There are stories that I remember from my childhood, books that were read to me at a young age - stories that were so creative and descriptive that I could see them in my mind as they were read to me and they would linger in my imagination for days. Like so many good children’s stories, there was also an adult reality behind them, a reality which was often lost on the intended audience.

In 1971, the year I was born, Dr. Seuss published “The Lorax”.
“ At the far end of town / where the Grickle-grass grows
and the wind smells slow-and-sour when it blows
and no birds ever sing except old crows…
is the Street of the Lifted Lorax.” That is how it begins.

The Lorax is the story of what happened to the Truffula Trees. “The bright colored tufts of the Truffula Trees! Mile after mile in the fresh morning breeze.” These magnificent trees were not only home to creatures like the Brown Bar-ba-loots (in their Bar-ba-loot suits) and the Swomee-Swans, but they can also be used to make Thneeds. What is a Thneed you ask? Well it doesn’t really matter, other than to say that a Thneed represents whatever the ‘must have’ item of the day might be.

When the first Truffula tree is chopped down, The Lorax appears. And he describes his job this way, “I am the Lorax. I speak for the trees. I speak for the trees, for the trees have no tongues.” Therein lies the plot of the book; the Lorax is trying to stop the manufacturer from cutting down the trees. But the manufacturer finds new, and better, and faster ways to cut them down. Ultimately the last Truffula Tree is chopped down. All the animals leave. The water is polluted and the air as well. Even the Lorax is gone. The landscape is bare and only a sour smell remains. That was 1971.

Thirty years later I was leading a group of high school students on a backpacking trip through the Appalachian Mountains of western North Carolina. After being on the trail for about a week, I read that story to the group in our campsite one night. Complete with people acting out the parts of the animals, the trees, and the Lorax. This constitutes entertainment after a week in the woods.

The next day, as we hiked through the cool rain and fog that is common in the mountains, we came to the edge of the woods and the entire crew stopped and stared in shocked silence. As I came from the back of the line and passed them I walked in a clearing. With the fog, it looked like it went on forever. There was not so much as a blade of grass left on the ground, just row after row of ruts in the mud from the tractors, everything had bee scrapped clean. There wasn’t even the sound of rain any longer since there was only thick mud to land on. No leaves. No birds. As we continued for some distance to the other side of the new clear cut we found a logging road and a sign. “Caution: Harvesting in Progress.” In that moment the childhood story met the adult reality.

So that is my bias, this image and a dozen others in my memory, that is the bias I bring with me to the text this morning. And I wonder if there was an image or an experience in his mind when Paul writes, “We know that the whole creation has been groaning in labor pains until now; and not only the creation, but we ourselves.”

This section of chapter 8 is a conclusion of an argument that Paul has been making to the church in Rome – “So then…” “So then, brothers and sisters, we are debtors.” Paul’s conclusion is that the truth about Christians is that we are indebted to God – the God who has made us children and heir to the promise of salvation in Jesus Christ. But in Paul’s rhetorical style, he interrupts his own sentence to tell us what we are not indebted to… “So then, brothers and sisters, we are debtors, not to the flesh, to live according to the flesh – for if you live according to the flesh, you will die.”

This is not, as some might want to interpret it, “a rejection of the God-given body and all its possibilities. It is a recognition that the present body, corruptible and head for death, is not all it might be and not all it will be in the resurrection.” ¹ What is regarded as “flesh,” is all that is temporary and fleeting and corruptible. So if our debt is not to the flesh, the alternative for Paul is to be indebted to the Spirit sent by God.

Paul is suggesting that to live by the inclination of our corruptible side of our nature, and that only, is to lead to destruction. But if we turn our sites to the Spirit of God, which is sent to lead us, to teach us all that God has commanded, then we will find ourselves coming closer to the potential for which we were created. Paul is not suggesting that we do nothing, indeed our bodies are to be used in joyful service to God . ² Rather, our actions should take their cue from the Spirit, from a way that more accurately reflects the image of God.

“For all who are led by the Spirit of God are children of God.” “And if children, then heirs, heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ.” That is our hope as Easter people, that since we are in Christ, we share in his death, and also in his resurrection, and ultimately in his glory.

Paul of course, knows that there is part of his argument that is a little hard to swallow. It is the gap between what has already taken place through Christ on the cross, and the reality of our current situation. For Paul, the true life is already present, but hidden. It is only with the Spirit that we can begin to live in the reality of the kingdom of God that has come near and, at the same time, knowing that the kingdom is not yet here in it’s fullness. Caught between already and not yet. All of creation is caught… creation is waiting.

“ For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the children of God.” Creation is waiting for a revelation. Everything in creation is waiting for the children of God to realize their identity, their God given potential and purpose. The creation is being subjected to “frustration,” to “futility, not of its own will but by the will of the one who subjected it.” Of no fault of its own, creation is suffering.

Paul points back to the very beginning, back to the garden, to identify “the one” that has subjected the creation to this suffering. When Adam disobeys God’s command not to eat the fruit of the tree, God says, “cursed is the ground because of you.” (Genesis 3) Because of human disobedience, God curses the ground. The hope of creation, however is in the revelation of the children of God. “For all who are led by the Spirit of God are children of God.” Human existence is linked both with the curse and the hope. Creation is caught in between our disobedience and our potential. While God is the one who curse creation and ultimately redeems creation, human being are both part of the problem and the solution. Caught in between. So creation groans.

I wonder if Paul had image, or an experience, in his mind when he writes of creation groaning. It is hard, these days, to miss what it looks like, what it sounds like – creation groaning. On Wednesday night several of you gathered in the Assembly room to watch the documentary “An Inconvenient Truth” and to discuss the issue of global warming. Thanks in part to Al Gore, I think many people are starting to get a picture of what creation groaning looks like. Images of rapidly receding glaciers, the melting of polar ice caps, the increase in droughts and record breaking temperatures, an increase in extreme weather episodes. “Our planet has a fever.” That is how Gore described it to a congressional hearing recently.

The cover article of Time magazine recently described, in fact, how hard it is to miss creation groaning. The article suggests that even the skeptics of global warming can’t ignore it. “If droughts and wildfires, floods and crop failures, collapsing climate-sensitive species and the images of drowning polar bears didn’t quiet most of the remaining global warming doubters, the hurricane-driven destruction of New Orleans did. Dismissing a scientist’s temperature chart is one thing. Dismissing the death of a major American city is something else entirely.” ³ The reporter is arguing that water temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico fuel stronger hurricanes.

“And not only the creation, but we ourselves.”
The same actions that cause the environment to suffer, also cause the people of God to suffer. Pastor and author, Brian McLaren, in an article about the need to change the nature of Evangelical Christian theology toward the environment, argues that the same forces that hurt the songbirds and trout, the ferns and old growth forests are the same ones that hurt the poor, the elderly, women, minorities, children, the foreigner – it is greed, impatience, selfishness, arrogance, anger, competition, and irreverence. Global warming is not just an environmental issue; it is a moral and theological issue as well.

This of course is nothing new. In the middle of the book of Leviticus we find the provisions for the Sabbath and the year of Jubilee. These provisions were to make sure that the land had a chance to rest, but also to provide for the poor, the workers, the alien, and the wild animals. It is all interconnected. Our behavior has reverberations throughout creation. Good environmental practices lead to a fuller realization of God’s purpose for creation, and for us as part of that creation.

McLaren concluded that “[w]hen greed and consumerism are exposed, when arrogance and irreverence are unplugged, when hurry and selfishness are named and repented of, the world and all it contains (widows, orphans, trees, soil) are revalued (or re-deemed) and made sacred again.” ⁴

We know, collectively, that we are part of the problem of environmental injustice and global warming and hopefully we can also come to realize that we are part of the solution as well. In our own confession, the Brief Statement of Faith, we affirm all of this…“But we rebel against God; we hide from our Creator. Ignoring God's commandments, we violate the image of God in others and ourselves, accept lies as truth, exploit neighbor and nature, threatening death to the planet entrusted to our care. We deserve God's condemnation. Yet God acts with justice and mercy to redeem creation.” That was 1983.

Our hope then is in revealing ourselves to be children of God. Creations hope is that we will walk in the ways of the Spirit and move closer to the glory for which we were created – the glory of living in the intimate presence of God.

One commentator summarizes it this way. “If the creation is to be renewed…and if that work has already begun in the resurrection of Jesus, it will not do simply to consign the present creation to acid rain and global warming and wait [idle] for Armageddon to destroy it altogether. Christians must be in the forefront of bringing, in the present time, signs and foretastes of God’s eventual full healing to bear upon the created order in all its parts and at every level.” ⁵

At the end of The Lorax, when all the Truffula Trees are gone, there is a sign of hope. There is one Truffula Seed left and it is given to the young boy who has been listening to the story. “Now that you’re here, the word of the Lorax seems perfectly clear. UNLESS someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It’s not.” So “plant a new Truffula. Treat it with care. Give it clean water. And feed it clean air. Grow a forest. Protect from axes that hack. Then the Lorax and all his friends may come back.”

As with any good children’s story, there is often an adult reality behind it.

Amen.

Footnotes:
¹New Interpreters Bible Commentary, Romans, p. 592
²Roman 12:1 “present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God.” Also see Colossians 3:5ff
³Time, April 9, 2007. p.52
⁴Brian McLaren, Sojourners, March 2004 p. 15
⁵NIB Commentary, Romans, p. 606

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