More Than Chicken Soup

A sermon on Romans 8:26-39 & Matthew 13:47-50 by Nathan Nettleton

“In our weakness, we do not know how to pray as we ought,” says the Apostle Paul. Nothing could be more obviously true than that this week. Death has come trampling into our lives, and it leaves us shaken, not knowing what to say, or how to pray. At Matins and Vespers each day, there is opportunity to pray in our own words, but in the past few days, even though the likely topics for prayer were perhaps more obvious, there was more silence than usual, more sitting there looking at each other, unable to find the words to pray.

It’s not a failure. There just are no words. There just aren’t. All we can do is fall silent, as we did in our prayers, as we have just been doing again in our sermon of silence in the last few minutes. There are no words. But our inability to find the words to pray does not mean prayer ceases. Paul tells us that the Spirit prays through us in wordless groans, in sighs too deep for words. God is with us in our silence.

I was glad to find this passage from Paul’s letter to the Romans in our readings tonight, not just for that reassurance that God is with us when words fail us, but for where it goes from there. But before I get to that, I need to grapple with something else. Sometimes it is tempting to discard one or more of the set readings because something big that has happened among us makes it feel inappropriate and we just wish it wasn’t there. But sometimes it is precisely that jarring clash that demands it be reckoned with. If it seems all wrong when it runs into the realities of life and death, does it really have anything worthwhile to say any other time?

I felt like that with one of the five parables we heard from Jesus in our gospel reading tonight. The one about the kingdom being like a fishing net, and the sorting out of the good and bad and the incinerating of the bad. We don’t want to confront images of fiery judgement at a time like this. But it’s there. We heard it. And we can’t unhear it. So perhaps we need to struggle with it. The God who is with us in our silence is surely with us in our struggles with biblical texts. So let me try.

For centuries, there have been preachers using these kind of fiery judgement images to try to scare people into doing as they’re told. It seems especially manipulative to do that right when people are most vulnerable as they grieve the death of a loved one. But that kind of preaching has been done so often, that very few of us do not squirm awkwardly when we hear a parable like this, and nervously wonder for at least a moment whether we are on the wrong side of it.

Anyone who knew Margie Dahl for any length of time had heard her say that she’d probably go to hell for this, that or the other thing. And while we knew that she didn’t really believe that God sends people to hell for such things, we could also see that she set impossible expectations for herself, and felt genuinely anxious about whether her inability to live up to them might make her the exception. This is exactly the sort of parable that would have pricked at her fears and sense of unworthiness.

You could hear it in that line she used to mock herself with about being a “humble and obedient servant.” It was a joke, but it was a joke that was powered by a nagging uncertainty about whether her unconventional and rebellious side might actually be a problem to God. Usually she said she was Jeff’s humble and obedient servant, but when I received the news of her death on Thursday morning, I thought I could hear her laughing in the distance and saying, “Well Nathan said I wasn’t allowed to die until he got back from leave, and since I’m just a humble and obedient servant …”

So these fears are real, and just because it feels more awkward this week, we can’t wish these parables away. The parable of the wheat and the weeds last week ended the same way, with the weeds being thrown into the furnace. So, having heard two of them on the Sundays either side of Margie’s death, it would be negligent of me to just act like they’re not there.

One of our difficulties is that at times like this we are especially prone to wanting the Bible to be a simple pot of chicken soup for the soul. Flick it open to any page and it will dish up a consoling word of truth. There is chicken soup for the soul to be found in the Bible, but it’s far from simple, because there’s a lot of other stuff in the pot too. The Bible is more like a complex conversation or even a debate about what it means to follow God and what God is like. Jesus enters into that debate and takes sides, and we often have to remind ourselves that what he is saying was first addressed to the other side of the debate, and not intended as a universal truth addressing the questions we might be sitting with this week.

When Jesus uses judgement illustrations like tonight’s one of the fishing net (Matthew 13:47-50) or the one of the wheat and the weeds last week (13:24-35), he is usually taking well known and widely accepted images and subtly subverting them. Often he is tweaking them to shift the focus. One like this would have previously been heard with a focus squarely on the identification of the good and the bad, and the incineration of the bad. Such stories were often used to reinforce social judgements and justify the persecution of those we identified as bad. 

But in both these parables, Jesus tells them in a way that takes the judgment out of our hands and pushes it off to the end of the age, and instead puts the emphasis on accepting the present intermingling. Last week’s one said you have to let the weeds grow with the wheat because trying to separate them now will destroy them both. This one depicts the Kingdom of Heaven as a wide net seeking to gather in everybody, quite indiscriminately. All are gathered. All are given the opportunity to experience and embrace the kingdom. Any sorting is pushed off into the future.

So why does Jesus leave the furnace in at all? We don’t know for sure. Maybe it is nothing more than that without it, the conventional story would no longer be recognisable and so his reworking of it wouldn’t be recognisable. 

Or maybe it’s bigger than that. Maybe it is possible to refuse God’s all-inclusive grace. Perhaps despite God’s best and most gracious efforts, some will turn their backs on it. Perhaps some will be so resentful and offended by God’s gracious willingness to welcome those they regard as beyond the pale, that they will denounce such grace as evil and refuse to be part of it. Perhaps ending up in the furnace is not actually anyone else throwing you in, but you refusing the offer of a way out because you’d rather burn than sit in safety with “them”.

Could that be the reason? We don’t know. We know that again and again Jesus’s tweaks go in the direction of de-emphasising judgement and centring love and grace, but these things still sit there unexplained. It leaves us with unanswered questions, as parables usually do, but Jesus is very clear that God’s love is not reserved to those who can answer questions. The God who is with us in our silence is surely with us in our unanswered questions.

Life and death constantly leave us with unanswered questions too. Why do people die before their time? We want things to make sense because it gives us an illusion of control, but sometimes they just don’t. Like trying to find words when there are no words, it is fruitless to demand answers when there are no answers. Not just fruitless, it often results in distortions, because we’ll settle for an ugly clarity rather than live with a mystery. 

Coming back to our reading from Romans, we run into a good example of that. Verse 28 says, “We know that all things work together for good for those who love God, who are called according to his purpose.” 

In the face of mysteries like an untimely death, people have often clutched at verses like this in their desperation to find some sort of explanation that doesn’t just leave them with the reality that life is random and unfair and full of undeserved suffering. So they will end up portraying God as some kind of capricious monster who would arrange the untimely death of an innocent person in order to use it for some other goal.

Or even more often, it is just a cheap and weak chicken soup for the soul, and you can usually recognise that version because most of Paul’s sentence is dropped so it just says, “all things work together for good.” That completely misses Paul’s point. He was promising us that nothing can prevent God from working for good, not even the most unwanted or unintended things, not even the death of a loved one. He was certainly never intending to say that everything that happens is done by God as part of some cunning plan. (See footnote below for more background on this.) Don’t reach for false clarity to avoid the uncertainty. Sometimes there are no answers. God is with us in our uncertainty.

The untimely death of a friend and loved one can slam us back into anxieties about whether such things are the acts of a capricious and judgemental God. Those fears can feed on things we’ve heard preached from the Bible, especially when we expect the Bible to speak with a single resolved voice. Reaching for quick answers and quick words usually makes it worse.

But when we sit patiently in our silence and our uncertainty, we can begin to hear the Bible differently. We can tune into its debates, its struggles, and we can begin to see which voices are emerging as genuine good news, as the life-breath of God. And when we do that, we will see that the message of God’s love and grace is the message that nothing, not even death, can silence or entomb. The final verses we heard from our Romans reading tonight are a stunning example of that:

I am convinced 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.

What an extraordinary promise – a promise that swallows up our fears and uncertainties with unquenchable love, even if it doesn’t offer chicken soup explanations and answers. Nothing, nothing, absolutely nothing can separate us from God’s love. Our closing song a little later will echo something of that promise – “maybe we can imagine just how wide, how long, how high, how deep, is the love of our God. Maybe we can imagine.” 

No matter how unworthy Margie sometimes felt, nothing can separate her from the love of God. And maybe we can imagine her wide-eyed surprise at being unconditionally welcomed by God with nothing needing to be made up for! God is with us in our self-doubts. 

No matter how bereft or frightened we might feel, nothing can separate us from the love of God. God is with us in our fears and desolation. 

Even if and when God’s love feels missing, nothing can separate us from the love of God. God is with us even when we are unable to perceive that God is with us.

The promise that God will be with us is not a promise of immunity from pain or disaster. It never was. Following Jesus means following in the way of the cross, following one who suffered and died unjustly and feeling forsaken by God, forsaken by everyone. But nothing can separate us from the love of God. In divine solidarity, God is with us in our pain and forsakenness, feeling all that pain and forsakenness with us, holding us in love, in love that nothing can threaten. 

And even when it feels like our world has stopped, God is with us, weeping with us, sharing our frustration over the hurts and the deaths and the disasters, but always still with us, and always continuing to find ways to work for good for those who love God, who are called according to his purpose, which, if God has his way, will be all creation. For nothing, 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.

FOOTNOTE on Romans 8:28
“All things work together for good” was apparently a saying from the stoic philosophy of Paul’s day, and Paul is doing a complex reworking of it by pairing it with a very Jewish concept of “those who love God and obey his commandments”, only he reworks that as well and replaces the bit about obeying the commandments. So by the time Paul has tweaked and tweaked again, just as we saw Jesus doing, he is certainly not simply endorsing the brief stoic version. And even then, some early manuscripts have yet another tweak so that it says, “in all things, God works for good …” which is certainly a version Paul would agree with, but the fact that anyone thought they should make that clearer perhaps suggests that even way back then there was a noticeable tendency to take his words out of context and distort their meaning.