Sermon, July 20, 2008 -- Romans 8:12–25

“Eager Longing” (Romans 8:12 – 25)
Rick Olson, July 20, 2008

This morning as I was, uh, putting the finishing touches on this sermon, I was watching this year’s Tour de France, the three week, 2100-mile bike race through the heart of France, and there are several kinds of riders in the tour . . . the most exalted are the General Classification contenders, or GC contenders for short, who have a chance to win the entire race; one of them this year is American Christian Vandervelde. The then there are the stage contenders, like, oh, Aussie Robbie Hunter, who have no shot at winning the overall, but can pick up a win or two in one of the 20 or so 100-mile plus stages each day, and then there are the majority, the domestiques, riders hired by the teams to provide support for the other kinds of riders. They have very little chance at winning a stage, will do so only by chance—for chance plays a huge role in the entire tour—but are vital to their teams’ chances, nevertheless.

But there is one thing they all have in common, and that’s hope: hope just to finish the Tour, which so few people in competitive cycling even get a chance to do it’s not funny. And by it’s nature, it’s a hope for something unseen, that they’ll be there at that finish line on the Champs Elysees, where they’ve all imagined they might be some day . . . and that’s exactly the hope Paul ends our passage with, Christian hope for restoration, for renewal . . . but to see how he gets there, which is half the fun—well, for me, anyway—we have to start off with a fun fact about Paul: he was a Pharisee. He was a trained Torah scholar, steeped in the Pharisitical ways of argument, of thought, and even though he became an follower of Christ, and quit persecuting other followers, it’s important to remember that he still thought like one, and still used the tropes and figures of speech of one in his writing.

And one of the things about Pharisees is that they loved a good dualism, they tended to view things in dualistic terms, that is, as oppositions of two sides that are diametrically opposed. Like light and dark, with the forces of God being the light and the forces of you-know-who being the dark. Or, like in today’s passage, flesh versus Spirit, a dualism that Paul talks a lot about, notably over in Galatians, where he says: “. . . the works of the flesh are obvious: fornication, impurity, licentiousness, idolatry, sorcery, enmities, strife, jealousy, anger, quarrels, dissensions, factions, envy, drunkenness, carousing . . . [but] the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.” Notice that there’s no in between, no compromise: it’s works of the flesh on one side, and they’re all bad, versus works of the Spirit on the other, and they’re all good. As Dana Carvey might have said, imitating George Bush, “Flesh: bad! Spirit: good!”

And our passage this morning begins with this opposition, flesh versus Spirit—and notice that it’s not just any spirit, not spirit as an abstract thing, but spirit as a person, with a capital S, the Spirit of the God of Abraham and Isaac and all of Paul’s other ancestors, and we need to nuance the word “Flesh” a little bit . . . we tend to have a very naughty view of that word, we say “things of the flesh” as if it refers only to sex, but to Paul, it referred more to things of the world, living according to the ways of the world which, of course, includes unhealthy sexual appetites, but much more, things like greed and idolatry and generally war-like and imperial behavior, it’s living according to the precepts of the world and, of course, he viewed those ways as corrupt, as opposed to the ways of God, which are the ways of the Spirit with a capital S.

And if we live according to the world we will die, we will carry the smell of death around with us; our lives will be lives, paradoxically, of death . . . but if we put to death the deeds of the body—and a better translation might be misdeeds, Paul doesn’t want us to do nothing—if we put to death the misdeeds of the body we will, paradoxically again, live. Notice that he doesn’t have to be talking about eternal life here . . . a tendency we modern Christians have is to interpret everything in terms of where we go when we die, but Paul doesn’t say this, he doesn’t use the technical word “justification” he uses elsewhere for being made right with God. So it’s probable—especially given that Paul is the wellspring of grace-not-works in the scripture—it’s probable that he’s talking about a kind of death to God, a death to what is spiritual here in this life.

But whatever the case, the next thing he says is crucial to his whole argument in this section: we didn’t receive a spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but we’ve received a spirit of adoption . . . our relationship to God isn’t one of abject ownership, of unthinking subservience—even though God did create us and therefore would have the right—it’s not a relationship of slave to master, but one of love and respect . . . and he underlines it by using the Aramaic word that Jesus himself used for God, Abba, Father, to emphasize that just like Jesus, we are now children of God . . .

And we shouldn’t get hung up on gender here, one way or another . . . gone are the days when we took Paul’s—or Jesus’ for that matter—calling God by a masculine name as normative, that is as an indication that God really is male or that we should address God that way . . . after all, over in Genesis it says “God created humanity in God’s image, male and female . . .” and Paul himself famously wrote that in Christ there is no male and female . . . but by the same token, we mustn’t let our tendency toward inclusiveness obscure the details of our relationship with our creator that is revealed in Jesus and Pauls’ addressing of God as “Father:” it is an intimate one, a familial one, as mother to son, as father to daughter, and it is a relationship not warped by the sad details of human frailty as are some of our worldly—perhaps Paul would say “fleshly”—relationships. No matter how some have portrayed God—including some of the writers in scripture—God is not an abusive parent. No matter how the image of our creator has been used by other broken creatures to shore up their own sense of inadequacy, their own feelings of insecurity, their own need for power, the reality is that God is not an abusive parent. In fact, our relationship with God might be the only perfect one we have. God our creator, the loving parent, enfolding us in merciful arms like an anxious mother, standing up for us like a stalwart father.

That’s the kind of relationship Paul is talking about here, and he knows—again paradoxically—that we are not proof from all suffering, that we are not immune from all the stuff that just happens. Indeed, Paul himself has endured some of it . . . “Five times,” he wrote, “I have received . . . the forty lashes minus one. Three times I was beaten with rods. Once I received a stoning. Three times I was shipwrecked; for a night and a day I was adrift at sea . . . on frequent journeys, in danger from rivers, danger from bandits, danger from my own people, danger from Gentiles, danger in the city, danger in the wilderness, danger at sea, danger from false brothers and sisters . . .” and the list goes on, and Paul doesn’t say here—although he does elsewhere—that it’s good or bad to suffer, just that it is: “we suffer with Christ in order to be glorified with Christ.” Period.

Note that he doesn’t blame God, either, as the ancient mind-set often does, and he doesn’t have that failing of the dualist mind, that denigrates our body, even though his work has often been co-opted to do so. You know, our life is just a vale of tears, and we can endure anything for its short duration, the kind of thinking used to justify the Conquistadors and other oppressors to forcibly convert the native peoples, with deadly force if necessary, because after all, the body is a worthless vessel, and they go to a far better place via the good graces of their conquerors . . . the kind of dualist thinking that encourages abused women to endure their abuse in the name of their Christian marriage because, after all, they’ll soon join Christ in the great by and by . . .

Paul doesn’t engage in that destructive logic, but he does compare the present suffering with the glory we are about to see and taste and experience and feel: “I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory about to be revealed to us.” And of course a truer statement has never been made . . . the kingdom of God, which will be revealed to us all, the Kingdom of God is more than we can ever imagine, more than we can ever foresee, more than we can ever predict . . . and Paul pictures the creation itself, personified here as a sentient entity, waiting with eager longing for that revealing.

And the thing that’s striking for me about this is and not only we, but creation with us is in need of bondage. Unlike some of the imperial forms of Christianity, where we are elevated above the rest of creation, we are right there with it, right there inextricably tied up with the rest. And for me, in this time of global warming, when even the most reactionary among us admit that God’s good creation is in grave danger, this is a stunning realization: if we are tied up with creation on earth, if we are one with creation in decay, then whichever way goes our natural environment, so goes us. Creation isn’t in this alone, we’re right there with it. And look at something else: creation’s decay—however it’s caused, Paul thinks that, like ours, it’s bestowed upon it by God—creation’s decay is of a kind with ours. And as a consequence, our deliverance from that decay, in Paul’s mind at least, is tied to that of the rest of creation.

And now, just as our passage began with the image of adoption, as in adopted through Christ as God’s children, so it ends with the same image, but changed slightly, as if modified by the verbiage in the middle of the passage, like a charcoal filter modifies the air that passed through it, as is the image of adoption has been modified by all the talk of creation waiting with eager longing, because now it signifies not adoption as children of God, but that final restoration of our bodies at the coming of the Kingdom . . . not only the creation, but we as well, in solidarity with our fellow created things, the rocks and trees and dogs and mountain lions groan inwardly while we’re waiting for this adoption which is, in case we doubt that the metaphor has changed, the redemption of our bodies.

And now, in a final change of tone, a final shift of gears, Paul ends this part of his argument on hope . . . if we wait with eager longing—along with the rest of creation—for the coming Kingdom of God, then it must be hope that keeps us going . . . in all the groaning, in all the wars and degradation and disintegration of creation, in all the nervous chaos that seems to be increasing with each newscast, we as Christians hope for the restoration. And it’s a hope without much evidence in the world . . . nonbelievers ask us “how can you believe in a just God with all the evidence against it? How can you have faith in a God that loves you when things seem to be disintegration around you?” And our answer is hope: Christians—along with all of creation—are saved in hope of that final restoration. And as we are constantly reminded in life, this final restoration is not seen for, as Paul puts it, it’s hope, and if we see what we hope for, it can’t be hope, can it? We Christians are people of hope, and Paul has one more admonition asour passage ends: if we hope for what we do not see, we should wait for it with patience.

And of course, that’s easier said than done, and less than 24 hours after our latest retreat with the Seekers, which was perhaps the most intense session we’ve had, I can’t help but be reminded of this . . . we have been patient, as patient as a domestique in the Tour de France, you have been patient through this long, almost two-year race through the mountains, and it has been hope that has kept us alive . . . hope that God has a new day, a new way waiting for us, and now that we are nearing the end of the formal training process, the formal teaching of your session and other leaders to do church in a different way, a way that enables us to be always looking for God’s will, as the formal process draws to a close, we will begin to spread that process, that training to every member of this body. And as we do, as we teach every committee, every commission, every new session member as they come on board, our hope for renewal will be realized. We are people of hope, it is our anthem, our song, and we are just now beginning to sing. Amen.