Trinity Sunday (Romans 5:1-5)  5/26/2013

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Not long after moving to the Chicago area, I was driving home from work and noticed the sky had become an angry looking color of green and purple. Growing up in Connecticut, this was a sky I was not familiar with at all. The dark clouds twisted and tumbled and there were a few rolling sections that seemed to be just waiting to reach toward the earth. As I neared my house the sirens began to wail, warning everyone to get inside and take cover. I found my family in the basement, which is where we all spent the next several minutes until the next series of sirens gave the signal that the danger had passed. As a native New Englander, the memories of that day remain with me; and those memories were in mind this past week as I watched the devastating impact of the powerful tornado that made its way through Oklahoma. Filled with Western spirit and resolve, the people of Oklahoma have already begun the hard work of putting their communities back together, but the frightening moments of that day and the challenges that lay ahead cannot be minimized; and we might wonder, where was God in all of this? A recent opinion article by Joshua Prager titled, “Is Our Suffering God’s Will?”^[i] addresses this very question. More than 20 years ago, Prager was visiting Jerusalem and was involved in a bus accident as he and several others made their way to the Western Wall. Prager suffered permanent damage to the left side of his body and many others on the bus that day suffered lasting consequences from the accident, consequences that would change the course of their lives in one way or another. He recently spoke with many of these same people in an effort to write a book of his experience. When asked why the unfortunate incident occurred, nearly every person responded they believed it was God’s will. Prager, himself, had believed the accident to be God’s will, but now admits that he understands the accident to merely be a collection of facts that created a particular outcome – a dangerously curved road, an inattentive young driver, a seat without proper safety equipment. Two opinions of the same incident that stand far apart: one that God willed the accident for divine purposes, and the other that facts and figures point to assignable cause without the need to bring God into the story at all. And somewhere between those two understandings there is a belief that places God in relationship with our lives without divine agency pulling all the strings. So where was God this past week in Oklahoma? Where is the presence of God for us?

The apostle Paul wrote to the Romans in an effort to explain the presence of God to them in the complicated and often times challenging world of the Roman Empire. This morning we hear Paul’s hope-filled promise to the Romans, “Since we are justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have obtained access to this grace in which we stand; and we boast in our hope of sharing the glory of God.” And further, Paul wrote, “God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.” (Rom 5:1-2, 5) Paul’s message was a message of love and overwhelming hope, a message that was especially powerful to those who heard his words because it was a time when it would have been easy to not have any hope. The Roman authorities had previously expelled those who followed the Christian practice of faith, and now upon the return of the exiles there was likely internal trouble among the community in addition to the external challenges of the State. Paul understood the challenge of remaining strong in the face of difficulty, he understood the importance of celebrating the joyous moments of life even as the difficult moments continued to exert their pressure on the community. Paul understood the wholeness of life to include both those challenging and broken parts that harken to our connection with Adam and Eve, and those joyous and restored parts that assure us we are heirs to the promise of the resurrected Christ. Life does not give us one or the other, we must live in the midst of both. But even in the midst of challenge, if we live our lives in Christ, we live in such a way that we are continually drawn into the hope of sharing God’s glory…and that is a hope that does not disappoint us. Paul’s assuring words of our continual hope in the glory of God remind us that God is ever present to us in all that we do, sometimes quite obviously and other times quite mysteriously, yet powerfully.

As the images of Oklahoma continued to appear throughout the week, I was reminded that God’s presence is made manifest among us in many ways: neighbors helping neighbors, a person rescued after endless hours of waiting for rubble to be moved, support from people in many, many different ways. This past Friday I read another opinion piece, this one by Nathan Gunter, a native Oklahoman and editor of Oklahoma Today magazine. He wrote, “Oklahomans have a special relationship with the sky. We know how to look up…To live underneath this unbroken expanse of heaven can be at once inspiring and terrifying.” And he described his native land with a quote from the Bible that should be familiar to us as well; he said it is the place “where we live and move and have our being. It is not only where but who we are.” He closed his piece with a wonderful image of how he envisions life in the West: “Our identity is in softly rolling prairies giving way to forested hills, in long stretches of horizon that make you feel like you could see almost to eternity, and in big skies stretched tight above it all. We have learned to watch those skies – for blessings, for rain, for sunshine, for wind and for signs of danger.”^[ii] Gunter’s insights capture the delicate balance we must walk in our lives; the balance between joy and sadness, challenge and opportunity, fear and comfort, just to name a few. And we are reminded on this Trinity Sunday that we are not alone as we struggle to keep this balance, we are continually surrounded with the presence of God. As children of God, we are filled with confidence as we know that God only wants what is best for us, and in the ups and downs of life, our hope in the love and goodness of God fills us with the blessings of God’s love.  AMEN