David Orendorff???????? Romans 8:22-27????????? May 27, 2012
Paul presents us two images of the world groaning in hope for the children of God to bring a new creation. The first is of a woman groaning in labor. I have been in the delivery room for three births. I consider it a great privilege to have been there for the miracle of new life. But I am also well aware of what it means to groan in labor. The only thing that keeps the mother from ending the pregnancy or murdering those attending her is the anticipated child who will hopefully soon enter the world. Without the hope of the child, the groaning is unbearable. And many a mother, after her first or even second childbirth, has said, ?I am never doing that again!? But then the hope of a child again moves in her and, knowing full well the groaning that must come, she does it again. Such, says Paul, is the creation?s suffering in hope as it waits for the children of God to enter the world to bring the new creation.
Paul?s second image of groaning in suffering while hoping for a new creation is that of waiting to be adopted. In 2010, the most recent statistics I could find, there were 10,068 children in foster care in Washington State; 2,167 of these children were waiting for adoptive families. Imagine you are one of those two thousand waiting for a family to find you. Typically you are nine years old and have been removed from your biological family because a court has found your parents unfit and there is no one in your family to whom you can be entrusted. Your median stay in any one home will be 14 months. You have a one-in-ten chance of being physically or emotionally abused. And even though you are only nine, you are in your second, if not third, home.[1]
And so, day in and day out, you suffer being a guest in a home not yours; you suffer being a child of temporary and hired care; you suffer not knowing if today you will be moved to another foster home. There are a great many very good foster parents, and I have been privileged to know some. But even the best foster parent is only temporary, and that uncertainty is devastating to a child who has been pulled from their biological family and is on a day- to-day basis with a temporary family.
As a child hoping for adoption, day in and day out, you groan in prayer that some loving family will find you and offer you the fullness a home can be, all the time knowing that the older you get the less likely you will be found. So you groan and you pray and you hope for what might be but is not yet seen; you groan and hope for the day of adoption and redemption. Such groaning, says Paul, is the creation?s suffering as it waits for the children of God to enter the world to bring a new creation. We are the children of God. It is for that which we bring that the creation groans and hopes.
I am going to take a sharp left turn here so hang on for a minute.
United Methodist pastors, in seeking ordination, have their ?call to ministry? tested by their sponsoring local church, their graduate education, their mentor and the various boards charged with the process of certifying ordination. During this process I realized that before I was called, I was pushed. God pushed me by making me painfully sensitive to the groaning of creation. When I look around I cannot avoid hearing the groans and seeing the suffering. God, by a deep soul pain, a groaning in pregnancy or waiting for adoption, pushed me into a need for finding a way to comfort the afflicted.
I didn?t know it at the time, but in 1965, Hal David and Burt Bacharach wrote and Jackie De Shannon sang what was to become my prayer for life.[2] If you know it and you hear in it a prayer to end the groaning of the world, ?then sing with me:
What the world needs now is love, sweet love
It?s the only thing that there?s just too little of
What the world needs now is love, sweet love,
No, not just for some, but for everyone.
So now I had a push and a prayer, but I didn?t have a way. The way to help, the call, came in my early 20?s when I discovered Jesus. It wasn?t that I hadn?t heard of Jesus. I had been raised in a Christian family and Christian congregations. But there came that moment when I saw for myself that Jesus was God?s love made flesh; that the way of Jesus was the way of love coming into and caring for the groaning world.
I saw in Jesus and those who were true disciples a vision of the kingdom of heaven; a vision which showed me that in Jesus the servant love needed was both possible and present. It was then that I felt that my life was called to serve no other God, no other love and no other purpose than to be a disciple of Jesus and carry to a groaning world the good news and the fact of a new creation. I was called to be a child of God who, by word and deed, might end at least a small portion of the world?s groaning for redemption.
Quickly along the way God taught me, through a great and repeated humbling, that I needed you, my sisters and brothers in the family of God, as mentors and companions. I learned that I cannot stay devoted and dedicated to God in worship, study and service without your presence and aid. So I have stayed with God?s call to pastoral ministry not because I am strong, but because I am weak. I have stayed with pastoral ministry because I see you, the beloved children of God, as the best answer to the groans of the world. It is here, in the congregation of the children of God that the love of God made flesh, if not always lived completely, is at least the spoken and prayed for purpose of all the future. I have come and I stay with the family of God because I need you,sa, that together we might bring the hope of new creation to fruition.
God pushed my heart into ministry by the groans of the world, taught me to pray for love and pulled my heart into ministry by the hope of becoming more like Jesus. And I have stayed in pastoral ministry because God has shown me that you are the children of God and the answer to the world?s groaning for the kingdom of justice, truth, peace and love.
Shalom and Amen.
[1] US Department of Health and Human Service, 2010, http://www.acf.hhs.gov/programs/cb/stats_research/index.htm
[2] You can see Jackie De Shannon sing ?What the World Needs Now? on Shindig at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tMS2uMUQNnQhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tMS2uMUQNnQ
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