With Eager Longing

Romans 8:12-25

Emmanuel Baptist Church; Rev. Kathy Donley

May 4, 2025

Note: A recording of the worship service in which this sermon was preached may be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7GhSZkTG-dA

This passage is one of the most theologically dense sections in one of the most theologically books in the Bible. It is one of my very favorite texts, but I still shrink before its mystery. I cannot say much about it before I run out of words because much of it is beyond my knowledge or experience, but I will try.

One problem jumps out right away. In this letter to the Christians in Rome, Paul offers a binary that may have made sense in the philosophies of his time, but not so much two thousand years later. He uses Flesh and Spirit to describe to opposing ways of living this world, a way of death and a way of life. For Paul, living according to the flesh evokes a destructive way of life, while living by the spirit is to pursue life in all its fullness. Now this is problematic because it has not served us well to despise bodily existence and to feel estranged from the earth. This concept has been pushed to a toxic place. But as Paul understood it, flesh is shorthand for our entanglement in systems of violence, deception and alienation which oppress and destroy. “The [systems of ] flesh are not exterior to us; any more than our physical body is something external and alien. It is an [inherent] part of us; it shapes the way we perceive the world.”[1]

Paul invites and implores us to live differently, to be led by the Spirit of God which bears witness that we are heirs of Christ. At the beginning of this letter, Paul says that Jesus was in his earthly life, a descendant of David, but through the Holy Spirit, he was transformed into the Son of God by his resurrection. (Romans 1:1-4). Other New Testament writers say this differently. For Mark, it happens at Jesus’ baptism, when the Spirit descends and a voice announces that he is God’s son. For Luke, it happens at conception. The angel tells Mary that he will be conceived by the Holy Spirit and that is why he will be called God’s Son. The timing differs but the consistent point is that Jesus’ Sonship is inseparable from his being marked by the Spirit. Jesus is God’s heir through the Spirit and then, Paul says, so are we.[2]

Jesus moved through suffering to glory via the power of Resurrection. Paul is asserting that the same Spirit is at work in us. God is transforming us into what humanity was always supposed to be, which Christ already is.[3]

Wendy Farley is professor of spirituality at San Francisco Seminary. She says that “For Paul, this embrace of life in the Spirit not about individual life after death; it is about the salvation of the entire world—all humanity and the earth itself. . . . Paul is inviting us into a completely different universe from the one we know. To wake up to the fact that we are children of God is at the same time to wake up to our common humanity; all creation woven into one broken, beautiful, beloved whole.”[4]

Paul says “For the creation waits in eager longing for the children of God to be revealed.” The entire creation is in bondage, groaning as it waits for freedom.

“I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory about to be revealed to us.”

That’s verse 18, a verse I love and yet, one I cannot claim to understand. Paul knew real suffering – he was beaten, shipwrecked, imprisoned, and lonely. I have suffered very little. But Paul says that all of his personal suffering and all that he is witnessing in the systems of violence, deception and alienation – none of that compares to the glory which is coming. Even though I personally have suffered little, some days it is hard to trust, hard to hope that Paul is right.

If we allow ourselves to hope, we make ourselves vulnerable to the pain of disappointment. Some of us have been so disappointed that we don’t risk hope any more. We may really only hope to the extent to which we can trust. Trusting the Spirit, whom we cannot see or measure, that’s the only action Paul assigns to us. The rest of the work of moving from global suffering to cosmic glory seems to be in God’s hands.

Sometimes, I am encouraged to keep hoping by others who have suffered and still they keep rising. One of those people for me is Alice Walker. You might know her as the author of The Color Purple. She grew up in Georgia in the Jim Crow era. Her father was a sharecropper; her mother was a maid.

When she was 8, her brother accidentally shot her in the right eye with a BB gun. It took a long time for her to get medical care. Her parents had to raise the $250 necessary to pay the white doctor. When she finally saw him, the doctor just gave her a bottle of eye drops and told her that eyes are sympathetic, so she would likely become blind in her other eye as well. She continued to fear that possibility into young adulthood.

Before the accident, Alice had been a pretty, lively, talkative child. After the scar tissue appeared, she grew self-conscious about her appearance and withdrew to a solitary world of books and writing. During this time, she felt ashamed, alone, and abandoned by her family.

Six years later, the scar tissue was removed and she recovered her confidence. She went on to become a popular high school valedictorian. However, the years spent in isolation made a permanent impact on her worldview. She learned to feel “empathy and a sense of kinship with other people she perceived to be afflicted” She also developed the powers of observation that serve her as a writer. She was active in the Civil Rights movement and has protested the South African apartheid, the Iraq War, the Israeli occupation of Palestine, and female genital mutilation.[5]

Paul writes about suffering and glory to encourage us, to implore us to trust and hope. Those who have suffered much and still allow themselves to hope – I seek to learn from them.

When the US invaded Iraq in 2003, a woman named Sundus Shaker Saleh, an Iraqi single mother of five, lost her home and her property, and was forced to flee to Jordan. A decade later, she filed a lawsuit against six key members of the Bush administration, arguing that the war was not conducted in self-defense and constituted a crime of aggression under international law. Alice Walker wrote a poem in honor of Sundus Shaker Saleh.

Hope Is a Woman Who Has Lost Her Fear[6]

In our despair that justice is slow

we sit with heads bowed

wondering

how

even whether

we will ever be healed.

Perhaps it is a question

only the ravaged

the violated

seriously ask.

And is that not now

almost all of us?

But hope is on the way.

As usual Hope is a woman

herding her children

around her

all she retains of who

she was; as usual

except for her kids

she has lost almost everything.

Hope is a woman who has lost her fear.

Along with her home, her employment, her parents, her olive trees, her grapes. The peace of independence; the reassuring noises of ordinary neighbors.

Hope rises, She always does,

did we fail to notice this in all the stories

they’ve tried to suppress?

Hope rises,

and she puts on her same

unfashionable threadbare cloak

and, penniless, she flings herself

against the cold, polished, protective chain mail

of the very powerful

the very rich – chain mail that mimics

suspiciously silver coins

and lizard scales –

and all she has to fight with is the reality of what was done to her;

to her country; her people; her children;

her home.

All she has as armor is what she has learned

must never be done.

Not in the name of War

and especially never in the

name of Peace.

Hope is always the teacher

with the toughest homework.

Our assignment: to grasp

what has never been breathed in our stolen

Empire on the hill:

Without justice, we will never

be healed.

I consider that the present suffering (which is real and pervasively harmful and anathema to God) is not worthy to be compared the glory which is about to revealed to us.

Video clip from the performance of the song Glory at the Oscars 2015

Hope is about choosing to trust. Awakening to the reality that we are children of God. The ultimate victory has been won; even if God’s intention of shalom is not yet fully realized. The reign-of-God movement that Jesus started did not disband and fade away. We are still living by the Spirit of love at work for love and justice. One day, when the glory of resurrection fully comes, it will be ours, it will be ours. Amen.

[1] Wendy Farley, Connections, Year A, Volume 3, p. 168

[2] J. R. Daniel Kirk, Romans for Normal People: A Guide to the Most Misused, Problematic and Prooftexted Letter in the Bible, (Perkiomenvill, PA: The Bible for Normal People, 2022), p. 97

[3] Daniel Kirk, Romans for Normal People, p. 98

[4] Wendy Farley in Connections: A Lectionary Commentary for Preaching and Worship, Year A, Volume 3 Joel Green, Thomas Long, Luke Powery, Cynthia Rigby, Carolyn Sharp, editors, (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press, 2020), p.168

[5] Biography of Alice Walker, excerpted from this website https://americanswhotellthetruth.org/portraits/alice-walker/