Sermon preached by Dr. Dennis Okholm
July 11 & 12, 2009
Copyright 2009, Dennis Okholm
All rights reserved

Not the Way It’s Supposed to Be
Exodus 15:22-16:4; Romans 8:18-30

"I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us." (Romans 8:18)

Grand Canyon video clip set up: Immigration lawyer coming back from Laker’s game tries to avoid traffic jam but his luxury car stalls in the part of town where the kids in gangs get respect with guns. He calls a tow truck, but before it arrives he is surrounded by five street thugs who threaten his car and his life. Finally, the tow truck driver arrives, hooks up the man’s car and negotiates by giving the leader a theology lesson. [CLIP] Repeat: “The world ain’t supposed to work like this. Maybe you don’t know that, but this ain’t the way it’s supposed to be. Everything’s supposed to be different than what it is here.”

Everything is supposed to be different, but the problem is that we human creatures spoiled God's perfect, righteous creation by our desire to be at the center of the universe. We wanted God to orbit around us rather than for us to orbit around God. And when everything starts to orbit around us, everything else gets off-center, and things aren’t the way they’re supposed to be.

But then Jesus Christ entered into God’s creation to set things right again: to bring us the righteousness we had lost and could not recover. We are still on the way to a full recovery. And we will get there. Paul guarantees it in our text today: "...and those whom he justified he also glorified . . . . He who did not withhold his own Son, but gave him up for all of us, will he not with him also give us everything else?" (vv. 30-31)

The end is coming, but when the Bible speaks about the “end,” it’s not talking about all of us leaving this earth, despite what some bumper stickers say. When the “midnight cry” that the choir sang about happens God’s kingdom will be established once and for all in this world he created, with the Creator at the center once again, except that this time nothing will defeat righteousness . . . nothing will ruin the right relationships God has intended for us and his creation (vv. 35-39).

But even when discussing the end, Paul reminds us we aren't there yet. In this in-between time, Paul reminds us that the "creation was subjected to futility," emptiness, frustration; it is in "bondage to decay," corruption, ruin, deterioration; the "whole creation groans in pain. . . . 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." (vv. 20-23)

All of us suffer the futility and decay that all of creation was subjected to in Genesis 3 and from which it will be released according to the vision in Revelation 22. We suffer loneliness, or betrayal from family and friends, or the triumph of an enemy, or powerlessness against diseases like cancer and AIDS, or the deterioration of old age, or the death of a loved one, or the loss of a job, or the barrenness that leaves a couple childless.

Even when we seem to be doing all the right things, we are frustrated. The great industrialist Armand Hammer once related the story of a young woman who asked him why he was in such good shape given the fact that he was over 80 years old. He told her that he didn't smoke, didn't drink hard liquor, and swam a half-hour every day. The young woman responded that her father didn't smoke or drink and exercised every day, yet he died at 57. "What did he do wrong?" she asked. Hammer answered: "He didn't do it long enough!" Indeed, not one of us will "do it long enough." If no other great tragedy interrupts our lives, all of us are in bondage to decay and death, says the Apostle Paul.

ALL of our earthly projects and prospects are subject to corruption, to frustration, to disappointment—even our attempts to forge peace in the world, to wipe out disease, to feed the hungry, to stop terrorism, to construct the perfect American family, to be the most successful we can be at our profession.

Paul is right! The whole creation is in bondage to futility . . . to corruption. Nothing and no one is exempt. Even the Christian experiences the full force of this futility and decay. We, too, suffer. Weeds grow in the believer's garden just as much as they grow in the unbeliever's garden.

Yet, Paul does not leave it there. If our prospects for the future were only a constant battle with the weeds, then the proper response would be just to tolerate our lives . . . or to grit our teeth and stoically resign oneselves to it . . . or to be an eternal pessimist. But the Christian, the one in whom the love of God is poured out . . . the one in whom the Spirit says "You are a child of God"—that one is not led to despair, but to hope. The Christian is the one who suspects that this futility is not the last word! Who anticipates a future glorious existence of justice, freedom, peace, and joy that cannot even be compared to the present sufferings.

The words that Paul uses to describe our anticipation of the future conjure up a strong image (vv. 22-23). Paul describes creation as suffering in agony. He describes both creation and the Christian as groaning or sighing together. This groaning is precisely due to the hope that we have in the midst of the pain and suffering. It is not merely groaning under the decay of the present, but groaning for the glory to be revealed. This is not the groaning of one who is dying, but of one who is giving birth. These are not the death pangs of those who live without hope; these are the birth pangs of those who anticipate a renewed heaven and a renewed earth. "The entire creation, as it were, sets up a grand symphony of sighs." This is GOOD NEWS: God wins in the end!

We groan for the day when our redemption will be completed—when we will finally share in God's glory, not as spectators, but as participants who mirror his image perfectly because in this in-between time we will have been perfectly conformed to his likeness...we will be in every sense of the word the sons and daughters of God.

This is strong language that Paul is using . . . this talk of groanings and birthpangs. It reminds me of what I witnessed as Trevecca labored to give birth to our firstborn, Ryan. Seventeen hours of groans and breathing and pushing until what we had hoped for was finally revealed. The groaning had a purpose and the purpose was the revelation of one who had already been our son for nine months, but who was now in a complete way, our son. In the same way, the groaning of those who are already sons and daughters of God in this world has a purpose—that we might be made complete—that we might experience the full glorious liberty of the children of God, with the creation following in our wake, freed at last from bondage to futility, suffering, sin, and decay.

But hat troubles me about this strong image is that I find few who live up to it—including myself. As I read this passage in Romans I ask myself why we don't often groan with birthpangs to share in God's glory—to become the sons and daughters of God.

To be sure, there is at least in all of us a subconscious awareness that things should be better than they are—that the world ain’t supposed to work like this. The saying "Hope springs eternal" refers to a deep-seated optimism in human beings. We are so optimistic that we believe in the evolutionary progress of the human race despite the fact that we continue to commit some of the worst atrocities of any species on the planet. Deep down inside, all of us hope for a new heaven and a new earth—the rescue of God’s creation. The whole creation participates in this on a subconscious level, as Paul implies.

But why is our conscious hope in the coming glory so weak? Why is our groaning for our adoption as children of God and for the redemption of our bodies so weak? Why does the prospect of eternal happiness pale in significance next to the prospects of earthly happiness? Why do we jump up and down when we win merchandise on the "Price Is Right" but endure a Saturday evening / Sunday morning sermon about the promise of a redeemed earth that will exceed our wildest fantasies? Why do we more easily groan about someone's decision about the interior decoration of the church building than about the redemption of all the outsiders who use our church building week after week? Why do we get more excited anticipating a night out in the city than God's coming redemption of the city?

Many answers could be given. I want to suggest just two.

First, our hopes are aimed too low. We are too worldly. We do get more excited about a vacation or a new car or an "A" on an exam or a promotion on the job than we do about God's promises to set this creation right again and of our adoption as His sons and daughters. We Christians so often focus our hopes on the projects and prospects of this earthly life which have an expiration date stamped on them. We are told to hope for the kingdom of God above anything else in our lives—to make that the focus and goal of our entire lives and to make every other hope secondary to it. But when we get really honest with ourselves we find that the kingdom of God doesn't often make the top ten list of those hopes that preoccupy our time, our money, and our energy. What Paul refers to as an "incomparable glory" is often incomparable in exactly the opposite sense that Paul has in mind.

We're like the little boy at the revival meeting who heard the preacher talk about the final coming of Christ. The preacher ranted: "Lightning will flash, rivers will boil, the earth will shiver, fire will fall from heaven . . . and then Christ will come again." At that point, the little boy leaned over and tugged his mother's sleeve and asked: "Mama, do you think they will call school off that day?"

The point I am making was put so well by C. S. Lewis when he wrote:

. . . if we consider the unblushing promises of rewards and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels, it would seem that Our Lord finds our desires, not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at sea. We are far too easily pleased. [The Weight of Glory]

Some of you have heard me tell the story about the time I was excitedly extolling the virtues of a computer system I wanted to purchase, when a caring Christian friend brought me back to the proper focus in my life by quietly asking, "And Dennis, how is that going to serve the kingdom?" Lewis is right: we are far too easily pleased. But we are not supposed to be. We're not supposed to feel comfortable with the present circumstances, because this is not the way things are supposed to be, and it is not the way things are going to be. If you and I are fairly comfortable this morning with the way things are going in our lives, then maybe we don’t really appreciate the futility of this fallen creation or maybe our Christian faith lacks real hope.

That brings us to a second reason that we don't often find ourselves groaning for redemption: we just do not like to groan. It is hard to be a patient “hoper” . . . to hope for what God is going to do in us and to us and for our world while we suffer in the meantime. We're like the Hebrews in the passage we read from Exodus who want to go back to Egypt rather than suffer the hardships they will have to endure in order to get to the Promised Land.

But the New Testament makes it clear time and time again that suffering precedes glory. In the New Testament there is an organic connection between our suffering and our glorification . Suffering is the way to our glorification. Glorification actually grows out of the suffering. The deeper our faith, the more doubt we will endure. The deeper our hope, the more liable we are to despair. The deeper our love, the more pain we will feel when we lose it. If we refuse to live with doubt, despair, and pain, then we will not know faith, hope, and love. [adapted from Parker Palmer]

Now this emphasis in the Bible is not attractive to our modern ears, for with all or our technological know-how we like to think that we are in control and that we should alleviate our suffering—bypass it—and as a result we have become weak in character. It has been said that with our technology we are capable of doing anything except for one thing—we have lost the ability to suffer well.

Some of you may have heard the story about a man who found a cocoon of the emperor moth and took it home to watch it emerge. One day a small opening appeared, and for several hours the moth struggled but could not seem to force its body past a certain point. Deciding something was wrong, the man took scissors and snipped the remaining bit of cocoon. The moth emerged easily, its body swollen, the wings small and shriveled. He expected that in a few hours the wings would spread out in their natural beauty, but they did not. Instead of developing into a creature free to fly, the moth spent its life dragging around a swollen body and shriveled wings. The constricting cocoon and the struggle necessary to pass through the tiny opening are God's way of forcing fluid from the body into the wings. The "merciful" snip was, in reality, cruel. Sometimes the struggle is exactly what we need. [Leadership]

If you can’t relate to an emperor moth, surely you can remember those times when you were a little kid sitting in the back seat of the car headed for Disneyland or the beach or the mountains, badgering Mom and Dad with the question, “Are we there yet?” And the longer you rode, the more you wanted to arrive. And it’s that way with our lives. We want peace and justice and all the bad things to go away . . . and we have been promised this. The longer the journey takes the more our anticipation of God’s promised future increases, especially as we experience the continuing wars and loneliness and illnesses of life. Our longing grows. We are stretched thin, and so we find ourselves crying out to God, “Lord, are we there yet?!”

That is precisely Paul's point in chapters 5 and 8 of Romans: suffering is not something to circumvent; it is something to rejoice in. Suffering is not to be wasted, because wasted suffering is, in a word, hell. Suffering is meant to produce the hope of glory in you—if you endure it in the right manner. This does not mean that the Christian goes looking for suffering or wallows in it. It does not mean that the Christian passively submits to suffering. Nor does it mean that the Christian does not welcome relief from suffering when it comes—we most certainly do and should. But it means that when we experience the futility of this world to which we are in bondage, we will rejoice in it because such suffering will produce a hope that does not disappoint. How does that work? How does suffering produce hope in us?

Suffering in our lives is a reminder that this world is subjected to futility. It can become a reminder of the present world's unfitness to satisfy our deepest needs. Suffering and the futility of our present existence become a powerful aid to get the right perspective on our earthly projects and our earthly hopes. Suffering—failures, disappointments, corruption, mortality—all remind us that such earthly hopes and projects are not what we are supposed to pin our deepest longings on. One person tries to make a dent on poverty, but the statistics only get worse, or he helps to alleviate it here but it pops up over there. A couple tries to socially engineer the perfect family, hoping that their model children become the optimum combination of a rocket scientist, cover model, and Olympic athlete, but instead they end up with kids who are quite content to perfect the question, "You want fries with that?"

Experiencing the futility of this world like this slams Paul's words right into my heart. Only then am I driven to groan for the only hope that cannot disappoint me. And then I can rejoice in my suffering as a part of the creation that longs for something the creation itself cannot give— something which only God can give.

In this way suffering can bring us into a closer personal communion with God. It can make us more aware of the Kingdom for which we yearn. And this yearning will not disappoint us, because we will discover that in our sufferings we can experience God's love for us as a foretaste of the glory that cannot even be compared to our present sufferings. As Paul writes to the Corinthians: "This slight momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison . . . ."

So, does this mean that we should have no earthly hopes and no earthly projects . . . that we should simply twiddle our thumbs and wait for the coming Kingdom? Quite the contrary. It means that with a Romans 8 perspective on the world and the future, we will be not be disabled or surprised by the inevitable disappointments and decay that our earthly projects will bring. We will become a realist who neither over- nor under-estimate our earthly treasures and aspirations. We can accept our earthly cares in gratitude, knowing that if they are not fulfilled—if they do not go according to plans, our joy and peace will be sustained even in the disappointment, for in hope we will stand tough—we will wait patiently, steadfastly, because our hope is not placed in that which is subject to futility; it is placed in the God who promises to bring the whole creation out of bondage to the glorious liberty of the sons and daughters of God. We will be those who know that victory is coming, because the decisive battle took place on the cross and in the tomb, so that, though we will lose a few of the remaining battles, we know how the war will end. And because this Christ who died and was raised and sits at the right hand of God intercedes for us, nothing will separate us from his love ever again. Nothing will thwart his plan this time. His creation will be rescued and restored to become what he always intended it to be. (vv. 34-35)

We live in anticipation of that day, praying down the Kingdom and groaning for it until the ultimate destruction of all the powers of evil is accomplished and the re-creation of the universe is completed and we have arrived where we began. Like children whose language and behavior changes in December, like little kids who cannot contain themselves because Christmas is coming, so we Christians are people whose present life is determined more by the future glory we anticipate than by the past from which Christ has released us. People around us ought to notice from our talk and our behavior that something is up. Like grade school children who can't wait to rip open their packages on Christmas morning, in everything we are witnesses to a reality that is coming.

So, we go from here as groaning and hopeful people . . . into our neighborhoods, businesses, schools, families, city streets, suburban malls, parks . . . as the church dispersed after the pastor gives the signal to "Charge!" at the benediction. We go where Christ goes—into the futility, into the blighted and dark places of the world, where people are addicted and alienated and diseased and dying, where spiritual powers oppress and enslave people, and where social conditions perpetuate idolatry, classism, racism, and sexism—bringing the good news of the coming Kingdom when God will establish his righteousness on this earth once and for all. [Family of Faith]

And we will say with the Apostle Paul that "in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us," for we are "convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Jesus Christ our Lord." Amen.

Dennis Okholm
St. Andrews Presbyterian Church
11-12 July 2009