The Christian year is moving deeper into Pentecost, that season sometimes called “ordinary time.”
Recent weeks, however, have been anything but ordinary. Today’s lectionary reading from Paul’s Letter to the Romans has me thinking about ancient Rome (the letter was, after all, written to Romans!) and the problem of empire — as well as our nightly headlines.
In short, I think Christians have made a mistake reading the below passage as a kind of legal argument regarding adoption and inheritance. It makes more sense if we read it organically — through the lens of interdependence and creativity.
Muse along with me on this hot summer Sunday.
Romans 8:12-25
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.
Last week, at the Wild Goose Festival, I was delighted to finally meet and share the stage with Bill McKibben. I’ve been a fan of his for a long time. When Richard, my husband, and I were first dating, he introduced me to Bill’s work. Not only was I taken with his ideas and his commitment to environmentalism, but his clarity and craft have long influenced my own writing practice. Along the way, smart publishers made sure we knew of each other’s work — and I think I’ve read every book he’s written in the last fifteen years.
But we’d never met in person — until this year’s Wild Goose Festival. Believe it or not, I was nervous and worried about fan-girling too much! We had a good time. I’m grateful to say that we liked each other as much in person as through the page.
I share this story because it relates to today’s reading from Romans. When we got back from Wild Goose, Bill sent out a newsletter titled, “‘I told you so’ are the four least satisfying words in the English language.” It is a startling piece of self-reflection on the climate crisis:
I wrote the first book on what we now call the climate crisis way back in 1989, and it feels like I’ve spent the subsequent three-and-a-half decades warning that eventually we’d get to this particular July: the hottest day and week and month on record…When I read things like this, I weep for the people involved, and I also weep at my own failure. I’ve known about this crisis longer than almost anyone on earth, and I’ve done what I can think of to do, and some of it has been useful, but it hasn’t been enough. Others have done more and better, but that hasn’t been enough either. ‘I told you so’ is, in this case, just a different way of saying ‘I couldn’t figure out the right words’ or ‘I couldn’t mobilize enough others.’ Kind people say ‘you tried,’ and I have, but that’s also another way of saying ‘you blew it.’
I confess: I feel the same way about the churches I’ve worked with, and about the continuing decline of belief in the United States. I’ve been writing about congregational vitality, the prospects for a renewed liberal Christianity, and how to stop the “mainline” downturn for nearly as long as Bill’s been writing about climate change (my first article on the subject appeared in the Santa Barbara News Press in 1994). Every time denominational statistics are released, my heart breaks a little more. And my husband says, “You told them so.” He says that a lot.
Bill warned us of the world heating up unless we did something about it. I warned of faith cooling down unless we did something about it.
Yeah. “I told you so” is painful. I hear you, Bill.
During these brutal, baking days of climate change, a new Gallup survey was released. It revealed something I never thought I’d see — only 74% of Americans now say they believe in God. Since long before I was born, American belief in God has been well above 90% (in 1960, when I was just a few months old, it was 99%). The number only started to fall post-2005, taking a precipitous tumble after 2015. It is a cold, cold world of religion out there. You might say that the United States is (finally) joining the rest of the western world in its long journey beyond its historical moorings in Christianity.
Of course, you might think these two things — climate change and religious climate change — a warming Earth, a cooling toward God — have nothing to do with each other. Lots of people cheer one and fear the other. You might be for Mother Earth and not God, or perhaps the opposite. Whatever your view of them, however, I suspect most of you would consider both me and Bill worthy nominees for St. Jude Award of Hopeless Causes.
You might wonder why in the world I’m writing about this today — in a Sunday Musings post. None of this sounds like one of my more typical optimistic reflections.
The reason is simple: Paul puts God and earth together in this Sunday’s passage from Romans. You can’t separate them, says the apostle. We’re bound up with one another. Everything is connected.
In the first part of the text, Paul contrasts “life according to the flesh” with being “led by the Spirit of God.” That word “flesh” has often tripped up Christians — the idea that bodies are bad, that worldly and sensual pleasures are to be eschewed.
But there’s another possibility here. Paul was probably making a political point, something largely invisible to readers today.
Earlier in Romans, Paul criticized emperor worship and used the word “flesh” to refer to participation in the imperial cult. The language of debt is also a clue that Paul is speaking of the empire. The entirety of Roman culture and economics was built on a system of debt — believing that everything and everyone across the empire was bound by a debt of obligation to Caesar, who was the “Lord and Savior” of the world. You owed Caesar your very life; you were forever owned by the empire.
But Jesus provided a way out of this fleshy — this worldly — imperial debt. He proclaimed liberation from empire, a casting down of thrones, freedom to captives, blessing to the poor, fed the hungry, healed the sick, and invited all sorts of marginalized, outcast, and socially unacceptable people to eat with him. He showed there was a different kind of community through friendship with God and being born of the Spirit. And in that Spirit, Abba-God would liberate all those held in slavery and adopts them into a new family.
In effect, Paul claims that one is either held in thrall of Rome, enslaved by perpetual indebtedness, or is a child, an heir, of God.
Paul uses “Abba” for God, a term sometimes translated as “daddy,” a warm, intimate term for “father.” The emphasis isn’t on gender — as in God’s maleness. Instead, the emphasis is on belonging, having an identity, or being gifted with life. Some scholars have suggested that the Aramaic word, “Abba,” or “Abwûn,” does means “father” but the nuance leans toward procreative meanings of fatherhood — with possible translations of “Thou, from whom the breath of life comes” or the “Birther of the Cosmos.”
If you read this text like adoption papers or a will of inheritance, Paul seems to move from a legal argument to, oddly enough, “the whole creation groaning in labor pains.” That’s weird mixed metaphor. The first and second paragraphs don’t seem to connect.
But if we think of God — Abba — as the breather of life, the birth of the cosmos — the passage about creation leaps from the page! God and earth are intimately connected, they always have been. Abba is the life-giving force of this whole beautiful creative business since before time began. But the birth has been slowed, hampered — a long, painful labor. The labor of creation stalled.
Why?
Because we humans didn’t do our part. We kept displacing Abba with Empire — and every empire wound up enslaving us and corrupting creation. We bound ourselves to false saviors — mostly greed and power — and became indebted to the very things that threatened to destroy. We surrendered to fear. We gave ourselves over to every tin-plated Caesar who promised bread and circuses that history threw at us — and they killed us and the earth in the process. All the while, we worshipped them. And we looked for the next Caesar to take the place of the terrible previous one. Surely, the next will be better!
Thus, creation groaned, unable to birth the joy, beauty, and new life it has been carrying around in its swollen womb.
God, the earth, and us. We’re of a piece. The life-giving breath, the dusty creation, our garden vocation to keep and till the earth — it has been messed up for so long that we didn’t know how to explain it and blamed it on forbidden fruit and a snake. Whatever really happened we’ll never know. But we do know that this trinity — God, earth, and us — broke. And we looked to the wrong place to “the flesh” to fix it.
But Paul’s message is simple: Empires enslave us and have destroyed the earth. The only liberation is a new harmony — found through and in a very different sort of family: God, the earth, and us.
The apostle isn’t entirely original in his assessment. He echoed pretty much the entire biblical tradition — prophets and preachers and teachers and judges and wise rulers and heroes and poets have been trying to shake us from the stupor of fear and warn us of empire. If we live according to the desires of the “flesh,” we find ourselves enslaved. The Spirit liberates, and it animates justice.
Jesus said it in a thousand ways and the Roman Empire tried to silence him. Paul argued that the earth waited for humankind to let go of fear and live in Spirit.
You might say that they told us so.
Our freedom and earth’s liberation are caught up with one another — only if we are truly born of the Spirit can the creation itself give birth to the world for which we’ve been longing. Our salvation is entwined. Everything is connected.
Please listen. Not because anyone wants to be right. It is bad news that the earth is heating up while our trust in God is cooling down. No more slavery to the Empire of Exxon. And more of the breathing, birthing Abba.
All creation is groaning. The liberated, courageous children of God must face our fears, confess the damage we’ve done, and finally fulfill our vocation to care for creation. Basically, I’m in favor of a hotter God and cooler Earth. If we were more enflamed with the Spirit, maybe we bring could down Earth’s temperature — by a little at least.
One thing poetry teaches us, if anything, is that everything is connected.
— Lucille Clifton
INSPIRATION
Of course, the trees with their greening,
their growing, their gift of eating light —
how beautiful they are in these first days of spring:
their feathery drupes that gather low sun,
the tender gold when the leaves first unfurl.
But today I am awed by the vital soil that feeds them —
awed by the multipedes and woodlice, fly larvae and springtails
that fragment the once-living world into mulch;
awed by the nematodes, the mites, the pauropods,
awed by the rotifers, the algae, the bacteria,
the single-celled protozoans — all of these makers of earth.
There’s elegance in the process — the breaking down,
the separation of proteins, the release of nitrogen,
the creation of rich, dark humus.
How seldom I honor the beauty of tearing apart,
the blessing of brokenness, the importance of those
who undo, who help the world go to pieces.
The earth itself is an altar to breakdown, decay,
collapse, demise. And from these infinite violences,
we rise, like trees, we rise.
— Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, “On Earth Day”
O God,
enlarge within us the sense of
fellowship with all living things,
our brothers and sisters
the animals to whom you gave the earth
as their home in common with us.
We remember with shame that in the past
we have exercised the high power of man
with ruthless cruelty
so that the voice of the earth,
which should have gone up to thee in song,
has been a groan of pain.
May we realise that they live not for
us alone but for You
and that they love the sweetness of life.
— St. Basil the Great (330-379 CE)
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January 12 -14, 2024
Last January, almost 700 people gathered at St. Simon’s Island in Georgia for a packed weekend of poetry, theology, and music.
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Two comments:
1. I read the Roman's reading 2 times and couldn't understand it...at all. And I'm a deep reader.
It jumped all over the place and I couldn't find the "tie-things-together" thread till I read what you (DBB) said/explained about the passage.
Much thanks for making the ideas/ideal in the text relatable/understandable.
The other is that it's soooooooooo hard to get people to understand that WE ARE ALL IN THIS TOGETHER--God, Gaia, and us (as so many have noted below). And the Aspen clone (how amazing!!!!) is (to me, anyway) a perfect example of just how "all in" we could be.
Loved your most recent Sunday Musings, thank you.You mentioned the 25% of Americans who say they don’t believe in God. I was wondering have any surveys further queried those folks to ask what they do value? I know many people who reject religion ( tho not sure if they would consider themselves atheists) but have strong moral values for justice, human and earth rights. I do not imagine this 25 % to be an homogenous group ( I have read some pretty mean spirited atheists) but am curious as to their guiding values. I suspect, hope many have a compassionate compass. They may well be allies in the struggle for the Kingdom over empire. It is the fundamentalist view of a retributive God, a God of violence who I think to be more of a roadblock to advancing God’s compassionate, loving will for creation.