Sermon preached at Christ Church
Greenwich, Connecticut
July 19, 2020 / Seventh Sunday after Pentecost
Christ Church Greenwich Valediction
Romans 8:12-25
In the Name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.
Last week, my oldest friend sent me a news item of interest: A humpback whale was attacked by a great white shark off the coast of South Africa. Some of you may have seen this story in passing. Humpback whales are nearly three times as large as a great white, so while the movie Jaws may frighten us and give nightmares to generations of children, the humpback whales are not impressed. And yet in this case, the shark severed a vein near the whale’s tail, waited a half an hour while the whale lost blood and energy, and then drowned it. As the marine biologist who witnessed the event described it: “The shark was very strategic about it, there was no hesitation; it was as if she knew exactly how to go about it.”[1]
In this morning’s lesson, Paul makes a remarkable statement: “For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the children of God.” And “We know that the whole creation has been groaning in labor pains until now; and not only the creation, but we ourselves.”[2] Does that sound odd to you? Paul’s theological thinking about the natural order here strikes a wrong note, doesn’t it? The creation is good, isn’t that the witness of the book of Genesis, which describes God’s response to everything that he had made? “And God saw that it was good.”
Highly idealized and romantic views of the natural world were a logical response to the industrial revolution in this country and in England. Poets and thinkers found something authentic in the outdoors that was distinctly lacking in the city, with its factories, smog, pollution, and pallid workers, whose vitality and creativity were drained by shuffling to and from grim office jobs. These ideas about nature continue down to the present, don’t they, and for understandable reasons. Most of us spend a lot of time indoors, glued to computer screens, and so of course social media is filled with images of people outside, on horseback, climbing mountains, crossing oceans, playing 18 holes or three sets, and always in the sunshine. We can draw a straight line from the poets to our own fondness for nature and to our assumptions about the natural world, which seem to provide us with a clear and fairly commonsense moral principle: nature is itself good, and the more natural everything can be, the better for everyone.
And yet, that doesn’t really work, does it? Annie Dillard, whom many of us think of primarily as a nature writer, has put it this way: “Fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly, insects, it seems, gotta do one horrible thing after another.” The natural behavior of insects, she says, “is an assault on all human value, all hope of a reasonable god.”[3] As our marine biologist described the great white shark attack: “The first strike was at the whale's tail, the skinny part above the flukes where she could get her mouth all the way around.” It took about an hour of the shark holding the whale underwater for it to give up the ghost.
The whole creation groans.
All this summer, and well into September, the astute listener will know that we have been working our way through St Paul’s letter to the Romans. We have heard a little chunk of it almost every Sunday, and we have heard it continued this morning. This letter is by common consent Paul’s masterpiece. In the words of one scholar, Romans “overwhelms the reader by the density and sublimity of the topic with which it deals, [which is] the gospel of the justification and salvation of Jew and [Gentile] alike by the grace of God through faith in Jesus Christ, revealing the uprightness and love of God the Father.”[4]
And what an unusual summer we are having in which to read this astounding good news. It’s nice to be outside, of course, but that pleasure is tainted in part by the knowledge that we are in peril. When we enjoy the warm summer weather, we are usually doing so wearing masks, protecting ourselves from a virus that is as much a part of the natural world as any whale or shark or mountain or tree.
In Paul’s view, the whole creation is implicated in the historic and one-sided breakdown of relations between humanity and God, which the book of Genesis also recounts. What was good in that creation story is not the world in which humans ultimately choose by their disobedience to live. Paul knows it, and we know it as well. What our English bible translates as “groans” (συστενάζει) is more fully translated as “groans together.”[5] It is not a modern intuition alone that the world is a vast ecosystem, interconnected in ways that we humans can only begin to understand; Paul knew it as well. The whole creation experiences and amplifies humanity’s rejection of our creator, and it waits with ripe anticipation for the restoration of all things in our Lord Jesus Christ.
This past season has been one of uncertainty for communities of faith around the world, a season in which entropy and destruction have come directly into our midst. What will happen to churches when their primary devotion—the Sunday gathering—is limited and significantly reduced in beauty and pleasure by the dangers of coronavirus? What will happen if for many months to come we cannot sing, cannot great one another with the love of Christ or break bread together? Is the future of Christian witness limited to password-protected Zoom meetings? Lord, I hope not, and I know you join me in that prayer. Those meetings are expressions on our desktops of illness and fear just beyond our walls, and sometimes not even then. Every time I see that blue icon now, I am tempted to groan. The whole world groans as well.
But, believe it or not, that is not a forlorn sound. It is hopeful.
Paul writes that “the whole creation has been groaning in labor pains.” It has been groaning in anticipation of the birth of something new. And that’s not limited to the natural order; we “ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly while we wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies.” On the cross, our Lord took upon himself the full weight of brokenness and decay, and defeated them once for all, and in dying for us he has remade the whole creation and injected life back into world. Christ’s resurrection is the new Genesis, the first new thing to have happened since the beginning of the world. God saw that everything he had made was good, and Christ’s restoration of that creation is good as well. That is why it is called good news.
Gathering in any form, through any medium—even Zoom—to hear the Word of God read and proclaimed and bear witness to Christ’s resurrection are the definitive activity of the Christian community, and it is they that give life, right here, and right now.
That is why Paul can write, “I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory about to be revealed to us.” It is not that those sufferings do not matter; it is that they are not the final word in the human experience, because we have been saved in hope. It is a hope that we possess when we hear the good news of Christ’s life, death, and resurrection, hope that we embody when we joyfully worship the Lord in his temple and when we carry the good news out into the world in acts of charity and service. The world is groaning, but it groans in the anticipation of something new, something revealed to it in Christ, even if it does not yet know it. “If anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation,” Paul writes, and it is true.[6]
I leave you these words of hope as my valediction, the end of my four years among you. If you are looking for evidence of the new creation in action, look no further than this pulpit. When I arrived here four years ago as a seminarian, I was opinionated, persnickety, a little arrogant, and very far from ordination. Now, I am ordained…. but still all of those other things. But in this place, working amongst all of you, the Lord has put even those flaws to work a little bit better in his service. During our time together, while some things have remained, much new growth has appeared. I have been proud to be a part of the story of this parish during this season, and so grateful to each of you for bearing me up in our shared work. I offer to each one of you my fond farewell, and my sincerest gratitude. It has been a joy to worship our Lord, together, and to witness to the good news week by week, and I commend to you the future of that work in this holy place.
“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.”
Godspeed, my friends.
AMEN.
[1] https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/strategic-shark-kills-ten-metre-whale-356kqrvbp
[2] Romans 8:19, 22.
[3] Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (New York: Harper & Row, 1985), 63.
[4] J.A. Fitzmyer, Romans. Anchor Bible Commentary (New York: Doubleday, 1992), xiii.
[5] Strong’s Concordance, 4959, https://biblehub.com/greek/4959.htm
[6] 2 Corinthians 5:17.