“Who shall separate us from the love of Christ?”

(Romans 8:35)

The curse of earthly existence is separation. Our lives are made of things and events and people from which we get separated in the course of the years: friends who come into the circle of our acquaintance and affection and then go, separated from us by, or neglect distance, the years; guests who arrive and depart; greetings and farewells; even the wedding vow contemplates this dread separation — “until death do us part”. For this is the nature of our earthly existence. It is composed of things and people to whom we become attached and from whom we get separated.

The ancient Jews and earliest Christians in their apocalyptic writings used as a symbol for separation the ocean, or sea. For them, the sea was something which divides, or separates. The sea with its limitless waves and distant horizons was that which separates, which comes between people who love each other so that they cannot see each others’ faces, hear each others’ voices, clasp each others’ hands. So, St. John, in writing his Apocalypse, pictures Heaven as a place where all those things which have plagued and cursed our earthly life will be no more: death and pain, weeping and sorrow, darkness and separation will be no more. He wrote, “I, John, saw a new Heaven and a new earth, for the first Heaven and the first earth were passed away; and there was no more sea.” — no more separation.

St. Paul tells us that one of the supreme glories he had discovered in the new life he had found in Christ, was that there was nothing which could separate him from the love of Christ. So in his Roman letter he affirms that for the Christian, life here on earth is this much like being in Heaven; there is no separation between us and our God. “Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness or peril, or sword? Nay, in all these things we are more than conquerors through Him that loved us. For I am persuaded, that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

And yet, in spite of Paul’s noble words, in spite of the victories of the saints by the grace of God, the fact remains that sometimes some people do feel separated from God. Christian mystics write of the dark night of the soul which they pass through. Jesus cried from his cross: “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”

A stalwart Christian once asked me when we were studying Romans 8: “If these are the things which Paul says cannot separate us from God: Famine, death, affliction and all those others, what are the things that can and do separate people from God? What are they?”

What St. Paul means, of course, is that there is nothing on God’s part, nothing in the world of events, nothing in the whole universe of created being, that can separate us from the love of God in Christ. The only thing that can separate us from Him is that which arises within a person’s heart or spirit. There are inner alliances, relationships, attachments of human making which can cut God out.

Certainly some of the most distressing things that separate men and women here are mental and spiritual realities. Nothing in the outside world, but all within. What can give you more genuine pleasure than meeting with an old friend after a long separation and immediately falling into comfortable conversation about people, incidents, ideas; and finding the old lines of communication there unbroken? We go away from such an encounter saying: “Why we just took up where we left off years ago. He is unchanged. Wasn’t it wonderful?” But by the same token, what is more heart-breaking than to be living side by side with someone dear to you and feel the slow, steady, upward thrust of an impenetrable psychological or moral wall between you? Though physically together, you find yourselves drifting apart. Something is separating you. Alien interests, affections, divergent systems of value emerge. The old understanding, that used to be sealed with nothing more than a slight smile or a look across a crowded room, is gone. You are separated in a way more horrible than distance could ever accomplish. Ships can cross the widest ocean, motor cars can devour the miles, and planes can circle the globe, but one soul separated morally and spiritually from another can beat its wings in vain against that unshatterable barrier.

So is it also in our relationship with God.

The theologians have always considered pride the basic human sin and therefore the most damaging to mankind, because of its disastrous effect in separating the human soul from God. For pride in a human heart is that inner spiritual reality that rises to push God off His rightful throne. “Every man would like to be God,” wrote Bertrand Russell, “if it were possible; and some few find it difficult to admit the impossibility.” And Meister Eckert, the Reformation era mystic, said: “We who are not the center of the universe, nevertheless seek to make ourselves the center of the universe.” We would try, if we could, to make other people and institutions, and events serve our whims and selfish interests. This is “pride” or as the ancient Greeks called it “X$DÊl,”. It is a devastating separator of the human soul from God, because it tempts and leads men and women to usurp God’s place, to play at being God. And of course, the inevitable result is that it deprives the God-pretender of all the spiritual graces God wants every creature of His to have, and which he could have, if his pride had not gotten in his way.

The theologians have divided human pride into many categories: there is pride of power, plaguing politicians, business executives, labor leaders, and parents. There is pride of knowledge dogging scholars, professional people and all folks who had rather be right about what they know or think than to be president. There is pride of virtue, the pitfall of saints, and prelates, and preachers and every pious person. There is the pride of possessions, of wealth, of all things we call ourselves owning during our brief earthly tenure. Pride tempts us all. We all step out of our true character as creatures of an Omnipotent Creator, and the inevitable result of our pride is separation from God.

Then, too, with some of us, getting separated from God is just a matter of our overcrowding, of filling our days and thoughts with such a variety of other interests that there is left very little time for God. Is this what is separating us from God? Is it our slowly changing scale of values, our cluttering our days and weeks with relationships to people and things which do not belong to His Kingdom? It’s not that these are evil in themselves, but our use of them is not to God’s glory, so our souls are not being enriched by God’s grace. Remember the advice of Screwtape to his junior demon, Wormwood, about how to tempt his human assignment to that one’s destruction: “Murder”, says Screwtape, “murder is no better than cards, if cards can do the trick. The only thing that matters is that you edge the man away from the light out into nothing.”

A mother, lamenting the influences of our high pressure culture spoke of what she felt to be the greatest threat to our young people’s development — namely the over-stimulation of their desires by advertising, by pornography and violence, by the customs and tastes of their peers, until they believe fulfillment for their lives consists in crowding their moments with the experience thrust in upon them.

Once John Wesley’s father, Samuel, was returning home from a call on a sick parishioner who lived across town. Someone came rushing up to tell him that his house was on fire. Old Samuel Wesley’s heart leaped to his throat. His precious family and all his earthly possessions were in jeopardy. In the old man’s diary there is this entry about the tragedy: “As I was returning they brought me the news. I got a horse, rode up, and heard by the way that my wife, children, and books were saved: for which God be praised, as well as for what He has taken.” So much for old Samuel Wesley’s thoughts. How much better off so many of us would be if a great amount of the clutter of our lives were burned out, or blown away. Then we could be in a more responsive mood to praise God for what remains.

But there are some people who are feeling separated from God because they have so fouled up their relationships with other persons that God can’t stay in there with them. It is true that we need to save some time when we can be still and know who God is. But religion is more than what Professor Whitehead defined it as: “What the individual does with his solitariness.” We do not stand in a solitary relationship with God alone. Herbert Farmer has pointed out that what makes human beings human is the personal relationship each of us has with God, but our religious life includes not only our acceptance of this personal relationship with God, but ^ our acceptance of other persons, men, women and children, as on an equal footing with us before God.

The Biblical tragedy of King Saul is a story of broken relationships. Saul fell out with and broke off with his heroic young friend, David, when David’s loyalty and courage won such popular acclaim as to make Saul jealous. Saul fell out and broke off with his old friend and counselor, Samuel, when Samuel rebuked his folly and disobedience to the commands of God. Saul fell out with his son, Jonathan and his daughter, Michal, and in the end he found he had separated himself from God. On the eve of the most crucial battle of his life, the scripture tells us, Saul inquired of the Lord concerning the coming conflict, and the Lord answered him not a word. So intimately connected are our human and divine relationships that we cannot violate the one without endangering the other.

St. John asks us how can anyone “who loves not his brother whom he has seen, love God whom he has not seen?” Jesus himself counsels us that if we come to church bringing our gifts and ourselves for worship and remember that any fellow man or woman has any difference with us, we are to stop short, go, seek out our brother or sister, be reconciled with them, and then come, offer our gifts and ourselves in worship.

“Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, distress, persecution … peril … or anything else? Nay, in all these things we are more than conquerors through Him that loved us.” Shall such as we, then, allow the passing fancies of our inconstant hearts, or the silly differences which embroil us with our brothers and sisters, or the proud vain nothingness of our little day of power, to separate us from Him who has promised never to leave us or forsake us so long as the world stands?

“Now unto Him that is able to keep us from falling, and to present us faultless before the presence of His glory with exceeding joy, to the only wise God our Savior, be glory and majesty, dominion and power, both now and forever. Amen.”