Tenth Sunday After Pentecost Year A 2008

10 Pentecost A 08
July 20, 2008

Romans 8:12-25
12 So then, brothers and sisters, we are debtors, not to the flesh, to live according to the flesh-- 13 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. 14 For all who are led by the Spirit of God are children of God. 15 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!" 16 it is that very Spirit bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God, 17 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.
18 I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory about to be revealed to us. 19 For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the children of God; 20 for the creation was subjected to futility, not of its own will but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope 21 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. 22 We know that the whole creation has been groaning in labor pains until now; 23 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. 24 For in hope we were saved. Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what is seen? 25 But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience.


The Birthday Party

As my daughter was being born, her mother cursed me. The women here who have undergone childbirth may remember doing similar things. One woman I know informed her husband that he would never get near her again. Why was this?

Of course, the pain is incredible. For us men, unimaginable. Some have said that kidney stones are worse, but not by much.

And yet many women do have more than one child. Some have called it the pain that is the hardest to bear, and the easiest to forget.

This month we’ve been reflecting on the question, “what does God want Philippi Christian Church to do and be?” We’re hoping that this series of sermons will help our vision team as they deliberate about Philippi’s future over the next five to ten years.

The first sermon had to do with our own inability to construct this vision out of our own minds and preferences and opinions. We discussed how we have to stand still and let God’s grace wash over us. At the same time, we realized that part of our mission as a congregation is to be that grace washing over every member and visitor.

Last week, we looked more deeply at the problem of receiving God’s direction. We saw that part of our work as individual believers and as a congregation must certainly be to try to identify and give up whatever blocks us from God’s Spirit. We spoke about how specific God-given instincts that serve us in many situations can come to dominate us in place of God.

And so it is we come to the question of just what the Holy Spirit does, if and when it comes to us and fills us. In our passage this morning, Paul is suggesting that God is preparing to transform the whole universe and the Holy Spirit is the advance guard of that new creation.

Paul’s vision if based on the resurrection of Jesus Christ. When he came out of the tomb Easter morning, Jesus was not a ghost. People touched him. He ate and drank. Certainly he was not the same. Many people didn’t recognize him at first. He did some interesting tricks like passing through locked doors and walls and appearing and disappearing. He seemed to have the ability to move between planes of existence. Now, I am the farthest thing from a supernaturalist. I’m always looking for the rational explanation. The gospels work very hard to make it particularly clear that Jesus was physically raised from the dead in a new and profoundly different kind of body. The tomb was empty, so it also seems clear that the new body was made out of the old.

Stay with me now. Strange as it may seem, this is all rather alien to mainstream Christian thought. I would venture to guess that most Christians do not seriously expect to physically rise from the dead.

Yet it seems very, very clear that this is precisely what the New Testament says. We are of course free to disbelieve what the bible says. Many people do.

But if we can suspend our disbelief for a moment, and just think through what this might mean, Paul’s words will begin to make sense. If Jesus was really raised from the dead in a new kind of Spirit-powered immortal body, this has real implications for the universe. Paul is saying that it’s not just going to be people who will be transformed. People, however, are to be the first fruits, the signs of everything else that’s going to change.

I don’t guess there was much knowledge of formal laws of physics in Paul’s day, but I’m sure most people realized that things tend to fall apart, to lose steam, to decay and finally to die. Things that are moving tend to stop moving. The resurrection of Jesus suggests that this fact may not always remain a fact.

Today, most physicists argue that the universe is slated for inevitable extinction. I don’t pretend to understand it, but the concept is called “entropic doom,” and it basically means that inertia is king. Things must inevitably stop.

But what if God intends to change that? And what if the resurrection is our sign that he does?

The church is a sign of the coming kingdom of God, carried out in the midst of the decay and death and strife of the current creation. We gather as church to celebrate a feast for which there is as yet no reason.

It’s like having a birthday party during labor.

Because, if we celebrate this hope every week, this amazing and insane idea that God might actually fundamentally transform the universe, the way things are will come to torment us. If we celebrate this hope, if we meditate on it, pray for it, calling on our Father in heaven to bring about this new birth, the very act of rehearsal will begin to bring the thing about, and if we do it right, it will cause turmoil.

I have never known things to change for the better without conflict. I have never changed for the better without suffering a great deal first. Human society has never changed for the better without tremendous bloodshed and agony. People who are benefiting from evil systems will not willingly give up those benefits.

We worship Christ crucified and risen. Without his death on the cross, without his conflict with the powers of the world, Christ would not have emerged triumphant from the grave.

One thing is for certain: to be filled with the Holy Spirit is to see the world through a new lens.
We see that the world is desperately lost, we see that the world is decaying and dying, we begin to feel the terrible pangs of new birth.

So many times, people have tried to pin me down. “Are you a liberal? Are you a conservative? Are you an evangelical? Are you agnostic?” It is absolutely true that God is at work bringing down the mighty and raising up the lowly, he is at work tearing down the temples and burning the abominations, but I continue to assert that the conflict is not ours to fight, though we may well receive the wounds of battle.

Someone has said, “choose your enemy carefully, for you will become him.”

Jesus taught in his parable on the wheat and the weeds that it is not up to us to determine who is faithful and who is not. It is not up to us to determine who will go to heaven and who will not. It is not up to us to identify those who are on the side of Satan. It is up to us to open ourselves to the Holy Spirit and pray for adoption.

When we are adopted, the way will present itself. And it is likely the enemy will find us.
But finally, our focus is not on those who are against God’s coming kingdom, but on the kingdom itself. We must remain busy celebrating the birthday even as we groan with labor pain. Whatever we suffer, just as with labor, will be nothing to the joy of the birth.

And so it is that hope is the basis of all that we are as the church, the hope that despite the terrible things that are wrong with the world, God is coming to make a change. We pray and work as individuals and as a church to somehow, some time, and in some way to let the world around us know that this great change is coming and to rejoice with us, despite the terrible cost we might suffer along the way.

This is why, if you have been with Philippi for some time, you might notice some differences between the world and our little community. God is shaping us to be that little taste of coming heaven in the midst of present suffering, an experience of coming wholeness in the present brokenness, a birthday party in the midst of the pain of birth.

Amen.