Weekly Devotion: Relentless
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The last time this passage appeared in the Revised Common Lectionary was in the summer of 2020. That year, was one filled with sadness, anxiety and mourning as we faced COVID, political turmoil, and the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd. It feels like we are trapped in the “Upside Down” the dangerous, horrible place made popular in the Netflix series “Stranger Things.” It’s a place filled with monsters that are ready to take our lives.
The Apostle Paul knew a thing or two about living in tumultuous times. He was under threat and would end up dying by the hands of Rome. The church in Rome had to leave the city because the Emperor wanted all Jews to leave and only recently returned from exile. “What are we to say about these things?” Paul asks. You can imagine Paul asking that question to us in the midst of all the problems that were going on in our world. What do you say?
But then Paul answers his own question. If God is for us, then who is against us? But what does that mean? What does it mean that God is for us? What does that mean in our world in our time?
Paul then tells us something about God: God’s relentless love. God loves us no matter what happens in our lives. God can do this because Jesus was not withheld from experiencing suffering in his own life. We know that God in Jesus was tortured and died an excruciating death. Jesus knows suffering and because of this, God can understand our own lives.
The true test of friendship is how someone acts when you face tragedy in your life. Sometimes people who you thought were friends were only being nice. God isn’t like that. God loves us and God doesn’t leave us even when we are mired in sin. God is relentless and never abandons us.
“Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Will hardship, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword?” Paul says. The answer is nothing. Nothing. Not famine, not a pandemic, not the economy, nothing separates us from God’s love. Paul ends chapter 8 with those well-known and well-loved phrases. “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.”
I fled Him down the nights and down the days
I fled Him down the arches of the years
I fled Him down the labyrinthine ways
Of my own mind, and in the mist of tears
I hid from Him, and under running laughter.
Up vistaed hopes I sped and shot precipitated
Adown titanic glooms of chasm-ed fears
From those strong Feet that followed, followed after.
Those are the opening lines of The Hound of Heaven by Francis Thompson. He talks about God’s relentless pursuit of him and us. Thompson endured a lot of heartache, some of his own making. But through it all, God was there still chasing after him, still showing devotion and love.
What’s separates us from God? Nothing. No matter how dark the world gets, we are loved by a God that loves us like a dog that won’t stop until they reach us and shower us with love. Even now in these uncertain times, we can rest in the thought that God loves us relentlessly.
-Dennis Sanders, Pastor