Eighth Sunday after Pentecost (July 19, Fr. Guiliano)

The sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory about to be revealed to us. For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the children of God…

As we’ve made our way through St Paul’s Letter to the Romans this summer, I’ve been thinking about how Paul’s lens has narrowed and widened. Sometimes, he is focused strongly on the struggles of the individual. Think of the verse cited in recent weeks: “Wretched man that I am! Who will save me from this body of death?”
   
At other times, this letter has a truly cosmic scope, taking in the whole human race and also the whole creation. We find that our struggles are not individual. They are part of a common experience, something in which all creation participates: a struggle towards freedom.

Christians have articulated this view of the world in different ways over time. We might remember the phrase “original sin,” which points to the stories of Adam and Eve and sees in human disobedience a cosmic catastrophe: consequences. The human person -- made for freedom, made to ensure the wellbeing of other creatures – chose instead to seize powers, pleasures, and knowledge not their own; human beings tried to become “like god.” 

The result? Misery; a rupture of the relationship between heaven and earth; distance placed between one human and another; consequences for each person, consequences for the land, the sea, the sky. “The creation was subjected to futility” (Romans 8:20).

We modern people may think ourselves beyond this old vision, but let us ask whether it retains its explanatory power. Does it not describe the world in which we live?

Is this a world of freedom for all? Are the nations living in peace with one another? Have you noticed a sudden uptick in neighborliness? When you walk in the park or in the woods, are the animals afraid of you, or do they gather around you like you’re Cinderella or St Francis? The human relationship with the earth does not reflect total harmony. 

Finally, do you feel at ease with your self?

We feel our estrangement, even if we find it hard to buy the biblical story of sin and redemption. We feel our bondage. And we yearn for something better. “We groan inwardly while we wait” it.

Everything around us is subject to decay. You might even say the world depends on it. It runs on death. The soil from which we sprang and from which we derive our harvests and to which we return at death – what is it, if not a strange blend? Minerals and water and air, organic matter, countless worms, fungi, and bacteria converting dead things into an environment for life. Generation depends on death. 

We depend on death in other ways, too. We harvest and eat plants; we kill and eat animals. Things that were alive once land on our plates, juicy and delicious, and we make them part of our selves. Is this freedom? Is this a glorious liberty for which creation longs? Not quite, however much we enjoy a steak, a glass of wine, a fresh salad, our daily bread. We live in a complex web of relationships, dependencies, subjections. 

Consider our home. Three-quarters of this state’s land is given to agriculture: some 27 million acres, generating millions of bushels of corn and soybeans, wheat, oats, sorghum, hay, pumpkins, beans, 5 million hogs raised for slaughter a year, about a million cows… much else. We rely on all this life and death, all this use of space, all this animal husbandry. I’m not criticizing farming or farmers. I’m reminding us of the world in which we live. 

The food looks glorious at the market and on our plate. It should. It still comes from dirt and hard work, labor and groaning and sweat, death and decay. 

What a world we live in! The suffering and work are baked in. We don’t know another way. And we are not alone in our suffering or in our sins; we have brought the cosmos into them.

And so: “The whole creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the children of God…” The whole creation waits for that great day of freedom, when we have fully learned a new way of being, when the bondage to decay is ended, when our bodies are changed…raised, when the world is free from death. 

This is the goal to which all things are moving. When the Son of God took flesh for our salvation, it is the purpose for which he worked – not just the undoing of our sins, not just our forgiveness, but the renewal of the world, the healing of all wounds, the restoration of cosmic harmony. 

A new world is coming; “it’s just around the bend”; a new world “coming in peace, [it’s] coming in joy” (Nina Simone). 

It is an unimaginable hope. What God has promised and done, what God is doing and will do, far surpasses our present troubles. We are being prepared for glory. “The sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory about to be revealed.” 

Let me unpack those phrases a little. 

I think St Paul means something very specific when he says that our sufferings are not worth comparing to the glory that is to come. He’s not saying don’t think about them. “Don’t think about the sufferings or the glory.” No, if you read his letters closely, he does plenty of both, sometimes describing his sufferings at length, as well as waxing poetic about glory.

Paul is pointing to something different. He means that the sufferings and the glory are not comparable; they cannot be weighed side by side. If we imagined a set of scales in which all the sufferings were on one side and all the glory on another, they would be wildly tilted. The glory that we hope for, the freedom that we are expecting is so much greater. 

The gifts we are receiving outweigh our trespasses, and sins, and all the consequences wrought on the world by human transgression and failure. 

In the age to come, you will finally know what it is to be free: morally, physically, spiritually; to not only choose what is good, but always to do it, to live outside the cycle of death and regeneration, to know and love God as fully as you are known and loved by him. 

That’s not your life now. Right now, you are like a stalk of wheat growing amid weeds, and you have no experience outside their choking and smothering influence. In the present, those weeds cannot be uprooted without peril. But when the harvest comes, things will be different. 

“There will be mourning nor crying, nor pain anymore.” “There will no longer be death.” For the former things will have passed away. There will be no futility, no waiting, no hoping for what we do not see. There will only be joy and rest and abundant life. There will be only freedom