Pregnant With God

"Pregnant With God"

Romans 8:12-25
July 20, 2008
Year A

So then, brothers and sisters, we are debtors, not to the flesh, to live according to the
flesh— for if you live according to the flesh, you will die; but if by the Spirit you put to
death the deeds of the body, you will live. For all who are led by the Spirit of God are
children of God. For you did not receive a spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you
have received a spirit of adoption. When we cry, “Abba! Father!” it is that very Spirit
bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, then heirs,
heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ—if, in fact, we suffer with him so that we may
also be glorified with him. I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not
worth comparing with the glory about to be revealed to us. For the creation waits with
eager longing for the revealing of the children of God; for the creation was subjected to
futility, not of its own will but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the
creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and will obtain the freedom of
the glory of the children of God. We know that the whole creation has been groaning in
labor pains until now; and not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first
fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly while we wait for adoption, the redemption of our
bodies. For in hope we were saved. Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes
for what is seen? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience.
I wondered where to begin with this sermon, as I often do when it comes to preparing
some sort of word for the congregation.

This text from Romans is actually a very rich text, lots of different ideas, lots of different
places to land, which makes it especially difficult if you’ve got only about 15-20 minutes
to preach. And then there is this word about hope at the very end of today’s text,
beautiful as they are, but words for those of you, and certainly me at times in my life,
they are the kinds of words about hope that may be sometimes difficult to hear, they
may sound hollow perhaps, because the night being gone through this moment is
especially dark, especially difficult to bear. Whenever someone like Paul writes about
hope, and I am the one hearing it thousands of years later, I always try to see if it rings
true for me, if what the writer says resonates with me. And sometimes it does and
sometimes it doesn’t—it all depends on the moment, I suppose, where I am in my life,
whether I am feeling particularly hopeful or hopeless at that point. How I feel about the
words of hope offered to me, in a particular moment, whether through some written text,
or through some well-meaning words from a friend or even a stranger, all of these
words are filtered through what is happening at that point in my life—the back story of
the moment, so to speak.

But I do know this as well—it helps to know who is speaking these words, and out of
what context they come from—what is the back-story of the one who is offering hope to
me through their words? I mean, there is something about knowing from where people
speak from, the stories they are living at that moment, or have lived through in the past:
knowing that story somehow gives weight to the words they are saying, especially
words that are meant to give hope.   Words of hope spoken out of a personal battle
with cancer mean more than words spoken from a person just coming from a healthy
check-up at their doctor’s office, a person who has never had to deal with cancer.
Both sets of words may be true, both sets of words meant to deliver some hope, but the
words spoken out of a battle with cancer carry with them the heavy weight of
experience, and thus they are taken more seriously by most of us.

Of course, for our text this morning, we don’t know the back-story of much of Paul’s life,
what is really going on in his story as he writes these words. Certainly, from another
text from the earlier part of Romans we heard a few weeks ago in this same pulpit, we
have a hint perhaps that he was struggling with his own demons, perhaps his own
disappointment in himself, the inner battle within him to live up to the words he taught
and preached, the life he called upon others to live. I don’t know for sure, but you
sense that he knows something of despair, something of hopelessness and deep
disappointment in oneself, and perhaps disappointment in God as well. Paul has spent
so much time teaching and preaching about the transformation of lives when one
follows the way of this Jesus of Nazareth. So, when it becomes apparent that we so
often remain very untransformed, I can’t imagine that it wouldn’t be disappointing—it
certainly is for me, at least so far in my spiritual journey. And the life of itinerant
preacher types like Paul, living from hand to mouth, from congregation to congregation,
traveling and making a living on the side when you can—its not an easy way to live a
life, I suspect. Paul is a man who has suffered, so the suffering that Paul is speaking
out of is probably as authentic as any of our suffering in this room. He isn’t offering
cheap hope, you know that cheap kind of hope that seems rootless and other worldly,
ungrounded in the dry soil that comes to most of us, for at least a season in our lives.

I’ve shared this reading with you before, but it is especially true for our purposes
today—and it is from one of my favorite novels.   In Wendell Berry’s novel, A Place On
Earth, a preacher comes to visit a family during World War II, a family whose son has
been Missing in Action for months now, and it has become apparent to most that he will
not ever be coming home. So, the preacher, responding to the obviousness of the
situation, comes to do his pastoral duty, and Berry creates a scene that reminds us that
offering hope that is not grounded in our own experience of hope always comes off
shallow and unbelievable. The prea

But he [the preacher] has begun [to speak to the family] and he goes on, hastened, like
a man walking before a strong wind, moved no longer by his intention but by the force
of what he is saying. His eyes have become detached from his hearers; he might be
speaking down from his pulpit now, looking at all, seeing none. But beneath the
building edifice of his meaning, he is aware of something failing between them. It is as
though in the very offering of comfort to them he departs from them. And now he is
hastened also by an urgency of haste. He feels that the force of his voice is turning
back toward himself, that he is fleeing into the safe coherence of his own words, away
from those faces shut between him and their pain. He speaks into their silence like a
man carrying a map in a strange country in the dark. It is from the possibility of
meaninglessness that the preacher has retreated. So that the earth will not be plunged
into the darkness, he has lifted the Heavenly City and hastened to refuge in its gate
(94-95)

That is the danger, isn’t it, speaking of something you do not know, perhaps even
speaking a truth, but that truth you speak of has not yet become your truth, the hope
you offer has not yet become your hope. But I think Paul is a man, unlike the preacher
in Berry’s story, Paul is a man with a map to that strange country covered in darkness,
which is our suffering, our human suffering. Paul knows this country, this landscape is
familiar to him, and this ground has been walked upon by his own two feet. And the
truth he speaks has become his truth, something he has experienced himself in his own
bones, in his real, lived life.

And so when he speaks these words of hope, I think we can hear them better, I think we
can take them more seriously, because I suspect that Paul’s own despair has been as
real as ours at times. Does he offer us the heavenly city? Yes, but he doesn’t hasten
us into its gates, as the preacher in Berry’s story tries to do with these grieving
parents. It would be too easy, and, more importantly, it would not reflect Paul’s
experience of reality, of what he knows to be true of his own experience of suffering. Its
interesting what Paul does here in this passage, because he does something that he
does not do anywhere else in his other writings—he connects human suffering, our
suffering, with the suffering of all the world, as if the earth itself was groaning with the
kind of pain you and I have suffered through, as if all of world was trembling with the
hurt we’ve seen in the faces of our loved ones. Our suffering has become the earth’s
suffering—all of creation, including us, groans with pain. The connection between our
struggle and the earth’s struggle—it’s a leap that Paul doesn’t make that often, if ever,
really, but he makes it here, for whatever reason.

And where he goes with this connection is interesting as well—he says that the pain of
all of us, of all creation, every living thing, is something akin to the pain that women
experience in the great act of childbirth.   Its not that he is saying that they are the
same “in and of themselves”—I mean, really, what right does he have to offer too much
of an analogy here, as a man who has never experienced childbirth? What he wants
us to see, I think, is that with almost every childbirth, there is an incredible gift that
comes out of that pain, out of the suffering, and of course, that is children, the product
of lovemaking. And yet it is ironic that our children’s entry into this world is so marked
by the suffering of their mothers, in the deep and sacred work of labor. I’ve been told
that in the very miracle and blessing of giving birth to a child, the suffering involved in
those hours somehow become almost erased when the new mother holds the gift of this
hours-old baby, a baby born out of those hours of pain. The suffering has been worth
it because of the gift on the other side of that suffering is worth it.   I consider that the
suffering of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory about to be
revealed to us, Paul writes in this passage from Romans.

And yet, here he is, poor Paul, expectant Paul, always believing that Christ would be
coming back very soon, and thus the Christian story would be ended in his lifetime or at
least very soon after his death. Of course, we are still here, and the story has gone on,
and we, all of us in this room, we still remain pregnant with the Spirit, which is just simply
another way of saying that we are bearers, like an expectant mother, of this God within
us, and we remain like Paul, and those who have chosen Christ’s way as their way, we
continue to remain waiting to give birth to God who is within us. Now, our labor pains
can seem almost, they can seem unbearable, undoable, but as anyone who has ever
given birth to great joy through great pain will tell you—it has been worth it all.   Why
this must be the way it is to be done, I do not know. Certainly, Jesus asked that same
question in the garden of Gethsemane when he asks for a way out, when he asked
God to take the cup of suffering from him, though he finally relented to taking the path
before him, the way to the cross.

I want to make clear something before I begin wrapping up this sermon, which is that
the point of Paul’s use of “laboring” language really is meant to point us to what is
actually being born in this world. Often we focus on the pain, the cross, the loss of a
loved one, the loss of a job, the loss of our self-worth, as if that was all there was—but
hearing these stories, they’re not just stories about loss and pain—they are actually
stories of people who are experiencing the trials and traumas that just come with
being—dare I say it—pregnant with God. No, I am not claiming any immaculate
conceptions today, there are no needs for that trick in this case, no need for any
angelic visits to Galilee, or Coloma, or Watervliet. Nor am I saying that God necessarily
brings these awful events into our lives—there are meaningless events in our world,
despite what Berry’s preacher wants to believe. Sometimes things just happen, and
there is no rhyme or reason, no divine purpose for things. Instead, in the midst of
whatever may come, meaningful or meaningless, we are being honored, surely as Paul
was, with the gift of being able to give birth to some new thing into our lives, and into
the life of the world, out of whatever may come to us.

It will be a new creation, a re-creation perhaps, but if the work of creation is something
that interested God at the beginning of creation, perhaps it ought to interest us as well,
we who are part of God’s re-creation of the world. We aren’t made solely for our
selves--we are made to help change the world so that the realm of God, a realm of
justice, peace, and joy, will come quicker rather than later, because we have attended
to the God who is about to be born from within us! And it’s not just us humans—all of
creation suffers and groans with us, expecting to be made new by this Spirit of God
within it all. We are not alone in our work of re-creating the world—all of nature works
with us, together, as partners in the divine work God has placed upon all of our
shoulders, including the shoulders of humans and non-humans alike. The trees, the
skies, the dogs and the cats, and creepy crawly things, all of it has a place, and a
purpose in what God is doing in this world, re-creation, in co-creating us, starting all
over again, and again, and again, just like each of us has to do when real life comes
along and decimates us. But we are not alone, being pregnant with God and all, we
have God within us, being born in and through us, and we have all of these
companions, friends, family, co-travelers, the trees, the oceans, our pets, everything
beside us, willing us on, pushing us onward, towards that moment of being born anew
in this world, changing the world with the gifts that we’ve brought into this world each
time we give birth to something new in our lives, to the God being born through us in
this life. Amen.