L.D. 13, Romans 8:1-17 "The Lord's Love" Scott Hoezee

Over the last few years I've been part of a wonderful group that gets together a couple of times a year. There's about fifteen people in the group with about an equal mix of men and women. But there is quite a range of ages. Some are in their sixties and nearing retirement, a few are mid-career folks in their forties, and the youngest are those who graduated from college recently and currently attend grad schools or are just beginning their careers. Whenever we get together, we spend some time filling each other in on what's been happening in our lives since we last met. Interestingly enough, if one pays attention to what is said, generational differences emerge quite clearly.

Those who are a bit older talk a lot about their work and how things have changed over the years. They also throw in a delightful smattering of grandchildren stories. The mid-career people also mention work but tend to spend more time talking about their own children as these kids leave the nest, move out into the world, and sometimes also have real difficulties in college--hardships that burden parents. But when it comes to those in their twenties, they talk about personal experience and, more specifically yet, what varied experiences teach them about themselves. So a typical comment might be along the lines of, "Recently I did this and that and I learned a lot about myself along the way."

Recently I mentioned a speech I heard by author Craig Barnes. Barnes spoke about the differences of outlook from his grandparents' generation to the current generation of high school and college-age folks. In terms of identity, he claimed that people who were born in the early twentieth century were very settled in terms of how they viewed themselves. Identity was something you inherited. You just assumed that you'd grow up to live and think in ways pretty similar to your parents. This generation had a deep attachment to home, to a very specific place where they put down roots.

The next generation were people who started careers and families in the 1950s. If the earlier generation were "settlers" in the sense of having a settled sense of identity and place, the folks in the 1950s were "exiles." The G.I. Bill had let millions of people go to college and pursue careers very different from their parents. They still had a sense for home but felt exiled from it as they built a new life in the new thing called the suburbs. For them identity was defined by work and volunteering. The 1950s was when women had more time on their hands due to labor-saving devices like electric dishwashers. So they began to form lots of guilds like the "Helping Hand Society"--organizations which have been fading away the last twenty years as many families have both spouses working outside the home now.

But the current generation of high school and college-age people Barnes calls "nomads." Few young people today have anything like an ancestral home. The world of you young people is more fluid and fast-moving. A college student today is likely to attend a school far away from wherever Mom and Dad are currently living. From that university in another state, the student may well spend a semester in England in the course of which she may take a weekend away to visit Paris where she may grab some cappuccino at an Internet cafe from which she will send an email to her best friend who is spending the semester studying in Brazil. Such freedom of movement, such great distances across which friendships are spanned would have been unimaginable to people fifty years ago.

But Barnes' point is that this generation believes that identity cannot simply be handed down to a person and may not be tied to vocation or career. Instead identity needs to be discovered. What's more, the best way to discover identity is through experience. But in order to have lots of different experiences, you need freedom to explore. You must be untethered from restrictive structures and rules so as to uncover the truth by trial and error, all the while seeing what this or that new experience has to teach you about yourself.

All of which is a long set-up for the dual focus of today's sermon. This morning I want us to think about two closely related themes: one is what it means to be children of God; the other is what it means to live under the Lordship of Jesus. Here in church we tend to throw this terminology around pretty casually. We say "Praise the Lord!" easily enough, maybe not even realizing that outside of a worship service you don't encounter the concept of lordship anywhere else in life. Similarly, we talk about being children of God without realizing that in some places of society, you may well run across people who would not at all like being designated a child, not even a child of God.

Think of it this way: I won't ask for a show of hands, but I would guess that at least some of you young people leading our service this morning have at one time or another said to your parents things like, "Hey, I'm not a child, mother!" Or, "Why don't you trust me more, dad!? I'm not a little kid anymore, you know!" Or, "You can't always tell me what to do. You don't own me!" Sound familiar?

Psychologists tell us that young people spend a good bit of their energy emancipating themselves from their home of origin. Growing up, we want to spread our wings, leave the nest, prove our independence. So we keep pushing out the boundaries. First you can't go anywhere without one of your parents along. If there is a school skating party, mom or dad hang around the rink. But then you get old enough where they drop you off at the rink for a few hours with your friends. Then maybe they start to drop you off at the mall, leaving you unsupervised for hours. Then you get your license and so have the freedom to be out and about without any help from mom and dad (except for maybe saying as you head out the door, "Can I have some money?"). And then you move out of the house altogether.

When you combine all that with what I said about the nomad generation and its desire to discover identity through having personal experiences, you maybe start to understand why at least some people today would not be happy to be told that over against God, they are children. Some today won't be pleased to hear that being a Christian means having a Lord and, what's more, that a Lord is kind of like a nanny who follows you around everywhere you go and who always has something to say about what is and what is not allowed. If Jesus is your Lord, you cannot say, "You don't own me!" because he does. If God is your Father, then you can't say to God, "I'm not a child, you know!" because you are.

In a society where we are told loudly that no one may tell a woman what she may or may not do with her own body; in a society where instant gratification is prized; in a society where we have advocacy groups for just about every kind of desire or lifestyle you can think of, Lordship can be a tough sell. Yet in Romans 8, where Paul so clearly spells out why Jesus is Lord and how we are children of God, there can be no doubting that Paul saw all of this as a glorious, joyous reality.

Why did Paul find happiness in the idea of being owned by Somebody? Because Paul knew what people today too often forget. You see, Paul knew that no matter what you do in life, the fact is that every human being is a slave. We all serve someone or something and there is no getting around it. So for Paul the question was not, "Do you have a master?" but rather, "Who is your master?" We have within us what John Calvin called the seed of religion, or maybe better said, the seed of religiousness. We have a hankering to worship, to serve, to be devoted to something with a fervor that is properly described as religious. So the question becomes, "Who is your lord?"

Of course, if you asked that question, lots of people would say they have no lord, no master to whom they are answerable. But it's not true. Look how furiously some people pursue pleasure. Whether it's the pleasure found in sexuality, the pleasure found in having a top-notch home theater system, the pleasure found in eating delicious food, or the pleasure of having a heavy-duty off-road experience as you take your Land Rover out for a spin, many people orient their lives around securing the tools needed to have fun. As a song that was popular when I was in college put it, "Everybody's working for the weekend." Pleasure can be a lord, and for many it is the lord around whom their lives are oriented.

Or look at that cadre of sixteen handsome and beautiful and talented folks who recently captured the nation's attention on The Apprentice. Even if you loved that show, can you look at those highly driven people who live tethered to their cellphones and honestly deny that they are serving some sort of lord with a zeal that is religious in nature? Over 200,000 people applied to get on that first round of The Apprentice and a similar number is lining up for round two. What do you suppose would happen, even in a place as huge as New York City, if every one of those same people devoted the same amount of time and energy to promoting the cause of Jesus through working in homeless shelters, soup kitchens, AIDS clinics, and after-school Bible programs? My guess is they would do a tremendous amount of good for the city. If they poured that much energy into spiritual projects, no one would hesitate to call that religious zeal. So why can't we spy the religious-like nature of pursuing the goal of impressing Donald Trump? What finally is the difference? We're fooling ourselves if we think only religious people serve a Lord but business types do not.

Paul saw no difference. The only difference is in the nature of the lord who holds you in slavery. Outside of Jesus, you will all-but inevitably be a slave of sinful desires--goals and dreams that Paul claims lead only to death. There is nothing you can desire in this world that can prevent you from dying. Whether your life's ambition is money, fame, success, a certain kind of house or car, travel, or whatever, even if you get what you aim for, it cannot do you any lasting good. It's a dead end because life is a dead end.

At the Faith & Writing Festival two weeks ago I heard Thomas Lynch speak. Lynch is a mortician from the other side of the state who has written about the silliness and spiritual emptiness of a lot of what goes on in the funeral industry these days. At one point in his speech he highlighted the items being offered now in the latest edition of a casket company's catalog. The big thing lately has been theme funerals. So for the avid golfer, you can purchase an array of funerary items to transform the funeral home into a golf course theme replete with an artificial putting green and a refreshment area designed to look like the 19^th hole bar that can be found in most golf clubhouses. Lynch even had with him an urn to hold a cremated body's ashes and the urn was an exact mini-replica of a golf bag.

The funerals that utilize such silliness treat death as no more than a chance to play uninterrupted rounds of golf. But it's just a denial of death. Indeed, more and more "funerals" today take place without any casket in site. But as Lynch says, that's like having a wedding without a bride or an infant baptism without a baby present. We're papering over the reality of death by denying that the things many people pursue the most fervently in life do not, as a matter of fact, have any impact beyond the grave. If perfecting your backswing or mastering the latest Nintendo game was your highest goal in life, then the God you meet after your death--the God who created every last one of us for so much more than just fun and games--may very well have some things to say you won't like hearing one bit.

Everybody serves some lord. The question is which one. Paul says that only one Lord leads to life, and his name is Jesus. All the other masters people serve stop dead the moment your heart gives out (and some of them don't even make it that far). Only Jesus gives us true freedom to become all that we were created to be. Only Jesus sets us free from the traps we set for ourselves when we make money or sex or success the be-all and end-all of our lives. And do you know why that is? Do you know why having Jesus as the boss of your life is good news even though he does indeed have something to say about everything you do? Paul knew the reason and here it is: because he loves you.

Jesus loves you the same as he loves this whole creation. Because he loves the creation he made, he knows best how everything is supposed to work. Because he loves you, he wants you to fit into this creation in ways that won't hurt you. You see, when Jesus is your Lord and when you are content to be a child of Jesus' Father, you don't mind taking direction from your Father and your Lord because you know they have your best interests at heart. When Jesus as your Lord tells you not to do something, you know it's for the same reason your mom once stopped you from sticking a fork in the electrical outlet: it's dumb and you're going to get hurt. When God your Father suggests you try something, you know it's kind of like the time your dad handed you a package and said, "Open it!" He knew there was a wonderful present inside and was eager to see you enjoy it.

Jesus is your Lord and that's good news because he loves you. And the proof of that love is symbolized in the largest single item this church has on display: the cross. Jesus became your Lord when he bought you, body and soul. He bought you with the most costly commodity in the universe, and that was his own blood shed on the cross. Ever since then, he's been watching out for you. That's what a loving Lord does.

You young people are so precious to us. But you're growing up in a dangerous world, and sometimes it gives us parents and grandparents the willies, to be honest. It's a dangerous world not just because of terrorism and war and all the rest. It's also dangerous because there are such enormous pressures on you to look for your life's meaning in ways that might well make you forget that the meaning of your life is already being held in the hands of a Lord and a Father who love you.

The truth about ourselves and our lives comes to us only when we live knowing that we are owned by a Lord who has already given us a Word called the Bible that sets boundaries and establishes a sacred story in which we need to fit ourselves very comfortably. Personal freedom does not end when you do that, as many in this world will tell you. Instead, and as Paul says in Romans 8, when you give yourself over to Jesus as your Lord, you discover a freedom and a joy so powerful, you know it is going to last forever.

Because then you start to think God's thoughts after him. You start wishing for the same things God wants. And the moment that happens, you are saved. Because the moment God's hopes become your hopes, you know you cannot lose. Because the dreams of God are more real than our waking reality. When God's dreams become your dreams, you know that not even death can end the dream.

In fact, maybe it is only in the sleep of death that you enter the dream of God and so find a new creation more substantial, more real, more joyfully wonderful than . . . well, than you could have ever dreamed all on your own. But when Jesus is your Lord and when God is your Father, sooner or later you find that dreams do come true. When someone loves you the way Christ Jesus the Lord does, then the best things of heaven and earth are no dream--they are a promise. And God always keeps his promises. That's why no matter how old or how young you are this morning, I beg you to stick with the Lord who claims you as his own. Being owned by Jesus, being his slave, is not a bummer, not a restriction, not a crimping of your personal style. It is life and love. And you can't do better than that. In Christ our Lord, Amen.