“Visible Hope”
Romans 8:12-25
Allen Huff
Jonesborough Presbyterian Church
7/20/14
The passage we
just read lies right in the heart of the chapter in which Paul crafts some of
his most memorable and influential writing.
One of my seminary professors said that because of the passion and depth
of Romans 8, some scholars have suggested that Paul wrote this chapter while in
the throes of some sort of spiritual ecstasy.
That may be
the case. I wouldn’t know. But I do know that this passage got the best
of me for most of last week. It took me
longer than usual to make peace with it, longer than usual to find a place of
belonging in this text. Now, I must
admit that Paul’s letters – his lectures
really – often leave me feeling somewhat disconnected and uninspired. Admitting something like that also evokes
within me a real but short-lived guilt.
In the grand scheme of things, we Presbyterians are not that far removed
from our Puritan forebears.
Here’s the
deal – for me anyway: Paul is writing a kind of neo-natal systematic
theology. With Christianity in its infancy,
Paul handles new Christians as a parent might care for a newborn. He feeds, dresses, changes diapers, and
carries his new babies every step of the way.
Do this, he says. Think
that. And avoid everything else. Paul even confesses his paternalism. To the Corinthians he says “I could not speak
to you as spiritual people, but rather as people of the flesh, as infants in
Christ. I fed you with milk, not solid
food, for you were not ready for solid food.
Even now you are not ready.” (1Cor.
3:1b-2)
To me,
systematic theology, even for all its grownup philosophy and studied argument,
is kind of like skim milk, or plain yogurt.
It may have significant nutritional value, but to be interesting,
systematic theology has to be mixed with something else. (Now, I
beg forgiveness from those of you who love skim milk and plain yogurt. I also accept your disgust at my preference
for unflavored soy milk.) The point
is that truly transforming theology is not systematic; it is systemic. It happens within, it is affected by,
and it has its effect on a deep, and
wide, and complex configuration of relationships. Good theology is not organized and
argued. Good theology is discovered in the messy, day-to-day
realities of life. Good theology is told
and shared as narrative. It is lived as story.
I finally
found my elusive foothold in today’s section of Romans 8 when I realized that
my own “eager longing,” my own laborious groaning was for some way to feel and
to speak of the “unseen” hope to which Paul refers. Story makes that hope visible. To turn Paul on his ear a little, story puts
“flesh” on Paul’s theological arguments and his endless lists of do’s and
don’ts. Some of that flesh is beautiful,
some of it not so much. But if the story
is to hold meaning and relevance, and if it is to transform us, all that flesh
is necessary.
To be fair and
honest, I think Paul understands this.
Remember, he begins his letter to the Romans with a lament. “For I am longing to see you,” he writes, “so
that I may share with you some spiritual gift to strengthen you – or rather
that we may be mutually encouraged by each other’s faith, both yours and mine.”
(Romans 1:11-12)
Paul knows
that there is no substitute for face-to-face relationships. There is no substitute for storying one
another, especially in spiritual matters.
As human beings, we really do not experience and relate to God through
systematic arguments, which almost always have winners and losers. We experience and relate to God through the
systemic processes of life. We watch
hope take shape and move through the stories we live and tell together,
here-and-now. Good theologians have dirt
under their fingernails.
Paul really
does understand this. I think he
embraces his role as a kind of midwife, or doula, a birth coach for the new
life which God is revealing through
the story of Jesus. Remember, Paul
writes his letters before Mark, and Matthew, and Luke, and John have written
their accounts of Jesus’ life. So,
Paul’s letters, as thick as they are with theological argument and wisdom,
might be summed up in three very familiar words, “In the beginning…” or perhaps
even the more compelling phrase, “Once
upon a time…”
Paul's work
both assumes and prepares us for Jesus' story.
His letters provide valuable insight on that story, but their authority
comes from his own faith story. The Love Chapter of 1Corinthians 13 brings a
bright clarity to the dim and hazy mirrors of life around us because we know
the systemic, relational process through which God transforms Saul into
Paul. We know how God stories this man from a systematic
persecutor of the first Christians into the first systematic theologian of the
Christian faith.
There is
spiritual buoyancy in Paul’s words not simply because they have become biblical
literature, but because Paul survives his own sufferings and groanings on a
ship bounced around on the sea by a horrific storm. Eventually shipwrecked, Paul swims ashore and
finds new life and renewed hope on the island of Malta, where he and his fellow
survivors are treated with kindness by people they have just met. When these new friends light a fire to warm
everyone, Paul gathers an armload of brush for the fire. As he throws it toward the flames, a
poisonous snake jumps out of the pile and bites Paul on the hand. The Maltese people take a step back saying,
‘Uh oh, this one’s a goner. He murdered
someone for sure!’ Well, not only does
Paul survive, he turns around and heals a man bedridden with fever and
dysentery.
Read Paul’s
story in Acts. By the time he writes to
the Romans, he has lived and continues living a life which reveals all manner of “unseen” hope. Maybe he calls it unseen only because so many
of his readers have yet to live into their own stories of adoption and
redemption.
When we look
around us at a world scarred by violence, at wars in the middle east, hate
between religions – and within them, children dying of preventable diseases and
starvation, spiteful and divisive rhetoric in our own political process – with
such things ever before us, we can hear enough discouraging news and see enough
naked hopelessness to convince us that the only way to survive is to entomb
ourselves in the lifeless, black-and-white religion called Despair. When worshiping the god of Despair, our
sanctuaries become bunkers of concrete and steel, mahogany and gold, certainty
and fear. When we worship Despair, we
try to shelter ourselves and our children from suffering, from the labor pains
of life. We try to abort the birth of
the new thing God is doing in the midst of all our groanings. In the sanctuary of Despair, we remove
ourselves from the enfleshed and enfleshing story of God’s continual work in,
with, and for the creation.
The irony of
it all emerges when we discover that the deeper we allow our stories to
intertwine with the present sufferings of the creation – the poverty, the
seediness, the broken-heartedness around us – the more our “eager longings”
become enfleshed with acts of visible and daring hope. When we enter suffering with Love, we enter
the gospel story, the saving story of Jesus.
In one of his
meditations last week, Richard Rohr says a similar thing: “Jesus clearly taught
the twelve disciples about surrender, the necessity of suffering, humility,
servant leadership, and nonviolence. The
men resisted him every time, and so he finally had to make the journey himself
and tell them, ‘Follow me!’… The Gospel gives our suffering personal and cosmic
meaning, by connecting our pain to the pain of others and, finally, by
connecting us to the very pain of God.
Any form of contemplation is a gradual sinking into this fullness …
which always produces a deep, irrational, and yet very certain hope.”1
To follow
Jesus is to enter his story. It is to
enter suffering and hopelessness, and to do so with the guarantee of feeling
the world’s pain and anguish as acutely as Jesus feels it throughout his own
life, death, and resurrection. But, it
is at that point that our stories, that our own hope-revealing lives, really
begin.
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