Listening to the Groans

I met with the new Crossroads class last week. It is meeting in the basement of the Fray Building, which is about as far from the front of the church as you can get. I was getting ready to leave to come get my things together for the 11:15 service and I heard a sound coming from the front of the property. It was the bell in our steeple. David Downing was ringing the bell as he does every Sunday. And for some reason I could hear it better from the Fray Building.

It’s a beautiful sound. It sings out to Franktown and to the fields and says, “Something important is about to happen. We are gathering here and God is going to be worshipped. Songs are going to be sung. Prayers are going to be offered. The Bible is going to be read. The word is going to be proclaimed. These things will happen even if you don’t come, but you should come. You should be here. You are invited. You are welcome.” That’s what the sound of that bell says. Amazing, isn’t it, that something so small, that we might not even notice, can say so much.

This week I got to tell Bible stories and do Discovery times with children and youth at our district Camp Occohannock. On Monday I was out there and I went down by the dock and found a periwinkle snail to use as an illustration. We were talking about creation and I wanted to tell the children about these periwinkles because they have this incredible ability to sense the tides. Even when they are separated from the water and their natural habitat they somehow know when the tides change and when it is time to move up and down the grass they live on to find the nutrients washed up by the tide. They have taken periwinkles to South America and as soon as they land there the periwinkles begin to move up and down in concert with the local tides. This tells us that the periwinkles are in tune with the pull of the moon which controls the tides.

So I was telling the youngest group of campers this on Monday and showing off my little periwinkle. I told them that the periwinkle must be an intergalactic space creature because it has this communication with the moon. Then I asked them what a periwinkle did every day. What do they think about all day? I was expecting an answer like, “They’re thinking about when it’s time to move up or down,” but one little boy said, “They’re thinking about how to take over the world.” He was expecting that these small creatures were going to make a big difference.

That’s also what Jesus seems to be expecting. When Jesus told parables about what the kingdom of God is like he used images of small things that made a big difference. A mustard seed, the smallest of seeds, growing into a great tree. Yeast, almost invisible, leavening the loaf. Salt giving taste to food. These are the ways Jesus talks about the way God works and the way the Church works. Like a bell on a summer morning or a periwinkle in the marsh, you have to pay attention to know what they’re saying and you have to know their story to understand where they are headed and what their purpose is.

So let me move us then to another seemingly small thing making a big difference in the world…something Paul talks about in the reading from Romans for today – the Holy Spirit. Christians talk about the Holy Spirit a lot but it may be the hardest thing for us to understand. We invoke the Spirit. We get anointed by the Spirit. We get slain in the Spirit. We are inspired by the Spirit. When the choir sings well we say that they’ve got the Spirit. But there must be something more to the Holy Spirit.

When we sing the doxology, as we’re going to do in just a little while, we praise God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is one of the three persons of the Trinity, one of the names by which God is known. We talk about God the Holy Spirit when we talk about the ways Jesus’ presence continues with us, when we talk about the ways God sweeps us up into the life of the Trinity, when we talk about the hope we have as Christians. The Holy Spirit is not some ghostly presence or ecstatic emotion; the Spirit is God with us still.

As Paul talks about it here, the Spirit’s role is to do two things – to help us know who we are and to help us hear where we are going. The Spirit has to help us know who we are because we so often forget and we begin to listen to other voices that want to tell us who we are. Paul’s way of talking about this is to say that when we are not listening to the Spirit of God we are indebted to the flesh – to those worldly voices that tell us that we are less than what God made us to be. You know these voices. These are the ones that tell us that we are slaves to our bad habits and addictions….that we cannot change…that we have no talents…that we are unforgivable because of things that we have done in the past…that we are unlovable because of things that were done to us…that no one cares for us…that we can’t reform the world…that there is no virtue in work no values worth giving our lives for…that I might as well look for number one because no one else will…that we do not bear the image of God and that because things have always been this way that is the way they will always be. You know these voices and they are the messages of the flesh according to the way Paul talks. When we are in the sway of these messages, we are dying.

The Spirit speaks a different word. It tells us that, yes, some things will have to die. The things we do as a result of the word of the flesh will have to die, but we will live. We are not made to live in slavery to fear, we are made to live in glory with Christ. The Spirit of God tells us that we have a new identity. We are children of God. When we are able to call out to God as a child calls out for a parent, then we have received the promise. We are part of a new family.

Now you might think this might not seem like good news. Who wants to hear that they are children? When you are 5 years old you don’t want to hear that you a child. You want to be a big boy or a big girl. When you are a teenager you don’t want to be a child, you want to be an adult. When we are adults we might envy the simplicity of childhood, but we don’t want to be children. We want to have some control of our destiny, to feel somewhat independent. But children is what the scriptures say that we are when we give ourselves over to Jesus.

Think about what children hear, though. Who is it that hears sleigh bells at Christmas time? Who is it that knows that there is still wonder and mystery in the world? Who is it that jumps up and down when a loved one or a friend comes for a visit? Children, the smallest among us, are in touch with God’s greatest treasures.

We don’t really lose that, you know. It’s always there, but we cover it over when we start to let those voices of the flesh define who we are. But the child is still there…waiting for adoption.

When we were in New Orleans last summer on the mission trip where we were helping to rebuild a home that had been hit by the hurricane, one of the best moments of the day was in the afternoon when the ice cream truck would come through the streets. It was really hot in that house and we looked forward to the refreshment that a lemon-lime ice rocket could provide. Nobody loved the ice cream truck more than Christy Ann. One day we were working together in the back room of the house and far off in the distance I could hear the music of the ice cream truck coming. I turned around to ask Christy Ann if she had heard it and she was gone. Her roller and pan were lying on the ground and she was out at the curb getting her change together.

Somewhere within us is that same impulse that can respond to God and wants to go running to God. The challenge for us is to listen in the distance for that future that the Spirit is leading us to. Remember that this is the other thing Paul tells us about the Spirit. It tells us who we are – children of God – and helps us to hear where we are going. Paul says, if you listen closely you will hear the whole creation groaning. Yes, there is suffering in this world. Yes, things never change as quickly as we would like them, too. Yes, our progress seems slow and it seems that we take one step backward for every two steps we take forward. But the important suffering is what the creation is going through as it waits for God’s new day.

The creation is suffering as it waits on the day when all will be revealed for what it really is. But this is a special kind of suffering – it’s like birthpangs. Just as a woman cries out in the pain of childbirth, but does so knowing that something is being born, so the creation cries out knowing that the end of this story is a birth, is life. And the creation waits on us to get it. The creation waits for us to hear off in the distance that sound that tells us that a new day is coming. Like a bell in church steeple…like an ice cream truck on a hot day…there is a sound that tells us God will do a new thing.

We have confidence and hope because we are awaiting our final adoption papers which will acknowledge what we already know through the Spirit – that we are children of God and heirs of Christ. If you listen closely they sound you hear is the flesh dying and a new person being born – a new order being established.

We have this great opportunity as Christians. We get to be agents of this new day. Our spirits respond to the Holy Spirit in a sympathetic chord that rings out in witness to what God is doing. And the world needs to hear.

How many people do you know who are suffering because they cannot hear these sounds? How many people do you know who are so bound by their own brokenness and pain and sin that they cannot hear any word of hope? How many people have forgotten the wonder of their lives and the wonder of this world and have settled for lives of quiet desperation, as Thoreau put it in Walden? How many of us are desperately trying to hide the places in our own lives that have become dried-up deserts? How many of us need a new day?

Pray, my brothers and sisters. Pray for an outpouring of the Holy Spirit that will remind us who we are and where we are headed. And go forth to love. There is no other thing we can do that will do more to change the world. Our acts of love are a witness to a Spirit that still blows in the wind and grows like a mustard seed and plots with the periwinkle to take over the universe which it has claimed and loved since before before. Thanks be to God.

Romans 8:12-25

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 are near to death. But if, by the Spirit, you put to death the works of the body, you will live, for those who are led by the Spirit of God are those who are children of God. For you did not receive a spirit of slavery leading again to fear, but rather you received a spirit of adoption through which we can cry, "Abba, Father." That same spirit bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God. If we are children then we are also heirs - heirs of God and heirs together with Christ, if indeed we suffer with him so that we may also share in his glory.

I reckon that the sufferings of this present age are not worth comparing to the glory that is about to revealed in us. For with expectation the creation eagerly awaits the revelation of the children of God because creation was subjected to futility, not of its own will but through the one subjecting, in hope that this same creation would be set free from slavery to corruption for the liberty that is the glory of the children of God.

We know that all creation groans together and has suffered the agonies of childbirth together until now. And not only the creation, but we who have experienced the first-fruits of the Spirit have also been groaning inwardly ourselves, we who are eagerly awaiting adoption and the redemption of our bodies. For we are saved in hope, but hope that is seen is not hope, for who hopes for what they can see? But if we hope for what we do not see, we eagerly await it with patience.