What's Next?: Groaning, Waiting and the Life of Hope

Romans 8:12-25 [NRSV]
So then, brothers and sisters, we are debtors, not to the flesh, to live according to the flesh—for if you live according to the flesh, you will die; but if by the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the body, you will live. For all who are led by the Spirit of God are children of God. For you did not receive a spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received a spirit of adoption. When we cry, “Abba! Father!” it is that very Spirit bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, then heirs, heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ—if, in fact, we suffer with him so that we may also be glorified with him.

I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory about to be revealed to us. For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the children of God; for the creation was subjected to futility, not of its own will but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and will obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God. We know that the whole creation has been groaning in labor pains until now; and not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly while we wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies. For in hope we were saved. Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what is seen? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience.

We Methodists like to eat. We are also known for our singing, but we rank pretty high in the denominational categories when it comes to eating, too. It’s no accident that we decided to mark this welcoming time with a lunch. We’re no strangers to the table. One of my colleagues used to say that Methodists ought to change that old sending forth hymn, “God Be with You ‘Til We Meet Again,” and instead sing “God Be With You ‘Til We Eat Again.”

I’m a pretty good Methodist in this way. I do like to eat. I’ve been watching that lately and I’ve really been trying to cut back, but I have to say, with all the great food that members of this congregation have shared with us…I’ve sampled. There’s been some sampling going on.

Last month, as Suzanne and I were traveling to meet my folks on the Outer Banks of North Carolina for vacation, we stopped in at one of our favorite places to eat—Jimmy’s BBQ in Sunbury, North Carolina. It’s just a small, hole-in-the-wall place—think the Exmore Diner in a cinderblock building—but the food there is straight out of my grandmother’s recipe book and when I go there I am transported back to her kitchen. Eastern North Carolina minced pork BBQ, (which is the only real BBQ), turnip greens cooked with a big ham hock, stewed tomatoes that verge on being tomato pudding, cornbread, slaw. Some of you are salivating, I can tell.

Suzanne and I were sitting there and, you know, I’d been being really careful about what I ate for several months, and this tidewater cooking hits every home-cooking sensor I have inside me, and it tasted so good and I…well, Suzanne says the noises coming out of me were obscene but I just want to state very clearly that they were not (though I think several other diners stared at me)…but yes, I made noises. It was totally involuntary. I wasn’t intending to groan…or drool…but these things happen. That meal, for me, was a foretaste…an appetizer for what is to come at the great banquet, which Jesus often uses as an image for the kingdom of heaven. Those noises, which were not obscene, were me anticipating what the best meal of all was going to taste like.

Now I realize that after starting that way, I’ve got a hard job awaiting me in trying to preach this sermon because all of you are starting to think about that meal waiting back there in the fellowship hall. But I start here because I want us to jump back into Romans, chapter 8, as we started to do last week and to listen for the sounds of God’s coming kingdom. Last week I talked about how this chapter, one of the most beautiful and important in the whole Bible, tells us about the real world, which is God’s world, which is already here through the work of the Holy Spirit. Remember we talked about reality television and the pains and struggles of life that we sometimes call “reality” and I talked about the Wizard of Oz and an old piano and somehow we got to the conclusion that what God intends for us and for the world is much greater than we often assume. The real world is one where God is making all things new.

Well, today we’re going to pick up with verse 12 of that chapter and listen for the sounds of God’s work. Paul begins this section by saying something that sounds unusual after all the liberating images he has given us. After talking about how the Spirit will free us from the failures and sin that we all know to be a part of human existence, Paul says, “So then, we are debtors.” We are debtors. We are still under an obligation. We are still bound. But, Paul says, we are not bound to the flesh – to our old selves that were enslaved to sin. As Christians living on this side of the resurrection…as Christians in the grip of the Spirit, which gives life, we are bound to God. Paul’s emphatic about this: You didn’t receive a spirit of slavery so that you would fall into fear again. You received a spirit of adoption.

This is where the sounds come in. The first sound that we hear in the new world God is bringing about is the cry of a human child. Paul says we bear witness to God’s work of redemption, we give voice to it, whenever we cry, “Abba! Father!” You might recognize that word, “Abba.” It’s an Aramaic word from the language that Jesus spoke. It’s an intimate word, probably one of the first words a child would learn in that culture. It just means “Daddy.” And it would have a particular resonance for the Christians to whom Paul was writing because they would hear in it Jesus’ own prayer in the garden of Gethsemane on the night before his death when he prayed, “Abba, Father, for you all things are possible.” The first sound of the real world is the sound of a child calling on a trusted parent – Abba. Daddy.

If we can just get ourselves to that place, where a child’s voice can remind us of how powerfully God speaks in the love of a parent for a child, then we just might be able to see how we, distraught as we sometimes are by the things we are going through, and despairing as we sometimes are about our inability to change things about ourselves, and as hopeless as we sometimes feel, if we can see God in a child’s trusting cry, the Spirit bears witness with out spirit that we are children of God.

And this is where Paul’s rhetoric really starts building up a head of steam. You know, once Paul gets going it’s hard for him to stop. It goes kind of like this: And then…And then…if we are children of God, then we are heirs of God…we have the inheritance…and if we have are heirs of God, then we are joint heirs with Christ--if, in fact, we suffer with him so that we may also be glorified with him.

That last part sticks a little, doesn’t it? If we suffer with Christ then we may also be glorified with Christ. When did we start to talk about suffering? What does Paul mean by suffering? Well, the people to whom he is writing are suffering as people of a minority faith in the Roman Empire of the day. Paul has already talked about his internal suffering that happens when he tries to fulfill what God’s law requires and finds himself failing at every turn. You remember his lament from chapter 7 when he says, “What I know I should do, I don’t. The thing I don’t want to do is what I do. Wretched man that I am, who will deliver me from this body of death?” You remember this is how Paul got on this tear in the first place.

But Paul wants to talk about an entirely different sort of suffering now. Yes, we know suffering in this life. Yes, we know the agony of defeat and the heartbreak of psoriasis. Yes, we know that our bodies betray us and our will fails us. Yes, we know that there is grief and death. We been to the funerals, we’ve stood at the bedsides, we’ve shared tears with the bereaved. Yes, we know that marriages fail, that parents can let you down, that drugs can mess you up, or that boyfriends and girlfriends can break your heart. Yes, we know that there is suffering in this life and we haven’t even mentioned the biggies of war, poverty, and hunger! But you know what Paul says to that: That’s not the real world. Paul says: “I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory about to be revealed to us.” And then Paul hears the sounds of another kind of suffering: The suffering that comes from eagerly awaiting. The “Busch Gardens anticipation suffering” on a massive scale.

The creation is groaning. The creation is crying out. The creation is standing on its tiptoes hoping to get a glimpse of what’s coming down the lane. The creation is jumping up and down because it just can’t stand it. The cosmos is beside itself with anticipation. The world is looking ahead like a 6-year-old on Christmas Eve. The whole earth is on edge because it is waiting…it is waiting…it is waiting on…us.

Wait a minute…did I read that right? Yes, I did. The creation is waiting…its about to burst because its waiting on you and me. Paul has been talking about our suffering, our battles with sin, our need for God. Now he suddenly pulls back the lens so that we can see the whole created order and it is waiting…not on God. But on us. “The creation waits,” Paul says, “with eager longing for the revealing of the children of God.” And the construction here makes it clear that creation is waiting for us to realize our true calling as children of God. How can that be?

This weekend our family went canoeing with a group in a tidal marsh in Raccoon Creek down in the Eastern Shore Wildlife Refuge. We’re mountain folk trying to get used to living on the shore. This marsh was full of all kinds of life. Teeming, I believe, is the appropriate word. As the tidal waters wash in and out of that marsh thousands of periwinkle snails and mussels filter the marsh and clean it up for other life. Crabs and birds and insects go about their work. Spartina grass and millet anchor the muddy soil in place. It is amazingly rich and beautiful and it is such a treasure. Those places on the margins, where the land meets the water, foster the greatest diversity of life. It is a very natural place to acknowledge that, “Yes, all creation is praising God.”

But when Paul talks about the creation here he says something a little different. It’s not some New Age-y notion that the creation is God. No, the creation, us included, is composed of creatures. But what makes us stand out from the crowd in this creation is that we seem to be the only creatures who can be delusional. We have the capacity for self-delusion.

What do I mean by that? Well, a periwinkle snail is not going to suddenly decide, “Hey, why am I sitting here stuck to a blade of spartina grass with a million other Joes? I’m better than them. I’m going to go off and start a garage band.” It just doesn’t have that capacity. A snowy egret is not going to give up wading to try to be the most famous bird it can be. A shrimp, even a jumbo shrimp, is not going to try to take over the world. But human beings have that capacity which other creatures don’t have: They can forget who they are and forget that they are essentially, necessarily, inextricably related to God.

Other creatures know who they are. Blue crabs do not need to be self-actualized. Pufferfish, even though they look pretty ridiculous to you and me, do not have self-esteem issues. Cats know that they rule the world. All of these creatures have their place in the cosmos, are conscious of their relatedness to God and they are waiting for us to get it!

That seems to be what Paul is saying. Creation knows that God has the first word, the last word and all the other words in between. Creation knows that in the end God “Yes!” to the world. Creation knows that God is worthy to be praised. And its doing it. And its waiting. The grass in the field is watching us each morning. “Do you think they’ll get it today?” Tomatoes are talking to rutabagas in the garden, “Do you think they’ll realize it today?” Stars in the heavens, suns are contemplating, “They’re not very bright, are they?”

I know. I know. It sounds ridiculous. And I’ve exaggerated a little. But there is something very powerful about that image. Creation waits with eager longing, it groans until the revealing of the one thing we have the hardest time getting our minds around: that God has known us, as the Psalm for the day, Psalm 139, says so powerfully: “It was you who formed my inward parts; you knit me together in my mother's womb”, God has known us. God has claimed us. God has accepted us as joint heirs with Christ…children of God. And we don’t know it. Decay and loss are not the end of the story for creation--freedom and redemption are.

Do you know what the greatest sin of the age is? I’ve been thinking about this more and more, especially as I worked with college students at UVA. I’m more and more convinced that the besetting sin of this age is not pride or lust or greed or envy. The besetting sin of this age is despair.

When Thomas Aquinas set out to define despair in the Middle Ages he talked about it as that sense that comes over a person when she or he believes that there is no way to achieve a goal towards which to move. A person can have every capability, every strength, every power at their command, but if they are in the grip of despair they are immobilized-- frozen in place.

I saw that in students. Bright, gifted young adults who should have been launched toward a distant target like an arrow in flight. But they couldn’t see beyond the obstacles in front of them. Some of them, yes. But many who were not able see where God was taking them or what God was making of them. One student I worked with, whom I baptized, said that he had lived most of his life like a child playing in the street who never had anyone to call him home when the other kids went home for dinner. Finding Christ for him was like hearing that voice he had been waiting for…that voice that could lift him out of despair and move him to beyond the walls of the narrow world he was living in.

You’ve seen that despair. Perhaps you’ve known it. We can live very comfortably with despair. It doesn’t expect anything from us or the world. It doesn’t require anything of us. But it also can’t set us free.

What sets us free…is hope. What is reordering the world is hope. What we can’t see when we are in despair is the end God is drawing us toward. What you’ll hear, if you really listen for God’s surprising new thing is the working of hope. Because you see, if you listen you’ll understand that it is not just the cosmos that is groaning and waiting and longing for us to wake up to who we really are as children of God. If you listen you’ll hear that that groaning is going on within us as well. “We ourselves,” Paul says, “who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly while we wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies. For in hope we were saved.” That’s a past tense verb. In hope we were saved. That happened in Christ. We don’t have to wonder when salvation will come. It has come. What we are waiting on, what the creation is waiting on, what God is waiting on, is our acceptance. The invitations have been sent to the wedding banquet. Are you going to accept?

So we hope. We hope. It is the life Christians are made for. And we celebrate now because we know what the end of the story will be. And we work for the transformation of our communities and our lives now because we know that’s what God is doing. And we look for evidence of God’s transforming work because we know it can be found. Hope is transforming the world to the image of God’s kingdom. And if you listen you can hear the birth pangs of the new creation.

That’s Paul’s image. It’s the next sound we hear. Labor pains. The cries that go with them. They’re not easy to hear. When I stood next to Suzanne during the birth of our children, it was painful to watch what she was going through. Maybe not as painful as what she was going through, but not easy. And birth is fraught with so many dangers and so many vulnerabilities. There is suffering involved.

But then there was the baby’s first cry and the absolute impossibility of offering any words that made any sense to describe what was going on. And, of course, there were so many dangers and struggles yet to go. This was only the beginning of a life. Who knows what it will bring, what this child will ask of us? So I was mute, but in my stumbling to find words I was saying was a blessing, a thanks to God for giving us a moment when we could be what God truly meant for us to be--a people receiving life and offering it back to God. It was a moment of hope. And hope can transform the universe.

If you listen you can hear it. A child’s voice crying “Abba”. The world groaning in expectation. And the birth pangs of a new order. When are you going to join the chorus? Thanks be to God.