Hope

Romans 8: 18-25

Pentecost Sunday, May 27, 2012

St. Stephen Presbyterian Church,Fort Worth,Texas

By Rev. Dr. Fritz Ritsch

 

The other day, I heard a story on NPR’s “This American Life” that particularly resonated with me. It was a story about the violence perpetrated by the government of Guatemala on its own people during the Guatemalan civil war of the 1980s and ‘90s. Sixteen years ago, I joined a Presbyterian mission group that travelled to Guatemala as the war was winding down, and I so I have some familiarity and ongoing interest in their struggle.

In 1982, a unit of Guatemalan commandos slaughtered an entire village, Dos Erres, starting with babies. The villagers were accused, wrongly, of hiding weapons for the rebels. Only three children were known to have survived. Two of them survived because they were adopted by two of the soldiers who’d slaughtered their families. Both of them were about three years old at the time. One of the adopted boys was abused throughout his childhood and treated as a slave. But another, Oscar, was adopted by an officer and his family, who raised him like a son. The officer died while Oscar was still young, but his family continued to raise him and tell him stories of his father’s kindness and heroism, stories that remain with Oscar to this day.

One day, people came to him with news. First of all, the officer was not his father: he was adopted after most of his family, including nine siblings and his pregnant mother, were slaughtered by the officer’s commandos. Second of all, Oscar’s true father was still alive.

Oscar was excited by the news of his true father. But he also wanted to know everything he could about his adoptive father, whom he’d always regarded as a hero. And he found it out. On the one hand, his father was a top officer, respected and loved by his troops. On the other hand, some people called him “the crazy sadist.” On the one hand, his father had participated in the massacre of his family; on the other hand, he’d been a kind and loving father to Oscar.

Oscar today is torn—he’s found his true father, but he has to face the reality of his true history. In a lot of ways, the entire history of Guatemala in the last forty years comes down to Oscar’s story, the story of one boy who survived a massacre.

Now there are some who’d say this story, terrible as it is, has nothing to do with Christian faith. For those folks, dealing with such matters as war and human cruelty aren’t matters of concern for Christians. Christianity is about escaping the troubles of this physical world through spiritual salvation. If you ask them, why be Christian, they will respond: because we want to go to heaven after we die. And, conversely, it’s because we don’t want to go to hell.

Others will answer the question “Why be Christian,” in this way: it’s so that we can have success in this life. We can be prosperous and rich. We can even be on the right side of history.

Others will say that, it’s because to believe in Jesus Christ is to be RIGHT, and to believe anything else is simply wrong.

If you listen to some, it’s because we all have sin-sick souls, and those sin-sick souls need to be healed so that we can be the people we are meant to be. That is a lot truer than any of the above statements. But it shares with it the same problem: it’s an “all about me” way of thinking about why we’re Christians.

The Apostle Paul wanted us to think about it differently. Paul wants us to understand that all of creation is sin-sick. All of creation is in need of salvation. “For the whole creation has been groaning in travail together until now,” he writes. The whole of creation is groaning. That is our concern, because it is God’s concern: the whole of creation.

He doesn’t want us to be thinking just about ourselves. He wants us to be thinking about the whole of creation. And how one life can both encapsulate the sickness of creation—and heal it.

Paul is writing in Romans about the presence of the Holy Spirit. We so often play down the Holy Spirit in our theology these days. But we must understand that for Paul, the Holy Spirit is the living presence of God in the world. The Holy Spirit is the reality of God’s Kingdom present and at work in the world. The Holy Spirit is God’s Kingdom injected like medicine into a sick body, fighting the presence of sin-sickness in our sin-sick world, and healing the world. The Holy Spirit is proof that we live in a new age, the age that Jews of his day would understand as Tikkun Olam, the healing of the world. Because the whole world is sick, the whole world is groaning, and through God’s Holy Spirit God has begun the process of healing the world.

The healing of the world is our business because it is God’s business. It is actually amazing and heretical that Christianity has ever taught anything else. From the beginning, Jesus taught that God didn’t intend to destroy the world in a great apocalypse, but to save it. “For the son of Man came into the world not to condemn the world, but that through Him the World might be saved,”  we read in John 3:17. The word for “the world” is kosmos—it means system, everything created, heaven and earth.

Christians have always believed that we don’t go to heaven to be with God, but that God comes to earth to be with us. We believe that God will redeem the heavens and the earth and make a new heaven and a new earth, a return to the Garden of Eden, and humanity will dwell eternally with God here, in this world.

And as Paul teaches, this has never been simply about our personal salvation, but the salvation of the world. “For the creation awaits with eager longing the revealing of the children of God; for the creation was subjected to futility, not of its own will but by the will of Him who subjected it in hope, because creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and obtain the glorious liberty of the children of God.” You see, our salvation and the world’s are intimately tied together: to the extent that we live our lives for the sake of God, for the sake of others, and for the sake of the world, we become healing agents, the antibodies God has injected into the world to enable the world to “obtain the glorious liberty of the children of God.”

Each of us, as hard as it is sometimes to believe, each of us has the ability—and the responsibility—to affect the healing of the world. Each of us both encapsulates the world’s sickness in our own sickness, but also, by the grace of God, contains God’s gracious ability to change and rearrange the world to God’s glory.

All this is because there is one person who both experienced and revealed the evil of the world and by His death and resurrection has completely overcome the world and begun its healing. That person is Jesus Christ. In his cross he is His God experiencing the suffering of the world—the suffering of that Guatemalan village and its people. In his resurrection He is God overcoming the suffering of the world—the grace-endowed possibility that people can change, that people can grow, that the world can change.

Perhaps the most moving part of the story of that Guatemalan village was the way the truth about the slaughter was revealed. Two of the soldiers who participated in it could no longer bear to live with the guilt. One kept saying, “I have to tell this story because I don’t want anyone else to do to my children what I did to those children.” And so they boldly, at great risk, stepped up and told the story. It was the first time that any of the participants in the Army’s war of terror on its own people had ever spoken up. Their boldness, their willingness to speak up for others even at their own risk, has begun what could be a slow healing process for all of Guatemala.

Or it may not be. The point is that our willingness to change for the sake of the healing of the world has a spiritual power that often transcends its actual concrete ability to make any concrete difference. It is not up to us to heal the world. It’s up to God, and God will do it. But it is up to us to do what we can, in the name of Christ, to make the world a better place. Sometimes all we can do is bear witness to the truth and put the results in God’s hand. As my rabbi friend Mark Raphael taught me years ago, the great rabbis say that “It is incumbent upon us neither to bring about God’s Kingdom, nor to desist in pursuing it.”

But what we Christians need to understand about the Holy Spirit is this: the Holy Spirit ties it all together. God’s will is tied at last to the destiny of the world. The World’s Destiny is tied to humanity’s destiny. Your destiny and mine are tied to the healing of God’s world. Our individual salvation, and the world’s, are intimately connected. And Christ’s death and resurrection are what tie it all together, because Christ not only died to save you, and me, He died to save the world.