Romans 8:18-27 "The Last Chord" Scott Hoezee

One of the most stimulating and enriching lectures I heard at the conference in Santa Fe last weekend was by Cambridge professor Jeremy Begbie, one of the world's leading experts in music and theology. Begbie pointed out that all tonal music in the Western world relies on patterns of tension and resolution. Songs begin somewhere, take us on a journey through a variety of ensuing notes and melodies, and then finally bring us back to where we started. It is a pattern of what Begbie calls "Home -- Away -- Home." This pattern is universal no matter whether it is Frank Sinatra crooning a love song, Randy Travis twanging a country ballad, or "Rage Against the Machine" doing . . . whatever it is they do.

When we feel we have been taken away from home, when we feel musical tension, we want to return home and have that tension resolved. The very music creates this desire in us. A simple illustration is the old "Shave and a haircut" routine. If you hear me knock on the pulpit 5 times like this, your heart will cry out for the answering two knocks. Some of you may remember the movie Who Framed Roger Rabbit in which cartoon characters (known as "Toons") were supposedly real, co-existing with human actors in Hollywood. But sometimes Toons would try to disguise themselves. But a Toon's Achilles' heel was the fact that no Toon in the world can resist the old "Shave and a haircut" routine. So if you wanted to know if any Toons were around, all you had to do was knock out the first 5 beats and every Toon in earshot would immediately shriek out "Two bits!"

But really we all feel that tension in music and want it resolved. Consider a more classic illustration from a song most of us know: Bach's "Jesu Joy of Man's Desiring." Ken is going to play the first few measures of that now (Ken: Play first 8 measures). In this piece we begin with two G-notes played just off-beat, one bass-clef G and one treble-clef G (Ken: Play just those first two G's as written in first measure). In this song, these G-notes are "Home." This is the place where we begin and from which we will be swept away in the rest of the song. Throughout the next 70 measures of the song we wander "Away" from that "Home." Finally you come down to this (Ken: Play the last 5 measures but STOP before the last chord).

Are you on the edge of your seat? Did that feel right to you? No? Ken, relieve our tension here (Ken: Play the G-chord at the end). Ahhhhh. That's better. Now Ken will play those last measures all the way through to the end (Ken: Play the last 5 measures including the last chord.) That feels complete. We've gone home again. And do you know what that last chord is? The same G-notes that began the piece. The two G's played just off-beat from each other in the beginning (Ken: Play the first two G's from the first measure) sound together at the end (Ken: Play the final chord), bringing us back home and leaving us with a feeling of completeness.

Jeremy Begbie sees in all this something that is also near the heart of theology. But in theology we don't talk about "Home -- Away -- Home" but rather "promise and fulfillment," "the already and the not yet." We live between the times, as we said in our first sermon on Romans 8 two weeks ago. We are, by grace, "in Christ" and yet we are simultaneously in the world. There is, naturally, a glorious "up-side" to being "in Christ." We know our sins are forgiven, we know there is power available to help us perform holy deeds, we know ultimately (as Paul will say at the climax of this chapter) that there is now nothing that can separate us from the love of God. But for the time being, our "in Christ" status is not only a glorious truth, it also creates tension. That is the main idea that today's portion of Romans 8 talks about.

Given the soaring rhetoric and the faith-filled confidence that permeates Romans 8, it is arresting to find the word "sufferings" occupying so prominent a place in verse 18. But Paul is firmly rooted in reality. For now we do suffer. Indeed, we suffer even more precisely because of the hope that is in us. We know Jesus has won the victory. We know what the end of the story is going to be. At the same time, however, we know that this conclusion is not yet here. And we're not the only ones. Listen: "we know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to this present time." The creation groans. It groans because it longs for something. It longs for something because although subjected to decay, God has suffused the creation with something else, too: hope.

God has given even the non-human creation hope. There is liberation on the way for all creatures of our God and King. A time is coming when decay, pollution, species extinction, oilslicks on pristine beaches, ozone depletion, and global climate change will be no more. Somehow, in ways Paul leaves tantalizingly unexplained, the creation knows this. So much so that in verse 19 Paul uses a wonderfully colorful image that has been totally obscured in translation. The phrase rendered as "eager expectation" means literally "to crane one's neck." It's the image of a little child at a Fourth of July parade, eager to see the next spectacle coming down the street. The kid is on tippy-toes, arching and craning his neck almost as though that physical action will draw the next float toward him more quickly. This is the posture you assume not just when you are excited but when you are certain that something wonderful is coming down the pike.

The creation's knowledge that renewal is coming is so firm that this is its collective posture. But the fact that it is not here yet causes also a collective groaning. The creation groans for the same reason we groan, as Paul goes on to say in verse 23: our faith shows us what is true in the grander scheme of things but for now we know we are not fully home yet. We are still waiting for that final chord to play in the musical score of life.

But then comes verse 26 and the opening phrase, "In the same way." This could also be translated as "similarly" or "likewise." Usually if you use words like this, you are connecting what was just said with what is going to come next. So for instance I might say, "I was really disappointed that we could not get tickets for the circus. Likewise my kids were really bummed, too."

So far in our passage today Paul has talked about the creation and us, claiming that we are all in the same boat: both the creation and we ourselves have a hope that, by virtue of not yet being fulfilled, causes us to groan, to feel tension. In short, we have some agony, some bitter groanings, sighs mingled with tears.

Verse 26 is going to talk about the Holy Spirit. But how can Paul say "Likewise" in reference to the Spirit? You don't expect to find out that one of the members of the Holy Trinity could similarly or likewise be described as having frustrations and groanings "in the same way" as the rest of us. But you know what? The Spirit does. In verse 26 the Spirit is said to "groan" with us and it is the precise same Greek word used in verses 22 and 23.

Now here is a realization to widen the eyes. Think how different the effect would have been if Paul had said that in the midst of our and the creation's groanings, the Spirit spoke to God on our behalf with unparalleled eloquence, with golden words that dripped with rhetorical honey so sweet as to make the angels weep. Had Paul put it that way, the Spirit might have seemed aloof, above it all, a detached observer--someone about as far away from the prisoner on death row as the lawyer who, though speaking for his client in court, can still at the end of the day hop in his Lexus and return to his home in the suburbs.

But the Spirit does not speak for us or pray for us from afar. He's with us in every way. In Greek the words most closely associated with this kind of "groaning" are "crying" and "weeping." These are groans borne of pain. They are the groans of a woman in labor whose body is being stretched and torn in ways that summon howls of hurt. They are the groans of a child dying of starvation, her distended belly belying in a mocking way the complete emptiness on the inside. They are the groans of an animal with one leg caught in a trap whose jaws bite clean through sinew, flesh, and bone. They are the groans of the widow whose longing for her now-dead mate are so acute that she does not recognize the sound of the sobs being heaved forth from her own chest. Have you ever cried so hard that you were startled at the sound you yourself were making? Groaning is like that. The Holy Spirit is so lovingly close to us as to groan with us and for us. The Spirit is the divine power that puts us "in Christ" to begin with and so this same Spirit knows well the agony this introduces in a world as harsh as this one often is.

Groaning fits our "between the times" status as we live suspended between promise and fulfillment. Like a musical piece, the very movement of the song has taken us away from home, and we long for that final chord to sound so that our tension will be resolved. Like a piece such as "Jesu Joy of Man's Desiring" (an apt title), so the music of creation and redemption creates in us the very desire the music itself will eventually satisfy.

But as we prepare to gather at the Lord's table now, two things remain yet to be said. First, if we really are people of faith, then we need to feel this tension. We have not heard the final chord. We carry in our hearts a sense of incompleteness. And let me suggest to you that we must feel this. It is not a sign of doubt to feel incomplete. It is not weak faith that pines to hear the final note but rather it is strong faith that feels this pull forward, this desire to round things out. When you want to hear that last note, you find yourself physically leaning forward, sitting on the edge of your seat, craning your neck in eager expectation of what you know must yet come. Faith like this keeps us moving forward, motivates us to work for justice, to be stewards of the creation and of our non-human cousins within that realm, to do whatever we can that gives life the shape of things to come.

But if that is so, then the second item to note in closing is that we dare not try to deal with our sense of incompleteness by attempting already now to settle for some quick way to round out the music. Years ago on the old "Muppet Show" the muppet Rolf was the dog who always played the piano. On one show Rolf was playing a gorgeous Beethoven sonata. He was somewhere in the middle of that piece when the stage manager whispered to him that he had only fifteen more seconds. So Rolf played a couple more measures of the sonata before suddenly playing that familiar quickie ending "Ba-da-dum-ta-da-dum. Dum."

There are also theological ways to try tacking on quickie endings. If we insist that all our music here in church is ever and only happy-clappy; that every sermon and each worship service round out everything neatly and fully with no questions unanswered, no loose ends left dangling; when we look at even the worst events in life but just smile as we say, "I'm not upset. It's all part of God's good plan"--in short, when we leave no room for wrenching groanings over the state of things, then we're trying to re-write God's music.

If even the Spirit groans, who are we to resist the same? What's more, the desire to avoid groaning by pretending all is well short-circuits our efforts to work toward the better things we know God desires. In addition to hope-based patience, we need also what the Contemporary Testimony calls "tempered impatience" in the sense that we will not settle for how things are but keep craning our necks forward in eager expectation of that final chord that God in Christ will play when our Lord returns.

This morning we eat this bread and we drink this cup and find in these signs and seals of our Lord's sacrifice not only a remembrance of what was and not only a living encounter with the Christ who is even now alive in our midst. We find also a foretaste of the heavenly banquet yet to come, a preview of that final chord we are so eager to hear but have not yet heard. This food gives us energy to keep witnessing to the gospel, to keep working for justice, to keep getting pulled forward by the divine music that puts us on the edge of our seats. We keep leaning forward and we keep moving until that day when the final Hallelujah will sound for every creature and every person under heaven--for that will be the day when we will know finally and fully that we are at long last Home. Amen.