Romans 8:12-25 Commentary

Those who wish to preach on this Sunday’s Epistolary Lesson might benefit from spending some time reading the works of J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis. As we do so, we might note, among other things, the role that “seeing” plays in those Christian literary titans’ writings.

Lewis, for example, sometimes refers to our world as “Shadowlands.” By that he at least seems to mean that we can see that the world isn’t yet what it should or even will be. Lewis notes that God’s people see creation as a place of both shadows and light, of illusions and reality.

The world we now see, according to Lewis, is one of shadowy landscapes through which we walk on our way toward the new creation. Lewis wrote, “The world as it is now, is a world of spoiled goodness, a world of decay.”  It’s a world, he adds, “Of shadows, of almosts, of neither/nors, close calls [and] what if’s.”

Romans 8’s Paul uses different imagery when he talks about creation’s brokenness. But Christians who peer closely enough at passages like this Sunday’s Epistolary Lesson can almost catch in it glimpses of some of the sources of Lewis’s ideas. After all, in verse 18 the apostle refers to creation as being “subjected to frustration” (hypetage mataioteti). In verse 21 he describes the creation as in “bondage to decay” (douleias tes phthoras). The creation has somehow been, the apostle adds, “groaning (systenezai) as in the pains of childbirth (synodenei) right up to the present time” (22).

Paul’s language is highly poetic. That may be why it’s also hard to fully understand. Christians profess, after all, that God, after all, created everything “very good.” That means that, among other things, creation originally fulfilled the purposes for which God made it.

Yet while we profess that people died as a result of our first parents’ sin, other creatures at least seem to have preceded Adam and Eve in death. So the death of things like plants, animals and stars may somehow have been part of God’s original intent for God’s “good creation.”

How, then, does God’s creation groan “as in the pains of childbirth”? Tolkien’s sub-creation Arda suffers from the evil Melkor’s attempts to shape it in the evil one’s own image so that he can control it. Melkor’s attempted subversion sounds a lot like Satan’s attempts to shape God’s good creation in the evil one’s image. Creation suffers, in part, because the evil one wants to wrest control of it away from God.

While it’s hard to know just how that power struggle displays itself, we can see some of the ways Satan has convinced people to mar God’s good creation. One can’t, for example, drive far in America’s Appalachian Mountains without almost hearing them groan. Coal-mining companies have, after all, sheared off countless mountain peaks.

Or consider what some people call “the Great Pacific garbage patch.” It’s a dense collection of plastic and other debris that may be even more than twice the size of Texas. So Christians who listen closely can almost hear that island “groaning as in the pains of childbirth.”

Or people who listen closely enough may be able to “hear” the groaning that’s the silence of God’s creatures that we’ve driven to extinction. The silence of things like the eastern elk and Carolina parakeet, blue pike and bigleaf scurfpea is almost deafening.

Yet somehow, Paul adds in ways he doesn’t explain, the creation doesn’t just groan because of what we’ve done to it. It also groans because it somehow knows something better is coming. The apostle implies that everything that God makes somehow senses that God will someday eliminate decay, pollution, extinction and climate change.

In fact, in verse 19 Paul says the whole suffering creation waits “in eager expectation” (apokaradokia) for God’s saving work of it. That suggests that God created everything in such an amazing way that it somehow longs for something better because God filled it with hope.

Preachers ought to be careful not to claim to know how everything from aardvarks to zebras longs for something better. It’s very hard to know how inanimate objects like rocks eagerly await God’s salvation of them. Jesus’ friends can only humbly profess that everything God creates eagerly awaits its salvation.

So not only is a time coming when death and decay, as well as climate change, oil on lovely beaches and toxic air pollution will die. Creation and creatures also somehow eagerly long for it. In fact, the apostle literally compares that eager expectation to a “craning of one’s neck.”

A colleague compares the groaning creation’s posture to that of a child at a Fourth of July parade. She can’t see the parade coming. So the child must stand on tiptoes in order to try to see the bands, floats and candy approach. She strains to look down the road because she believes something wonderful is coming.

Yet it isn’t just the creation that stands on tiptoes to look for what God has in store for it. This Sunday’s Epistolary Lesson’s Paul invites his brothers and sisters in Christ to crane our necks to “look down the road” as well. After all, we see with eyes of faith that something wonderful is coming for the whole creation.

When Tolkien alludes to creation’s redemption, he talks about “seeing things as we are (or were) meant to see them.” Yet while we can see things as Satan corrupts and we’ve abused them, it’s far harder to see creation as God intends it. It’s hard to see as God is even now working to restore the creation.

A few Christians deduce that the creation is such a mess that God’s going to replace the whole creation with something that’s so different that there’s no point in even working to redeem it now. Still others find the Scriptures’ allusions to the new creation so mysterious that they don’t even try to imagine what it will be like. What’s more, there’s little individuals can do to clean up things like polluted water or smog.

So it’s always tempting to refuse to do anything to shrink our negative impact on God’s creation. Yet those whom God helps to see what the new creation will be like can take steps to do what God created us to do. In the Contemporary Testimony, Our World Belongs to God, some Reformed Christians profess that God appointed us “earth keepers and caretakers.” We tend God’s earth “for the unfolding and well-being of his world so that creation and all who live in it may flourish.”

God sends God’s adopted children to care for the earth because such stewardship helps the creation as well as all creatures to flourish in the ways for which God created. We also tend everything God makes because it helps our neighbors to thrive. When, after all, creation suffers, our neighbors who are materially needy are especially unable to defend themselves against its effects.

Yet Romans 8 at least suggests there’s even more to our earthkeeping. One of a hard text’s hardest phrases is Paul’s claim that creation is waiting “in eager expectation for the sons of God to be revealed” (19). We’ve generally assumed he’s just speaking there of the time when Christ’s return will reveal just whom God has adopted as God’s children.

However, my colleague Fleming Rutledge, who lent me a number of ideas for this commentary, suggests that such revelation happens first when we’re actively involved in the world as Christ was. God’s sons and daughters are initially “revealed” when we, among other things, work to alleviate God’s creation’s groaning.

Of course, Christians sometimes argue about the causes of that groaning. After all, we know who shaves the tops off West Virginia’s mountains and creates islands of plastic. However, some Christians argue, sometimes endlessly, about who (or what) causes things like climate change.

Even the most inspired preachers are unlikely settle that debate in parts of Christ’s Church. But we can remind each other that that debate easily distracts us from caring for what God cares for. If, in fact, God’s children’s identities are partly being revealed by our care for creation, then our inaction may be disguising us.

After all, Romans 8:12-25 suggests that God’s sons and daughters don’t just claim we’re Christians. We don’t even just do religious things like pray and go to church. Paul suggests that God’s adopted children also care for everything God makes.

So he invites those who see that God has something better in store for what God makes to show it by actively caring for what God creates. We show that we’re God’s adopted children by taking on the job God first gave our first parents of caring for God’s creation.

Illustration

Laura Tillman’s book, The Long Shadow of Small Ghosts, tells the ghastly story of the murder of three young children by their parents. While she tries to fathom what the parents did, in the end Tillman admits that she simply cannot understand this.

However, she manages to find some hope in the reaction of this family’s neighbors following the murders. Because those neighbors turned the yard where the children had once loved to play in into a place filled with raised garden beds–a kind of living memorial.

Tillman concludes, “The garden had accomplished something unexpected – it made the [site of the murder] seem beside the point. The story of what had happened there lent strength to this new incarnation, a symbol of renewal in a spot where death once reigned.”