The New Creation
First Congregational Church – Wauwatosa, Wisconsin
9th Sunday after Pentecost – July 17, 2005
Rev. Samuel Schaal

Romans 8:12-25
Psalm 139
Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43

In January 1981 my first child was born.  His little brother was born in January 1985.  I recall each birth vividly.  I can’t say I have experienced for myself what labor pains are like, but I at least witnessed those labor pains of birth.

I have experienced the pains of parenthood – the pains of helping children to grow up, the fears that you may not be doing it right, the fears that they may fall subject to influences in the world that will harm them, the hope that everything works out.  In the years since that first birth of my kids, I have groaned not with labor pains, but with the honest concern of any parent.   For those of us who are parents, as well as those of us who have witnessed others being parents, we have a sense of what it is like to participate in this part of creation. We get a sense of how our children … all children … are a possibility come to life.  A potentiality, a sign of all creation’s urging that life continue, even amid all the difficulties of the world.

Paul speaks of a world of creation groaning for new birth, for transformation, yearning for release from death and decay. In today’s reading from Romans, Paul starts by beginning to say we are indebted to God, but in typical fashion he gets sidetracked and doesn’t finish that thought.  Instead he begins speaking of our relationship to the divine as one of parent and child through adoption.  We are adopted into the family of God. So we are children of God.

Paul’s statement about our cry to God as “Abba, Father” underscores this.  This was a phrase Paul took from Jesus.  “Abba” is Aramaic, but our English word “father” is not the best translation.  Abba is a term of endearment, so “daddy” or “poppa” is a closer translation.  Paul’s Greek had no equivalent for such an intimate term, so he used the word Father.  This means that our relationship to God is not merely as a parent and child, but a close and intimate connection, where we might relate to God as daddy, or poppa.

Paul’s logic continues.  If we are children of God, then we are heirs of God, and joint heirs with Christ, so we might think of Christ as our big brother.  This relationship, however, is no mere philosophical, disembodied relationship.  We will be glorified with Christ, and we also will suffer with Christ, so Christ knows our suffering, knows our experience in the flesh. 

Then he shifts to a discussion about suffering.  The whole creation groans in labor pains.  And by “creation” he means more than just humans …  it is all of our interdependent global ecology … humans, animals, plants, inanimate creation….all yearn to be transformed.

Paul paints a poetic picture.  He looks around and sees all of creation as decaying, as dying, as waiting for its liberation from all this death into everlasting life. 

Waiting, Paul says, with eager longing, with expectancy.  One commentator says that “to Paul life was not a weary, defeated waiting; it was a throbbing, vivid expectation.”  He lived – we live – in the worn and weary world, but we also live in Christ.  We see within the structures of this world the sign of another world, a world overarching, undergirding, forever present in our earthly moments.  Paul waited – we wait – for the New Creation.

The mid-twentieth century theologian Paul Tillich says the whole of the Christian message for our time can be stated in those two words:  New Creation.  He quotes the Apostle Paul in 2 Corinthians 5:17:  “So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new!”

In one of his sermons, Tillich says:  “Christianity is the message of the New Creation, the New Being, the New Reality which has appeared with the appearance of Jesus who for this reason, and just for this reason, is called the Christ.  For the Christ, the Messiah, the selected and anointed one is He who brings the new state of things.”  (Paul Tillich, The New Being, Charles Scribner’s Son, 1955, p 15.)

The Apostle Paul talked about the travail of life at that time.  And he equates that with the travail of a woman in labor.  The pain is intense, the pain is real, but there is also amid the pain the possibility of new life and potentiality.  Certainly, Paul’s time and ours are different in some ways.  He was witness to a changing era as the new religion of Christianity evolved from a Jewish sect into a universal religion.  Paul and other Christians of that era faced persecution unknown to most of us.  Paul’s sense of the urgency of the times, of the urgency of the second coming of Christ, was different perhaps than ours.

And yet his description of the yearning of his generation for redemption, for transformation, mirrors ours.  The groaning of all creation was in his day not a lot different from our day.  For death and decay continue to haunt us.  We continue to yearn for a more full realization of God active in the world, transforming us, transforming the world.  Many of us yearn for a deeper experience with the source of all being, with the ultimacy of all creation, with God.  We seek a release from the despair, from the suffering, from the materiality of our lives.

And it is in our tradition, perhaps, that we come to experience the transformative effects of Christian faith.  Not all at once, for most of us, but in stages.  Perhaps we experience, over time, a second birth.  We understand that Jesus was born to give us that new birth.  We begin to see that in community we can help to birth a new world yet to be.

For we are, whether we know it or not, whether we like it or not, whether we believe it or not, we all are birthing our future lives.  We are pregnant, so to speak, with the future, all of us, men and women alike.  We are pregnant with our future.  Our church is pregnant with its future. 

Especially in our congregational understanding of how to be church, we begin to see that what we do influences each other.  We are more than the sum of our parts.  There is, when we gather as a church, a reality that we experience, a reality that is within physical creation, but also beyond that physical creation, that which transcends our earthly lives.

*  *  *  *  *

In 1905 an obscure clerk in an obscure Swiss patent office, beginning this job with a new Ph.D., wrote several papers that profoundly changed our notions of the structure of the material universe.  The man was Albert Einstein.  His discoveries, notably the theory of relativity, ushered in the quantum age and the nuclear age.  Our science is, 100 years later, still catching up to his prescient notions. One physicist from Harvard said that after Einstein, we discovered that one could take, he said, “a hunk of material … any old material … and realize it was pregnant with enormous quantities of energy.”  (Nima Arkani-Hamed, http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/einstein/experts.html)

What this suggests is that our universe is not always what is appears to be.  That we participate in another reality not obvious to the unaided naked eye.  That our world is not deterministic, but dynamic, prone to altering itself as it must to meet new demands of being, ready to recreate itself as needed.  Pregnant with the very soul and substance of its divine origin, always ready to manifest what is needed to advance itself.

Theologically, it suggests that within the immanence of created matter there is a transcendent reality. Transcendence within immanence.  What Einstein struggled with at the level of physics is perhaps not so different from what Paul is suggesting about the transformative nature of reality in Christ … that we live amid great potential and possibility, that we participate in this new creation, that we are witnesses to, and participants in, this great cosmic drama, even in the mundane structures of our lives.

We live, though, somewhere between the old creation and the new creation. The parable Jesus tells about the weeds and wheat shows that evil continues to have life, even amid this creative process. But we are not to ultimately worry, for God is the one who separates the weeds from the wheat, for only God has the fullest knowledge.

We live, as imperfect as our lives appear to be, in this parenthesis of eternity, in this advance of the ages.  The Rev. Dr. Forrest Church is the minister of All Souls Unitarian Church in New York City and a prolific author.  He picks up this theme in one of his books:

“Let me make it simple, for it is simple.  For us to be here more than a billion billion accidents took place.  All our ancestors lived to puberty, coupled, and gave birth.  Not just our parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents.  Take it all the way back to the beginning, beyond the first Homo sapiens to the ur-paramecium.  Even the one in a million sperm’s connection with the egg is nothing compared to everything else that happened from the beginning of time until now to make it possible for us to be here.

“So how do we respond?  Far too often with, ‘What did I do to deserve this?’

“Nothing.  Against unimaginable odds, we have been given something that we didn’t deserve at all, the gift of life.

“What does this mean?  Astoundingly, unbelievably, it means that we have been in utero from the beginning of the creation. We can trace ourselves back, genetically, to the very beginning of time.  The universe was pregnant with us when it was born.” 

(Forrest Church, Life Lines: Holding On and Letting Go, Beacon Press, 1996, pp. 169-170.)

I quibble with Dr. Church on one point.  We are not here by accident.  As Christians we understand God to know each one of us and for creation itself to have purpose and mindful volition. Psalm 139 speaks eloquently of this, of how we are known and loved and guided by the infinite God.

But otherwise he is on the mark.  Each of us is the fruition of millions of years of creation, and yet we are not at the end of time, for creation continues and there will be millions of others to follow us in the millions of years to come.

So we live in in-between times. Our location on this day is an example of this.  We sit here today in a room we now call our Social Hall, and is our old worship space. because our usual (and somewhat “new”) worship space is being repainted.  This in itself is a metaphor for what I’m trying to pinpoint.  We sit in, it could be said, the Old Creation, and yet our life belongs to the New Creation, our newly painted Nave.  But we are not there yet.  We will be soon, next week if the painting goes according to schedule, but not yet.

In our own lives, we live in-between the Old Creation and the New Creation.  We live in hope for the future.  God continues to birth our lives.  We cooperate in that process.  We are midwives to the process—coaches and midwives.  Especially in our congregational understanding of the Christian faith, we ought to be coaches and midwives to each other’s birthing of a spiritual life.

Whatever it is that you need, wherever it is that you are going, however it is that the New Creation is emerging in your life, may you do so in the hope that what is yet unseen, will be seen, in the glory of Christ working in your life.

Amen.