This is a sermon that I preached on Sunday, 03/08/26, at Berkeley Friends Church. The scripture reading for this sermon was:
Romans 5:1-11.
I’ve got a good friend who is a very mild mannered, polite, and respectful guy. But when he gets into traffic he gets very frustrated, to the degree that it can seem out of character. I understand it, though. He has a tough time keeping his cool with the behavior of some drivers out there. To remind himself that he needs to check his attitude and chill out, he likes to say that he’s not in traffic; he istraffic. This is sort of a motto for him: You’re not in traffic; you are traffic.
When we’re driving along and we see bad behavior on the road and we get upset, maybe sometimes we feel a little judgmental of people who are doing bad things on the road. And the irony is that it’s pretty likely that we ourselves have done some things that are questionable on the road recently. It’s very likely that someone else has looked at us and gotten upset at our driving.
I’m sure this doesn’t apply to you, but I know there have definitely been times on the road when I have been the traffic. I remember being behind another car at an intersection and the car had stopped and the light was green and I really wanted to go and the car just sat there for what felt like way too long. Why weren’t they going? Eventually, I frustrated enough that I start honking. It’s right then – just as I start honking – that I see them: a group of people in the crosswalk, approaching the other side of the street. I realized that this car was stopped out of courtesy, so that it wouldn’t run over the pedestrians in the crosswalk. And here I was, laying on the horn.
Oops.
In times like these, I have to look at myself honestly and consider: Am I the baddie? And when I take this question seriously, the answer is very clear: Yes, of course I am. I am the problem. I lose my temper. I make mistakes. I do the wrong thing. I hurt other people. I’m not in traffic; I am traffic.
This is a hard thing to accept. It’s heavy to realize that other people judge me and that their judgment is sometimes fair. It’s challenging to realize that, far more often than I even realize, I’m the one who’s in the wrong.
It’s not easy to accept this, but when I do, my whole life starts making a lot more sense. I think about all those people in my life that I see who are making bad decisions, who are getting in my way, who are frustrating me, who are even hurting me. And I see that I’m no different. I’m no better. And yet, in spite of all the ways, I’ve chosen to be selfish, and short sighted, and mean. In spite of all this, God loves me.
It doesn’t make any sense! Given who I am and what I’ve done and what a flawed person I am and how much I get on people’s nerves. God still loves me. This is amazing.
But realizing that God miraculously loves me is, at best, half the journey. The real brain-exploding realization is that God loves all those people who I hate. God loves the people who have harmed me and have done me wrong. The people who have hurt my friends. My enemies. Evildoers. Think of the person you most despise: God loves them, just like he loves you. In spite of everything.
That’s pretty amazing. It’s destabilizing. Because if God loves the people who most bother me, if God loves my enemies, that means I don’t get to hate them, do I? And God loves me in spite of me being just like them. God is pouring out so much love on me that if I want to receive it I have to let it flow through me onto all these frustrating, dangerous, threatening people whom God also loves.
This is exactly what God has done for us in Jesus. Paul writes in the fifth chapter of his letter to the Romans that, “God proves his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” He says that, “while we were enemies, we were reconciled to God through the death of his son.” It’s through him we’ve been reconciled to God. We will be saved by his life.
When I think about the people who annoy me, when I think about the people in traffic who get in my way, when I think about my enemies who have it out for me and want to hurt me – none of that really compares to what happened to Jesus on the cross. I think I’ve got enemies but compared to Jesus, wow, my enemies are pretty mild. Jesus’s enemies were the Jewish religious authorities, and the people, and the government of Rome, the greatest empire that had ever existed up until that time. Jesus took the full weight of humanity’s hatred and bore it – and in bearing it, he loved us.
The love of God that we find in Jesus is wondrous, unspeakable, unimaginable. Paul says, “Indeed, rarely will anyone die for a righteous person, though perhaps for a good person someone might actually dare to die. But God proves his love for us, and that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.”
It’s impossible to imagine the depth and breadth and height and power of God’s love, but we do have a pretty good metaphor for it, to try to wrap our heads around it. That metaphor we receive from scripture is that of a father and a son, a parent and a child. While there are a lot of unhealthy and dysfunctional family relationships out there, I think it’s fair to say that good fathers and a good mothers love their children unconditionally. It doesn’t matter what they’ve done. Their parents will always love them, always seek the best for them.
And let me tell you, as a father of four children, I screw up all the time. I am not always the best father. To say that I am deeply imperfect is an understatement. But God isn’t. God is the perfect father. God is the perfect parent for all of us.
So when we imagine God, we must imagine a parent who is seeing their child, their little four-year-old child, run into the street, into busy traffic. And maybe that child was being ridiculous. Maybe that child was being rebellious and disobedient when they ran to the street. Maybe the child was screaming and yelling about something that they were upset about. Maybe they were making a scene. Maybe they were being absolutely aggravating to their mom or dad.
But when we imagine a good father, when we imagine the kind of father who’s the father of our Lord Jesus, when we imagine that father, there’s no doubt in our minds what happens next.
I was in a conversation at work recently over lunch, and we were talking about a movie where at the end of the movie, everybody dies because a comet hits the Earth. And that led us in our conversation to talk about, what we would do if we knew the world was ending. If everything was ending, if it was all about to go up in flames, what would you do? How would you even handle that? What would your last actions be?
For the two of us at the table who were fathers, the answer was completely obvious and instant and without reflection. We just looked at each other and said, obviously we would just be pouring out our love on our children. That’s all we would be doing. That’s all that would matter.
That instinct, that absolute unquestioning love of a parent for their child is the kind of love that we experience in our God.
We know what God’s going to do when he sees us running out into busy traffic and our life is at stake. We know what our good father is going to do. He’s going to run right out into the middle of the road. He’s going to put his body between us and the cars. And if he needs to die to protect us, that is 100% what’s going to happen.
I know in the biblical story Jesus is the Son and God is the Father, but in some ways the metaphor breaks down. In his life and sacrifice on the cross, Jesus was being a parent to us. He was running out to that busy street. He was putting his body in between us and the traffic.
Of course, we aren’t just out standing in the traffic. We are the traffic. We are the danger. Jesus put his body in the middle of the road. He covered us with his blood so that traffic would hit him instead of us. That’s what the love of God looks like. Absolute. Unconditional. Like a good parent for a little child.
It’s easy to lose sight of this. When we get our image of God-as-father wrong, we tend to do so in one of two directions. Some churches veer into a vision of a God who is so consumed with fury at our sin that the cross becomes primarily about satisfying divine anger – as if Jesus had to die so that God would calm down and love us again. On the other hand, there are churches that want to speak only of love, with no acknowledgement of what we’ve done and how dire our situation is. But a parent who sees their child in the road and says, “everything’s fine” isn’t loving at all. Neither of these sounds like the perfect father we meet in Jesus.
In Paul’s letter to the Romans, we find a truer vision of who our heavenly father is. He writes that God loves us more than we can imagine, but the situation is not okay. We are not OK. God sent Jesus into the world to save us, because we desperately need rescuing.
So God chose take extreme measure to save us, up to and including being hit by traffic on the cross. But God isn’t angry with us in the way that I get angry with someone who cuts me off on the highway. He’s not annoyed with us in the way that I get impatient with someone who’s taking too long checking out at the grocery store.
God is absolutely furious, but he’s not furious at us. He is furious in the way a father or a mother is furious when they are pumped with adrenaline and racing into the street to save their little child who is about to be hit by a car. And let me tell you, a parent who in that situation is a wild animal with rage. They will do anything to protect that little boy or girl.
That’s what the love of God looks like. That’s what the cross of Jesus means. That is the unconditional, absolute, powerful love that we are called to embody, “because the God’s love has been poured into our hearts, through the Holy Spirit that’s been given to us.”
We’re in a mess. There’s no doubt about that. We’re standing out in the middle of the street facing oncoming traffic. And we are the traffic. There’s no two ways about it: it’s going to be a mess getting out of this situation in one piece. But our father is here now, and he’s putting his body between us and the threat.
That doesn’t mean there’s not going to be any more problems. That does not mean everything is going to go well for us all the time. We are not out of the woods yet. But because of the unshakeable love that we have found in Jesus, we can say with Paul that “we boast in our hope of sharing the glory of God… knowing that suffering produces endurance and endurance produces character and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.”