It has been fifteen years since Bill Bishop and Robert

Cushing, sociologists who live and write in central

Texas, published their book titled The Big Sort: Why

the Clustering of Like-Minded America is Tearing Us

Aparti

. Their conclusion, after much sociological and

demographic research, is this: Americans seem to be

sorting themselves, socially and geographically, on

the basis of ideology and political identity. Perhaps

more importantly, their insight was that this kind of

sorting intensifies incivility, solidifies stereotypes, drives

division, and degrades our discourse. In the years

since the book’s publication, the trend has become

clearer and its implications more obvious. Increasingly,

it is possible to live your entire life in a bubble of likemindedness. On its face this may not be such a bad

thing, but the danger of this condition is the extremism

that results from never having to question your

assumptions or broaden your perspective, of living in

a so-called community defined only by unanimity and

uniformity. We have seen the charged rhetoric and even

the violence that such sorting encourages and enables.

This kind of sorting raises a question that people of faith

have been wrestling with for centuries. What kind of

community do we want to build? Where do we draw the

boundary lines of acceptance and inclusion? Perhaps

most to the point: who belongs?

In many ways, this is the question faced by the Apostle

Paul as he sat down and put pen to parchment to draft a

letter to the Christians living in Rome. The congregation

there was like our own congregation, made up of people

from very different backgrounds, believers who were

shaped by strongly held convictions that did not always

align with those of their neighbors in the pews. This is not

breaking news, but you are not currently in a like-minded

bubble. Second Church remains blessedly unsorted.

For Paul, the possibility that those differences might

divide the church and drown out the message of

the gospel was a real and present danger. He knew

that people were looking across the sanctuary with

suspicion. Under their breath or in the parking lot after

worship, they wondered aloud, “Do they belong here

with me? I mean, just look at how they live! Just look at

what they eat! Just look at whom they befriend, where

they come from, how they vote!”

In response to these questions hovering in the air and

the tension that they bring to the surface, Paul responds

with wisdom and passion. Behind those questions, Paul

senses a deeper anxiety at work. And so, Paul responds

with his very best—the Letter to the Romans.

In a time when the Christian faith is often distorted,

when the church is struggling with a sense of identity

and too often capitulates to the forces of division at

work in the world around us, we need to hear again

what mattered most to Paul, and we will find it in the

eighth chapter of Romans. Here, Paul’s words provide

three promises we need.

First, Paul lays out his unshakable faith in the presence

of the Holy Spirit. The Spirit is God’s way of being

present in our lives and available to us, the bridge that

connects us to God, often misidentified as coincidence

or serendipity. Earlier in the chapter, Paul says that

the Spirit of God helps us most when we need it most,

when we are our weakest. Paul writes that the Spirit

intercedes with sighs too deep for words. The Spirit

speaks when our language will not suffice. Have you

heard these sighs of the Spirit? I have heard them.

I’ve heard them in hospital rooms at the bedside of a

dying patient. Sighs too deep for words. I have heard

them from a group of exhausted teenagers on the final

morning of a powerful youth conference. Sighs too deep

for words. Those sighs are the Spirit interceding on

our behalf when words will not come, bringing peace

and comfort in the midst of overwhelming emotion. I

think the Holy Spirit is often disguised as a lump in our

throats, leaving us momentarily mute, quiet so that we

might listen for the voice of God. Paul insists that the

Spirit is present.

For Paul, however, God is not only accessible and

near to us. God is also beyond us, sovereign, powerful,

majestic. Paul uses words in Romans 8 like purpose,

foreknowledge, predestined, and called to describe

this conviction that God is the one in control here. And

this is another word we need to add to the current

Christian conversation because too often, I hear God

described as if the divine were the puppet and we were

the ones pulling the strings. Too often God is enlisted

as a foot soldier in our battles. We call on God to justify

our opinion and perspective. This is not Paul’s picture

of a sovereign God who transcends both our demands

and our expectations. Friends, if you can put your God

in a box, then your God is too small. Or as Presbyterian

author Anne Lamott has brilliantly written, “You can

safely assume that you have created God in your image

when it turns out God hates all the same people you

hate.”ii Paul describes a different God, a God who is

Lord of all—and that means all—before whom we are

called to be humble, reverent, worshipful. We need to

hear that conviction.

God is present and with us. God is powerful and

beyond us.

But earlier, I suggested that Paul sensed a deeper

anxiety behind the accusatory tone and the creeping

division at work in the Roman Church. It is, I think, the

same anxiety that lies behind the big sort driving us

apart as a people and as a nation. Whenever we lash

out at so-called enemies, whenever we belittle those

who are different from us, whenever we lash out in

anger or build walls of separation and cast aspersions

through screens, these actions come from deeply

unsettled places within us. And so, the question Paul

uncovers beneath the divisions that plague the Church

is not “do they belong?” It is “do I belong?” In my

experience as a pastor, the most bitter and resentful

souls are also the least secure, and often the most

wounded. All of us wonder at times, “Is there a place for

me here? Do I belong?”

In response to this existential anxiety, Paul lays out his

deepest conviction, so central that he repeats it again

in the chapter. The conviction is this: that you belong to

God, that there is nothing that can separate you from

God’s love in Jesus Christ. Paul’s repetition discloses his

conviction and also his appreciation for how difficult this

truth can be to internalize and accept.

Some time ago now, I was eating lunch alone on a

Thursday afternoon. This is a rare occasion for me. Just

myself, a brand-new book, and a whole hour stretched

out before me of unscheduled time. Seven minutes

into that hour, the person at the table next to mine

leaned over. “Man, whatever you’re reading must be

good. You’ve hardly looked up from it.” She asked me

about the book that I had been reading, and from there,

the questions just kept coming. Finally, she asked the

question I most dreaded. What do you do for a living?

Before you, my congregation, I confess to considering

my options on this one. But reluctantly, I told her. “Oh,

then I have another question for you!”

Just in case, I tried to remember the five tenets of

Calvinist theology and which Protestant beliefs were

deemed heretical at the 16th Century Council of Trent.

Neither of those topics came up. “Well, she said, “There

is this pastor on TV. He bottles holy water and sends it

out to people who need to get right with God. It’s $29.95.

Now, look. I’ve made some mistakes in my life, and the

truth is I’ve made some big ones. I’ve tried to get my life

together. I go to a church. I read the Bible and pray. But

the preacher on TV says that God asks more, requires

more. I don’t know if I am right with God, and so I’m

thinking about ordering some of the water. Pastor, what

do think?”

What do I think? I think, and I have staked my whole

life on the belief, that Paul was right. That the promise

we proclaim at baptism is true, and that the water of

baptism is the only water we will ever need. That there

is nothing imaginable, including our own brokenness,

that can separate us from the love of God. I think—I am

absolutely convinced—that God’s love for us is stronger

than anything.

But please hear this. If you feel separated from God

by words spoken, mistakes made, abuse endured,

judgment pronounced, opportunities unseized, anger

harbored, forgiveness withheld, doubts that linger…

If you feel separated from God by distance of time or

space… Know this: that whatever aims to separate you

from God is precisely what God intends to overcome, for

God grants nothing the power to keep us from God.

Each Thursday morning for decades now, a group of

men from Shallowford Presbyterian Church down in

Atlanta have gathered at church at the crack of dawn,

prepared breakfast, enjoyed fellowship and good food

together. And then they pray with and for each other,

offering their prayers out loud in turns around the table.

Early in my time as their pastor, before the births of our

two boys shifted my morning routine, I was a regular at

Thursday morning prayer breakfast. And in that setting,

I learned so much about that congregation—about

its foundation and its history, its vision, and the deep

value of relationships that form the heart of the place.

The men’s prayer breakfast story that has impacted me

most was not one that I experienced firsthand but heard

about later. Ted Bayley was among the most visionary

and committed leaders that church had in its first sixty

years. He was also a faithful weekly member of the

men’s prayer breakfast for as long as his health allowed.

Ted suffered for years with dementia and Alzheimer’s

Disease. Week after week, even as he was barely able

to speak, Ted would walk from his house around the

corner to the church to attend the Thursday morning

breakfast. The story is that, after learning his diagnosis,

Ted came one Thursday morning, and at breakfast he

prayed, “Dear God, my memory is failing and I’m afraid.

I’m afraid I won’t recognize my friends before long or

remember their names.” Raw, powerful prayer. Seated

next to Ted, and so the next person to pray, was his dear

friend Ed Carithers, another Shallowford saint and pillar.

Ed grasped Ted’s hand and began his prayer this way,

“Father God, please help Ted to know that even if he

forgets who we are, we will always remember who he

is.” That’s the church I want to build. The community I

want to nurture.

And so, here is the promise we need to hear, to believe,

to trust, and take to heart. God is present in sighs

too deep for words. God is present in sovereign and

powerful love. And you belong to God. No question

marks. No caveats. No exceptions. No matter what.

Amen.