Romans 8:26-39
July 24, 2011
Presbyterians are often associated with the doctrine of predestination – and not always in a good way. The doctrine of predestination has been based, in part, on this passage in Paul’s letter to the Romans. The idea is that God has already selected those who will be saved and there’s nothing we can do about it. Either I’ve been chosen for heaven or chosen for hell, and no amount of belief or good works will change that. Admittedly, I’m not a big fan of this doctrine either.
But there is a way that predestination does make sense to me – but only in light of the whole bible. When we begin with creation – begin with the idea that we are created in God’s image – and end with revelation – with the idea that history is bending toward justice and a new world order – and then read this passage about predestination, we hear something more than just that we are predestined for heaven or hell. I think Paul is talking about what we are predestined for in this lifetime – while we are here on earth. I think he’s talking about the very nature of what it means to be humans – to be children of God – living in this world that God has created.
With creation and a new world order as book ends, Paul is saying we are predestined to change and to grow over our life time to be more and more like the one who created us. All of us; because all of us, we are told in Genesis, are made in the image of God. All of us are meant to reveal that divine image in the world, just as all of creation is destined to reflect the realm of God. All of us have built in to who we are an impulse toward growth and goodness. Our task is to tap into this impulse – to find it and go with it.
For the last few weeks we’ve been talking about how change happens. The story of faith is, in part, the story of change. We want to always make our lives conform more and more to our beliefs and what we know about God’s intention for our lives. This often means change. Sometimes big, sometimes small, but growing in faith means change.
For Paul, we know that change starts with Grace – being freed from our guilt and shame that has accumulated over the course of our lives from all the times we weren’t able to “do the good we wanted to do,” to use Paul’s phrase. And partly that grace can be found when we understand why it is so hard to change. Our brains are wired for habit not change – at least not self-initiated change. Our brains make it difficult to start and cultivate new behaviors, even when we know they are good and we want to change with all our heart, soul, and mind. Accepting this means letting go of the idea that it’s easy to tell ourselves to change and then to do it. We can’t be so hard on ourselves…and we can accept that God doesn’t judge us for this or expect perfection. We’re just being human.
Once we admit our lack of a certain kind of power to change ourselves, we can open up to the idea that we need to look outside of ourselves for the power to change. We are creatures built to be in relationships – our brains are changed by others’ brains. Good, healthy, loving relationships can bring about change we could never accomplish on our own. However, as we saw last week, there are limitations to human love. We can love to the best of our ability and someone might still suffer. We might ourselves be impervious to the love of others for all sorts of reasons outside our control.
This week, Paul brings it home. We are limited, yes. Our brains make it hard to start new habits, to make big changes. But, Paul says, we are predestined to change. It’s who we are. It’s in our fabric, our nature, our identity. We are destined to change because part of what it means to be created in the image of God is that we are created to be in relationships, and as we learned, relationships change us. And most importantly we are destined to change in positive, life-giving ways because our primary relationship is with the life-giving spirit of God.
Paul couples the idea of being predestined to grow more and more into the likeness of Christ with this odd little passage about the spirit; this spirit who swoops in and intercedes for us. The spirit itself longs for us to change, it longs for renewal and for the birth of something new in our lives. When we feel hopeless, when we are stuck, when we suffer because a loved one is stuck, Paul believes that the spirit comes to our rescue. The spirit is what changes us.
How? Not by offering shortcuts or quick fixes, not by waving a magic wand, but by being in relationship with us, by praying for us…or the other way Paul so poetically puts it, by sighing for us. In our suffering, in our limitations, in the uphill battle, the spirit comes with sighs too deep for words.
This is the connection for Paul for how our lives change and grow – the spirit comes and sighs with us. Because the spirit yearns for our suffering to end, because the spirit yearns for our lives to reflect that divine imprint we have within, we are predestined to change. The fundamental relationship in our lives – our relationship with the divine – is based on caring…on compassion and empathy. And that’s the root of transformation.
In the same way, this is how we are to relate to one another – this becomes the basis for human relationships that bring about life-giving change and transformation. Stan Greenwald sent me a great blog entry this week written by the physician who is the president of the Minnesota Medical Association. He is writing about how to be better physicians - how to help patients change and heal. He talks about something he calls, “generous listening.”
He says in generous listening, “we’re to listen completely and mindfully to each person without interjecting any comments or questions.” Generous listening is being completely and totally present with someone. Not worrying about the past or rushing to figure out the future. Just present. It is the secular equivalent of praying with and sighing with another person. When we do that, we participate in the spirit’s work. When someone does that for us, we are moved by the spirit through that other person.
In general, I think we’re not always so good at generous listening. It’s hard. We want to fix things – now. We want to see change. We want results, and we want to help get those results – in ourselves and others. But, if we want to change – if we want to grow in the way the divine one yearns for us to grow - we need to move away from our normal mode of trying to fix things – trying to fix ourselves and others – to focusing on being with each other. Focus on just listening and feeling what the other person feels. Paul calls this “a sigh too deep for words.” It takes us beyond anything we might be able to say – and advice we might offer. Relationships that imitate the divine spirit look less like a session with Dr. Phil and more like an afternoon with a Buddhist monk. We are to sigh with one another.
My close friends and I have an agreement. When we want to talk about something going on in our lives – something hard or upsetting, even something we are dying to change about our lives but feel helpless to do so – the other person asks whether we are seeking feedback and advice, or whether we just want someone to listen…to be there…to sigh with us.
For me, this is one of the most important aspects in my friendships. The fact that my friends have the capacity to do either – to give advice or just provide generous listening – and the willingness to be so intentional about it, is of infinite value to me. And in my experience, the generous listening is usually more helpful in moving me to grow and change and deal with hard things than any advice they give – and let me tell you, they’re extremely good advice givers.
Rarely, however, is the change born of generous listening immediate change, or even linear change, which admittedly can be frustrating beyond belief at times. It’s part of what makes it so hard to practice this generous listening. We rarely get to see something change immediately. It’s also why it’s hard to not want someone to tell us what to do. It’s why we are always looking for the magic fix.
But it’s worth it – this kind of change is the kind that moves us closer to the divine, that brings our lives more and more into alignment with our beliefs and values, that deepens our faith. Change born out of relationships of empathy and compassion is about more than just changing behaviors – though it is that as well. It’s about forming us into empathetic and compassionate people ourselves. It’s about tapping into that divine nature at the heart and soul of who we are and having that be the place from which we live, move and act.
Change is hard – it can feel like a constant uphill battle. And trying to do it alone, or trying to motivate ourselves with guilt and shame, is a perfect recipe for failure and suffering. This is why we should put as much energy into building a community of people who care for each other as we do into reading self help books and beating ourselves up for not being as perfect as we wish we were. This is why we should make as much effort to listen generously to others as to trying to change ourselves. We can create an incubator of change and growth right here just by learning to better listen to and be present with one another.
If we learned to be generous listeners and if we learned to share our stories with each other – if we let people share our suffering and our hopes, and if we walked with others in their joy and pain – if we build a community that gives shape and voice to the sighing spirit of God, then the divine imprint in each of us will be ignited.
One final thing I want to tell you about that scientists have stumbled upon in their experiments relating to human nature and change: Our ability to change is affected by the stories we tell about who we are at our core. If the story we keep telling about ourselves is that we are bad or lazy or weak, change becomes much harder. If, instead, we tell ourselves that we are someone capable of change, we are more likely to change. The story we tell matters.
Which means we have a decision to make – we have one of those big life questions to answer: What is the story we believe? What do we believe about who we are, who God is and what the impulse of creation is? Paul was unequivocal: His entire world view and life are built on the story of a good God who is for us always. Paul tells us that all things work together for good…and that’s not just a polly-anna platitude of his. Nor is it meant as a feel good tag-on to every situation. We all know that not everything is good…not every situation has hope. When a child dies, when genocide happens, it is cruel to just answer that with God all thing work together for good.
What Paul means is that even in the midst of our suffering, and a suffering world, we can affirm a larger story – the larger truth: We are God’s children, we have the divine imprint, and nothing, no matter how devastating, can change that fundamental story. God is good. Paul Tillich, one of the most profound and practical theologians of the 20th century, wrote a beautiful sermon on this passage. He knew how real suffering is – he knew about human limitations – and he knew…he believed…in the potential for change.
He wrote, “There is a creative and saving possibility implied in every situation, which cannot be destroyed by any event. The daemonic and destructive forces within ourselves and our world can never have an unbreakable grasp upon us, and that the bond which connects us with the fulfilling love can never be disrupted.
The only thing that can destroy our faith in [the fact that we are predestined for new life] is our disbelief in the love of God, our distrust of God, our fear of God’s wrath, our hatred of God’s Presence, our conception of God as a tyrant who condemns us, and our feeling of sin and guilt. It is not the depth of our suffering, but the depth of our separation from God, which destroys our faith in possibility.
This is our story – it’s our sacred story. Nothing can separate us from the love of God.
But of course, it’s not enough to tell ourselves that story – we need to build a community based on that assumption. We tell each other that story over and over. We recognize that the divine impulse is to yearn for our growth and new life, and because of that the divine comes to walk with us, sigh with us, and through that presence, we do change. If this is part of our story, then we must build communities that participate in this divine work.
The arc of history bends toward justice. The arc of our lives bends toward growth and deepening of faith. It’s built into creation. The divine impulse to goodness is woven into the fabric of creation and into the neurons and synapses of our bodies. And the love of one another helps us join that divine impulse more than any effort to force change in our lives. It won’t be linear, it won’t happen immediately – but we can participate in this divine movement in many ways. And as we do, we will become more and more like Christ – more and more like the divine – more and more like who we hope to be. Amen.
