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Messages from Rev. Loren Richmond Jr., M.Div, MBA. at various churches
Loren Richmond Jr (00:02)
I have spent what feels like the entire summer repainting my pergola.
It's a big structure, and after hours and hours of work, I am finally nearing the end. I ran out of paint Saturday, so I'm gonna get the next gallon. Next Saturday. The last time I did it was in 2021, and I probably waited a year too long. But last summer I did the fence. And summer before that, I did the deck.
And I've already started doing the math again in my head.
Next summer I'll probably have to do the fence again. Eventually the house will need to be repainted. And by the time I finish all that, the pergola will probably need attention again. It's sort of exhausting. And my wife wonders, why is it taking so long? And I say, Well, I don't want to spend my entire Saturday, A, when it's 100 degrees out in the heat. And B, like I'm just gonna have to do it again soon enough.
Perhaps you can relate. Wood rots, paint peels, metal rusts. Eventually the things we carefully build and faithfully maintain begin to break down. We can repair them, we can repaint them, we can develop better and more sophisticated materials and technologies. But eventually.
Most of the time, the best we can do, and this is sorta depressing to say, the best we can seem to do is just delay the decay.
And that raises a much bigger question than the one I'm wrestling with with my pergola. What do we do? What do we do when we realize that human effort alone cannot keep everything from falling apart?
This is a problem that many of us can relate to beyond simply home repair projects. Try as we might, human effort alone cannot solve all the world's problems, or even, it seems, the problems facing our own nation. We have more knowledge, more technology, and more resources than it seems any other previous generation. And yet suffering persists, war persists.
Hunger remains.
New medical treatments extend our lives, but they cannot keep our bodies from eventually breaking down. The Apostle Paul calls this a bondage to decay.
Now the assumption of American culture in our lifetimes has been that progress is inevitable, or at least mostly possible.
Through human achievement, if we can educate enough people, elect the right leaders, and create the right technologies, we can steadily improve the world. Now that confidence has lost some of its luster in recent years. Still we cling to it. We continue searching for the right innovation, the right institution, the right political movement that will fix finally what is broken.
Now, let's be clear, these efforts are not wrong, per se. We should relieve suffering where we can, we should pursue justice, we should develop medicine, we should care for this world. But none of these efforts can finally free us from decay. And like my painting of my pergola, they simply hold it back for a while.
Eventu eventually we are forced to confront a reality we'd rather not face that the future cannot depend entirely upon us.
Now, Paul does not say this to leave us in despair. Our reading this morning is a rich and full passage. It contains promise upon promise that the Spirit helps us in our weakness, that God remains at work amidst the suffering, and that nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus. There is far more here than we have time to explore this morning.
So I want to focus on one thread running throughout Romans chapter eight and this particular verse in Romans
That God is moving creation toward a promised future. Something new is coming, and Christians have a word for that. Christians always have big, complicated words, if you've noticed that. In this case, the word is eschatology. Basically, in a very simple summation, it's that the trust that God has a future for our world.
That creation will not remain trapped forever in decay, and that God is at work redeeming it, restoring it, and ultimately making all things new.
Now in Paul's time, in the time of the Apostle Paul, they believed in many gods. The question was not whether God or many gods existed, the question was whether or not there was a God who cared about creation and had a purpose for the world and for humanity.
Or whether everything we know and love was destined just for decay. Paul's answer is yes, God does have a purpose, and that's the hope at the heart of Romans 8:28. He writes, We know that God works all things together for good, for the ones who love God and for those who are called according to his purpose.
Now, I do want to add this important caveat. This verse is sometimes used as if Paul were saying that everything that happens is good, or even that suffering is good. But I want to be clear that Paul does not mean that suffering in itself is good. Paul knows that bad things happen. He knows that suffering is real. The point is not that everything that happens is good. The point is that God
Is working in and through everything that happens to bring good toward God's intended purpose. It's also worth noting, I think is quite interesting that the Paul the word Paul uses for works in this passage is in the present active tense in the original language, meaning that God's work is not merely something that God completed long ago.
Nor is it something that God promises to begin someday, but rather it's something that God is doing right now. Right now, continually and actively, God is moving creation towards God its good intended purposes.
Now, truth be told, we may not always recognize that good work. We certainly cannot always understand how present suffering could be drawn into something good. But Paul is confident that even amidst the groaning and decay, God remains at work. He writes that God decided in advance that we would be conformed to the image of his son. God's purpose is to bring humanity, us.
and creation into the future God is already revealed in Jesus.
In the risen Christ, we see what lies beyond suffering, death, and decay. We see renewed humanity and restored creation. Jesus is not simply the one who rescues isolated individuals from the world. Jesus is the first glimpse of the future God intends for our creation.
This is why Paul calls him the firstborn among many brothers and sisters.
This purpose was already at work, this purpose was already in process before we recognized it.
We don't need to invent it, we don't need to bring it into existence, we don't need to carry the responsibility for its completion. God calls us into a future that God has already promised and begun in Jesus. And this is what I believe gives our lives meaning and purpose. We're not simply trying to slow creation's decay.
Or make a few isolated improvements along the way before eventually everything disappears. Rather, we are invited to live with God's movement towards a promised future. We do not need to create that future. God creates that future, but we can begin living as witnesses to it right now.
So what does it mean to trust in this promise?
First, I want us to trust that the responsibility is not on us.
As one theologian put it, it is impossible to understand the Bible as long as we think in terms of human effort being enough to achieve human betterment. What he means is this that human that does not now let me say this, that does not mean that human effort is unimportant. It means that human effort alone cannot carry the weight of our ultimate hope.
God has not asked us to defeat by ourselves every form of injustice.
We are not being asked to end every effort every element of human suffering through our own efforts, nor carry the responsibility for freeing creation from its inevitable decay. We are not the savors of the world. That position has already been filled. And being released from that burden does not mean we are free to ignore suffering whatsoever.
Rather, I would say this morning, it frees us to care with hope. We can look at the world and honestly say, This is not, this is not how things should be. Because in the life and witness of Jesus, we have already seen, God has already shown us how the world is meant to be. Which leads to the second promise.
That God, that God will have the final word. As one writer puts it, our hope is not in that our efforts can make the world a better place. Our hope is in the action of God to open our eyes to see the small but sure ways that God's new reality is breaking forth. God is working now. God's promised future is already breaking forth into the present.
And we may only see it in small glimpses, but its completion does not depend entirely on our own efforts. It depends upon God. This is why, this is why we can name what is wrong without assuming responsibility for fixing everything. We know that children should not go hungry. We know that migrants should not be abused. We know
The LGBT person should not face discrimination. We know that poverty, violence, and death are not how God intends things to be. But this present reality will not have the final say. God will have the final say. And God's final word will be life. Every tear wiped away, every suffering brought to an end, and all things made new. Friends, that's good news.
And the third promise we can trust this morning is that God's actions will bear witness to God's future. And we are invited to participate through our actions to testify to that future. As one theologian writes, our responsibility is not to bring about the new reality, but to live for it, to act for it, even if it's not yet here fully.
And even our small acts, even our seemingly insignificant acts, become a sacrament, a testimony to that coming future. So we feed the hungry, we advocate for the human for the better treatment of migrants, we stand for the dignity and honor of all people. We comfort those who grieve, we welcome those who have been excluded.
We care for whatever corner of creation that God has entrusted to us or called us to.
And we do this even as we know that one meal will not end hunger. We know that one act of advocacy or kindness will not end injustice whatsoever. We know that befriending a lonely person will not end loneliness entirely. But each action, each action of ours bears witness. Each act of mercy says that this suffering does not belong to the world that God intends.
Each act of justice says that the present arrangement will not have the final word. Every act of love that we offer offers a glimpse of the future that God is bringing.
Friends, our actions do not need to save the world. Rather, they are signs of what God has promised.
And this is the movement, this movement from responsibility to participation, it's a movement from control to trust. We are not trying to create God's future. We are bearing witness to something that is already coming. The responsibility is not on us. God will complete what God has said, God will do.
And even our smallest actions testify to that promise.
And trusting in these promises changes the way we enter a world filled with pain.
As a hospital chaplain, I regularly enter into rooms filled with problems I cannot fix. I cannot cure the cancer. I cannot undo the accident. I cannot bring someone back from the dead. If I believed it was my responsibility to fix all of those things, I could not keep walking into those rooms.
That amount of suffering and pain and injustice would eventually overwhelm me.
But the burden is not on me.
Last week I shared that sometimes when I walk to the hospital I I almost do so with a bit of enthusiasm because I know that I have good news to share. The good news I seek to share is that God is present and at work no matter the situation, seeking to bring good for whatever happened.
When a woman who has endured a lifetime of you of abuse asks me whether she is worthy of love, I cannot undo everything that had happened to her. I cannot guarantee that she'll never be heard again. Just as I cannot single handedly end every form of abuse or injustice that happens in our world today. But I can look her in the eyes and I can tell her the truth that God loves you.
That what happened to you is not what God intends for you, that it does not define your worth, and that it will not have the final word.
Now again that may not fix everything immediately, but it bears witness to the future that God has promised, a future in which abuse, suffering and injustice and death are finally overcome.
And this, I believe, is what faithful participation looks like. We enter into places and spaces to which we have been called to offer the mercy, justice, hope, and love that we have been given to offer, and we entrust what we cannot fix to God.
And that does require a fair bit of trust. I often leave hospital rooms wishing I could make everything better. This past Thursday I entered a room of a woman who was quite literally at the end of life. In fact, an hour or two later I was called back to be with her family and pray with them after she had passed.
I wished I could have ended the death. I wished I could have had brought her back to life. But I brought with me the good news and hope that I could bring that God had given me to bring, the hope that God had given me to bring, the place and the calling God had brought me to.
Bring that good news.
We don't need to carry burdens that are not ours to bear.
We don't need to protect ourselves from feeling like nothing we can do matters. Because God is working, there is another way. We can care without believing that everything depends on us. We can name all that is wrong without pretending that we can correct it all. We can walk towards suffering rather than turning away because we know we do not do it alone.
We carry good news. This is not how things should be. This is not how things will eventually be. God is at work even now, and we are bearing witness to the world that is coming.
We have good news to share, friends, and and for the two months that I've been with you, I've been trying to proclaim this thing that the gospel of Jesus Christ really is good news and really has relevance and impact to our world today. It's good news for all of us. The burden is not ours to carry alone. God is at work, God will have the final word.
And we are free to live and act towards that promise in whatever area of the world that we have been called to make a difference and to share God's good news. Thanks be to God.