July 17, 2005
Year A
Title: Hopeful Patience
I wondered where to begin with this sermon, as I often do when it comes
to preparing some sort of word for a congregation. This text from
Romans is actually a very rich text, lots of different ideas, lots of different
places to land, which makes it especially difficult if you’ve got 15 minutes
to preach and communion to serve on a Sunday like this one. And then
there is the word about hope at the very end of the text, beautiful as they
are, but words for those of you, and certainly me at times in my life,
these kinds of words about hope may be difficult to hear, they may
sound hollow perhaps, because the night being gone through this
moment is especially dark, especially difficult to bear. Whenever
someone like Paul writes about hope, and I am the one hearing it
thousands of years later, I always try to see if it rings true for me, if what
the writer says resonates with me. And sometimes it does and
sometimes it doesn’t—it all depends on the moment, I suppose, where I
am in my life, whether I am feeling particularly hopeful or hopeless at that
point. How I feel about the words of hope offered to me, in a particular
moment, whether through some written text, or through some well-
meaning words from a friend or even a stranger, all of these words are
filtered through what is happening at that point in my life—the back story
of the moment, so to speak. How I react to them, whether they nurture
more hope in me, it all depends, I think, in the context of the moment.
But I do know this as well—it helps to know who is speaking these words,
and out of what context they come from—what is the back-story of the
one who is offering hope to me through their words? I mean, there is
something about knowing from where people speak from, the stories
they are living, that somehow gives weight to the words they are saying,
especially words that are meant to give hope. Words of hope spoken
out of a battle with cancer mean more than words spoken from a person
just coming from a healthy check-up at their doctor’s office, a person
who has never had to deal with cancer. Both sets of words may be true,
but the words spoken out of a battle with cancer carry with them the
heavy weight of experience.
Of course, for our text this morning, we don’t know the back-story of
much of Paul’s life, what is really going on in his story as he writes these
words. Certainly, from another text from the earlier part of Romans we
heard a few weeks ago in this same pulpit, we have a hint perhaps that
he was struggling with his own demons, perhaps his own disappointment
in himself, the inner battle within him to live up to the words he taught
and preacher, the life he called upon others to live. I don’t know for
sure, but you sense that he knows something of despair, something of
hopelessness and deep disappointment in oneself, and perhaps
disappointment in God as well. Paul has spent so much time teaching
and preaching about the transformation of lives when one follows the
way of this Jesus of Nazareth, that when it becomes apparent that we so
often remain very untransformed, I can’t imagine that it wouldn’t be
disappointing—it certainly is for me, at least so far in my spiritual
journey. And the life of itinerant preacher types like Paul, living from
hand to mouth, from congregation to congregation, traveling and making
a living on the side when you can—its not an easy way to live a life, I
suspect. Paul is a man who has suffered somewhat, so the back story
that Paul is speaking out of is probably as authentic as any of our
suffering in this room. He isn’t offering cheap hope, you know that cheap
kind of hope that seems rootless and other worldly, ungrounded in the
dry soil that comes to most of us, for at least a season in our lives.
In Wendell Berry’s novel, A Place On Earth, a preacher comes to visit a
family during World War II, a family whose son has been Missing in
Action for months now, and it has become apparent to most that he will
not ever be coming home. So, the preacher, responding to the
obviousness of the situation, comes to do his pastoral duty, and Berry
creates a scene that reminds us that offering hope that is not grounded
in our own experience of hope always comes off shallow and
unbelievable. The prea
But he [the preacher] has begun [to speak to the family] and he goes on,
hastened, like a man walking before a strong wind, moved no longer by
his intention but by the force of what he is saying. His eyes have
become detached from his hearers; he might be speaking down from his
pulpit now, looking at all, seeing none. But beneath the building edifice
of his meaning, he is aware of something failing between them. It is as
though in the very offering of comfort to them he departs from them. And
now he is hastened also by an urgency of haste. He feels that the force
of his voice is turning back toward himself, that he is fleeing into the safe
coherence of his own words, away from those faces shut between him
and their pain. He speaks into their silence like a man carrying a map in
a strange country in the dark. It is from the possibility of
meaninglessness that the preacher has retreated. So that the earth will
not be plunged into the darkness, he has lifted the Heavenly City and
hastened to refuge in its gate (94-95)
That is the danger, isn’t it, speaking of something you do not know,
perhaps even speaking a truth, but that truth you speak of has not yet
become your truth, the hope you offer has not yet become your hope.
But I think Paul is a man, unlike the preacher in Berry’s story, Paul is a
man with a map to that strange country covered in darkness, which is our
suffering, our human suffering. Paul knows this country, this landscape
is familiar to him, and this ground has been walked upon by his own two
feet.
And so when he speaks these words of hope, I think we can hear them
better, I think we can take them more seriously, because I suspect that
Paul’s own despair has been as real as ours at times. Does he offer us
the heavenly city? Yes, but he doesn’t hasten us into its gates, as the
preacher in Berry’s story tries to do with these grieving parents. It would
be too easy, and, more importantly, it would not reflect Paul’s experience
of reality, of what he knows to be true of his own experience of suffering.
Its interesting what Paul does here in this passage, because he does
something that he does not do anywhere else in his other writings—he
connects human suffering, our suffering, with the suffering of all the
world, as if the earth itself was groaning with the kind of pain you and I
have suffered through, as if all of world was trembling with the hurt we’ve
seen in the faces of our loved ones. Our suffering has become the earth’
s suffering—all of creation, including us, groans with pain. The
connection between our struggle and the earth’s struggle—it’s a leap
that Paul doesn’t make that often, if ever, really, but he makes here, for
whatever reason.
And where he goes with this connection is interesting as well—he says
that the pain of all of us, of all creation, every living thing, is something
akin to the pain that women experience in the great act of childbirth. Its
not that he is saying that they are the same “in and of themselves”—I
mean, really, what right does he have to offer too much of an analogy
here, as a man who has never experienced childbirth?—what he wants
us to see, I think, is that with almost every childbirth, there is an
incredible gift that comes out of that pain, out of the suffering, and of
course, that is children, the product of lovemaking, And yet it is ironic
that children’s entry into this world is so marked by the suffering of their
mothers, in the deep and sacred work of labor. I’ve been told that in the
very miracle and blessing of giving birth to a child, the suffering involved
in those hours somehow become almost erased when the new mother
holds the gift of this hours-old baby, a baby born out of those hours of
pain. The suffering has been worth it because of the gift on the other
side of that suffering is worth it. I consider that the suffering of this
present time are not worth comparing with the glory about to be revealed
to us, Paul writes in this passage from Romans.
And yet, here is , poor Paul, expectant Paul, forever Paul, always
believing that Christ would be coming back very soon, and thus the
Christian story would be ended in his lifetime or at least very soon after
his death. Of course, we are still here, and the story has gone on, and
we, all of us in this room, we still remain pregnant with the Spirit, which is
just simply another way of saying that we are bearers, like an expectant
mother, of this God within us, and we remain like Paul, and those who
have chosen Christ’s way as their way, we continue to remain waiting to
give birth to God who is within us. Now, our labor pains can seem
almost, they can seem unbearable, undoable, but as anyone who has
ever given birth to great joy through great pain will tell you—it has been
worth it all. Why this must be the way it is to be done, I do not know.
Certainly, Jesus asked that same question in the garden of Gethsemane
when he asks for a way out, when he asked God to take the cup of
suffering from him, though he finally relented to take the path before him,
the way to the cross.
I want to make clear something before I begin wrapping up this sermon,
and that the point of Paul use of “laboring” language really is meant to
point to what is being born in this world. Often we focus on the pain, the
cross, the betrayal of the spouse, the loss of a job, the loss of our self-
worth, as if that was all there was—but hearing these stories, they’re not
just stories about loss and pain—they are actually stories of people who
are experiencing the trials and traumas that just come with being—dare I
say it—pregnant with God. No, I am not claiming any immaculate
conceptions today, there are no needs for that trick in this case, no need
for any angelic visits to Galilee, or Memorial Villages, or Katy. Nor am I
saying that God necessarily brings these events into our lives—there are
meaningless events in our world, despite what Berry’s preacher wants to
believe. Instead, in the midst of whatever may come, meaningful or
meaningless, we are being honored, surely as Paul was, with the gift of
being able to give birth to some new thing into our lives, and into the life
of the world, out of whatever may come to us. It will be a new creation, a
re-creation perhaps, but if the work of creation is something that
interested God at the beginning of creation, perhaps it ought to interest
us as well, we who are part of God’s re-creation of the world. We aren’t
made solely for our selves--we are made to help change the world so
that the realm of God, a realm of justice, peace, and joy, will come
quicker rather than later, because we have attended to the God who is
about to be born from within us! And it’s not just us humans—all of
creation sufferings and groans with us, expecting to be made new by this
Spirit of God within it all. We are not alone in our work of re-creating the
world—all of nature works with us, together, as partners in the divine
work God has placed upon all of our shoulders, including the shoulders
of humans and non-humans alike.
So, all of us, we are pregnant with God, the Spirit has been growing
within us, waiting for the day when we will give birth to our part of God’s
re-creation of the world, painful as that process will be. But we need
food for the journey, nutrition for the labor of childbirth that must be
gotten through, and communion has always been the church’s attempt to
feed people on the journey, to give us what we needed to get through
the difficult hours of labor ahead. To be honest, communion never
meant much to me for many years, and I never understood its ability to
prepare me for what lay ahead, for difficult hours that come. Before I
served this congregation, I served MCC churches, which primarily served
lesbian and gay people, and I remember the first MCC service I went to
in college, in a storefront in Birmingham, Alabama—my friend Lee and I
drove up on Sunday morning from Tuscaloosa where I was going to
college. To be frank, the worship was a train wreck of a service, and I
cannot really begin to speak about how almost everything felt flat for me,
EXCEPT one thing, and that was the way they served communion, and
the powerful impact it had on the people in a small storefront church in
Birmingham, Alabama. People would come up just weeping like babies
when they would come forward to receive the gifts at the table, and it
took me awhile to figure it out but I think it had a lot to do with being
spiritually hungry all the time, being starved for a life-time, people having
spent a lifetime trying to give birth to something good and graceful in
their lives, but being told that they had no right to the food of this table,
the nourishment found at this table—certainly they were not part of God’
s recreation of the table! Those experiences of seeing a 65 year old
man or 18-year old woman crying as you offer them these simple gifts
bread and cup, and you pray with them, those memories remain with you
for a lifetime. I never knew how much I needed this table, these simple
gifts of bread and cup, until that moment, how much I needed them in
order to be able to go ahead and do my work in this world, to give birth
to my part of God’s work, of God’s re-creation in this world. But we all
need food for the journey in order to feed the Spirit within us, whose
suffering is producing in us a new thing, a new part of the puzzle that is
needed in God’s reclamation project of the world. We can wait with
hopeful patience, knowing that the work of giving birth takes times, and
that in the big picture of the universe, and even in the smaller picture, we
will always reluctantly struggle to embrace the labor pains, we will always
struggle with them, as does all of creation, but if we are patient, we will
see what God is birthing through us and in us. We are all pregnant now,
forever pregnant, forever giving birth, changing the world with the gifts
that we’ve brought into this world each time we give birth to something
new. Amen.
