When Prayer Fails and Hope is Kindled - Romans 8:26-39

Most mornings, after coffee and some time reading, I find my way to our family laptop and crack open the lid.  I’m drawn to it, but there’s also a sense of dread as I click the browser and head for the news.  War, disaster, unnerving heatwaves, children gunned down in their schools—what’s there to say in the face of all that?  How could I even begin to pray about such things?

Then there are the emails, and text messages, some of them carrying news of more mundane tragedies and closer griefs.  A child plagued by anxiety, a father of young children dying of a painful cancer, the sudden loss of a friend who gave in to despair.  And in all of it, I’m left speechless.

So it is that later in the morning, more days than not, when I go to the shed in my backyard to pray, I find myself lighting a candle and just sitting before God in silence.

In our reading from Romans, we learn that God welcomes that silence.  It is in my inability to speak, the weakness of my words, the seeming failure of my prayers, that the Spirit moves into my heart, hearing its hope and grief, and offering my deepest self to God.  The Spirit shares in the loss of words, speaking only in sighs, and yet the Spirit’s groaning on our behalf is understood by God. When we no longer know what to say, the gate to our deepest prayers is opened. 

 But it is hard to us to wait through that quiet; it is difficult to let the Spirit work down through our unspeakable grief.  All too often we leave the silence of our heart and jump to just saying something, anything to break the tension.  We want some magic sentence that will make it all better, for ourselves and those we love, and Paul’s next words are often what we reach for: “All things work together for good.”  By which we mean, “Cheer up, God’s got it under control.”  Has such a sentiment ever been a comfort to you in the face of unspeakable suffering?  Probably not. And given that Paul was just telling us that the Spirit shares with us in our grief, that God is with us in our suffering, maybe we’ve misheard what Paul is saying here. 

We know that in all things God works for good with those who love God…

Do you hear the difference in this translation?  Here we don’t have a promise that all things work together for good; a pat on the back in the face of grief and loss.  Instead, in this fuller rendering of the Greek, we find God working for good with us.  As the scholars Brian Walsh and Sylvia Keesmaat put it, “in the face of being rendered utterly wordless, followers of Jesus don’t grasp for cheap words and easy comfort but get busy in paths of redemption.”  God is working toward good in all things, especially those unspeakable things for which we have no words, and God calls on those who love him to join in the work of bringing that goodness into reality in all of the places where creation groans and people suffer.

We get “busy on the paths of redemption,” not by developing some new social program or political solution.  Instead, Paul tells us that the aim and purpose of our lives is to become like Jesus.  Jesus, who loved the world, healed the sick, taught a kingdom that was worth giving everything, even your life, to possess—it is in imitation of him that we fulfill our greatest call.  It is in imitation of Jesus, that the new society and politics of God’s reign begin to show up even now.  It is through becoming like Jesus that the hope of a new creation begins to be realized.

There is a saying that Hope has two beautiful daughters: Anger and Courage.  Anger at the way things are and Courage to change them.  As our lives are brought into the life of the Spirit, called to work with God for good in all things, we find that we can now live into the world, whatever it throws at us, with a new courage.  Our grief can spark holy rage, but resting in God’s love we are empowered to act without bitterness—courageously facing all obstacles knowing that God is with us.  It is with that courage that we are called to bring the hope of Christ, a hope we know will not save us from suffering, but will instead help us overcome it through the power of God’s love.

There is no power, no thing in all the world, that can keep us from God’s love.  Paul gives us a long list of the possibilities, dismissing them all.  Neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities…And we are invited to think, what are the things we would add to the list?  What are those obstacles in our life that seem insurmountable?  Paul invites us to say with him: Neither the loss of work, nor the death of a spouse, nor the struggle of addiction, nor the pain of past wounds, nor the neglect we experienced as children, nor the loved ones who abandoned us…fill in the blank with whatever is in your heart—none of it can separate us from God’s love. It is in all and through all and it is the most powerful reality in all the world.

Under the power of God’s love, we may still open the laptop in the morning with a sense of dread, we may still wake up at 2 a.m. with the worries of our days creeping into the night.  We may still experience the seeming failure of our prayers in the face of all the world throws at us.  But in these words of scripture, penned 2,000 years ago by a man who had experienced no shortage of loss and grief, we can hear the assurance that we do not go alone. God is with us, in our hearts and in our grief, in our hope and in our love.  God is working with us, in the face of the Unspeakable, to do the work of good.  And in the end, God’s love will overcome all, swallowing the darkness in its light. Go then, in courage and boldness, to show the world that there is a new creation and in your life it has already begun. Amen.