Show Notes
Genesis 29:15-28 | Psalm 105:1-11, 45b | Romans 8:26-39 | Matthew 13:31-33,44-52
Chapters
- (00:00:11) - Romans 8
- (00:05:44) - St. Peter's Episcopal Church
- (00:12:09) - Coming soon to the Feast
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Episode Transcript
[00:00:11] I'm absolutely convinced that nothing can get between us and God's love. In the name of God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, Amen.
[00:00:21] It's so good to be with you this morning. I'm grateful to be back here at the chapel of the Transfiguration. This is my third summer to serve here at the chapel. I served in 2018, last year and this year. But chaplain was not my first job in Jackson Hole 26 years ago. The summer before my senior year in college, I drove up here from Texas with a friend. And we got jobs at Jackson Drugs. So I was a soda jerk before I was a captain.
[00:00:54] Also that summer I was introduced to my second love, fly fishing.
[00:01:01] This is my favorite place on earth.
[00:01:06] There are few places in the world as beautiful as the place where we are worshiping this morning. Behind this altar of the Tetons. Granite reaching towards the heavens. The trees, the river nearby. Creation. Almost too beautiful for words, right?
[00:01:20] We look through this window and we see the beauty of God's creation. Creation. What God can do.
[00:01:29] But this morning, we're given another gift.
[00:01:32] We're given another view, if you will. We have just heard from what might be the most important chapter in the entire Bible, Romans chapter 8. If I were stranded on an island and I could only take one chapter from the Bible with me, it would be Romans 8.
[00:01:48] In it, St. Paul. He gives us another breathtaking view. Not of creation, but of God's word redemption.
[00:01:56] If these mountains could speak and reveal something of God's creative power. Romans 8 speaks and reveals the heart of God's redeeming love for the world.
[00:02:11] One is the beauty God made. The other is the beauty God is making. We know the goodness of God's creation. Just look around. Paul knew the goodness of God's creation. But he also knew what had happened to creation because of our human carelessness. As we pray, later we'll use that phrase. We fell into sin and death. And so did all of creation. The wrongs this world knows don't only affect us humans, but they also affect all of creation. The whole world, Paul says, is growing.
[00:02:44] And Paul knew that in Christ, God had begun the work of making all things new. He said the whole creation has been groaning in labor pains. Creation is looking for something to be born.
[00:02:58] Clearly, standing in this park, we cannot help but celebrate God's good creation. It's glorious. But we also know that creation floods.
[00:03:06] Creation burns.
[00:03:08] Creation quakes.
[00:03:10] Creation waits for better things to come. A birth, a new birth. We live in this world that floods, burns, quakes. We know it when we read the headlines, but we also know it right in our personal lives.
[00:03:21] It may not be something you read on your news feed, but we know when our world becomes and feels a bit shaky.
[00:03:29] We know these moments, these experiences, when we discover that the ground beneath us is not as solid as we once thought it was.
[00:03:37] Maybe it's happened in a job or a relationship or it happens when the doctor calls you and says, we need to talk.
[00:03:46] It happens when things go wrong and we might wonder why. We might think that we brought this upon ourselves.
[00:03:54] Perhaps we didn't. This is just the world in which we live and we can't escape it.
[00:04:00] I'm sure there's others out here who feel the same way I do. I really like the show shrinking on Apple tv, right. I hear we have some fans. And I remember one of the early scenes in one of the early episodes when Dr. Rhodes, played by Harrison Ford, he's sitting on a bench, like the benches we have just outside the chapel. And he's sitting with Jenny's daughter, who's experienced a lot in her young life, a lot of challenge, a lot of difficulty. And they're sitting there talking and she's complaining about the lack of maturity of her peers. They haven't been through all that she's been through. And Dr. Rhodes, the prophet says, nobody gets through this life unscathed.
[00:04:46] We live in this world that floods, burns, quakes, and we can't escape it. But here's the thing.
[00:04:52] God does not offer us an escape from this world. He loves this world too much for that.
[00:05:02] The whole letter Paul writes to the Romans is about God's rescue plan. The gospel begins with a God who came down from heaven for us and for our salvation. God came down from heaven. And the good news story we tell in the church is about a God who entered this broken world with all of its sorrow, pain and death.
[00:05:25] Not to abandon creation, but to redeem it from within.
[00:05:31] That's the beauty that we behold in Romans 8. That's the beauty we behold in the Gospel. This is the beauty that we behold in this most spectacular place. In a chapel, looking at the Tetons.
[00:05:44] Friends, I come to you this morning from St. Peter's Episcopal Church in Kerrville, Texas.
[00:05:50] Three weeks ago we marked the one year anniversary of the July 4th flood. A tragic flood. One of the deadliest floods in US history.
[00:06:03] Many lives were lost in that flood. And I can assure you our community has change forever and for the better. I'd say going back a year ago, there were Days, those early days. I remember standing before my congregation on Sunday, July 6, and the first words out of my mouth and my sermon were, what can you say when you have no words?
[00:06:30] We had nothing but the Spirit.
[00:06:34] Paul says, the Spirit helps us in our weakness, for we did not know how to pray. We don't have the words. But that very same spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words. This is love. This is beautiful. This is God. Creation groans, we groan.
[00:06:51] And amazingly, we have a God like no other gods. Because Paul says, the Holy Spirit groans with us.
[00:07:01] Friends, I read the Bible a lot. I'm still. I should. I'm a priest, right?
[00:07:07] And I'm convinced that the most important word in the entire Bible is the word with.
[00:07:17] If you read the Bible, you will see that word repeated over and over again. And it's not an unimportant word. God is with us. This is how the story goes from beginning to end. The prophet Isaiah says, when you pass through the waters, God will be with you.
[00:07:34] We're tracking the Jacob narrative with the Old Testament lessons. And last week, when Jacob was out in the wilderness, running for his life, alone and vulnerable, a ladder reached down from heaven and God came right by his side and said, jacob, know that I am with you.
[00:07:52] And I have literally walked through the valley of the shadow of death.
[00:07:57] And I know God was with me.
[00:08:02] The whole story from beginning to end was moving towards Jesus. And he was given the name when he was born, Emmanuel, which means God is with us.
[00:08:16] And Matthew bookends, brings it home. When Jesus, raised from the dead at the very end of the Gospel, standing before the disciples on their home turf, says, remember, I am with you always, even to the end of the age.
[00:08:33] Nothing can separate us from them.
[00:08:38] No hardship, no distress, nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus. The object is the hardships of this world. The list. Go back this afternoon and read the list that Paul gives of homelessness, hunger being bull. Jesus knew all of those things. Jesus was hungry in the wilderness. Jesus was homeless. He had nowhere to lay his head. Jesus was bullied. People betrayed him. He knew all of these things that we know in our own condition. And as Paul writes, he exposed himself to the worst of it.
[00:09:11] He came down into this mess and he did it out of love.
[00:09:16] He did it to restore us, to bring us back to a life that's even better than it was before.
[00:09:23] Recently, someone in my congregation, she came to me one day at church and she said, father Bert, now I think I get.
[00:09:31] And I said, what's that?
[00:09:34] What do you get?
[00:09:36] And my sister in Christ, she's an artist. And so she told me about this Japanese art form called kintsugi. And she related her experience of the gospel that she knows very well now. She related it to this art form. When a bowl or a cup breaks, the Japanese artist does not throw it away or try to hide the cracks. Instead, the broken pieces are carefully brought back together with this lacquer mixed with powdered gold. So say it's a blue bowl that's been cracked all throughout. You see these gold lines in the cracks. Cracks aren't disguised. They just are part of a more beautiful story.
[00:10:11] They become the most beautiful part of the work of art.
[00:10:15] What a fitting image for this love of Christ. We know we've been cracked, we've been broken. We're not going to get through this life unscathed, yet we're being wonderfully restored by the love of God in Christ Jesus. The gold we see is the love of God. Nothing can separate us.
[00:10:31] He's the gold. He's the glue.
[00:10:34] Nothing, not trouble, Hard times, hatred, hunger, homelessness, bullying, threats, backstabbing. Paul says, here's my list, what's yours?
[00:10:42] And God does not simply put us back together exactly as we were, but his purpose is to shape us. He says along the same lines as the life of his son. That's the good, that's the beautiful.
[00:10:54] The love of God is making us into something more beautiful, something more Christlike, something that even suffering and death cannot destroy. Nothing can separate us from that love.
[00:11:04] It was only a few weeks ago, like I said, that we marked this one year anniversary of the flood. And on the day of the anniversary on July 4, St. Peter's held a sunrise service at the outdoor pavilion in Hunt, Texas.
[00:11:19] And Hunt's ground zero for that blood a year ago.
[00:11:25] And that service was glorious. It was beautiful. Over 400 people came. First responders, bereaved families, locals all gathered there. I got there that morning at 5am I was the first person to arrive at the pavilion. And I can tell you that Hunt, Texas is pretty dark.
[00:11:49] And myself others, we had gone along the river for a couple weeks. We collected river rock from the riverbed and we put those rocks all around the base of the altar. And then we put 119 votive candles on those rocks in memory of every person who died in Kerr county on that day.
[00:12:09] Once I prepared the table and I was the first one there again, people began to arrive.
[00:12:15] One by one, they stepped out of the darkness. It's almost like they just suddenly appeared under the pavilion. And I knew each one of these people. These were the people with whom I grieved. These were the people who had carried one another for a whole year. These were the people who had rebuilt homes, cooked meals, prayed with strangers, buried the dead, loved their neighbors.
[00:12:35] These were the people whose lives have been shaped along the same lines of Jesus.
[00:12:43] One after another, they came into the darkness, out of the light, or out of the darkness into the light. And each one of them was shining like gold.
[00:12:52] And suddenly I realized what I was seeing.
[00:12:56] It was like a broken piece of pottery that had been put back together. And I could see the gold holding all of us together.
[00:13:03] I get it now.
[00:13:06] We are more than conquerors. Through him who loved us, we're more beautiful than ever. Restored, renewed, truly alive in Christ.
[00:13:18] I'm absolutely convinced that nothing, nothing living or dead, angelic or demonic, today or tomorrow, high or low, thinkable or unthinkable, absolute nothing, can get between us and God's love because of the way that Jesus, our Master, has embraced us.
[00:13:44] Amen.
