5th Sunday after Pentecost
Romans 8:12-25
July 17, 2011

Green Theology

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, Iowa

In the year that I’ve been hanging around Decorah you may have noticed that I don’t often preach from Paul. There is a reason for that. The Apostle Paul and I have our differences. He comes across as a pompous know-it-all and, really, there is only space for one of those in a room at a time and I would rather it were me. His prose is awful. His sentences run on and on, dangling participial phrases like charms on a charm bracelet. He starts out to make a simple point and then takes every available detour until he and we have forgotten what he set out to say. To put it succinctly, the Apostle annoys me.

I feel badly about it, of course. I don’t like it when my own preferences get in the way of loving someone, even someone dead for nearly two thousand years. One year I took it as a lenten discipline to preach from Paul every time he came up in the lectionary. And, wouldn’t you know it?—it was every Sunday during Lent! So every week I sat down with this person that I don’t really like very much. We had our arguments, our points of profound disagreement and some surprising agreements as well. In the seven weeks that we met for conversation I found what many people of have found when they’ve really made an effort to get to know someone whom they do not like: I came to respect him.

I discovered that it was not Paul himself I had rejected—it was the report I’ve had about him from others. His writings have been captured and, I believe, distorted by an agenda that I can only describe as narrow and abusive. He is taken out of context and made to seem to be saying things that he simply does not say. I have found him to be innocent of many of the charges made against him.

Don’t get me wrong. We’re not quite friends. I’ve never invited him to a baseball game or out for a pint. But I respect him. I think I understand him a little. I appreciate his perspective. I sometimes preach from his writings when it isn’t even Lent. I was intrigued by something I think I see in this week’s lesson, so this is one of those weeks. I’ll need two weeks of vacation to recover from the effort and maybe you’ll be glad of two weeks with someone else in the pulpit as well!

Romans is unique among Paul’s letters because it was written to a congregation whom he had never met. It is a letter of self-introduction to them because he is planning a missionary journey to the far west of the known world, to the Roman province of Hispania, and he hopes to gain their support for this effort. Rome is on the way and he would like to break the journey into two stages.

The letter is Paul’s fullest statement of what he has been preaching. He doesn’t deal with the particular problems of a particular congregation. Instead, Paul’s concerns are more general. He deals with the issue that has every Christian congregation struggling. In broad strokes the problem was this: How is the community of Jesus-followers going to deal with the presence of both Jewish and non-Jewish Christians? Is the gospel about Jesus for Jews only or is it for non-Jews as well? Do non-Jews have to become Jews in order to become Christians? Must non-Jewish Christians keep the Jewish law? If not, what law are they supposed to follow?

Paul said what God had done in Jesus the Christ was so new, so powerful, so radical, that the categories of Jew and non-Jew no longer made any sense. The Jewish law no longer counted, nor did any other law. The only thing that mattered was confidence in Jesus’ faithfulness and living a life that grew out of that confidence. This new thing rendered the old ways obsolete.

God’s plan includes both Jews and non-Jews. In fact—and here’s where our reading comes in—it doesn’t just include people. God’s plan is a plan for the whole of creation. We are not the only ones who long for redemption. With eager anticipation all of creation longs for it with us, longs for what Paul calls “the freedom of the glory of the children of God.”

Paul’s train of thought has left its rails. The course of Paul’s argument won’t be picked up again until the next chapter. In the meantime Paul’s train of thought continues careening along through —to change metaphors—a poetic crescendo that will end at chapter’s end with Paul’s jubilant shout that nothing seen or unseen in all of creation will separate us from God’s love found in the Jesus Christ! Hooray!

Now, where were we? Oh, yes: Paul was sketching out how things are with us. There are two choices, Paul says, for both Jew and non-Jew alike. On the one side there is flesh, death, the deeds of the body, slavery and fear. On the other side there is life, spirit, adoption, freedom, and glory. We who are Christians, says Paul, still live at least in some sense on the side of flesh, death, slavery and fear. But we hope for the side of spirit, life, freedom and glory. We aren’t there yet, but we hope for it, we yearn for it, we live toward it, we groan for it. We are in labor, giving birth to a new creation. This scares me, because although I’ve never been in labor myself, I have seen it and it looks like hard, painful and frightening work.

But we’re not the only ones who are in labor for this new thing: the whole of creation does, too. Now this is something odd, a thought that neither the ancients nor we have taken seriously.

To the ancients nature was not a good thing. As the opposite of culture it threatened everything they did. Wolves threatened their sheep. The forest threatened their cultivated fields. The sea threatened sailors. Nature could overthrow culture all too easily. Nature could turn an assembly of rational citizens into a blindly furious mob. People wanted to get as far away from nature as possible.

They admired the scenery of a cultivated countryside. They would have liked this part of Iowa, but not for its pockets of woodlands or its limestone cliffs. Nature on its own terms was dangerous and uncanny, hostile to humans. It wasn’t beautiful.

We didn’t start seeing nature as beautiful until the late seventeen hundreds, less than three centuries ago. That only happened after we began to imagine that we could control nature. Then we began to think of nature as beautiful. People began to travel to see the wilderness, not so they could plow it up or cut it down, but so they could appreciate its newly discovered beauty. When Jane Austen’s Elizabeth Bennett cries, “What are men to rocks and mountains?” she is saying something quite modern, something her great grandparents would neither have said nor even understood. We have come so far from the ancient point of view that we now see nature as flawless. We see a “natural” ingredient in an otherwise highly processed food as a selling point. We set aside plots of wilderness for protection. We have turned the ancient world upside down.

But notice that both of these views agree that nature is one thing and we are another. We have changed our minds about the relative value of culture and nature, but we are agreed that human beings and their culture stand outside of and apart from nature.

Paul disagrees. Paul says that we are creatures. We are deeply flawed creatures. And here is the huge point: because we, the capstone of creation, are flawed, so is the entire edifice. The condition of our species is not a problem just for us. It is a problem for the whole world.

But we knew that already, didn’t we? If we misuse fertilizers in Iowa, a patch of the Gulf of Mexico dies. If we build a nuclear power plant on a seismic fault-line, the soil and the sea life suffer. The careless agricultural use of marginal land leaves a gully where there could have been a pasture or woodland. A consensus of climatologists has come to the conclusion that the greenhouse gases that our species is producing are changing the climate of the whole planet. None of this is new news.

What is new is what comes next. Paul tells us that just as our flaws have become a deep wound in creation, our healing will be nothing less than the liberation of the rest of nature from its slavery. So what God plans to do is to rebuild creation from the ground up, to lay a new foundation for the natural enterprise.

God has a dream for us. This is true. What is also true is that this dream isn’t just about us; it’s about the world we live in, it’s about Elizabeth Bennett’s “rocks and mountains,” it’s about salamanders and tree frogs, slime molds and saguaro cactus, fireflies and falcons, blue whales and bluebells.

So far, our efforts to protect the environment we live in have been based either on self-interest or nature worship. When Paul’s train of thought left the rails, he showed us, whether by accident or on purpose, that there is another possibility. It is a happy derailment, I think.

It offers us a different way of thinking about ourselves and our world and a different reason for our caring. We can care for ourselves and for the rest of our world, neither because it serves us to do it, nor out of guilt, but because loving the world towards the “freedom of the glory of the children of God” is part of our calling as God’s children. Our fellow creatures can do more than groan with us because of our deep woundedness. They can celebrate our healing with us. They can rejoice that God is not saving us out of the world, but into it. Then will what we and our fellow creatures hoped for be in plain sight. Then will God’s dream for us be realized.

©2011, John M. Caldwell. Permission is given by the author to reproduce and distribute the unaltered text of this sermon provided this notice is reproduced in full and provided that this sermon shall not be offered for sale, nor included in any collection or publication that is offered for sale, without the express written permission of the author.