How Wide Is God’s Love? (Colossians 1:11-23; Lent 3C; March 3, 2013)

How Wide Is God’s Love?

 Colossians 1:11-23
Lent 3C
March 3, 2013

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, IA

The Bible is a conversation.  I am more and more convinced of this.  I didn’t used to be.  There was a time, a third of a century or so ago, when I was convinced that the Bible wasn’t just the word of God, but the words of God.

Oh, sure, there were parts of the Bible that I struggled with.  There were passages that I could only bring into agreement with other passages by standing on my head.  But, hey, I was doing it for God, so it was worth it.

I always knew, of course, that the Bible isn’t a single book, that it is a collection of writings written over a period of centuries by different authors.  But the Bible, I was sure, had only one message and that message was the Word of God.  It was plain to see.  At least it was plain to me.  If other readers didn’t agree, well then, the fault probably lay with them.  Although to be fair to myself, I did not entirely reject the idea that I could be wrong.  I was just pretty sure that I wasn’t.

Lots of biblical study gradually convinced me that I was fundamentally mistaken.  I came to the conclusion that the various writers brought their own perspectives and they often disagreed with each other, sometimes about very important things.  

But it’s only recently that I’ve been able to put this into the words that I began with: The Bible is a conversation.  It’s a conversation between the various writers.  As is true for many conversations, there are times when the writers are in agreement and there are times when they are not.  Sometimes the disagreements are subtle and sometimes they are carried on with raised voices and reddened faces.  

The Word of God is not the exclusive privilege of any of the authors, especially not of the loudest.  For me the Word of God no longer lies in the words of the Bible, but in the conversation itself.  

The helpful thing about this way of putting it is that Christian faith becomes a matter of taking part in the biblical conversation, rather than of having to believe certain things.  We listen and talk back to various writers and with each other.  There are many voices and many perspectives and we don’t get to say who is right and who is wrong and the Word of God is in the conversation.  We can agree with some things and disagree with others and it’s okay.  As long as we stay in the conversation we are where we belong as Christians.

A couple of years ago Rob Bell started one of those conversations that gets carried on with raised voices and reddened faces when his book, Love Wins: A Book About Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived[1], hit the book stores.  I confess to not having read it yet, so I can’t speak to what he actually said.  I only know that he stirred up an old debate about what is called Universalism, that is, the idea that God will save everyone.  Some welcomed his book.  Some recoiled in horror at the very idea that no one would get sent to hell.

I’d like to weigh in on the argument, because it’s a subject that’s been on my heart and mind for a long time and you deserve to know what I think about it, even if, or maybe especially if, you don’t agree.

If I were to summarize the traditional view in the Western Church (of which we as Protestants are a part) it would go something like this: Because of the sin of Adam and Eve human nature is tainted with what is called original sin.  Tainted in this way we are unable to live without sinning against God.  We are unable to free ourselves from this taint and from the guilt of actual sin.  Since God is infinitely righteous we cannot be in God’s presence in this condition.  If we die while we are in this state, we will be separated from God forever, that is, we will go to hell.  

Since God loves us, God was unwilling to allow things to remain this way.  So God sent Jesus who as one who was both fully human and fully divine was able in his own death to pay the penalty for our sins.  If we believe in Jesus our sins are forgiven, we can have new life, and we can go to heaven when we die.

There are some fuzzy points here.  What do we mean Jesus was “fully human and fully divine”?  How does Jesus’ death pay the penalty for our sins?  What does it mean for us to “believe in Jesus”?

These fuzzy points aside, this is good news for us who believe in Jesus.  We can live in the confidence that we are “saved.” 

This sounds good so far, but there are some questions, the most important of which is this: “What if we don’t ‘believe in Jesus’?”  What if we’ve never heard of Jesus?  This, of course, has been the major motive for missions and evangelism.  If we are sure that those who do not believe in Jesus because they have never heard of him will be damned to hell for all eternity, then there should be no lengths to which we will not go to make sure that everyone hears about Jesus.  But what about those who have already died or those we don’t get to in time?

What about those whose only knowledge of Jesus has come from hateful people or even from the normal sort of messed up people like you and me who try our best but don’t always get it right and somehow Jesus becomes associated with our failures?  What about those who grew up with the judgmental, angry Jesus that some people preach and believe in that Jesus all too much and really would rather not?  In short is God willing to damn someone because of our failures to tell the good news about Jesus so that it really is good news?

And what about the folks who have experienced God’s love but in the vessels of another faith tradition altogether?  What about the people who have embraced compassion as Buddhists, or the peace of submission to the will of Allah as Muslims, or the justice commanded by the God of the Jewish covenant, or living in community with all creation as Wiccans?  Or even the people who, not finding convincing reasons for believing that there is a God at all, nonetheless seek to live respectfully with the human and global communities around them?  Is God willing to damn them because they opted for the wrong brand name?

Some folks, and I’ve been one of them, have considered each of these cases and have tried to work out how the demands of God’s justice and God’s love may both be met.  Some years ago I began to wonder if I was going about all this in the most helpful way.

So I started over with this: God loves us. God is also passionately committed to justice.  By that I mean the justice that seeks to ensure that the needs of all are met and that the world’s resources are used for the general welfare.  It’s this kind of justice that is embodied in the law of Jubilee that frees debt slaves and returns land to its original family every fiftieth year.  God is passionately committed to this form of justice.  God’s goal for humankind is the peaceful justice that is called shalom in Hebrew.  When there is shalom, there is genuine community.  Resources are shared.  There is no permanent underclass.  There is no permanent upper class, either.  The poor do not lack what they need; the rich don’t have too much.  Justice seeks a state of being for all that someone has called “enoughness.”

This is what God wants for us and for our world.  When it comes to this kind of justice, there is no conflict with the requirements of love.  

Of course, we are not quite ready to welcome this justice.  Walter Brueggemann defines justice as finding out what belongs to whom and giving it to them.  This sounds fine except that a lot of what belongs to some is in the hands of someone else who thinks it belongs to them.  Separating us from whatever stuff we have that belongs to someone else is not going to be easy for us to embrace.  

This is what judgment is about.  Judgment is facing the justice of God with our less-than-just lives.  Whenever that happens, during life or after it, I have come to believe that we are both revealed as the glorious creatures that God intended for us to be and that we are separated from everything that keeps us from that glory.  It is a painful process, but it is worth it.  This judgment is God’s work of perfecting us, the work of finishing in us the work of creation and of new creation.  It has to do with healing, not condemnation.  We see this unfold in this morning’s lesson:  

In Christ all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him God was pleased to reconcile to [God’s self] all things, whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace through the blood of his cross.  And you who were once estranged and hostile in mind, doing evil deeds, he has now reconciled in his fleshly body through death, so as to present you holy and blameless and irreproachable before [God]--provided that you continue securely established and steadfast in the faith, without shifting from the hope promised by the gospel that you heard, which has been proclaimed to every creature under heaven. 

Along with all of creation, we are reconciled with God and redeemed from everything that keeps us from God’s love.  God intends to leave no one and nothing out of this great rescue and healing.

I could just as easily cite other lessons that would threaten us—or someone at least—with everlasting judgment.  But the Bible is a conversation and I am allowed to take sides in the debates.  And this is the side I am taking.

God intends to rescue and heal the whole of creation.  Every human being is included in that rescue and healing.  

Now, of course, we are free to resist or even refuse.  God will not force God’s self on us.  So I still believe that there is a hell, if hell is defined as the absence of God.  But God is not willing to give up on us and I do not think that there are many of us who will be able to resist God’s love forever.  I suspect that hell is pretty much empty.  But whether we try to resist or give up and give in, beside us, under and around us, is this inescapable truth: “God loves us and there’s nothing we can do about it.”

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[1] Bell, Rob. Love Wins: A Book About Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived. First Edition. HarperOne, 2011.