Preached @ Christ Church, Billericay on 19 September 2021 @08:00am
Precious
What’s most precious to you?
[allow time]
I wonder what you thought of? Perhaps it was an object that holds special memories and connects you to someone now gone. Perhaps it was just a memory of a special time and place with special people. Perhaps it was a person. Your spouse, a close friend, or one of your children or grandchildren.
I would like to suggest that perhaps the most precious thing to us is our future. It’s not static like an object or a memory, and it’s something we have a reasonable amount of control over, unlike another person, who we can’t really control at all (or shouldn’t!).
Star Trek
I’ve been watching Star Trek Voyager on Netflix – I’m a bit of a Trekkie. The other day, they had a story about a man who was planning to visit the 29th century to steal their technology and bring it back to the current day.
Time travel is of course impossible for us, but that doesn’t stop the story being interesting.
Stealing from our futures
While I was reflecting on some aspects of the story and thinking about the future, I realised that we are all stealing from our own futures.
Think about it. We are using the earth’s resources at roughly twice the rate we should, so they are becoming depleted, and future generations will be in need because we have used what should rightfully be theirs.
Our Gospel reading speaks of the abundance that God provides, not just in harvest, but for our lives in general. But we, in our greed, continue to want more and more and manage to make even God’s abundance not enough.
With our way of life, we are wasteful of what we have. We burn fuel for energy to make our lives easier and put the waste products into the atmosphere, damaging the whole environment. Already we can see the effects, our weather is changing, making the environment more hostile. It will be worse for our children and grandchildren.
Scientists have known that we are changing the climate since the 1970s, but their warnings fell on deaf ears. Do you know that if you look at the record of our climate carefully you can even see the effects the Roman Empire had - nothing like the effect we’re having now, but it is there.
No wonder that Paul says creation is groaning. It has suffered the onslaught of mankind’s greed for centuries.
Cursed is the ground because of you
Worse than that even, it was Mankind’s actions that put it under a curse in the first place.
After the incident with the fruit tree in the centre of Eden, God said to Adam, “Cursed is the ground because of you; through painful toil you will eat of it all the days of your life. It will produce thorns and thistles for you, and you will eat the plants of the field.” (Gen 3:17-18)
Our harvests too are much better than Adam, Abraham and co. could even dream of, but the overuse of fertilizer poisons streams and rivers and causes even more groaning.
Creation tied to man
You may think that mankind is dependant of the creation that God placed them in, but the Bible suggests that it’s more complicated than that. God gave us creation to look after, to rule over:
Ge 1:26 Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, in our likeness, and let them rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the livestock, over all the earth, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.”
Bondage and Decay
So creation has been subjected to bondage and decay, not by it’s own choice, but by God, because He gave it to Adam, and Adam because he failed to follow God’s very simple rules.
We, too, are in the same cycle of bondage and decay, we are born, grow, get old and die, as does everything in creation. The next generation must learn all that we know, and make their own decisions. – It seems such a waste of all that effort.
Should be different
Creation seems to know things should be better. “The creation waits in eager expectation for the sons of God to be revealed.” The sons of God, Paul has already said in verse 14 are those who are led by the Holy Spirit.
Creation waiting for us
Creation is waiting in eager expectation, for us to be revealed, so that it can join our freedom.
If you wonder what eager expectation looks like, The JB Philips version translates the verse as “The whole creation is on tiptoe to see the wonderful sight of the sons of God coming into their own.”
It’s a lovely image, it reminds me of Thomas, standing on the window ledge, his nose against the glass, straining to see Liz come home when he stayed with us the other night. He was not very patient though, and kept asking the question “Where’s Mummy?”, but his hope was never dimmed.
Convert the world – save the planet
Perhaps the idea that creation will be freed when the children of God are revealed is where the idea comes from that suggests that ‘all we have to do’ is convert the world and all the environmental problems we have created will be overcome.
This is, of course, only a partial truth because we are also groaning inwardly as we await eagerly our adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies.
When that happens, then there will be a new heaven and a new earth, and all the disasters that us human beings have brought on creation and each other will be over. Judgement will be complete, and we can get on with living with our Lord for Eternity – no more problems will be created.
Until then, those of us who recognise God’s rule have a hope to look forward to – the return of Jesus. We don’t know when that will happen, so we shouldn’t be using up the earths resources and generating pollution bumper harvests so that there is something left for our children and their children. So, we also still have the responsibility to look after creation to the best of our abilities. We’ve seen many ways to do this during our recent Summer Series, and Christ Church is working to become a more environmentally friendly church.
Return – redemption
Our hope is in the return of the Lord Jesus and the redemption of our bodies, so that we no longer decay. We hope, because we do not have, and so we watch carefully for signs that the time is coming, I think back to Thomas, who had to wait for hours at the window, and eventually to go to bed before his Mum finally came home.
That may also be true for us, we may not see Jesus return and our lives redeemed before we have to face death, but we continue to hope – expectantly and patiently – perhaps on tiptoe looking for the signs that the end of our groaning is coming soon.
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