Our super-power

Reflection for morning worship with the Community of Brendan the Navigator on Tuesday 9th July 2024

Today, I think most of us feel afraid

We are fearful for what can seem like a threatening, dangerous future. I shan’t spell out the names of my own fears. We each know what we personally fear, though we don’t necessarily agree on it. It would be so very easy, wouldn’t it, to let ourselves be overwhelmed by pessimism, to feel the future is hopeless? But that would immobilise us. That would prevent us from responding to the real dangers we face. And that would make the bad outcomes we dread more likely.

That is not how we as Christians are called to behave. The future is not hopeless. God has given us a great gift of hope, hope in the love of God in Christ Jesus, our Lord. And surely we must share this gift of hope with others, who may not share our faith, but badly need our hope.

The ground of our hope is our Christian belief that nothing, nothing whatsoever, can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus.

Paul expresses this belief compellingly in the reading we’ve just heard (Romans 8:31-39):

·         ‘If God is for us, who is against us?’, asks Paul rhetorically, answering that God has proved he is for us by giving up his own Son for our sake.

·         ‘Who will separate us from the love of Christ?’, asks Paul again rhetorically, answering that the risen Christ Jesus intercedes for us at God’s right hand.

·         So Paul declares, ‘I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.’

These are beautiful, encouraging and reassuring words, aren’t they?

If we share Paul’s conviction that nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus, then like him we too must live in hope. Our hope becomes our super-power, with life-changing implications:

·       Because we believe that God loves us, we live in hope.

·       Because we live in hope, we do not fear the future, no matter how dangerous it may seem.

·       Because we do not fear the future, we have the confidence to work to make our world a better place, in other words, to work for God’s kingdom.

This poses a great question to each one of us – and to us all as a body, as Christ’s body the Church. The question is this: What am I going to do, what are we going to do together, to make God’s kingdom a living reality?

We do not fear. We hope. We are convinced that nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. This is our super-power.