Tara Harmon 7-6-25

Good morning, Hyland.

Well, thanks to Shane for having me and thanks for you to you for being here to listen to me. It really is an honor for me to be here talking to you this morning. And also thanks to Julie for your beautiful prayer to my mom and dad for their communion reflection. This sermon is not about tragedy, but it is about our biggest challenges.

It is a fact of modern life that if you want to watch a multi season TV drama or read a book series as the books are published, you will have to be able to tolerate a cliffhanger. You'll reach the end of the book or the TV show season and the end won't really be the end. The final chapters or episode will indeed address the tension that the story has been leading up to. But instead of resolving that tension and letting you make peace with the ending, another element will be introduced to raise the tension. Once again, a new discovery.

A villain resurrected. Yet another impediment to the hero going home. The ending for your characters is yanked away and they are left squarely in the middle again with a new challenge to face. Harry Potter almost completes the Triwizard Tournament, only to discover that Voldemort is back. Elphaba finally makes it to Oz to find the wizard is not the savior that she had hoped.

I never watched this show, but I understand that there was a time when the topic of many water cooler conversations was who shot jr? All of these endings signal that you haven't reached the end of the story. You are still in the middle. And sometimes the order of things matters. Recipes, IKEA instructions, assembling scuba diving equipment.

One of my favorite features that comes up in some movies is the hero training sequence when the protagonist knows what kind of challenge they will be facing, but they have to go prepare for it. So they go somewhere to acquire the skills and the resources that they need. This part of the story starts with the hero experiencing a lot of failure and frustration. But they keep trying and slowly they get better. And after some amount of time, and usually some kind of musical interlude, we as the audience finally believe that the hero has a chance of doing whatever it is that they have to do.

Mulan gets strong and learns teamwork. Daniel realizes he hasn't just been waxing Mr. Miyagi's car and painting his fence, he's been learning karate all along. The chef and the rat learn how to cook together. In Ratatouille. Four Jamaicans learn how to bobsled.

All of these training moments have one thing in common. They happen in the middle. It wouldn't make any sense for them to happen at the beginning, but before they know what it is they have to do. And it wouldn't make sense for them to happen at the end when the problem has already been solved. They have to happen in the middle.

And so I say this about beginnings and middles and endings to say that I'm going to be talking about the middle of Romans. Shane only gave me one week to preach, so I'm skipping over the beginning and I'm skipping over the ending. You'll have to learn about those some other time. The part that we're going to look at today is right in the center, so keep in mind what we know about middles. So I want you to listen again to Romans 8, 31, 39.

What then are we to say about these things? And quick note these things is pointing us to the paragraph above, which is actually about suffering.

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, how 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 who died, or rather who was raised, who's also at the right hand of God, who also intercedes for us.

Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Will affliction 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 victorious 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 of creation will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord. Here is the gist. No one is available to judge you. God is the one who judges, and God isn't judging you. Maybe Jesus could judge.

He's the one who died and was raised. He isn't judging you either. The Holy Spirit we just Learned in chapter 8 that the Holy Spirit helps us in our weakness and in our suffering. The Holy Spirit isn't judging. No part of God is condemning you.

What else is left that could possibly have the power to separate you from God's love? The answer is nothing. No illness, no financial situation, no amount of shame or sadness, no act of a government can separate you from the love of God in Christ Jesus. Whether you live or die, whether those close to you live or die. God still loves you.

You think you have the power to separate yourself from the love of God? I'm sorry, friends, you don't have that power.

That nagging voice that says in your ear that you are somehow an exception to this rule, that says God loves people, but maybe not you. Specifically. Specifically, that voice is wrong. The God who holds the universe together by simply willing it to be so loves you. And there is no power in the universe that can change that.

If you hear nothing else in this whole sermon, hear this. Know in your bones that nothing can separate you from the love of God. Let that knowledge seep from your head and into the deepest places of your heart.

Now, that would have made a good ending to the book of Romans. It's beautiful, it's climactic. It sums up the whole argument of Romans to this point. But remember, it's not the end, it's the middle. Chapter 8 ends with nothing can separate us from the love of God.

And chapter nine opens with Paul saying he has great sorrow and unceasing anguish in his heart. Wait, what? How can he go in one verse from the heights of the love of Christ to such depths? It's a jarring shift in tone that makes you wonder, how can this be? So here's my suggestion.

I think the Christians in Rome needed to know about the love of God before they heard the next part of the letter. So pardon a little bit of Roman's background while I explain what I mean. Paul wrote the letter to the Romans to a church that he'd never been to before. And this is different than some of the other letters that he wrote to churches that he knew closely. If you read chapter 16 at the very end of the Book of Romans, you'll notice that there are some people there that he does know and some people that he knew closely, but he has never been there before.

But he knows that the church in Rome is facing a particular problem that has to do with Jews and Gentiles. We don't know with clarity everything about the origins of Christianity in Rome, but a situation something like the following makes sense with evidence we have from inside Romans itself and from outside of the Bible. The church in Rome probably began in Jewish synagogues. And at some point, those who were following Christ shifted out of synagogues into house churches. And these house churches would have been comprised of both Jewish and Gentile Christians, but probably tended, at least at first, to be led by Jewish Christians.

In the year 49, the Emperor Claudius evicted the Jews out of Rome, and this would have included Jewish Christians. The Roman authorities wouldn't have distinguished between the two at that time. And when the Jews were allowed back into Rome about five years later, the churches that they were coming back into probably looked a little different. Different people were in leadership. Perhaps some things were being done differently.

We can imagine that these house churches probably shifted from primarily Jewish leadership to primarily Gentile leadership. Maybe they had some different customs. They certainly had different ethnic makeup. When the previous leaders came back to town, the church had been operating without them for five years. It's easy to imagine that the new Gentile leaders might not have wanted to step aside and return to how things used to be.

It's also easy to imagine how, after being away from home for five years, coming back to a church that felt different might have been disorienting to Jewish Christians. All these things led to tensions that were both practical and theological. And one of the reasons that Paul wrote to the church in Rome was to address these tensions. How can Jewish Christians and Gentile Christians be one church? Once you know this question is at the heart of Romans, you will see it all over the book.

Okay, bear with me for one more quick piece of Romans background. Paul's letter to the Romans was not haphazardly composed. It's a carefully crafted letter, and it has three basic parts. Chapters 1 through 8 says that Jews and Gentiles are equal. Chapters 9 through 11 gets into the really tough questions about God bringing the Gentiles in and whether or not God was really being fair in doing that.

And then chapters 12 through 16 is a lot of practical answers, a lot of practical questions about how they should act in regards to what God is doing.

And so as we move from chapter eight to. To chapter nine, we're getting into the hardest problem that the church in Rome is facing. It's the beginning of a section that addresses their theological concerns. But as you might have noticed in your own experience with churches, sometimes there can be a lot of emotional attachment to theological issues. This conversation about God in relation to the Jews and the Gentiles is the hardest challenge that the church there is facing at that moment.

And so here's my suggestion. Romans 8 is the training sequence before delving deeply into the issue that threatened their community. They needed some practice. They needed to run up the stairs a few times like Rocky, for some conditioning. And specifically, what they needed to know.

And not just to know, but to know deeply and to practice the knowledge that nothing could separate them from the love of Christ, regardless of how disorienting the changes in their church were. God was working things out for their mutual benefit. Once they knew that, then they were ready to face their hardest challenges. So what might all that have to do with us?

We too are in the middle of our stories and we too have challenges to face. And our hardest challenges might be different. But regardless of the challenge, the message that we need to hear is the same. We too must learn to be centered in the unbreakability of God's love in order to face challenges. I grew up in the era of merry go rounds.

By the time my kids were old enough to go to parks, merry go rounds had mostly disappeared because they were death traps. So for those of you who haven't experienced one, a merry go round is a piece of playground equipment that has a flat round surface and bars attached to it. And to play with it, one or more kids would sit on the platform being careful not to burn all the skin off their legs if they were wearing shorts and it was summertime and they would hold on tight to the bars and one or more kids or adults would spin the contraption around as quickly as possible. With the right combination of a well oiled merry go round and strong people spinning, you could go fast enough to sling a 50 pound kid all the way across the park. And one lesson you learned on a merry go round is that it's easier to hold on in the middle than on the edges.

In the middle you can sit down and hold the bar and it's almost impossible to fall off if you're on the edge. However, any false movement or shift in your grip could cause you to fly off and break your arm, or cause you to fly off into your little sister and break her arm. And so this is what living out of a deep sense of God's love can do for us. It can move us closer to the middle, to a place where we're more stable. Our lives are going to spin around.

The love of God doesn't prevent bad things from happening. But we don't have to live on the edges where we hold on in fear. We can move to the middle where we are able to face our hardest challenges without flying off the merry go round and hurting ourselves or hurting someone else.

How do we do this? It's one thing for us to believe that nothing can separate us from the love of God, and it's another thing for that to become the air that we breathe and the very force that grounds us. If I had taken a poll when you came in today and asked the Question. Can anything separate you from the love of God? I think most of you would have said no.

You knew this information before the sermon started. So I wonder, how does this statement that we already believe in our heads come to live in our hearts? And how do we fight these voices that tell us the opposite, that we are not good enough, that we are not useful enough, that there are other better people out there, that someone else should do the good thing that needs to be done. This is the hard part. I have a couple of thoughts.

First, one of my deep down in my bones beliefs is that each of you knows something about God that I don't know. You have your own experiences and your own lives of faith. You have your own wisdom to draw from to contribute to this question. Ask each other about it. Identify the times in your life that made you certain of God's love and tell each other.

Bolster each other with your stories about God. Let someone else borrow from your moments of clarity.

My second suggestion is prayer. I realize that telling someone to pray is a default answer. It's the thing we say when we don't know what else to say. Just try asking God. See if that works.

And asking God for what we need is wonderful. It's a little bit different than what I mean here. I think the kind of prayer that can help us learn to be centered is the kind where we learn to sit quietly with God and open our hearts. It's less about asking God to act and more of about offering up time and trying to let God come in. It's about learning to be aware of God and what God is doing.

This kind of prayer is very hard work, worthy of any training sequence, but it can help us move to the middle of the merry go round.

Finally, there's one last word in our passage I want to point to. 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. All.

That's the word. God gave up his son for all of us. When you know deeply that nothing can separate you from the love of God, you will know that that nothing can separate any of us from the love of God. That unbreakable love that God has for you is the same unbreakable love God has for the person sitting next to you and the person across the room and the person across the town and the person across a border.

The ones who aggravate you and the one whose pain makes you want to avert your eyes. God loves them too. All of them. Deeply and permanently.

We face many kinds of challenges. Our lives, our families, our church, and our world friends. The world needs us to be able to face those challenges. If you are still here, you are still in the middle of your story and you still have challenges ahead. And whatever those challenges are, step into them with an awareness of the vast and unbreakable love of God.

Thank you.