Romans 8:12-25
“Eager Expectation”
July 17, 2011 - Fifth Sunday after Pentecost

         We were making supper when the phone rang. “Pastor Steve, it’s Bruce and Becky. You said you wanted to go with us and it’s happening right now.” Beth and I turned off the stove, put supper in the refrigerator and drove to their house. We got in the car with them and rode out of the city into the Nebraska countryside, headed for a hospital in a small town.

         Once in the hospital we sat in a little office with our friends while a social worker went over a stack of papers for them to sign. Finally the moment arrived, and a nurse came in and asked Bruce and Becky if they were ready to meet their daughter. We followed along as they were escorted down the hall into a little nursery where another nurse placed a baby in Beck’s arms. Tears filled the eyes of everyone in the room as this little girl met her new parents, was adopted into her new family.

         As we move into the next part of Romans 8, Paul makes a transition from the more conceptual and theological language of “flesh” and “Spirit” to the deeply human and intimate language of adoption.

         Verse 12 partly repeats what we heard last week, the call to live in the Spirit rather than in the flesh. Paul speaks of a debt or obligation, not to the flesh but to the Spirit. Living in the Spirit of God through Christ, we no longer have any debt or obligation to our old way of life, our old manner of thinking. We are not debtors to the flesh. We don’t have to live its way any more. Instead, by implication, we are indebted to the Spirit.

         The flesh cannot hold us in obligation because all it can offer us, says verse 13, is death. On the other hand, when we put the old ways to death in the Spirit, God gives us life. It’s obvious, then, where our debt lies. But we feel the truth of this when Paul moves the idea of debt and obligation into our human experience of family.

         We may joke about it, but the simple fact is most children owe a huge and unpayable debt to their parents. I stop and think about my mother as a single parent raising my sister and me; I ponder the sacrifices she made, even of her own happiness, so that I could live and go to school and pursue God’s call on my life. And I’m overwhelmed with what on a purely human level I’ve been given that I can never pay back.

         So in verse 14 Paul moves from the language of debt and obligation to the sweet affirmation that “those who are led by the Spirit of God are the children of God.” Our debt to God is a function of His deep love for us as our heavenly Father. We owe God the way children owe their parents, except more so.

         Children are led by their parents. That little hand reaches up and holds on they are led across the street, or down the hall to bed, or to children’s church or Sunday School. Those who are led by God’s Spirit become God’s children. God led the children of Israel in the wilderness with a pillar of fire during the day and a pillar of smoke at night. Now He leads His children in Christ through His Spirit.

         In contrast to the pagan relationship with the Roman gods of Paul’s time, we are not slaves to our deity. The Spirit who leads us, says verse 15, is not a spirit of slavery leading us to fear a god who make bad things happen if we don’t do what is right. No, he says, “you have received a spirit of adoption.”

         We are in debt to God because we did not start out as His children. We were slaves to the flesh and to sin. We were slaves to other gods, maybe not idols like Israel worshipped in Egypt or the Romans worshipped before the met Christ, but still gods of money and sex and food and power and our own selves. But God in Christ through His Spirit took us by the hand and led us out of that slavery and fear, just like He led Israel out of Egypt. So now we are children of God.

         As adopted children of God we are not living some sort of second-class relationship with the Lord. Verse 15 continues with what must have been an early Christian form of prayer, the cry “Abba! Father!” Mark 14:36 shows us Jesus Himself addressing God like that. “Abba” is an Aramaic word that means “Father,” but it’s a deeply personal, intimate form. It’s “Daddy,” or “Papa.” It’s the way a little child names a father.

         In His own Son Jesus Christ, God welcomes you and me into His family, and not just into the family, but fully into the family. Verse 16 draws the conclusion that if we are children, then we “heirs, heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ.” There’s that wonderful line from “Joyful, Joyful, We Adore Thee”: “Thou our Father, Christ our Brother, all who live in love are thine.” Jesus is the older brother of every Christian and with Him we inherit all that God has to give us.

         When Bruce and Becky drove out into rural Nebraska to meet their new daughter, they left a daughter they already had behind with a babysitter. Jennifer was their biological child, 7 or 8 years old. In the years that followed her new sister discovered she was loved just as much as Jenny was. Though adopted she was just as much a child of that family as her older sister. That’s they way it is with ourselves and Jesus.

         But our adoption through the Spirit is deeper than merely being treated equal to God’s natural Son. We are adopted by our lives being incorporated in Jesus’ life. What is true of Him becomes true of us. Remember our baptismal identification with Christ. Remember the beginning of Romans chapter 6? In baptism we are buried with Christ into His death so that we can be raised with Him into His new and abundant life. The end of verse 17 is the same, “we suffer with him so that we may be glorified with him.”

         What follows in this text and continues next week as we finish the chapter is not just a sidebar on human suffering. Paul isn’t just pausing to acknowledge that, while we have a great hope out there in the future, things are pretty hard right now. No, Paul wants us to see that our adoption and our hope of inheriting glory right alongside and with Jesus is a truth that colors our lives with hope right now.

         I had dinner with Eric and Shelby this past week in Chicago. They’re expecting a baby next month. We had a good time together, but Shelby was uncomfortable. Her back hurt riding in the car. The baby was pressing on tender places. She kept shifting around, trying to ease the discomfort. Yet I know by the smile on her face and the hope in her eyes that she would tell you it’s all worth it, that those little pains don’t really matter.

         It’s what Paul says in verse 18, “I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory about to be revealed upon us.” As children of God, as beloved and dear adopted heirs of God, we have an expectation of such a glorious future that what we suffer in the present, even the worst of it, pales in comparison to the glory. Paul is sure about this. The word “consider” is rooted in the word from which we get “logic.” Paul hasn’t just considered this. He’s calculated this. He’s figured it out. And for Christians, present suffering is nowhere near as great as future glory.

         Our Gospel reading today, Jesus’ parable of the wheat and the weeds in Matthew 13, is the same story. There’s trouble for us in the present. God won’t uproot all the weeds of the world and make it perfect for us now. But in the end He will carefully separate His wheat, His beloved children, out from the rest and glorify them. Jesus said, “then will the righteous shine like the sun in the kingdom of their Father.”

         Yet that glory God has planned for His children is not something separate from or even out of this world. God plans to save us from the fire, but He’s not going to airlift us off planet earth. In fact, verse 19 tells us that the earth, “the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the children of God.” We’re not going to leave the world behind because the world is going to be glorified along with us.

         Here’s that great overall plan of God coming through for Paul in Romans again. God means to save the world, to save His whole creation. That’s what God promised to Abraham, that Abraham’s descendants would inherit the whole earth. That’s what we see now from the perspective of creation, of nature itself. Nature in all its “futility” as verse 20 calls it, in all its “bondage and decay” says verse 21—nature is waiting, waiting on us.

         That squirrel you saw run over in the road on the way to church. That great empty hole where I saw a 150 year old tree had been cut down at North Park University last month. Those thousands of acres of burned over forest in Arizona and New Mexico. That pelican on the Gulf coast coated with oil or those fish dying in the Yellowstone River. They and every bit of pointless pain and destruction that troubles this poor planet are all the aches and groans of a world that is waiting for you and me, waiting for the children of God to receive their glory so that the world itself may be glorified with them.

         Did you see “Toy Story 3” last year? Those films make us laugh and cry from the perspective of children’s toys. This last installment was particularly poignant for us empty nesters. Andy, the boy who owned Woody and Buzz Lightyear, is going off to college and his toys are being left behind. We watch the story of the toys agonizing search for a new home. They are almost thrown away with the garbage, then brutalized at a daycare center, before they are finally adopted by a another child.

         Creation is like those toys, straining forward in expectation, waiting for their children to come into their own glory and play with them in the good and beautiful way for which they were made. The world itself waits in eager expectation—for us! The glory that Paul promises, that Jesus promised for the children of God, will bring the world its own proper glory, its own order and healing and peace.

         Verse 22 says “the whole creation has been “groaning in labor pains until now.” Our earth is like a mother in labor, panting and moaning through her contractions, waiting for the joyful moment of birth when the pain will be over and the child arrives. Except that human beings are the child the world waits for, the people who through faith in Christ have become the children of God and the rightful heirs of all creation.

         Eric and Shelby showed me the baby room set up in their apartment in Chicago. They had a crib and a changing table and a car seat sitting on the floor. There were little blankets and some toys. It’s all waiting, waiting for the child to arrive, like the world around us is waiting for us to come into our own, to arrive at the day of our complete salvation in Jesus Christ.

         In the meantime, creation groans and, verse 23 says, so do we. We’re not there yet. We struggle with jealousy and cancer, greed and heart disease, illnesses of the body and of the soul, groaning with all those pains. Our world groans with global warming, water pollution, strip mining and the extinction of whole animal species. We’re both waiting for the adoption.

         J.B. Phillips famously translated the “eager longing” or “expectation” of verse 19 with the image that creation is “standing on tiptoe,” waiting for the children of God. Picture not, as we started, one child needing adoption but a whole orphanage, maybe in eastern Europe or in Asia. Picture yourself walking through the place and seeing toddlers pulling themselves up out of their cribs, older children peeking around doorways, teenagers trying not to look interested but glancing at you when they thing you’re not looking, all hoping that you will take them home, adopt them and make them your children. That’s you and I and the world together, waiting for the final adoption of God.

         There’s no way any one person or couple could adopt a whole orphanage. The only way to set things right for all those parentless children is to make the world different, to eliminate the poverty that causes families to give up children, the wars that kill fathers and leave families destitute, the social systems that make a nation value boys more than girls. The only way to empty out the orphanages is to change the world. And that’s the point. That’s what God is working on, the redemption of His children and of the world together.

         The last two verses of the text tell us that we live in hope. In Jesus Christ, we are already adopted by God, filled with His Spirit, made into children who can cry “Abba! Daddy!” to our Father in heaven. Yet that adoption is not complete. It’s not final. We’re like children in that agonizing limbo of going home with our new parents but with the finalizing of the adoption yet to come. So we are now children of God, but we wait for the full power and glory of that to be realized in us.

         “Now hope that is seen is not hope,” says Paul, “For who hopes for what is seen?” We can’t forget that. We can’t forget that the adoption is not complete, that there is still plenty of groaning in us and in our world. It’s not enough just to say, “I’m saved,” and sit back and wait for the end. No, Paul calls us to look ahead, to stand on tiptoe, to lean forward in anticipation of what is coming.

         To borrow Madeline L’Engle’s famous children’s book title, we live in “a wrinkle in time,” a space where past and present fold over on each other. We are constantly aware of our past, of sin and death and all the sufferings of our world. Yet in Christ we find our future folded over all that past, with glimpses of the renewed world God plans to give us, of the new people that we are meant to be. Mostly though, we can’t see it yet. We wait, says Paul, “for what we do not see.” It’s not present yet.

         But we see and feel enough to know it’s coming. We feel the Spirit bearing witness in us that we are truly children of God. We see the love of God working in and through us to do what we can right now to rescue children from poverty and slavery, to rescue our world from pollution and destruction.

         The last phrase here is that we are “to wait for it with patience.” As we’ll see next week in the verses that follow, that doesn’t mean sitting down to just suffer quietly with the way things are. It means to pray and to work for that better world, that glorious adoption by God of all who believe in Jesus. It means sharing Christ so that others can join His family and it means doing what we can to make the world more just, more clean, even more beautiful simply because we anticipate the coming glory.

         We said it at the beginning of the service, those wonderful words from I John, “Beloved, we are God’s children now; what we will be has not yet been revealed.” There’s the hope in the wrinkle in time. We are God’s children, but we are waiting to see everything that will mean someday. For now, we live in hope, live in time’s wrinkle, patiently waiting by patiently praying and serving our Lord until our adoption is complete.

         Amen.

Valley Covenant Church
Eugene/Springfield, Oregon
Copyright © 2011” by Stephen S. Bilynskyj