Daily Devotional • July 6
A Reading from Romans 8:18-24
18 I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory about to be revealed to us. 19 For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the children of God, 20 for the creation was subjected to futility, not of its own will, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope 21 that the creation itself will be set free from its enslavement to decay and will obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God. 22 We know that the whole creation has been groaning together as it suffers together the pains of labor, 23 and not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly while we wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies. 24 For in hope we were saved. Now hope that is seen is not hope, for who hopes for what one already sees? 25 But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience.
Meditation
If it was already clear to Saint Paul and the original readers of his epistle that the whole creation has been groaning in labor pains, how much more should we be able to hear and recognize the groans of creation today, in this period of environmental degradation and climate weaponization? And yet we so easily and so often shut our ears at the groans of our human and nonhuman neighbors who most intensely strain under the weight of disastrous pollution and unprecedented warming.
Paul is not only concerned with exhorting us to merely listen to a groaning that occurs outside of us, however. He goes much deeper than this. We must allow the groans of creation to penetrate us, joining with our own deepest groans, and offer each to the God whom we as his children call “Abba!” in the Spirit. In this way, Paul offers a vision of human beings participating in a kind of priestly ministry of groaning within and on behalf of the whole creation in which we interdependently live. And this priesthood into which we are incorporated in baptism is not one that occurs in a pious separation from the world, but is a ministry constituted by plunging headfirst into the chaotic waters of our groaning selves and the groaning world.
It’s unlikely that we will simply “solve” the climate crisis by tinkering with how we imagine our theological relation to the world around us, even if we manage to consciously convince ourselves of Paul’s cosmic and ecological vision. But we can and we must learn to practice this ecological solidarity of groaning in our prayer, our daily lives, and our politics: the whole creation is waiting with eager longing for the revealing of such children of God.
Maxine King is a lay Episcopalian and student of theology at Virginia Theological Seminary.
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Daily Devotional Cycle of Prayer
Today we pray for:
The Diocese of Grahamstown – The Anglican Church of Southern Africa
The Consortium for Christian Unity