On Haiti, MLK & the love of God

Meditation given this past Sunday.

Romans 8:31-39
What then are we to say about these things? If God is for us, who is against us? He who did not withhold his own Son, but gave him up for all of us, will he not with him also give us everything else? Who will bring any charge against God’s elect? It is God who justifies. Who is to condemn? It is Christ Jesus, who died, yes, who was raised, who is at the right hand of God, who indeed intercedes for us. Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Will hardship, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? As it is written,
“For your sake we are being killed all day long;
we are accounted as sheep to be slaughtered.”
No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For 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.

Nothing can separate us from the love of God.

It is in weeks like this that we begin to wonder about that statement. We think of the little children, men and women trapped under the rubble of Haiti’s buildings and we wonder where the love of God is in those places. Where was the hand of God the minute before the ground began to shake? Where has God been in Haiti’s history of poverty, mismanagement, dictatorship, and colonialism?

Nothing can separate us from the love of God.

There are easy ways to answer the questions that this passage brings up for us this week. Some say that Haiti simply deserved what they got. A well-known television preacher spouted that one off this week. Some say that God does not exist at all or if there is a God, that God is completely impotent. These answers make sense. They help us put pieces together.

But for me, these answers are not satisfying. They do not make sense with the God that I know in Scripture, in history and in my own experience. The God I know is not punative. The God I know does not abandon us, even when we are at our worst. The God I know responds in truthful love, never devastation. The God I know is always drawing us into reconciliation and wholeness.

Nothing can separate us from the love of God.

What we see of God in Jesus is a God that does not run away from the worst pain. God enters the tension with arms wide open in strong, compassionate, creative, truth-telling love. God affirms the meaning and beauty of life in this world while also suffering with us.

Into this world of paradox, Jesus was born a poor man in an occupied country. He was “a man with his back up against the wall.” In his lifetime, Jesus protested against radical suffering. He resisted the powers that inflicted it. He healed the sick. He loved the unlovable. He demonstrated how we are to live in a world of tragic tension between suffering and meaning. And he died. The one sent to save us. The beloved Son of God.

The story does not end there. Three days after his death, he appeared to his friends. They struggled to understand their experience. What could this mean? For them, it meant that God is stronger even than death. Death was not the end of relationship. The eternal love of God continued even past this life and so these women and men, the friends of Jesus, were freed to follow the way of Jesus – living their lives for the healing and blessing of the world.

Nothing can separate us from the love of God.

And because God does not remove Godself from this world in either its pain or its joy, neither do we.

If you know nothing else about Christianity, know this. We believe in a God who rushes into the paradoxes of this world. We believe that love is stronger than death. We believe that justice is more powerful than evil. As Christians, we are always seeking to embody this more and more in our world, to be the hands and feet of God where there are no pat answers. Or at least that’s where we should be.

Nothing can separate us from the love of God.

The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr got this. He believed in this God who resided in the middle of the pain and injustice of the world, always seeking to restore, heal, and bind together. And because he believed in this God whose love goes beyond death, he sought to live without fear. After a demonstration in the south, he said that the authorities were not expecting the courage they found in the African Americans. Dr. King said, “They were not aware that they were dealing with Negroes who had been freed from fear.”

Because Dr. King believed nothing can separate us from the love of God, he believed that nothing can separate us from each other. He believed we live in a web of interconnectedness that makes your pain, my pain, your joy, my joy. “All men are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality.” He believed the more we could live into this, the more hope there is for the healing of the world.

Nothing can separate us from the love of God.

This week I heard someone echo a sentiment given after 9/11. But instead of saying, “We are all Americans,” this week we say: “We are all Haitians.” We cannot escape our interconnectedness. Our hearts grieve with those who have lost. We long for not only the recovery of Haiti, but healing for the nation of Haiti. We give and pray. We long for restoration.

Nothing can separate us from the love of God.
And nothing can separate us from each other.

It is not a matter of making this true but merely of realizing that it is true. It is a matter of living in reality vs. living a lie. May we live in truth. May we embody and show in our largest actions and our smallest gestures that we are connected.

Nothing can separate us from the love of God.