Creation Groans

Romans 8:18-25 (NRSV) 18 I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory about to be revealed to us. 19 For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the children of God, 20 for the creation was subjected to futility, not of its own will, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope 21 that the creation itself will be set free from its enslavement to decay and will obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God. 22 We know that the whole creation has been groaning together as it suffers together the pains of labor, 23 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. Picture Woolsey Fire, Pepperdine University (Nov. 2018) I don’t think it’s too difficult for us in the Anthropocene to see and hear creation groaning. I actually have to stop myself from seeing flames ablaze and blackened hills as I read this passage. We all likely have different imagery evoked with this language, but for me, I am taken back to my first semester at Pepperdine when we sheltered in place while wildfires raged across California. For our community though, just hours before the order we had received the news that Alaina Housley, a fellow first year, had died along with eleven others at the Borderline Shooting. As we waited in the library, grief-striken, watching the flames from the window, listening to the helicopters flying above, feeling the tears roll down until they were stopped by N95 masks, there was such a mixture of confusion and fear, but also the sort of sublime clarity that comes in moments of life and death… there was no need for convincing: creation groans, creation waits to be set free, creation longs for redemption. That harrowing experience was in 2018, but today, such groaning persists. Countless others have been displaced and suffered from the violence of climate change, particularly vulnerable communities who have contributed the least to it. However, what did Paul have in mind when he wrote this in his letter to the Romans in the first century? And what sort of theology of hope is there for both creation and the children of God? Paul’s notion of creation groaning is more imperially subversive than we might initially think once contextualized. In 17 BCE, the first Roman Emperor, Augustus, held the ludi saeculares, the Secular Games, which inaugurated a golden age of fertility, prosperity, and victory and which paid homage to the traditional gods and goddesses. Yet, as the Empire expanded, the reality of military conflicts and economic exploitation ruined cities, depleted fields, polluted streams, and deforested mountains. By the time Paul writes to the Romans, he is challenging the propaganda of civic religion, that the emperor, now Nero, could only be associated with glory and was the one who brought order and deliverance. My supervisor and the theological coordinator of Creation Justice Ministries, Derrick Weston, has noted the tendency of ecological movements to romanticize the past. However, he says, “we can’t forget that extractive economies are as old as empire itself. Paul would have been witness to his own version of an ecological crisis.” Picture Picture Rather than a sort of modern day superhero ending of rescue or a gnostic idea of the material world as evil and something to be disregarded, we can understand this passage as a sort of question of right relations in the cosmos. Paul intertwines the longing of both creation and believers. Our eschatological destinies, whether we acknowledge it or not, are tied together. It makes me think of Ecclessiastes 3:20… “All go to one place, all are from dust, and all turn to dust again.” Our world’s current sufferings find their solidarity with Jesus, he, the Word that created the world, nailed to a tree. Yet, Paul reminds the Romans that Jesus’ glory will become something for all, human and nonhuman, to also share in. Resurrection is one of the few promises we have in Scripture. If I’m honest, I struggle with that promise. It is easy for me to say creation suffers, but difficult to believe resurrection is coming. I guess it feels foolish, or I think that somehow affirming that the coming glory is not worth comparing to our current sufferings will remove accountability to the present people and creation that so desperately need our attention. However, despite some of the teachings of my evangelical upbringing, Christianity has never been an abandonment of the material world, only a deeper invitation to care and restore it. Jesus’ resurrection is embodied; his scars remain, but he lives. This Earth is not going anywhere, it will bear the scars we inflict on it. But there is reason to hope. Our God is not averse to suffering. God does not shrink from, but goes down into the depths of it with us. There is no place or situation too dire, for “even the darkness is not dark to You” the Psalmist says (Psalm 139:12). That is why the most repeated commandment in Scripture is “do not be afraid.” Hope is a freedom from crippling fear, from the lie that nothing can be done; it will be the God-given tool to liberate us from the paralysis the climate crisis can often make us feel. Hope, in its truest form, unveils the problem and lets us confront it with confidence. It is always first engaged in a sort of radical naming and truth telling of the way things are, but does not leave us there to be swallowed by it. Somehow in knowing that the only finality will be the divine movement from grave to garden, we actually become more, not less present to the world and tasks in front of us. ​ Hope is a freedom from crippling fear, from the lie that nothing can be done; it will be the God-given tool to liberate us from the paralysis the climate crisis can often make us feel. Picture We are not in Paul’s Greco-Roman world, but our empires are only increasingly abusive, wielding unrestrained power at the expense of creation. Our current sins of consumerism and individualism have exploited the land and created the circumstances for cataclysmic natural disasters. Paul’s language of creation groaning finds a special resonance with us centuries later, we too have seen it up close. The role of the Church remains though, to help us hope in the glory to come, so we can partake in the freedom available to us now if we are brave enough to take it. God is with us, and the vision for redemption that Christ brings is cosmic in scope.