I found that I could cut that scrollwork or ornament out and throw it away and start with the first true simple declarative sentence I had written.

Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast

I don’t often preach from Paul’s letters, because they’re so rich with imagery and especially layered with all sorts of academic thoughts as well as powerful insights that they are a handful to try and flesh out in a short sermon (and I already have trouble keeping them short!). The text this morning is especially rich. Some scholars see this as the last of Paul’s undisputed letters and of those we’ve been able to find. Among their reasons is the maturity of the letter. Sometimes called the Gospel according to Paul, this is Paul’s ultimate thesis, his views on faith, forgiveness, following the law, falling into sin, fostering hope, and the gift of grace and God’s love.

This text also includes some of my favorite verses in the entire New Testament. Why?

Because it tells us about a God who is for us and not God against us. It reminds us that life in Jesus Christ isn’t about condemnation. We are free of our own self-righteousness and false belief that we have it all together or that we’re better than our brothers and sisters, than our friends or foes. We are told that we are brothers of Christ, by the Spirit of adoption, so we too can cry out to the one whom Jesus called “Abba, Father.” And as our Pastor, Shannon, preached so powerfully last week, we are also told about the ways in which we groan, along with all creation, not only because of the suffering in this world (which Paul tells us doesn’t compare to the glory to come, to the complete in-breaking of God’s kingdom), but we groan in hope for something new—the birthing of a new age in Christ.

For Paul, this is the summary of truths he has come to experience, believe, and live into. This is likely an older Paul, just a couple of years away from what tradition has said is his execution by the state. By this point, he has stirred up controversy, not only in the Roman Empire, but among Jews and Christians. He has been threatened, beaten, persecuted, and arrested. So despite our usual experience of Paul as too academic, Paul is not waxing poetic with lofty verses for the academy when he asks, “Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Will hardship, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword?” Paul’s companions have experienced this. The churches to which he’s written have experienced this. Paul himself has experienced this, and not for the last time.

The final paragraph we usually translate starting with “For I am convinced.” That Greek word for convinced can also be translated as “persuaded”—persuaded with evidence such that it would lead to our being convinced. But I love the nuance of the word persuasion for our own reflection today. The term convinced makes Paul seem all too certain, with scientific exactitude or academic stubbornness, but persuaded tells me that Paul, much like the rest of us, also struggles with doubt, especially in the face of hardship; he struggles with loss, meaning, and death. He must be persuaded by someone, something, to write a true sentence, but it is a truth too deep for words that he must go on and on with such powerful rhetoric, using moving imagery; he must even get cosmic with talk of angels, all creation, and things to come. Paul, the author, is writing the truest sentence he can write.

There’s another author I’d like to talk to you about today: Ernest Hemingway, one of my favorite authors. As I come to the end of my time here in Chicago, I’ve committed to visit several tourist spots before I head out (if you have any recommendations, see me at the reception!). One of them is the Ernest Hemingway birthplace and museum in Oak Park, which I visited on Thursday. For those of you familiar with Hemingway, you might know that he is most famous for his almost postmodern cynicism and search for identity found throughout his writings as he pens short stories that deal with outdoor activities like hunting, fishing, and war, and you might have heard of his books A Farewell to Arms, For Whom the Bell Tolls, and The Old Man and the Sea.

Now Hemingway, like the Apostle Paul, has also encountered many hardships and writes from a place of deep pain. He has a troubled relationship with his mother, with women in his life (he marries four times), and with his children. He reflects on the pain and absurdity of war as well as the struggle of gender identity. He tragically ends his life, as his father did, shooting himself.

Another of Hemingway’s books, titled A Moveable Feast, which is quoted on the cover of your bulletin, was published three years after Hemingway’s death. It’s a memoir and likely the last of any complete drafts he had intended to publish (and it still needed some editing). He started working on it in 1956, just five years before his death by a self-inflicted gunshot. He was working off of notes he had taken in Paris in the 1920s as a young man. It’s a wonderful book that features such characters as F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, and James Joyce, among others, and describes the dynamics of English-language writers in Paris. In one section, he’s reflecting on his struggle to write: “All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know. So finally I would write one true sentence, and then go on from there. It was easy then because there was always one true sentence that I knew or had seen or had heard someone say.”

Write the truest sentence you know. That sounds like something to live by. Sadly, in this very sentence, Hemingway seems to suggest that it was no longer coming easy to him—something confirmed by people who spent their last years with him and in letters. Hemingway was losing his ability to write, or perhaps his appetite for it, or even any truth to write about. In his search for identity, the author who belonged to what critics have called the Lost Generation has himself became lost—perhaps in his own celebrity, but certainly in his own depression, alcoholism, and deep sadness. He had lost his grasp of what was true in his life. He even questions his own sense of manhood.

However, this other author, the Apostle Paul, also in the face of great hardship is writing the truest sentence he knows, likely just four years before his death. I don’t think it’s because Paul doesn’t see what Hemingway describes as reality: “the world breaks everyone.”

Paul also sees that life is full of suffering and sorrow, which features prominently in Paul’s writings. For Hemingway, some figure out the cruelty of the world’s reality and then they die. But for Paul, he just doesn’t see this as the end of the story that God is writing.

Hemingway was looking for his truest sentence, but Paul was writing his: “For I am persuaded, to the point of being convinced . . . that nothing can separate us from the love of God.” By whom is Paul persuaded? By the God who is For us and Not Against us, who in Christ Jesus was reconciling the world to God’s very own self. By this God, whose love is steadfast, whose pursuit of God’s people is relentless, whose covenant to be God with us and not God without us endures, and whose mercies are new every morning, This God is the one who has persuaded Paul.

See, faith isn’t about having it all figured out; it’s about being open to God’s persuasion. It happens over your lifetime, in the midst of sorrow and joy, God at work to persuade you of God’s unconditional love for you. We can be ashamed and try to hide our greatest guilt and our storied pasts from God, convinced that we couldn’t possibly be forgiven for everything, but I invite you to be persuaded that you can.

I must admit that I have come this morning with some sadness. You have all watched me grow, encouraged me, offered feedback, and prayed for me—this I know. You have shared the heaviness of your hearts with me over these two years that seem to have passed so quickly; you have trusted me with your doubts, pains, and greatest joys. As you shared your time with me in worship, and your words thereafter, what you likely don’t know is that I needed to be persuaded by God over the course of my life.

Before setting off to seminary, I questioned my call and wrestled with my faith. When I sat in seminary early in my first year, I was wondering what I was doing, whether I had perhaps made a mistake, that I didn’t belong because I didn’t even think I wanted to be a pastor and hadn’t studied religion like everyone else and didn’t pray enough or believe enough. There I wrestled with God.

Even over the course of two years here at Fourth Church, I didn’t think I always belonged. I didn’t think I was worthy or holy enough to stand at this pulpit, nor wise enough to offer counsel, nor did I think that my improvisational style lent itself well to an institution like this. In my supervisory meetings with Adam Fronczek and Hardy Kim, I would sometimes share this—that I was struggling to adapt to the institution’s culture. They didn’t resolve that struggle for me and just heard me, for which I thank them (now that is, not then!). With the young adults, I found myself frustrated that I would often talk too much and not allow enough discussion. I always wondered whether my sermons were hard to follow or were too long. When people sat down with me to share their moment of crisis, I prayed I could have some words to share because I knew I had no answers. I questioned if I was truly called to be a pastor, to preach. The adaptation to this place also came in the midst of being away from home, from important milestones and struggles for my family, and from friends back East. And lastly, there are the winters here (which sure is funny, but when you’re wondering whether you’re even called to do what you’ve been doing, it can be a low point, and it was.)

But God persuaded me that the pulpit wasn’t about how eloquent I was and pastoral care wasn’t about having answers and that the church as an institution like this and church as a coffee shop conversation with a former prisoner both offer access to faith in Christ Jesus. God persuaded me that it wasn’t about me, but about the one who loved me.

God did this in so many ways—through conversations with friends and family, while journaling, and with mentors. And through you, each one of you here today. Through wonderful folks like yourselves, who embraced me, encouraged me, who offered hugs and yours hearts. In Bible study, and Academy classes, in responses to my devotions and prayers and sermons, my colleagues, and our new Pastor, Shannon, you all affirmed God’s love for me, the one who persuades us that we are ultimately loved. For that I am most thankful to you.

Now, I must say good-bye to this community or, better yet, until we meet again, wherever that might be. You will be in my heart and in my prayers, as I hope I will be in yours.

And in my heart will be this true sentence, the truest sentence of all, and I pray it will be in your hearts as well—for I am persuaded 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.

That’s the truest sentence to live by.

Amen.