Homily for 15th Sunday, Cycle A, 7/13/14 “We know,” writes St. Paul, “we know that all creation is groaning in labor pains even until now.” There are some folk who maintain that the cause of creations groaning is the “we,” that is, the human species, devastators and despoilers of all we survey. A group called the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement suggests that just about everything we do harms the planet – and the more of us there are, the greater the damage done. There is but one solution, and I quote: “When every human being chooses to stop breeding, Earths biosphere will be allowed to return to its former glory.” This group’s motto is: “May we live long and die out.” That there are actually folk who think this way – not merely to make a point, but who really think this way – might strike many as a bit comic or more than a bit insane. Yet, given the genuine harm that unthinking or uncaring human activity can inflict upon nature, it might be worthwhile, as a moral exercise, to take seriously the suggestion of the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement that Earth would be better off without us – take the suggestion seriously enough to ask what would be the proper Christian response to that stance. St. Paul’s response would be that, without us, creation is very simply incomplete, incomplete to the point of meaninglessness. “Creation,” he writes in today’s excerpt from the Epistle to the Romans, “Creation was made subject to futility.” Things come to be, they exist, they decay, they die, they corrupt – without knowing why, at any and at every stage. Unless the human kind of creature, the one creature made in the image, after the likeness, of God, unless the human kind of creature is present, futility reigns. In God’s design, we have the role of imparting meaning to, appreciating the beauty of, God’s handiwork, all of which, in Pauls wording, unknowingly awaits the day when “creation itself would be set free from slavery to corruption and share in the glorious freedom of the children of God.” Only with our participation has that promise of “glorious freedom” the potential of being realized. Without us, all the beauty of nature has the value of a piece of art sealed forever in a vault, no eyes ever to appreciate it. St. Paul, of course, is keenly aware of the presence of sin, the boundless capacity of the human kind of creature to mess up anything it can, certainly including the freedom granted the children of God. We groan as we await the fullness of our redemption, and, sorry to say, we often make everything around us groan as well. But it is no solution to pull the plug, to abandon the rest of Creation to meaninglessness. We must rather constantly recall and return to God’s intent for Creation, Gods intent most fully expressed in the event of Christ Jesus Our Lord, who in total cooperation with Gods will so loved the world that He became part of it to save it, opening, for us and with us, the prospect of a gloriously renewed planet, renewed gloriously in Christ.
Posted on: Sun, 13 Jul 2014 16:30:00 +0000
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