Some of you know that Steve and Susan Forrester are expecting a baby. On the other hand, some of you might not even know who Steve and Susan Forrester are. Steve’s the pastor of the Methodist church up the street, and Susan is one of the counselors at their counseling center. Anyway they’re really excited, and we’re excited for them, but the prep time is kind of difficult because they don’t know when the baby will arrive.
You see, they’re adopting.
They’re getting a Korean baby through Holt International, and they’re most of the way through the process. I wrote them a letter of recommendation and filled out a bunch of forms last December, and just last week they had what is called a home visit, which is the final step before formal approval. Now they just have to wait. And get ready. I asked Susan for permission to use their story as an illustration for my sermon, because it was so very much to the point. Because, you see, for the next several months their lives are going to be pretty chaotic. And one of the hardest things about it is not knowing how to pace the tasks to be accomplished between now and then. If they get it all done too soon, and the baby doesn’t come right away, how on earth will they make it through last couple of months without bouncing off the walls? But of course if they delay, assuming things will take a while, the baby will arrive before the nursery’s painted.
Waiting is hard.
And in the meantime you wouldn’t believe the chaos. They’re moving things out of the craft room into Steve’s study, but first they had to get Steve’s study ready, so they had to empty it out, and paint, and so on. You can imagine. And it means that Susan couldn’t be in our play - actually, nobody is going to be in our play, we’re not doing one this year due to low turnout - and it means that Steve couldn’t go to Honduras for the mission trip, and goodness, their whole year is completely taken over by this project. Is it all really worth it? I mean, just think how much easier life would be if they didn’t have this enormous change coming up.
Well, I expect you all know the answer to that. As Paul said, “I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory about to be revealed to us.”
So Steve and Susan will often be frustrated - maybe even frazzled - over the next few months, balanced somehow between the now and the not yet - but one thing that they will not be is hopeless. They will not question the purpose of it all as they trip over the piles of unsorted stuff and sniff the paint thinner and mourn lost opportunities. Because every scrap of chaos, every expense and inconvenience, is made with a purpose in mind that puts it all in a whole different perspective.
Just so does Paul remind us, as God’s newly adopted children, that the way station called life where we spend our time between redemption and redemption is not the final destination. And it’s not just people, not just God’s children who are suffering in the chaos of the present time. All of God’s creation is in the same condition.
Somehow it’s hard to think of the creation as being frustrated, isn’t it? I mean, frustration is about being prevented somehow from doing what you want to do and so you have to think of creation wanting to do something it can’t do... and that’ all of a sudden gives us a new perspective on the created order, doesn’t it? As filled with beauty as it is, the world isn’t what it’s supposed to be.
It isn’t that way just because we human beings have taken lousy care of it, although that’s certainly part of it. It’s also because the curse on Adam and Eve in Genesis 3 also fell upon the earth. The ground produces thorns and thistles, and we as their descendants get food - and energy and raw materials and all the other stuff that makes our modern society run - only by ‘painful toil’ and sweat. Paul sums up the results of God’s curse by the one word, "frustration." It means "emptiness, futility, purposelessness, transitoriness." It’s the idea expressed in the book of Ecclesiastes, "Vanity of vanities...All is vanity’ which in the NIV reads ‘"Meaningless! Meaningless! Utterly meaningless!’" If it weren’t that we are waiting for something that makes it all worth while, the life we live "under the sun," imprisoned in time and space, is just as pointless as the Existentialist philosophers of our century concluded.
The thing that gives it all meaning is that this frustration wasn’t pointless, but on the contrary, it was ordained by “the will of the one who subjected it, in hope.” [20b] God, being both Judge and Savior, built hope into the world he cursed. It wasn’t arbitrary, whimsical, heartless, any more than the dismantling of Steve & and Susan's craft room to turn it into a nursery. It’s messy. But there’s a point to it all, and it won’t last forever. “The creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay,” [21a] Paul says. The word ‘hope’ turns from the past to the future of creation. One day it will experience a new beginning.
Like frustration, bondage seems an odd concept to associate with creation. It’s a personal sort of thing, isn’t it, imprisonment? What is creation enslaved to, what is it going to be freed from? Paul seems to imply that nature is locked into an unending cycle, so that concep¬tion, birth and growth are relentlessly followed by decline, decay, death and decomposition.
It is spring, and Easter reminds us of more than the death and resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ. It also reminds us that God is continually bringing life out of death. But it is equally true that death is the end of all life - as we know it. Everything dies.The only question is, how soon. That is what the season of Lent is about, facing our mortality, our weakness. The only life that does not end in death is that of the resurrected Jesus.
And what Paul is telling us is that not only we ourselves, but all of God’s creation will “obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God.” [21c], literally "released into the freedom of their glory." Can you imagine what that might be like?
Old Testament prophecies of the messianic age are full of attempts to describe that incredible fulfillment, especially in the Psalms and Isaiah. The earth and the heavens will be changed like clothing, God will "create new heavens and a new earth," including a new Jerusalem; the desert will blossom, wild and domestic animals will co-exist in peace, even the most ferocious and poisonous creatures "will neither harm nor destroy" throughout God’s new world.
The New Testament writers don’t speak quite like that. But Jesus spoke of the "new birth" of the world at his coming; Peter of the "restoration" of all things; Paul here of the liberation, and elsewhere of the reconciliation, of all things; and John of the new heaven and earth, in which God will dwell with his people, and from which all separation, sorrow, pain and death will have been eliminated.
I haven’t a clue how it’s going to work, scientifically; clearly the "laws of nature" will be radically different. It is as utterly beyond our imagination as Jesus’ resurrection was to the apostles - until they actually experienced it. I tend to fantasize about a whole range of possibilities, from gardens not needing to be weeded to riding tornadoes like amusement park rides.
But we’re still in the cosmic Lent, so to speak, stuck somewhere between incarnation and resur;ection, face to face with our mortality and sinfulness. “The whole creation has been groaning ...until now,” [v. 22] Paul says. But now we know that the frustration was part of God’s design, and at the other end hope is waiting, so the groans stop sounding like symptoms of despair. Instead, Paul says, we should think of them as "labor pains," for they provide assurance of the coming emergence of a new order. Mothers, do you remember the beginning of your own labor pains? Was this a time of despair or a time to buckle down and get to work? This is a positive time, a time of expectation, even though the pain is quite real.
In just the same way, Paul says, the pains and ailments of our own mortality should point us toward hope. What is true of God’s creation is also true of God’s children... who “groan inwardly while we wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies.”
In five or six weeks, the final report on Steve and Susan will be ready. One copy will go to the INS (Immigration and Naturalization Service) and one will go to Oregon, to be translated into Korean. Two or three months later, they’ll get their “assignment.” This is another word meaning “baby.” This is when they find out whether it’s a boy or a girl, and Susan can start buying clothes. It doesn’t really quite catch the flavor, does it? Anyway, between receiving their “assignment” and getting the real baby takes another couple of months. The adoption is a done deal - but the baby hasn’t arrived.
And that’s just where we are at, as Christians. We’re caught in the tension between what God has inaugurated (by giving us his Spirit) and what he will consummate (in our final adoption and redemption); we groan with discomfort and longing. The indwelling Spirit gives us joy, and the coming glory gives us hope, but the interim suspense is a real pain.
Paul highlights our half-saved condition with five affirmations:
First, we have the first fruits of the Spirit. That’s an agricultural term. "First fruits" were both the beginning of the harvest and the pledge that the full harvest would follow in due time. There’s a double meaning here: not only was the Feast of Weeks the first-fruits festival, it was also Pentecost - the day on which the Spirit had been given. But since Paul is writing to Rome, the biggest city in the known world, he then replaces the agricultural metaphor with a commercial one. He describes the gift of the Spirit as a "first installment, deposit, down payment, pledge" which guaranteed the future completion of the purchase. Although we have not yet received our final adoption or redemption, we have received the Spirit as both foretaste and promise of these blessings.
Secondly, we groan inwardly. This should not come as a surprise. You see, the very presence of the Spirit is a constant reminder of the incompleteness of our salvation, as we share with the creation in the frustration, the bondage to decay and the pain. So one reason for our groaning is our physical frailty and mortality. Paul expresses this elsewhere: “...we groan, longing to be clothed with our heavenly dwelling (probably our resurrection body).... we groan under our burden... [2 Cor 5:-4] But it isn’t only our fragile bodies which make us groan, it is also our fallen nature, which hinders us from behaving as we should, and would altogether prevent us from it, were it not for the indwelling Spirit. And if it weren’t for the Spirit showing us our true selves, we wouldn’t suffer over our shortcomings as we do. So our groans express both present pain and future longing. Some Christians, however, grin too much (they have no place in their theology for pain) and groan too little.
So as we groan we wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies. Just as the groaning creation waits eagerly for God’s children to be revealed, so we groaning Christians wait eagerly for our bodily redemption. Our spirits are already alive, although only sort of at the beginning of the gestation period, so to speak. And one day the Spirit will also give life to our bodies.The deterioration which we all experience - some of us more than others, these days - will be replaced by the "freedom of glory."
So we have to focus on our future hope, not the present frustration, because in hope we were saved.This reminds us that we are only half-saved. For we haven’t gotten past judgment day, nor have we been scoured of the final vestiges of sin in our human personalities. We were saved "in hope" of our total liberation, as the creation was subjected to frustration in hope of being set free from it. This double hope looks to the future and to things which, being future, are so far unseen. “Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what is seen? But we hope for what we do not see.” [24-25]
We know it’s coming, but we can’t see it. We don’t have a timetable. We can’t go off and do something else knowing that the alarm will summon us in plenty of time to be ready. We can’t turn our backs on our hope, for that turns the frustrations of this world into meaningless madness. And so we wait for it with patience, that is, for the fulfillment of our hope. For we are confident in God’s promises that the first fruits will be followed by the harvest, bondage by freedom, decay by incorruption, and labor pains by the birth of the new world. This is all about "between times," between present difficulty and future destiny, between the already and the not yet, between promise and fulfillment, between suffering and glory.
"We were saved in hope" brings them together. And in this tension the correct Christian posture is that of waiting, waiting eagerly, with keen expectation, and waiting patiently, steadfast in the endurance of our trials. We are to wait neither so eagerly that we lose our patience, not so patiently that we lose our expectation, but eagerly and patiently together.
It is hard to keep the balance, isn’t it. Some Christians have turned the call for patience into a sort of deadened passivity, frowning on enthusiasm and responding to life’s changes and challenges with apathy or pessimism. They have lost their sense of direction, their hope, their confidence that God’s grand design is unfolding exactly as he promised. Others, in contrast, grow impatient of waiting. They are so carried away with zeal that they almost try to force God’s hand. And with millennium fever stirring, the temptation is even stronger than it usually is. And of course we want to be done with the seemingly endless cycle of weakness, disease, pain and decay. Some of us want to hold it back at all costs; others see wars and rumors of wars, famines and earthquakes, corrupt rulers and so on as signs that God is about to bring the baby home.
The work of waiting is to do all things in the light of hope. The work of waiting is steady, not frantic, doing what needs to be done each day, but letting tomorrow’s work and worries wait until tomorrow.
