Sermon for Sunday, 18 June 2023, St Peter’s Bramley. Romans 5:1-8
Earlier this week, I was scrolling through social media – and yes, it can be a waste of time, but it also brings up some unexpected gems. I came across this story, which seems appropriate in this week of the Special Olympics, when we celebrate the sporting achievements of people with disabilities.
It concerned a parent. Her daughter enjoyed basketball and wanted to excel at it. There were just two small problems, if you’ll pardon the pun: the girl was very short, and also partially blind. Now as we all know, basketball players tend to be tall, because it’s easier to get the ball in the basket. They also need great eyesight for the hand-eye co-ordination to judge the throw just right. So that was a challenge. But her mother did everything she could to get her daughter onto a basketball team.
You can imagine the pride in the mother’s heart when she stood on the sidelines watching her daughter play a competitive match with her team for the first time. But then she heard the comments that other parents were making: ‘Who let that girl on the pitch?’ ‘She’ll be no good, she’s too small’. ‘She keeps missing the net!’ Despite this, the mother refused to answer the critics and continued to cheer her daughter on.
On this Father’s Day, let’s think about the relationship between ourselves and God with the imagery of the parent-child relationship that the Bible often uses. Jesus constantly referred to God the creator as ‘my father’ and told us to pray to ‘our father in heaven’. Today’s passage from Romans tells us three ways in which God, as our heavenly Father, relates to us in the same way as the best human parents relate to their children – only more so.
Firstly, God is a proud parent. Unless there’s something seriously wrong in the family relationship, all parents express pride in their children from the very start, and in a way that doesn’t depend on the children’s successes and failures. My own father died relatively young, and had been unwell for some time following a stroke that left him with very little speech. But after his death, my mother told me that one of the last things he said to her was, “I’m so proud of all our children”.
We can also see that in the story I quoted. The mother was proud of the fact that her daughter had made it onto the basketball team. It didn’t matter at that moment that she wasn’t scoring points, what mattered was it was her daughter out theredoing what she loved. Parents who are proud of their kids will boast about the fact to other people. And because of that pride, they do want the best for their children, whatever the cost. In the same way, we mean so much to our heavenly Father, whatever our shortcomings, that he is proud of each of us, and wants each and very one of us to be the best people that we can. In fact he boasts of us.
‘Boasting’ is a word that Paul uses several times in the letter to the Romans. He uses it to make a distinction between the good sort of boasting – that celebrates goodness in other people – and the bad sort that’s all about seeking glory for ourselves. He uses it twice in this short passage, firstly to say that because we stand in the grace of God, we can boast about sharing in the glory of God. What can give me the confidence to say that I stand in the grace of God and boast about sharing his glory? Nothing that I’ve done, only this: that I know God is proud of me as he is of all his sons and daughters, each of us differently unique as we are.
Secondly, God is a patient parent. That girl who made it onto the basketball team – she clearly wan’t going to be a star overnight. Her height and disability meant it would take extra effort and time to become good at her sport. But her mum was behind her all the way, and the coach obviously believed in her potential as well, to have let her on to the team.
The second time Paul uses the word ‘boast’ here, always strikes me as strange: he says we can ‘boast in our sufferings’ (or our ‘troubles’ or ‘tribulations’ depending which Bible translation you have). The patience of God means that he will work with us, whatever sufferings we experience. That may include physical limitations and mental health, our difficult backgrounds and failed relationships.
‘While we were weak’, Paul writes, (some translations say ‘helpless’), ‘Christ died for us’. Or as it says in our gospel reading today, ‘When Jesus saw the crowds, he had compassion for them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd’. Whatever may make you feel weak, harassed and helpless, for that very reason Christ died for you.
But boasting in weakness and suffering? It doesn’t make sense until you read the rest of the sentence: ‘for suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope’. Like the parent who was willing to support her daughter in battling against the odds to become a good basketball player, God longs to work in and through us, to bring about virtues of endurance, strong character and hopefulness.
That’s what we can boast in – not the fact that we suffer, but that our patient Father is with us for the long haul to help us overcome our sufferings and reach the position where we can confidently hope in the glory of God. There will be setbacks – times when the ball misses the net, times when we experience injury or criticism – but none of that stops God’s patience from working itself out in our lives.
If you heard Jon Swales preach last week, you may remember he talked about fast miracles and slow miracles: people who come to faith instantly, and others whose faith grows slowly over many years. It’s the same principle: ‘Christ died for the ungodly’ refers to what happened on one day when he was crucified; but the progression that enables us to grow from our weak, helpless and troubled state to full maturity of faith in Christ may take many years. As one commentary puts it, ‘salvation is a healing process’.
Thirdly, God is a provident parent. Verse 5: ‘Hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.’ That basketball mother provided for her child: she obviously provided the sports kit, but more importantly she came along to watch, to cheer her on despite the unfair criticism of other parents, to provide the encouragement that we all need when we engage in a difficult task. A proud and patient parent will provide everything their child needs to become a success, whatever the cost to themselves.
What God provides for us is the Holy Spirit, God himself poured out into our hearts. That phrase ‘poured out’ implies something extravagant and overly generous, like the woman who poured all her perfume over Jesus’ feet without counting the cost. Elsewhere in Paul’s letters he lists nine fruits of the Spirit, ways that all of us can expect to be changed as he is poured out into us: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. Just the sort of qualities any parent might wish their child to display, but our provident Father offers all of them to each one of us.
So we have seen in these few verses the different ways that God shows himself to be the perfect parent to all of us – the proud parent, the patient parent and the provident parent. May all of us experience this grace of God in our own lives today. And to those of you who are parents, grandparents, carers or who have the chance to be an influence in anyone else’s life, may God by his Spirit pour these qualities into your life as well. Amen.
