Redeeming the Whole Creation

Sermon by Cynthia A. Jarvis
December 6, 2009, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill

Isaiah 24:1-13
Romans 8:18-25
Revelation 22:1-7

“We know that the whole creation has been groaning in labor pains until now; and not only the creation but we ourselves….”

“There is no fragment or particle of the world,” said John Calvin, “which, in the grip of the knowledge of its present misery, does not hope for resurrection….Shall the brute animals, and even inanimate creatures-even trees and stones—conscious of the emptiness of their present existence, long for the final day of resurrection…?” On this second Sunday in the season of Advent, lest we think that Christmas is all about us, I want us to consider how it is that creation also waits with eager longing for redemption. I want to ask after the hope of the flora and fauna, the rock and the hard place, the wheat fields and the vines, lest in the bleak midwinter we fail to hear creation’s groaning too. For according to Calvin, it is not just we ourselves but every fragment and particle of the world that looks for the new heaven and new earth Christ’s birth portends.

On the one hand, of course, you could dismiss Calvin’s statement about a world in the grip of misery as rank anthropomorphism: trees have no consciousness of their suffering; rocks do not hope for resurrection. The inanimate and brute world is just that and warrants no concern on our part, either about its present feelings or its future hope. For the most part, I believe we believe this is the case. Our poor tending and tilling of the earth is ready evidence.

Or you could say, as Darwinians have, that creation itself is as fallen as we: “Organisms behave,” the argument goes, “so as to benefit themselves at cost to others. A bird grabs a seed, and others foraging nearby do not get it. A bird eats a worm, and benefits; the worm loses….Richard Dawkins’s most fundamental biological truth is ‘the gene’s law of universal ruthless selfishness.’” [Holmes Rolston] This presumes a sort of moral choice on the part of creation and creatures that I think is better described neutrally as the self-generating, self-conserving, self-maintaining action of all living things.

But neither Dawkins’ nor Darwin’s take on the trees and the stones coincide with the longing that is set in motion in the second creation story of Genesis, the story that will presently send us and perhaps every fragment and particle of the world run, run, running to Bethlehem. The story begins at the beginning. Before there were plants and herbs of the field, before there was rain upon the earth because there was no one to till the ground, God formed man from the dust of the ground in the first place and only in the second place planted a garden in Eden. “The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden to till it and keep it,” we read and then, in the third place, God formed every animal of the field and every bird of the air to be partners for the man. None seemed to fill the bill so it was that, in the last place, the woman came to be.

The rest of the story we know. We know from our own broken lives how the blessing of creation became a curse. We know, first hand, the enmity between our seed and the serpent’s. Christmas eve begins here every year because the fault and the cause of the incarnation are ours, we think. “Cursed is the ground because of you,” said the Lord God to Adam. “In toil you shall eat of it all the days of your life; thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you; and you shall eat the plants of the field. By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread until you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; you are dust and to dust you shall return.”

From our perspective, this means that we must spend our lives endlessly weeding the garden, watering the lawn, outsmarting the deer, frustrating the squirrels. Or were we Presbyterians on the prairie, there would be drought and hail storms to confound us, floods and tornadoes to undo our every attempt at dominion. Our inevitable choice to live as masters of the universe rather than as grateful servants of its Creator is the confounding sin. Therefore when nature does not do our bidding, when the unwilled chaos at the edges of creation threatens to overtake our ordered lives, when the ice cap melts, the ocean rises, the earth quakes, the drought endures, we bitterly curse the One who first cursed us!

By the way, for those headed toward the manger, the debate over global warming vis-à-vis our tending of the earth is beside the point. God could not care less whether scientists have been cooking their books or politicians creating facts to bolster the party line. The truth about those of us whose story this is is to be found in the consequences of our broken relationship to creation. We have subjected the whole creation to suffering by our refusal to live within the limits set by the Author and Giver of life, by our thankless grabbing of the gift day by day, by our loss of wonder before the magnificence of it all, and by our irresponsible rejection of the vocation of steward.

So from creation’s perspective, the trees and the rocks are waiting to be redeemed from our oversight, hoping to be saved from the consequences of our sin. Because of our tilling, roars Isaiah, “the earth dries up and withers, the world languishes and withers; the heavens languish together with the earth. The earth lies polluted under its inhabitants….The wine dries up, the vine languishes, all the merry-hearted sigh [read: groan]….[A]ll joy has reached its eventide; the gladness of the earth is banished.” It is said that Paul had the words of the prophet in mind when he wrote of creation’s eager longing to be set free from its bondage to decay. Likewise Calvin had Paul’s words in mind when writing about creation’s hope for a new heaven and a new earth: “[S]ince Adam by his fall brought into confusion the perfect order of nature,” says Calvin, “the bondage to which the creatures have been subjected because of man’s sin is heavy and grievous to them. Not that they are endowed with any perception, but they naturally long for the undamaged condition whence they have fallen.”

This longing of creation for redemption, therefore, is intimately tied to the redemption of the creature whose sin has been heavy and grievous. It is back to Christmas being about us, save that Christ has redeemed us for the sake of the tree and the rock, the flora and the fauna, the birds and the bees. Indeed, what paradise would there be without the things of this world whose beauty and glory, even now, hint at the eternal? What hope for eternal life if Christ made room enough in God for us only? Yet how can we begin to conceive of a new heaven and a new earth who have so defaced the first heaven and the first earth? What in the world could possibly redeem the bleak midwinter and save not only us but the whole creation from the curse of death and decay and destruction?

According to Paul, the groaning of nature itself is paradoxically the ground of our hope in these latter days. For while groaning expresses a deep distress of spirit, the groaning of creation is a groaning that signals the coming of new birth. Apparently in Greek, “nature” is rooted in the idea of giving birth. “The ‘giving birth’ requires ‘labor,’” writes philosopher and Presbyterian minister Holmes Rolston, “and the birthing metaphor, making possible this continued reproduction, seems inseparable from elements of struggle. Biological nature is always giving birth, regenerating, always in travail. Something is always dying, and something is always living on….[T]he way of nature [is always] a via dolorosa.”

That is to say, built into creation after the fall, according to Scripture, is the fact that “creatures are forever being sacrificed to contribute to lives beyond their own.” They are “plunged into a struggle in which goodness is given only as it is fought for. Every life,” says Ralston, “is chastened and christened, straitened and baptized in struggle. Everywhere there is vicarious suffering,” but ever since a babe born in a manger assumed and so redeemed the life-and-death-birth-and-rebirth of material existence, the groaning of creation has been given reason to hope for what cannot now be seen. We then become the creatures in creation who must put words to this hope for a new heaven and a new earth where death will be no more, neither sorrow nor crying nor any more pain.

Paul identifies these words (often poetic) and this language (always aesthetic) as the sighs too deep for words that is prayer. “O come, O come Immanuel” we have prayed this morning in our singing, not knowing what it will mean or matter for the birth pangs that brought forth a Savior in the fullness of time to bring forth, at the end of time, a new heaven and a new earth. “This world,” wrote theologian Jurgen Moltmann, “‘cannot bear’ the new creation, cannot give birth to it. The potential for…the new does not lie latent within the old, but relies utterly on a new work of the God of the resurrection. The present is not pregnant with future except…as the God of the virgin conception is at work in its midst, calling forth life where there is only the potential for death and decay.”

So in this season, says Paul, when death is especially unbearable for us and evident in the whole creation bending under the load of our lordship, we groan inwardly, hoping for what we do not see, longing for what we cannot imagine, waiting for the redemption of the whole world with patience and perhaps even a little wide-eyed wonder.

“I never merited this grace,” writes Annie Dillard, “that when I face upstream I see the light on the water careening towards me, inevitably, freely, down a graded series of terraces like the balanced winged platforms on an infinite, inexhaustible font. ‘Ho, if you are thirsty, come down to the water; ho, if you are hungry, come and sit and eat.’ This is the present, at last….This is the now, this flickering, broken light, this air that the wind of the future presses down my throat, pumping me buoyant and giddy with praise….

“You don’t run down the present, pursue it with baited hooks and nets. You wait for it, empty-handed, and you are filled. You’ll have fish left over. The creek is the one great giver. It is, by definition, Christmas, the incarnation. This old rock planet gets the present for a present on its birthday every day.” Listen for its groaning and add your own sighs that are too deep for words, until that day when the unmerited grace of God appears as an angel to show you what you have barely glimpsed in the fleeting present of bread broken and cup poured out: the river of the water of life, bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and the tree of life whose leaves are for the healing of the nations. See, he is coming soon! Thanks be to God.

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