By Rev. Chris Jorgensen
Hanscom Park United Methodist Church
October 22, 2017
Scripture – Romans 8: 18-25
This week, we are finishing up our Unwritten sermon series, and I would like us today to consider our place and our role in God’s unfolding story of love and liberation. We are somewhat like the community in Rome to whom Paul is writing in our scripture. Surely, the historical and cultural details are wildly different. But on the grand cosmic level, we are pretty much at the same point in the story.
In the grand biblical narrative, Paul and the Romans come into the story after all the big stuff has happened. It is after Jesus’ death, after his resurrection, after his ascension, and in the midst of a promise: A promise of a return that will bring renewal and restoration for all of creation. The members of the Roman church are a people waiting for God’s promises to be fulfilled, and Paul tells them to wait with patience. They also wait with hope.
Fast-forward about 2,000 years to our place in the story, and we are still waiting. I’m not sure even Paul knew how much patience this waiting would require. And I didn’t know until I started studying our scripture this week, just how much responsibility we had either. So in this text, Paul is writing about the future restoration of all of creation, about how all creation will be freed from its bondage to death and decay. That sounds amazing! Restoration! No more death and decay. Who doesn’t want that?
But as I read closely, I saw this little nugget that was not so amazing. Paul writes, “For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the children of God.” He says that once we humans are revealed as the children of God, then all of creation will be restored. Which sounds good in theory, but is actually a bit distressing when you think about it. All of creation is waiting for us. It is groaning under the stress of it. Because all of creation is not going to see the full salvation of God, the end to decay and death, until we humans get on board with God’s agenda.
I’m not sure how you feel about that. But for me, that is way too much pressure. I don’t want the restoration of all of creation being contingent on whether I personally am responding to God’s call on my life. And I certainly don’t want it depending upon all of humanity responding to God’s call to peace and love and justice.
I’m not sure if you’ve looked around at how we are doing as a human species lately, but it doesn’t look so good. We humans are pretty messed up. We are mired in political bickering and personal attacks that keep us from focusing on people’s real needs for health and safety and sustenance. There are violent conflicts going on around the world. Even the small ways we interact with each other on Facebook or in person – they seem so often to be filled with fear and hostility and anger – instead of compassion and understanding. I don’t see that we as a human species are doing very well contributing to God’s dream these days.
When are we going to be revealed as the children of God?
Creation is waiting for its redemption, its restoration: but it sounds like we humans have to go first. The view from the ground on that can be pretty discouraging. Theologians have wrestled with this for a long time: this question of whether humanity is sort of generally on track to fulfilling its role as children of God, or whether we are hopelessly doomed and creation will only be restored after we are more-or-less wiped out.
One theologian I have been reading about lately is the one who wrote our opening prayer today. His name is Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. He was a Jesuit priest living in the late 19th and early 20th century. And he articulated this hope we read in Paul like this: God is moving all of creation toward what Teilhard calls the “Omega Point.” The Omega Point is the point of fulfillment to which all of creation is going. More or less, the Omega Point is Christ. We (in the very big cosmic sense) are all moving in the direction of restoration and unification in Christ.
Teilhard’s views were controversial during his lifetime. He wrote in the wake of the First and Second World Wars. Many theologians believed that humanity had proved itself unredeemable. They might have called Teilhard a foolish optimist, whose theology was not grounded in the reality of human experience.
Yet Teilhard constructed his theology, what some might call an unreasonable hope, during his time as a stretcher-bearer in the trenches of World War I. In the midst of seeing the worst that humanity could do to each other and the earth, Teilhard found hope in the promise of God as articulated by Paul. He found this hope by pulling his perspective back, way, way back to the cosmic view of history and the universe. He was a scientist who studied evolution. He admits that humans indeed go through very dark times, do very violent things to one another, but that God is always moving us to the Omega Point, to Christ himself. He points us to times in natural evolution where all seemed lost, but then something extraordinary arose.
A scholar of Teilhard, Cynthia Bourgeault writes this about his perspective:
“Even the emergence of human consciousness itself, he reminds us, reaching its present configuration a mere 125,000 years ago with the stunning debut of homo sapiens, was preceded by a 10,000-year ice age, in which it appeared that all that had been gained prior to that point was irreversibly lost. It wasn’t. No sooner had the ice receded than the first [scientific evidence] confirm[s] that human beings were now using fire and tools— unmistakable evidence that beneath the ice and apparent desolation, the evolutionary journey was still unperturbedly marching forward.”[1]
Our hope comes from the cosmic view, from the universe’s timeline, and from God’s promise that the end to which we are moving is life not death. Now, I will admit. It can be hard to get from that cosmic, billion-year timeline down to what we are doing today.
I think our old friend John Wesley might be able to help connect the dots for us. Toward the end of his career as the founder and visionary of the Methodist movement, Wesley began to preach more and more on this theme of the new creation. Of course in the 18th century, Wesley was not privy to the science that Teilhard employs, but he found the same hope and promise in Paul’s letters. Wesley too was convinced that God was acting in history to produce a “new creation:” one in which suffering and death were no more.
And Wesley connected the intensely personal experience of a person becoming a “new creation” in Christ to God’s cosmic work of bringing about a “new creation” everywhere. Wesley had no illusions about people being just sort of generally good, and they would do the right thing in time. He has a very robust theology of sin. He probably would not be that surprised about the current mess we are in.
But he did believe that faith in Christ could transform even the most flawed person into a “new creation.” And as new creatures, we are able to respond more and more in line with what God would have us do. Through faith, there is the possibility that we will be revealed and restored as children of God, and then one day, all of creation will share in that restoration.
Wesley notes that the way our lives change when we experience Christ is evidence of the new creation, what he calls the “age to come,” started right here in us. To quote him directly, “’In a degree’ we can experience both God’s purpose for us and the first evidences of the age to come as “God sets up his throne in our hearts.” [2] What Wesley calls the “first evidences of the age to come,” Paul names in our scripture as the “first fruits” of the new creation. The transformation that is wrought in our lives because of faith is the first evidence, the first fruit, both a sign and a seed, of the restoration of all of creation.
So that leads us to ponder the question: What first fruit of the new creation is present in my life, and how am I being called to use it to contribute to God’s dream of a world of peace and love and justice?
Put another way, what gift has God given me that I can offer for the good of the world?
Your answer might be one of the fruits of the Spirit that Paul describes in Galatians. Has God gifted you with love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control? Maybe it’s one of the gifts of the Spirit listed in First Corinthians: wisdom, knowledge, or healing. Maybe it is one of the big three gifts that abide: faith, hope, and love. Maybe it is something I haven’t named.
What gift has God given you that you can offer for the world?
I will tell you. For me, it is hope.
The greatest gift God has given me is hope in God’s promise: that God’s dream for the world will come true, and that I can contribute to it, even in just a tiny way, through my faithful response to God’s love. That is my job. I have received the gift of hope and am called to offer hope back into the world.
And I know, in our desperately broken world, my gift of hope alone is not going to bring about the fullness of the reign of God. But I trust that when I respond to God’s call and offer my tiny contribution…and when all of you do that, too…that God will take our offerings and do something with it.
And that God’s dream for the world will one day become reality: in us, and through us, and – thanks be to God – sometimes even in spite of us.
May it be so.
Amen.
[1] From: https://www.omegacenter.info/teilhard-for-troubled-times-1/
[2] John Wesley in Theodore Runyon, The New Creation, p. 9.
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QUESTIONS FOR REFLECTION / DISCUSSION
- What gift has God given you that you can offer for the world? (If you were at church Sunday, what word did you write on the altar cloth?)
- What is some evidence of that gift in your own life? Describe a time or situation where you have experienced that gift.
- How do you or how can you share that gift with others?