Who then is the one who condemns? No one. Christ Jesus who died—more than that, who was raised to life—is at the right hand of God and is also interceding for us.  Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? …  in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us… nothing in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord. 

(selections from Romans 8:34-39)

This week we come to the end of our Truth That Cuts Through the Noise series with one of the most soaring, magnificent and important passages in all of Scripture, the conclusion of Romans 8.  Nothing -- nothing in heaven or earth, no circumstance, no catastrophe, no disaster -- nothing can separate us from God’s love for us in Christ!

There is a great deal of noise these days about our vulnerability to separation from what we hold most dear.  We live in a time of ticking time bombs and existential threats.  We can be separated from our health, our possessions, our mental acuity, our hopes for the future – we can, by death, be separated from our very lives!  And all by things over which we have little or no control:

Artificial Intelligence/Robot Apocalypses!  Climate change and environmental collapse! Budget deficits and the national debt!  The rise of authoritarianism and totalitarianism and the retreat of democracy!  The GOP!  The Democrats!  Persecution and spiritual warfare!  Drugs, immigration, drought, superstorms, wildfires, wars –

It’s a lot of noise, incessant, relentless, increasing in volume.  Be scared, be very, very scared!  Be angry, very, very angry!

Or rest in the reality that nothing is able to separate us from God’s love in Christ.

And therefore …

We might think that this was the end of Paul’s letter.  After nothing in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord, there really isn’t any more to say, right?

But Paul was only halfway done: there are six more chapters in Romans.  Because we know that nothing can separate us from God’s love in Christ, we are therefore called to live differently.  The world may be going to hell in a handbasket, but we are not to stand to the side and wave, “Bye-bye, World!”  The church is not a lovely cruise ship pulling away from a burning pier, it’s a hospital ship steering toward it.

Because Christ has secured us in his love, Christ calls us, as individuals and as his people, his body, to roll up our sleeves and keep at the Good Work of the Good News: communicating God’s truth and demonstrating God’s love to a world that is increasingly deafened by all those ticking time bombs, scared to death about all those onrushing existential threats.  That wonderful, beautiful, terrified world needs to see that the answers to defusing all those bombs will not come through greater control and smarter management, not through bigger or smaller government, not by smarter and more lethal military might, but by learning how to take up the cross and follow Jesus.  To learn to live according to the Spirit of Christ and not the spirit of the age.  To seek, first, last and always, the Kingdom before which every other kingdom, including ancient Rome and the modern United States of America is but a pretentious, sad counterfeit.

And therefore, nothing can separate us from God’s love in Christ is not the last word. It’s the first word over the rest of life.

And therefore, this week, you can do …?