Fall and Creation
By Rev. Dr. Fritz Ritsch
July 20, 2014
St. Stephen Presbyterian Church
Fort Worth, TX
Romans 8:12-25
“Western Christians have imagined that, at the end of the day, God is going to throw the present space-time universe into a trashcan and we’ll be sitting on clouds playing harps. The ultimate future that we’re promised is much more interesting than that. It’s new heavens and a new Earth with new bodies to live in.”—N. T. Wright
I’m a year out from the 30th anniversary of my ordination in 1985. Don’t worry, I’m not fishing for another party like the one you threw me for my 10th anniversary. Frankly, the 30th anniversary of my ordination only reminds me of how old I am. But I do often have a fantasy. I sometimes wish I could go back to those first early years of my ministry, when I was a solo pastor of a small but wonderful little inner city church in Virginia, and start over again, but with all the knowledge that I’ve garnered from the past twenty-nine years. There were many good things about my years there, but many things that didn’t go so well either because of my personal shortcomings or because I simply didn’t know enough. That church in 1985 would benefit so much from what I know today in 2014 about pastoral care, preaching, worship leadership, community engagement, and social justice.
That’s a fantasy we all can relate to—not about the church so much, as about other aspects of our lives. We all have areas of our lives that we wish we could do over—areas where we disappointed ourselves or others, where we feel like, if we knew then what we know now, things would be different.
Not only that, but we know full well we’re not all we could be even now. Morally, spiritually, emotionally, mentally, in our relationships with others, in our relationship with God, we know we fall short.
This is what Paul means when he talks in scripture today about “frustration.” “For the creation was subjected to frustration,” Paul says. We’re all frustrated because of our own failings and shortcomings. And we all wish we had a cosmic “do-over” button we could press so we could have another chance to get it right.
All humanity is frustrated, but all of creation is frustrated, too. Our limitations limit the cosmos itself, and as a result, Paul says, all creation groans in frustration. Sometimes people ask me why we pray the Prayer of Confession every Sunday. It’s because as Christians, we’re charged with praying not only for ourselves, but for the whole world. So even though we go back and forth about who might be right and who might be wrong in the recent escalation between Israel and Hamas, there’s something terribly wrong with a world where war is viewed as a solution at all. Every time we pray one of our confessional petitions, “The profit and pleasures we pursue lay waste the land and pollute the seas,” we get uncomfortable because we tend either to believe pollution is an overrated concern, or that it’s a necessary evil in world with complicated needs. But it doesn’t change the fact that’s not how God intended us to interact with God’s good creation. How do we know this?
Because that’s not how God originally set things up in the Creation. That’s not how things were in the Garden of Eden.
I don’t want to get into any kind of debate about much of the Garden of Eden story is literal and how much is imaginative. Whether it is real or an incredible piece of creative fiction, it is true for all practical purposes, or it wouldn’t be scripture. It’s point is this: When God created the world, God created it good. Humanity interacted wholesomely with each other, God, and nature. According to the Bible, Adam and Eve were vegetarian—they didn’t harm animals. According to the Bible, humanity didn’t work—work, we discover, enters the world as a curse, when God says that humans shall earn their food by the sweat of their brow as part of our punishment for our disobedience. According to the Bible, God walked with Adam and Eve in the Garden–we had a deep personal relationship. According to the Bible, people didn’t have a sense of alienation and separation from one another in the Garden of Eden—they understood themselves as individuals, but also one with one another. There wasn’t enmity or war. According to the Bible, rain didn’t fall from the sky, but rather all the water that was needed exuded up from the ground. This was symbolically very significant to ancient people, because in the desert, rains often turned to floods and had become symbolic of chaos. But there was no chaos in the Garden of Eden. There was only God’s Shalom—peace—wholeness with God, nature, and each other.
And then humanity fell. We fell because of bad choices. We chose our ways over God’s ways. We chose selfishness over serving the larger good. We chose domination over all rather than unity with all.
We made terrible mistakes. And according to Paul in our scripture from Romans today, all of creation suffers from it.
If only there was a cosmic “do-over” button. If only we could start over again, having learned from our mistakes, and with the help of God get it right this time.
That’s what the promise is. We think of eternity as what we call heaven, a place where we escape the world. But the opposite is true. Eternity is God recreating the world. It is, as theologian N. T. Wright puts it, “a new Heaven and a new Earth with new bodies (for us) to live in.” There is a cosmic “do-over” button. God is rebooting Creation, and this time it will be fixed, and for all eternity.
Did you know that you have a “time machine” function on your computer? I’ve used it a couple of times when either because of viruses or user error I’ve really messed up my computer. It allows me to choose a date in the past when my computer was functioning properly and reset the computer to that date. In theory, at least, this could put the computer’s function back to the way it was before I made the stupid mistake that messed it up. When I first did it, I was afraid I might lose files I had created since the date I reset it to, but that doesn’t happen. You take the “time machine,” but your present-day files stay pretty much the same. It doesn’t always work, but I love the concept: somehow go back in time to fix all the bad stuff that’s happened, but with the ability to take all the good stuff from the present day back with you.
That’s the future that Paul is predicting, indeed that all the Bible is assuring us will happen. It’s a return to the Garden of Eden, to the original purpose of creation, to the world as it was before the Fall. And even though we weren’t there, we get to be part of it, with everything that makes us who we are, body, mind, soul, heart, redeemed and intact and made whole and eternal. In the beginning, we went from Creation to Fall. But now by God’s grace we are moving from Fall to Creation.
In fact, Paul says, all the pain and frustration of the present day are really the birthpangs of the day that’s surely coming. “We know that the whole creation is groaning in labor pains until now; and not only creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly.” It’s a powerful analogy: I haven’t been through childbirth personally, but I’ve certainly been deeply involved in it a couple of times. It is a time of frustration and anticipation, of uncertainty and great hope, of pain that anticipates joy. The frustrations of the world, Paul says, are prophetic predictors of the good world to come. Pollution and environmental distress make us long for a world of clean air and blue skies and of humanity living in harmony with nature. War makes us long for the day when humankind lives in harmony and love with one another. This isn’t to say that pollution and war are in any way good. Paul’s point is that our frustration over the world as it is inspires us to hope in the world that is to come. And that hope, Paul says, does not disappoint. The day is surely coming when humanity, nature, and God will live in harmony with one another once again.
But what we Christians also believe is that hope is active. Christ calls us to put our hope into action now. We know how God intends for the world to be. We are called to work for it. Unfortunately, it’s in the nature of living in a still-fallen world that we’ll fall short. To return to my analogy about a computer’s “time machine” function, I’ve never seen it work perfectly. There are always glitches. But the fact is that it does make my computer work better.
That is our calling as Christians—to make the world work better. To make it more like the world we once knew at the dawn of creation, and that we hope to see again when God’s Kingdom fully arrives with Christ. So we work for a better world. Peacemakers work for an end to war and what they get is a brief cease-fire. Environmentalists work for an end to all pollution and what they get is a species designated to the endangered list or a company voluntarily reducing its pollution output. It’s frustrating.
But Paul wants us to view that frustration as hopeful. And it is. In a fallen world, every positive action is a sign that we’re moving a bit closer. Every cease-fire, every decision to reduce pollution, every donation that provides food or shelter for one endangered child, is a step in the right direction. It’s not perfect, but like the politicians say, “Don’t make the perfect the enemy of the good.” The perfect is the inspiration for us to do the good we can do. Even the smallest thing is better than nothing at all. It’s a sign that we shouldn’t give up on each other yet—and we certainly shouldn’t give up on God.