Romans 8. This is a strange bit of the bible to preach from about the Trinity; and suffering is a strange place to start such a sermon. Then again we proclaim a strange faith.
A faith- that professes that the Father, good, holy, the arbiter and foundation of all that is Good and Holy, created the world. Created Eden, created perfection, yet things are all messed up. There is murder in the garden; there is starvation in the garden. The garden is sick with pollutants and man is polluted with the sickness of sin.
A faith- in the Son, a man murdered by a powerful empire that has long since become dusty tomes in a dusty library.
A faith- that, in this loud and extraordinarily busy and self important world, where indifference trumps action, materialism trumps morals, and where it seems more important to watch Friends than make them, in this world where we attempt to drowned out the voice of God, we claim that the Holy Spirit is as close to us as our jugular vein.
A faith- that knows one God, and yet knows God as Father, and Son, and Holy Spirit.
A strange faith.
Yet a faith worth suffering for. A faith- with many martyrs. A faith- the first of those martyrs, St. Stephan was stoned for. A faith- the Apostle Paul was whipped, beaten, stoned, shipwrecked, and eventually died, for.
While they are very important it is not just those noble sufferings of the saints of old that we should consider when reading this letter of the Apostle Paul. No, we ought also think of the perennial problems of life, the problems that make all of creation fall to futility.
All of humanity, each and every last one of us, is a card within a house of cards. We were all stacked carefully and precariously atop one another. Even the slightest breath, a slight jarring of the table, would cause the whole house to fall down. And that deck of cards has fallen down a long time ago, and we are constantly attaining toward a return to our original placement. Every personal sin is a card falling, knocking down the whole deck. This deck is in a constant flurry of motion, Jacks falling atop crazy eights, and twos upon Kings. Every time a wall of a house is reconstructed two more fall down. The interactions of these cards grow in intensity until they become a splashing, bubbling sea of black, red, and white.
But we can’t stop there, for we should consider the present sufferings/ be they physical pain, emotional ache, or spiritual distress. And we must realize suffering has meaning. It turns us back to what once was. It is the echos of Eden that makes us ache. It is a yearning for God.
More than that a calling from the Father. A calling to live as Children of God. To live into the goodness of creation as it was made by God.
So the Father has "subjected us to hope." So the Father has left us with a distinct feeling that things can, should, be better. That’s good news isn’t it? (ask again)
And still there is more gospel, more good news. God’s son, Jesus, entered into creation. He was born into this suffering as you and I were. He lived for some 30 years teaching about the Kingdom of God and the Love of God. He suffered on a Roman cross, and died there. Yet the "bondage of decay" would not hold him.
In this way the Son’s Life, Death, and Resurrection, bring us closer still to the new creation we yearn for. We have hope for "the redemption of our bodies." That is, death no longer controls our bodies because we have the hope of Resurrection and New Life. That’s good news isn’t it? (ask again)
And there is more gospel, more good news. After Jesus left his apostles they were gifted with the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit gave them the ability to proclaim the saving message of Jesus to the ends of the earth, and were led by the spirit to do many things, including welcome non-Jews as equal followers of Jesus.
And we Christians today are heirs to those first followers of Jesus. And we still are animated by the Holy Spirit. The Spirit still helps us in our weakness, that we may be and become Children of God, and live in the new creation that we now "groan inwardly for."
God is still with us, the "Spirit himself intercedes for us with sighs too deep for words." That’s good news isn’t it? (ask again)
The good news today, more than any abstract, or even concrete, statement about the nature of God, any statement about the Trinity, is this.
"I am sure that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor heights, nor depths, nor anything else in all of creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ our Lord."
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