It has been fifteen years since Bill Bishop and Robert
Cushing, sociologists who live and write in central
Texas, published their book titled The Big Sort: Why
the Clustering of Like-Minded America is Tearing Us
Aparti
. Their conclusion, after much sociological and
demographic research, is this: Americans seem to be
sorting themselves, socially and geographically, on
the basis of ideology and political identity. Perhaps
more importantly, their insight was that this kind of
sorting intensifies incivility, solidifies stereotypes, drives
division, and degrades our discourse. In the years
since the book’s publication, the trend has become
clearer and its implications more obvious. Increasingly,
it is possible to live your entire life in a bubble of likemindedness. On its face this may not be such a bad
thing, but the danger of this condition is the extremism
that results from never having to question your
assumptions or broaden your perspective, of living in
a so-called community defined only by unanimity and
uniformity. We have seen the charged rhetoric and even
the violence that such sorting encourages and enables.
This kind of sorting raises a question that people of faith
have been wrestling with for centuries. What kind of
community do we want to build? Where do we draw the
boundary lines of acceptance and inclusion? Perhaps
most to the point: who belongs?
In many ways, this is the question faced by the Apostle
Paul as he sat down and put pen to parchment to draft a
letter to the Christians living in Rome. The congregation
there was like our own congregation, made up of people
from very different backgrounds, believers who were
shaped by strongly held convictions that did not always
align with those of their neighbors in the pews. This is not
breaking news, but you are not currently in a like-minded
bubble. Second Church remains blessedly unsorted.
For Paul, the possibility that those differences might
divide the church and drown out the message of
the gospel was a real and present danger. He knew
that people were looking across the sanctuary with
suspicion. Under their breath or in the parking lot after
worship, they wondered aloud, “Do they belong here
with me? I mean, just look at how they live! Just look at
what they eat! Just look at whom they befriend, where
they come from, how they vote!”
In response to these questions hovering in the air and
the tension that they bring to the surface, Paul responds
with wisdom and passion. Behind those questions, Paul
senses a deeper anxiety at work. And so, Paul responds
with his very best—the Letter to the Romans.
In a time when the Christian faith is often distorted,
when the church is struggling with a sense of identity
and too often capitulates to the forces of division at
work in the world around us, we need to hear again
what mattered most to Paul, and we will find it in the
eighth chapter of Romans. Here, Paul’s words provide
three promises we need.
First, Paul lays out his unshakable faith in the presence
of the Holy Spirit. The Spirit is God’s way of being
present in our lives and available to us, the bridge that
connects us to God, often misidentified as coincidence
or serendipity. Earlier in the chapter, Paul says that
the Spirit of God helps us most when we need it most,
when we are our weakest. Paul writes that the Spirit
intercedes with sighs too deep for words. The Spirit
speaks when our language will not suffice. Have you
heard these sighs of the Spirit? I have heard them.
I’ve heard them in hospital rooms at the bedside of a
dying patient. Sighs too deep for words. I have heard
them from a group of exhausted teenagers on the final
morning of a powerful youth conference. Sighs too deep
for words. Those sighs are the Spirit interceding on
our behalf when words will not come, bringing peace
and comfort in the midst of overwhelming emotion. I
think the Holy Spirit is often disguised as a lump in our
throats, leaving us momentarily mute, quiet so that we
might listen for the voice of God. Paul insists that the
Spirit is present.
For Paul, however, God is not only accessible and
near to us. God is also beyond us, sovereign, powerful,
majestic. Paul uses words in Romans 8 like purpose,
foreknowledge, predestined, and called to describe
this conviction that God is the one in control here. And
this is another word we need to add to the current
Christian conversation because too often, I hear God
described as if the divine were the puppet and we were
the ones pulling the strings. Too often God is enlisted
as a foot soldier in our battles. We call on God to justify
our opinion and perspective. This is not Paul’s picture
of a sovereign God who transcends both our demands
and our expectations. Friends, if you can put your God
in a box, then your God is too small. Or as Presbyterian
author Anne Lamott has brilliantly written, “You can
safely assume that you have created God in your image
when it turns out God hates all the same people you
hate.”ii Paul describes a different God, a God who is
Lord of all—and that means all—before whom we are
called to be humble, reverent, worshipful. We need to
hear that conviction.
God is present and with us. God is powerful and
beyond us.
But earlier, I suggested that Paul sensed a deeper
anxiety behind the accusatory tone and the creeping
division at work in the Roman Church. It is, I think, the
same anxiety that lies behind the big sort driving us
apart as a people and as a nation. Whenever we lash
out at so-called enemies, whenever we belittle those
who are different from us, whenever we lash out in
anger or build walls of separation and cast aspersions
through screens, these actions come from deeply
unsettled places within us. And so, the question Paul
uncovers beneath the divisions that plague the Church
is not “do they belong?” It is “do I belong?” In my
experience as a pastor, the most bitter and resentful
souls are also the least secure, and often the most
wounded. All of us wonder at times, “Is there a place for
me here? Do I belong?”
In response to this existential anxiety, Paul lays out his
deepest conviction, so central that he repeats it again
in the chapter. The conviction is this: that you belong to
God, that there is nothing that can separate you from
God’s love in Jesus Christ. Paul’s repetition discloses his
conviction and also his appreciation for how difficult this
truth can be to internalize and accept.
Some time ago now, I was eating lunch alone on a
Thursday afternoon. This is a rare occasion for me. Just
myself, a brand-new book, and a whole hour stretched
out before me of unscheduled time. Seven minutes
into that hour, the person at the table next to mine
leaned over. “Man, whatever you’re reading must be
good. You’ve hardly looked up from it.” She asked me
about the book that I had been reading, and from there,
the questions just kept coming. Finally, she asked the
question I most dreaded. What do you do for a living?
Before you, my congregation, I confess to considering
my options on this one. But reluctantly, I told her. “Oh,
then I have another question for you!”
Just in case, I tried to remember the five tenets of
Calvinist theology and which Protestant beliefs were
deemed heretical at the 16th Century Council of Trent.
Neither of those topics came up. “Well, she said, “There
is this pastor on TV. He bottles holy water and sends it
out to people who need to get right with God. It’s $29.95.
Now, look. I’ve made some mistakes in my life, and the
truth is I’ve made some big ones. I’ve tried to get my life
together. I go to a church. I read the Bible and pray. But
the preacher on TV says that God asks more, requires
more. I don’t know if I am right with God, and so I’m
thinking about ordering some of the water. Pastor, what
do think?”
What do I think? I think, and I have staked my whole
life on the belief, that Paul was right. That the promise
we proclaim at baptism is true, and that the water of
baptism is the only water we will ever need. That there
is nothing imaginable, including our own brokenness,
that can separate us from the love of God. I think—I am
absolutely convinced—that God’s love for us is stronger
than anything.
But please hear this. If you feel separated from God
by words spoken, mistakes made, abuse endured,
judgment pronounced, opportunities unseized, anger
harbored, forgiveness withheld, doubts that linger…
If you feel separated from God by distance of time or
space… Know this: that whatever aims to separate you
from God is precisely what God intends to overcome, for
God grants nothing the power to keep us from God.
Each Thursday morning for decades now, a group of
men from Shallowford Presbyterian Church down in
Atlanta have gathered at church at the crack of dawn,
prepared breakfast, enjoyed fellowship and good food
together. And then they pray with and for each other,
offering their prayers out loud in turns around the table.
Early in my time as their pastor, before the births of our
two boys shifted my morning routine, I was a regular at
Thursday morning prayer breakfast. And in that setting,
I learned so much about that congregation—about
its foundation and its history, its vision, and the deep
value of relationships that form the heart of the place.
The men’s prayer breakfast story that has impacted me
most was not one that I experienced firsthand but heard
about later. Ted Bayley was among the most visionary
and committed leaders that church had in its first sixty
years. He was also a faithful weekly member of the
men’s prayer breakfast for as long as his health allowed.
Ted suffered for years with dementia and Alzheimer’s
Disease. Week after week, even as he was barely able
to speak, Ted would walk from his house around the
corner to the church to attend the Thursday morning
breakfast. The story is that, after learning his diagnosis,
Ted came one Thursday morning, and at breakfast he
prayed, “Dear God, my memory is failing and I’m afraid.
I’m afraid I won’t recognize my friends before long or
remember their names.” Raw, powerful prayer. Seated
next to Ted, and so the next person to pray, was his dear
friend Ed Carithers, another Shallowford saint and pillar.
Ed grasped Ted’s hand and began his prayer this way,
“Father God, please help Ted to know that even if he
forgets who we are, we will always remember who he
is.” That’s the church I want to build. The community I
want to nurture.
And so, here is the promise we need to hear, to believe,
to trust, and take to heart. God is present in sighs
too deep for words. God is present in sovereign and
powerful love. And you belong to God. No question
marks. No caveats. No exceptions. No matter what.
Amen.