Today’s author is Prince of Peace’s Intentional Interim, Pastor Steve Sylvester.
Yesterday in worship, we continued our summer series on Creation with a reading from the 8th chapter of the book of Romans. Romans differs from other missives of Paul’s in that it is not a letter written to a specific community of Christians to address particular issues or questions. Romans was a summation of Paul’s theology, written (or, likely, dictated) in a Roman prison near the end of his life. The major question Paul struggled with in Romans was the question of the degree to which God’s love was inclusive. Was God’s love for Christians only? Did God’s love continue to embrace Paul’s fellow Jews? Just how wide was God’s embrace?
Sprinkled throughout Romans 8:18-27 are words like sufferings, futility, enslavement, decay, groaning, pains, weakness. But intermingled with those words are words like glory, freedom, adoption, redemption, hope, patience. In other words, this is not a Pollyanna passage. It’s real. It’s difficult. It’s truthful. But it speaks to our lived experience and the plain reality of our present brokenness even as it places everything in the embrace of God’s promise of goodness, which is the will of God.
The promise of this passage is that nothing ends up in the dumpster out back. Nothing. In the beginning, God deemed everything good, and in Jesus, God has re-deemed everything good. That promise is the source of our patience and the ground of our hope. It is the will of God. It is the will of God that nothing and no one be left behind. Nothing. No one. Thanks be to God.