Ninth Sunday after Pentecost; 30 July 2023; Proper 12A (RCL); Genesis 29:15-28; Psalm 105:1-11, 45b; Romans 8:26-39; Matthew 13:21-34, 44-52.
Who doesn’t love this passage from Romans, with its assurance that nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ? The list sounds pretty extreme, so surely nothing we face can compare. But for Paul hardship, distress, persecution, famine, nakedness, peril, or the sword was a catalog of dangers he had faced personally (see 2 Corinthians 11:21-29 — five times he received the forty lashes less one, and then a whole list of other trials). And yet, he was confident of the gospel he preached.
This is about more than just the assurance that God loves us. It is about our calling to glory, and our vocation as the midwives of the new heaven and new earth. In last week’s reading, we heard that the creation is groaning in labor pains until the revelation of the glory of the adopted children of God (that’s us), when it will be freed from its bondage to futility. So, we might ask, as we look around at wildfires raging in Europe, an unprecedented heatwave in much of our own country, warming oceans, gun violence, and the whole catalog of ills for creation brought on by human sin, “How should we pray? What should we do?”
Paul’s communities faced similar crises. Paul understood that “we do not know how it is necessary to pray” (making that “we ought to pray” is not a good translation — makes us feel guilty). But the Spirit takes our part with us in our weakness (again, helps us is a weak translation), and intercedes for us with wordless sighs. The verb for to intercede means literally to meet up with someone on someone else’s behalf. The implication here is not that the Spirit is praying for us, for our needs, but is doing the praying we don’t know how to do, interceding for us, not interceding for us. And the Greek carries the same implication as the the Latin root for intercede — to stand between. Since we don’t know what to ask for, on behalf of the creation, as we enter God’s presence, and what to do when we leave, the Spirit will do that work in our place, or through our agency. The Spirit does that work for us, according to God’s purposes, that is, for the freeing of creation from futility.
And anything we do is better than nothing, because we know that all things work together for the good for those who love God. Even if we get it wrong, God will use what we do. This doesn’t mean that everything comes out good for us in the end, as many think (God has a plan for your life; even what seems like tragedy, God will work toward your good — NO), but that what we do, God will use for the good.
And God chose us for this purpose from the beginning. The word translated “predestined” should really be “fore-ordained.” God has known that this how things would work out for creation from the beginning. We have been foreordained to be conformed to the image of God’s Son (a scary thought, knowing what happened to Jesus) for God’s own purposes. So God has drawn us together in a righteous community and glorified us, on behalf of creation.
So, despite all evidence to the contrary, we know that God is with us. In all of these things, we are more than conquerors. What a grand vision!
God has called us for the redemption of creation. Yikes! What can we possibly do? This week’s parables can help. The kingdom of heaven is like a little, tiny mustard seed that makes a scrappy bush in which birds can make their nests (a reference to the Kingdom of Israel, which is like a might cedar of Lebanon, in which the birds of the air make their nests). Or like a little bit of yeast that woman hid in 12 gallons of flour, and the whole mass was leavened (who is she baking bread for? By estimate, that’s about 15 pounds of flour. That’s a lot of bread).
Call it the butterfly effect; what little we do has consequences beyond our imagining. Paul would say that that is evidence of the Spirit interceding for us, multiplying our efforts. The Talmud says, “Do not be daunted by the enormity of the world’s grief. Do justly now. Love mercy now. Walk humbly now. You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to abandon it.” Paul would add that we have the assurance that God’s purposes cannot be thwarted, and we are called into those purposes.