More Than Conquerors: A Sermon on Twilight

Romans 8:31-37

What then are we to say about these things? If God is for us, who is against us? He who did not withhold his own Son, but gave him up for all of us, will he not with him also give us everything else? Who will bring any charge against God’s elect? It is God who justifies. Who is to condemn? It is Christ Jesus, who died, yes, who was raised, who is at the right hand of God, who indeed intercedes for us…^* Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Will hardship, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? As it is written,
‘For your sake we are being killed all day long;
   we are accounted as sheep to be slaughtered.’
No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For 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.

Sermon

In all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us.

Paul gives us a brilliant, fantastic, completely veiled, impossible to discern turn of phrase that continues to resonate now nearly two millennia later. You are more than conquerors; not because of yourselves but thanks to Christ, who loved us and died for us. And thanks to that, nothing will separate us from the love of God, not the whole litany of separating forces. That is love—pure and unbridled. When we say “God loves you” it has its absolute genesis in passages like this. God loves you, in spite of everything you do and everything done to you. That’s where I want to start, because this is a sermon about love, but it’s not going to be only warm or fuzzy. So I want to get the warm and fuzzy out of the way at the beginning.

Now let’s talk about what that means.

I’ve been reading Twilight for the last week or so. Some of you are now wondering if such a thing is appropriate for a pastor to do and others don't know what that means, so I had better explain a little. Twilight is a book, turned series, turned movie saga centered around a girl who moves to the rainy Olympic Peninsula of Washington, meets a boy named Edward and falls in love. Things get slightly more complicated as Bella quickly realizes that Edward is, in fact, a vampire, who is torn between his human feelings for her and his vampiric desire to drink her blood. If you think this all sounds silly you may be right, but let me paint you a quick picture of the scope that Twilight has.

Currently, there are almost 20 million people who are fans of Twilight on Facebook—more than both Harry Potter and Barack Obama. The latest Twilight film made $140 million at the box office—on opening weekend. And the novels and films have won countless teen and young adult awards. It’s a phenomenon, and one that more than a few people find befuddling.

The books are, quite simply, a love story. Told from the perspective of Bella, a teenage girl, we are carried along by her emotions, particularly the strong desire she has for Edward as the first book progresses. This is Twilight’s version of the big love; the love that matters. Edward must control the desires that come along with being a vampire, and Bella has to quell the fears she has over Edward’s strength and speed. He could quite easily kill her at any moment if he were to let his desires take over.

I said that this would be a sermon about love, and Twilight is about love. It’s about searching for something lasting, eternal, something that will give meaning, an attachment more important than anything—even life itself. And Bella finds that embodied in Edward. Please allow me to briefly run through the checklist of Edward’s qualities: immortal, beautiful, dangerous, capable of great love and great destruction…

Isn’t it interesting that the person who Bella deeply longs for has many of the same characteristics of God? 

Don’t misunderstand me. Edward isn’t God. God certainly isn’t interested in drinking your blood, but even more importantly God’s love looks a lot different. We are to fear and love God—as Luther reminds us in his Small Catechism—not because getting close to God means that we run the risk of being destroyed, but because God is worthy of those feelings. God has created you to be more than conquerors, but only because of his love.

At one point in Twilight, Bella asks Edward how he can resist being what he is—in short how he, the lion, can resist her, the lamb. He answers that “just because we’ve been…dealt a certain hand…it doesn’t mean that we can’t choose to rise above—to conquer the boundaries of a destiny that none of us wanted.” Edward is a conqueror, but that’s where the fulfillment ends. Love between two people is wonderful, it’s splendid, and it’s also hard. Few things tell a bigger lie than the wedding industry when it suggests that the wedding night must be perfect for the marriage to set off on the right foot. Any couple that’s been married more than a few months realizes that marriage is never easy, love is never simple; it is built on disagreements, give-and-take, and the realization of each other’s imperfections.

Edward conquers his innate tendencies, but as Paul reminds us in Romans we are not mere conquerors of desire; we are more than conquerors, not by resisting some urge to do bad things, but only through Christ. My fear for Twilight is this: The love that Bella is looking for will never be fulfilled, because death is coming. This is why there is tension throughout the series as Bella and Edward struggle to come to terms with her mortality; this is why she wants to become a vampire like him, because in the end death is coming for her, whether by a vampire or the slow decay of time. My fear is that Twilight makes the escape too easy, and so seeks a way around the fleetingness of human love.

Death is a reality. Love knows this. In fact, love between human beings requires this. When you make marriage vows it is not to live forever without trials; instead, it is to stand with each other in sickness as well as health, to hold each other’s hands in the midst of disappointments and struggles, and to see beyond each other’s faults to the creation that God made behind the veil of flesh that each of us wears. The proof of love is not joy but grief borne out of loss. To be more than conquerors means 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.

That is the love that conquers our meager imaginations. Twilight is searching for it, just as we all are. But in the end, we aren’t looking for a vampire… or even another person to make us complete. Love is deeper, wider, and stronger than all that. Love for one another is a reflection finally of God’s love for us. Any other genesis of the L-word is ultimately going to leave us wanting, as Twilight left me.

A friend of mine told me about her youth group girls who loved the Twilight books and were extremely excited for the first movie to come out. They went on opening night.

When my friend saw them on Sunday she asked, excitedly, “So how was it?”

The girls answered with a shrug, “It was alright.”

“Alright?” my friend asked incredulously, “You were all so excited about it. What happened?”

One of the girls responded, “It’s just that he was so much hotter in our minds.”

When love is made real it doesn’t always look pretty. In fact it often looks like a cross.