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From The First Baptist Church in America pulpit – Providence, Rhode Island
“Creation Groans” (Romans 8:18-25; Isaiah 24:5-6) August 16, 2009
Dr. Dan Ivins, preaching

St. Paul was a mystic. His theology was deeper than most and difficult to understand. But he lived long enough to know that at the center of all existence, animate, inanimate, and Divine, there lies a groan. He heard it coming from three places: the first being, the entire cosmos: "all creation groans together in travail until now." It's so profound you can hardly hear it, but you know it's there. And it's not just something recent like “global warming.”

Even in pre-scientific days, the Bible has a theology of ecology and is aware that this blue planet we call home is in real distress -- a lot or a little, depending on your economic and political views. “The earth dries up and withers and heaven languishes. The earth lives polluted under its inhabitants; for they have transgressed laws, violated statutes, and broken the everlasting covenant” (Isaiah 24:5-6).

Whether you lean left or right, are an unrepentant industrialist or militant tree-hugger, the “sky’s-falling” camp or “everything’s-dandy-gang,” I don’t know anybody who doesn’t think of land as a resource - either to be protected or profited from. Which is fine, as long as we use common sense. But it’s gotten way out of hand. Because like anything controversial, it’s been politicized. Regardless of what political parties claim, dirt is inert, having no rights beyond the wishes of the deed holder; mere clay in the hands of whoever can afford it. The will of the owner determines the use of the land. And it’s a rare proprietor who isn’t keenly aware of the dollar value of the property.

God doesn’t want the delicate balance of nature interfered with. And boy have we interfered! But it we didn’t interfere how could we make money? No work. No pay. “It’s a shame to let good land go to waste.” That’s what we say about anything that’s been removed from our control. Whether land or kids or our government, as if their worth depended solely upon our intimate involvement with them. But God sees things differently. God doesn’t consider it “going to waste.” God calls it caring for the cosmos! And even God must be baffled over why we’re so resistant to it to the point of destroying our own home, like the L.A. riots. I’m not sure what we think would happen if we did what God said, but we’ve been afraid of it since the Industrial Revolution, and all it’s done is separate us: from God, from each another, from Mother earth -- whose Sabbaths we’ve shanghaied for a mighty long time.

Now we face serious ecological consequences, and it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see why: because of rampant greed and too many people living on too small a space with too few resources. By 2012, seven billion and counting. So it’s only going to get worse, not better. Desacralization allows us to sever any relationship we have to other living things and never have to ask “How much is enough?” Our centuries of “never enough” have suddenly become “Enough is too much!” The groan has been there ever since the third Chapter of Genesis, with the demise of all the “good” God created. When the man and woman “fell,” they took the rest of creation down with them, resulting in futility and decay, with “thorns and thistles cursing the ground." And it’s getting louder the more people populate our over-loaded orb. It’s the groaning of a deer being smashed by a Jeep on the way to no place in particular. Or the blackening oil slicks off our pristine coasts. The dripping melt of our polar ice caps.

Creation has a way of getting even with us! Twirling tornadoes, earthquakes, floods, volcanoes and tsunamis at us. Our polluted planet groans! But that's not the way it's supposed to be and that's not the way it's always gonna to be, according to the scriptures. The Bible claims it’s part of God's will to redeem “paradise lost,” to deliver nature from the bondage of depletion and decay. "The wolf and the lamb shall feed together, the lion shall eat straw like the ox…they shall not hurt or destroy in all my holy mountain, says the Lord" (Isaiah 65).

Will the groaning ever stop? The Apostle imagines creation peering out a window in anticipation of cosmic redemption. I don’t reckon it’ll ever happen. It hasn’t so far. And we’re still fighting over whether we can do anything substantive about it or not. But it’s still the word of the Lord, as much as “thou shalt not steal.” And it's not just a question of education or correct scientific information. There's a deeper darkness inside of us than not knowing -- the darkness of not wanting. Our stubborn refusal to stop doing something harmful to ourselves. You could call it addiction. The Bible calls it sin.

Jesus confronted a man lame for 38 yrs by the pool of Bethesda with a harsh question. It has nothing to do with knowing but everything to do with wanting. “Do you wanta be healed?” (John 5:6). Turns out, he didn’t. At least not bad enough to change is lifestyle. “But everybody wants to get well.” God knows it isn't that simple. Sickness has its own consolations: to be exempt from responsibility and complex decision making. To not have to go to work; to be taken care of by somebody else. Before long, it becomes a way of life. When you’ve grown accustomed to certain routines – laying around the pool all day? That’s not “change we can believe in!” Jesus saw through this guy’s phony whine for healing because he wasn’t prepared to pay the price that comes with being well.

This is our eco-question: “Do we really want to get well?” Some do. Most don’t. It’s not bad enough yet. Besides, wanting to be healed is to admit you're part of the problem; that you’ve sinned against God's creation and need to repent. Our capacity for denial is immense. There will be no greening if we don’t become involved in the cure. And that’s never done without inconveniencing the vested interests in terms of cost and conflict. Telling people to protect the environment it like telling Catholics to use birth control. And this is why I'm skeptical about a positive solution: human beings have to change their lifestyle. And that's like passing sensible bills through Congress. Few things I can think of could be harder than getting people to change what they're accustomed to having and spending and consuming. The good life has got a hold of us, which makes the insatiable glut of affluence the main culprit in destroying our environment. So creation groans over what is, over what could be.

But creation’s not the only one groaning. Paul says we groan too. "We who have the Spirit as the first of God's gifts also groan within ourselves as we wait for God to set us free." It’s the groan of our vulnerability to the vicissitudes of life; the groan for the redemption of a new body. As we age, our bodies don’t work so well or look as good as they used to. Some drag a useless limb around or a curved spine or sightless eyes or a brain that can’t even remember the memories. Time sees to it that we struggle with the way things are over against what they ought to be.

It’s obvious to me that we need a renewed spirit more than a new body. Paul knew how far short he fell from God's ideal. "My inner being delights in the law of God, but I see a different law at work in my members; a law that fights against my mind. Who will rescue me from this body of death?" That tension is the groan. I’m sure you’ve felt it. It's not supposed to be that way. It won't be that way forever. But meanwhile, we’re left with our longings for things that are wrong -- to be made right.

But Paul heard another groan: even God groans. “We don't know how to pray like we ought, but the Holy Spirit takes up the slack and intercedes for us with groans too deep for words." This is mystical lingo. Make of it what you will, but it sounds to me like God is talking to God about us, for us. Some things can’t be expressed with words. Those that involve feelings and memories and yearnings. So God prays for us with “groans too deep for words.” I can't say anything more about that because I don't know anything more to say about it. Except this. The longer I live, the more I think God is a realist when it comes to his earthly creation. And doesn’t have any expectation that his fallen creatures are even capable of letting up on our destiny of destruction, or even contemplating -- giving “Mother earth” a break. When there’s money to be made? Power to wield? Trees to cut; mines to plumb, Oil to sell? Maybe God just said it “for the record,” so that at least we know the earth doesn’t belong to us. And so we’d know who God is and how this world works, whether or not we decide to live according to the wisdom of biblical knowledge. What’s the harm of tossing a cigarette out the window when there’s money to be made? Power to wield? Shots to call? Trees to cut; mines to plumb, Oil to sell. I think maybe God just said it “for the record,” so we’d know who God is and how this world works, whether or not we decide to live according to the wisdom of biblical knowledge.

At this church our main strength is our noble heritage. “We have this treasure in earthen vessels.” Our love for this ancient structure and determination to protect it and preserve it for posterity goes without saying. I just wish the world could be as caring of our environment, and treat it with such respect as we reserve for this historical Meeting House. It is my hope that today’s worship will bring us to such a decision, even if our “little bit” won’t make a tiny dent in the larger problem. But we can do our part to stay on the path of obedient stewardship in harmony with the natural order God has so lavishly given to us. As we walk away from this sanctuary of corporate devotion, let us greet the morning sunlight of the true Holy of Holies that awaits us outside these portals, more committed to the healing of creation's groans.

Did you know Jesus groaned once? Mark says he was at the Decapolis and they brought a guy to him who was a basket case: "Rabbi can you help him." And Jesus wet his fingers with his tongue and stuck them in the man's ears and then Mark says, "Jesus looked up to heaven…and groaned!"

When it comes to groaning, we assume it’s a symptom that we’re not as close to God as we ought to be. But Paul is saying just the opposite. The groans couldn't even be expressed, except for the presence of God's Spirit within us; to do it for us. That's what prayer is: the divine in us appealing to the divine beyond us. The groan is ubiquitous: it’s in creation, in us, in God. But it’s not the groan of death. He's not talking about death row, but the moan of childbirth! And how God wants more than anything to re-create “a new heaven and a new earth.” So that by the time we’ve mastered the groan, we’re gonna have to exchange it for a ‑ WOW!

Providence Prayers. (8/16/09)
O Thou whose will we can resist but never overcome, are so tightly wound, boxed in, prisoners of our illusions. The machines we worship have reduced us to a bunch of look-alike consumers. It’s no wonder that “we don’t know how to pray as we ought.” But we know human history can’t be separated from natural history. We who were intended to be “caretakers of creation,” have let human progress get in the way. But any progress we make can never be set against the preservation of and cooperation with the natural order of the universe ... and win. So we lament the distance between where our world is and where it could be. But as long as people are in it, good luck! We’ve defaced this “terrestrial ball” so badly and turned the “Garden of Eden” into a field of thorns. Good Lord forgive us. Open our eyes before it’s too late. Show us how we’ve been living on overload too long with the motto: “Whatever it takes to make a buck.”

We pray for all who are becoming slaves to unworthy masters: those whose freedom is controlled by what other people think; those for whom money has passed from a means to an end; those committed to loyalties they no longer feel; those in public office who discover how their political paybacks stifle their desire to do what’s right. “Fearfully and wonderfully made,” and graciously kept -- may Thy divine wind enable us to overcome hate and war with goodwill and peace; overcome ignorance with knowledge, sickness with health, despair with hope. Overcome our confusion with clarity. Overcome death with life, for the sake of Him who was called Eden’s Garden “good,” but groaned in Gethsemane’s Garden: "Thy will be done." Amen.