7/20/08                                                                                ROMANS 8:18-25

“BOUND FOR GLORY”

Rev. James Singleton

            Summertime should be a time when “God is in his heaven and all is right with the world.” It should be a green time as gardens are growing and ripening and fruits are plumping up. Summertime is the time when we hear the squeals of delight and laughter from children playing baseball, riding bikes, and jumping into swimming pools. Summertime is a time of weddings, vacations, hammocks, and barbeques. These are the months that we long for all the rest of the year, because if ever there is a perfect, care-free time when the world and life are as they should be, it is summertime.

            All of these thoughts were running through my mind as I awakened last Monday to a lazy summer morning. And then I went downstairs, opened the Akron Beacon Journal, and saw the headlines scream that a Twinsburg police officer, a husband and father, was shot and killed during a routine traffic stop. Above that headline I read that 9 more U.S. soldiers were killed in Afghanistan. And a few pages later I read that a child was beaten to death by his mom’s drunken boy friend.

It was a reminder that even during these months so filled with life and joy, this world is still a place of death, tragedy, and suffering.

            This summer wild fires in California have destroyed dozens of homes, floods in the Midwest have devastated entire towns, and tornados have wreaked their usual summertime havoc.

            Perhaps some of you have received winter news this summer when the doctor told you about a disease you have, or a surgery you must undergo. Or perhaps a beloved relative of yours is dying or has died. Maybe your family continues to disintegrate despite all efforts to keep everyone together. We all pay the price at the pump of suffering.

            Just last month I was standing at a graveside with a family as they gathered to bury their stillborn twins who died just a couple of weeks before their birth. We were gathered in a part of the cemetery in Medina reserved for stillborns, infants and small children. It was a beautiful, warm summer day. I looked at the Teddy Bears and dolls and other memorabilia left by grieving parents beside the tombstones; I looked into the eyes of the heartbroken parents and grandparents whose summertime joy had turned into a winter nightmare as they grieved for what should have been but never will be and a cold chill blew over me.

Even the undertaker was moved. As we left he said to me, “No one should have to suffer like this.” And I thought to myself, “You are right. No one should have to suffer like this.”

What can possibly be said in the face of such tragedies? What words can make a difference or change reality? I never feel more helpless as a pastor than when I stand before grief stricken parents who look at me with a puzzled face and expect me to answer their question, “Why?” I know and they know that there is nothing that can be said that will make any difference in the here and now. No words will fill the empty places in their hearts. No words will take away the sting of death.

Nonetheless, the Apostle Paul gives it his best shot. He says words that, while they don’t change present reality, they promise that present reality will change. “I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory about to be revealed to us…For in hope we were saved.” He says it to Christians who are facing their own sufferings and persecutions and trying to reconcile their present circumstances with their faith.

            Paul admits that this world is not always a summertime world. This world continues to groan in travail, waiting and hoping and sighing for relief from all the pain and agony that floods it. So, how do we cope in such a world? How do we keep from losing our minds and continue to live in a world that falls short of being heaven on earth?

            We do it, Paul says, by not hiding from the bad news of this world while, at the same time, remembering the good news that is coming to this world. The good news that Paul reminds the Roman Christians of is that this world is not simply bound in suffering but is also bound for Glory.

This world is in transition. We have to wait for it to come in full because we do not possess God. God has plans we don’t understand. But through our faith in Jesus Christ that glory is beginning to peak out like rays of sunlight bursting through dark clouds.

            Paul tells us that there are two things we need to do when we find ourselves in times of suffering and challenge. We need to wait and we need to hope. We don’t like doing either one. We don’t want to wait for anything; we don’t want to hope for anything. A current television commercial captures our attitude when a husband goes out to purchase a new television set. The wife tells him not to go overboard, but when he sees the huge plasma screen TVs, a chorus begins to sing, “I want it all and I want it now!”

But just because we want it all now doesn’t mean we will get it all now. Paul didn’t claim to understand the fine points about how God worked, but he believed that God was working to redeem this world from suffering. He believed that we have a destination that we are bound for as Christians that is so wonderful, so magnificent, and so unimaginably beautiful that the sufferings of this present life are not even worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us in this Kingdom that is coming.

If we ever get to the point where we can no longer wait and hope; no longer believe that better days are coming; no longer believe that a better life awaits us up ahead, then our days on this earth will become intolerable. Hope is to our spirits what oxygen is to our lungs. Without it we die.

            The old slaves of the south knew hard living like few have known it. So they sang a song that kept them going from day to day. “This train is bound for glory, this train.” They walked into the cotton fields each day because they knew that they were on a train bound for glory and one day it would not be cotton fields that this train stopped at, but the day would come when it would pull into the station where their ticket would be stamped free and they would know joy like they have never known it. This train called life is bound for glory, this train.

            We have the courage to live today because we believe in the Glory of tomorrow. Dwelling fully and completely in the eternal life and glorious love of God is our inheritance. It is the unseen hope that propels us forward. Yes, we have a taste of that life through our faith in Jesus Christ. But our hope reveals that that taste will become a full course meal one day where we and our loved ones will dance and sing in the resurrection life within the heart of God. This life is but a pale shadow of the radiance of the life that is coming.

            Yes, there is death, but life will prevail. Yes, there is sorrow, but joy will come in the morning. There will be a new heaven and a new earth where God will wipe away every tear from our eyes and death will be no more, neither will there be mourning nor crying nor pain anymore for all of the negative powers of this present time will have passed away.

If we ever forget that, then this world will defeat us. But so long as we remember that this train is bound for glory, even though we may have to go through some long, dark tunnels, we will never lose heart.

            If you have even been to the Grand Canyon and taken one of the mule rides into the Canyon, you may have had the sensation that you were on a life-threatening journey. The mules are prone to wander perilously close to the edge of the narrow path to munch on the shrubs several feet below the path. As they reach down toward the shrub, you have the sensation that you will go tumbling headlong into the depths of the canyon.

The only way to overcome that fear, say the guides, is for you to look-up. Look-up, they tell you, at the beautiful blue sky and the glorious sun shining. Whatever you do, don’t stare constantly into the depths of the canyon. That’s when fear gets the better of people.

            It’s good advice for life, isn’t it? The news and events of this life give us the sensation that we are on a life-threatening perilous journey. And when we stare too long and hard into the deep canyon of whatever sorrow or tragedy we are facing, fear begins to get the better of us.

That’s when people say things like, “This is not a good time to bring children into the world” or “I feel sorry for young people today.” Those are people who need to remember to look-up and be reminded that this world is bound for glory. The sun is shining overhead and the sky is blue no matter how dark it may appear down below. For those who are in Christ it is always a good time to be alive for we are always in God’s care and always will be.

            The German Poet Rainer Maria Rilke, a deeply spiritual man, wrote a poem entitled Autumn. Rilke begins the poem by speaking of falling leaves, a symbol of human suffering and mortality. He ends the poem this way:

We are all falling. This hand is falling too –

all have this falling sickness none withstands.

Yet there is One whose gentle hands

this universal falling cannot fall through.

There is one whose hands we cannot fall through. There is one whose hands will catch us and lead us to the Promised Land. If only we can hold out against our current heartbreaks by clinging to that hope and not give in to despair, the promise given to us today is that “the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory about to be revealed to us.”

That is a hope worth waiting for; that is a hope that can save us.

                                                                                                            AMEN.