God's Awe-Ful Love

Rev. Erin K. Swenson
July 25, 2004
St. Luke Presbyterian Church, Wayzata, MN

Romans 8:31-39

What a privilege to be with you this morning, to be at the very place where the "Twin Cities Overture" had its birthing! And it becomes my pleasure to bring greetings and thanksgiving from the Board of More Light Presbyterians for your vision, your courage, and your fortitude to stand up and be counted among those who cry out for justice in the Presbyterian Church, U.S.A.

And this is a special pleasure for me personally, because it is my first official contact with a More Light Church as national co-moderator of MLP.

While things didn't pan out as we had hoped for GA216, please be assured that your determination to press for the removal of G6.0106(b) has inspired others, and new efforts will abound. So do not be discouraged for a second for, as our national field organizer Michael Adee likes to put it, "this ministry is a marathon, not a sprint."

You should know that I have roots in Minnesota. My Dad was born in Ortonville, about 150 miles west of here just on the South Dakota line. They moved to St. Paul, and I have many childhood memories in and around Hamline University, which was Hamline College back then, and Minehahah Park was where I ate my first cotton candy. When I was born I was baptized in the Lutheran Church, appropriate for someone named "Swenson" and even though my Granddad was actually a Swedish Methodist. Some people might say that I had a checkered background. They don't even know the half of it!

Paul knew something of people with checkered backgrounds. By the time he sat to write the great letter to the church in Rome Paul had established churches all over Asia Minor. He necessarily had run into all sorts of people, from mystics to charlatans. He knew firsthand how wonderfully diverse is God's creation in humankind. Which is why this letter stands as perhaps the first great Christian theological work. And here in Chapter 8 are words that express the very kernel of Christian theology. Verses 38 and 39 are perhaps the penultimate in Christian thought. Hear them again,

I am certain of this: neither death, nor life, no angel, no prince, nothing that exists, nothing still to come, not any power, or height or depth, nor any created thing can ever come between us and the love of God made visible in Christ Jesus our Lord. (Romans 8:38-39, Jerusalem Bible)

"Single Couples." That's what we called them. It was 1970 and Sigrid and I took our young family, including our four-month-old daughter Inge to Columbia Seminary in Decatur, Georgia. There we were, a young couple with child. And we coined the term "single couple" on a Friday night, just after another couple, new friends, had called at the last minute to invite us to go out to a movie with them. Didn't they know we couldn't just run out willy-nilly, that a last minute babysitter was near impossible to find on a Friday night? We were disappointed, and a little angry. "Single couples!" They don't understand what it's like to be a parent. WE were parents, and our newfound perspective on life forever differentiated us from all those other childless people. Our vision of life was different, even superior! My arrogance seemed to know no bounds.

I was finally confronted a few months later, when I was struggling with a sermon in my Introduction to Preaching Class. I had decided to use a hard night at home as a sermon illustration - a night when I had struggled for sleep while Inge, our daughter, screamed her way through yet another a painful ear infection. It was the night before an important Greek exam and I was sleepless and angry. I struggled for the words, "I wanted…," "I wanted…," I couldn't say it.

"To kill her," Don asked?

"Yes," my voice was trembling on the verge of tears, "to kill her."

"Every parent feels that," said Don, "and that is why it's such a powerful thing to say. Just because you feel it doesn't mean you will do it."

"But I can't say that in a sermon!" I almost screamed.

"Why not?" asked Don. "People will understand. God understands."

I am certain of this: neither death, nor life, no angel, no prince, nothing that exists, nothing still to come, not any power, or height or depth, nor any created thing can ever come between us and the love of God made visible in Christ Jesus our Lord.

A scant six years later parenthood got me again. Lara, our second child, was born two and a half months premature. We were unlucky. Had she been born twenty-five years earlier she would have likely died. Twenty-five years later and medical technology would perhaps have been able to prevent the two cerebral hemorrhages that now left her multiply, severely, and permanently disabled. But there she was, my daughter, terribly injured in her fight to survive.

This time the conversation wasn't with a seminary professor. No. This time I went right to the top. "God," I prayed, "it's really a good thing you're a spirit, because if I could get my hands on you… " I hesitated. God and I had had lots of heated conversations in my short life, but I had never felt this feeling. "…I would kill you!" I choked through stinging tears.

This time there was no caring seminary professor to catch me, to revive me, to bring me back to my humanity. I would have to wait on grace - but it came. It came in the crooked smile of a severely disabled little girl who taught me how much God loves me. Who taught me how to love myself again.

I am certain of this: neither death, nor life, no angel, no prince, nothing that exists, nothing still to come, not any power, or height or depth, nor any created thing can ever come between us and the love of God made visible in Christ Jesus our Lord.

You would think that I would learn. By middle age I had been talking to God for a long time. "God," I would whine, "if you love me enough to give your son, why can't you love me enough to take this damned gender thing away?"

I had spent the better part of four decades wrestling secretly with this unreasonable and incorrigible desire to be female. It was the stuff of many of my conversations with God, some filled with anger, some with supplication, all heartfelt. I had wanted to "get away with it" - to be able to live through all of my life to the very end with my terrible secret safely intact. Now, in middle age, the inevitable depression threatened to overtake me. It had already brought an end to my marriage and threatened to bring an early end to my life.

By this point in my life my homicidal anger had long since disappeared, perhaps wrapped into the self-hatred of my depression. This time the messenger of grace was not a seminary professor or my little daughter, now grown. This time the message came from a back-slid Roman Catholic from Warsaw Poland, a psychologist named Margaret. She was my fourth therapist in over twenty years of continuous therapy. "For a minister you have little faith!" she reflected. "And you're not confused about your gender, you're just afraid that no one will understand," she spoke like an Old Testament prophet.

I am certain of this: neither death, nor life, no angel, no prince, nothing that exists, nothing still to come, not any power, or height or depth, nor any created thing can ever come between us and the love of God made visible in Christ Jesus our Lord.

You see, these are beautiful, even awesome, words spoken to us through Paul. The problem with them is not the beauty of their truth, but the difficulty we have in hearing them. Awe-ful love is what I like to call it. I like the mixed textures and meanings the word expresses, the Thirteenth Century marriage of awe and fullness. To be filled with awe. But I also like the darkness of it, the way that it appeals to my struggle to understand God's incredible love in the sticky messy reality that is my life.

Why do we not just GET IT! Why do we so struggle to understand? Paul knew well how hard it is to fathom this kind of aweful love. In this, perhaps his most fully developed thinking, he draws clear lines for us, showing our very human need to somehow deserve the love we receive, what Paul calls the Law, and the simple truth of our being loved in God's marvelous way through Jesus, who is the Christ. Being truly loved without deserving is both precious and difficult at the same time, awe-ful. But we feel insecure in such love, needing somehow to be in control of it, to earn it. And so we struggle even in the full knowledge of God's precious gift of Jesus.

And that is why we need each other. None of us can claim full knowledge of such awe-ful love, even though the scripture lays it out clearly. The assertion of Romans 8:38 & 39 is without qualification. Nothing, nothing in all of God's creation can separate us from this love. And to understand this we must all come to the throne of grace with our individual struggles, to fathom this love in the context of our own experience whether it be the experience of disease or disability or race or gender or poverty or even, my favorite, faithlessness. We can hear the words of love in scripture, we can remember the expression of love in the sacraments, but we cannot experience the love without the full embrace of every member of Christ's body.

I want to stop talking for a minute, and just ask you to look around. Go ahead, turn your head and scan the crowd God has gathered to celebrate this moment in the church's life. Some of the differences between us are visible. You can see race, and gender, and age, poverty and wealth, and some of our disability. What you cannot see represents perhaps even more profound differences. Experience, language, pain, fear, joy, peace, ignorance, love, disease, hidden disability, and doubt. All of these things, and much more, are here with us today in this place, and we bring them with us as we approach this celebration of love. As one stumbles, others lift and help, all moving toward the One who created us the One who loves us completely.

How can the church say that there are some of us whose experience of God's love is unacceptable, whose voices must be muffled, whose lives cut off? How can we rend our churches asunder when we so desperately need every life, every community in our quest to fathom God's awe-ful love? How can we show to a world struggling with hate and fear what this love is if we cannot tolerate it in our own houses?

And so this gathering is, in a most colorful way, an expression of the very ministry we celebrate.

Our churches are under assault. Make no mistake. There are those in our fellowship who would make our denominations exclusive and safe places, where those who seem to be outside the pale of acceptable Christian fellowship are relegated to other, more "tolerant" denominations. Ordination, they say, is only for those whose lives are exemplary, whose experience extraordinary. When I suggest that my transgender life is extraordinary they are quick to clarify… for I am indeed not acceptable.

How many people here remember being baptized? Perhaps the only real problem with infant baptism is the fact that we cannot carry the memory of that moment with us in our lives and ministries. For it is clearly the most important celebration in our journey with Christ. It is the moment we are claimed and proclaimed fit for service as a minister in Christ's church. Let me make this clear, there is no other essential qualification for ministry! We are all God's ministers, and your ministry began the moment that hand, dipped in water, rested on your head and claimed you for the Church.

I am certain of this: neither death, nor life, no angel, no prince, nothing that exists, nothing still to come, not any power, or height or depth, nor any created thing can ever come between us and the love of God made visible in Christ Jesus our Lord.

Sometimes at that moment a wave of light breaks into our darkness, and it is as though a voice were saying: 'You are accepted, accepted by that which is greater than you, and the name of which you do not know'.

Do not ask for the name now; perhaps you will find it later.

Do not try to do anything now; perhaps later you will do much.

Do not seek for anything; do not perform anything; do not intend anything.

Simply accept the fact that you are accepted!

If that happens to us, we experience grace.

After such an experience we may not be better than before, and we may not believe more than before, but everything is transformed. In that moment, grace conquers sin, and reconciliation bridges the gulf of estrangement. And nothing is demanded of this experience, no religious or moral or intellectual presuppositions, nothing but acceptance.

In the light of this grace, we perceive the power of grace in our relation to others and to ourselves. We experience the grace of being able to look frankly into the eyes of another, the miraculous grace of reunion of life with life.

(Paul Tillich, The New Being)