Homily: Fifteenth Sunday Ordinary Time. Rom 8:18-23
I can still vividly remember from the hazy recollection of my youth a particular Sunday morning in the summer of 1975. The sunlight pouring through the stained-glass windows, the water cascading off of Mr. Wallacavage. He had no choice but to march all the way to the front pew. His shoes squeaked with every step as he walked up the aisle, leaving a river of water behind him. Right then and there I learned a valuable lesson: never try to outsmart a raccoon.
It all started with the theft of their favorite garden gnome, Harry. The Wallacavages were convinced neighborhood teenagers were stealing their garden gnomes, so they did what any sensible suburban family would do in 1975: they installed what passed for high-tech home security back then. Big clunky cameras the size of breadboxes, wires strung everywhere like spaghetti. The whole neighborhood turned out to gawk. Mr. Potts declared it “better than the moon landing.”
On the third night the cameras delivered justice. Eddie and I had snuck out with a flashlight and a bag of popcorn to spy on the operation. From the safety of Eddie’s tree fort, we watched as a fat raccoon dragged Harry across the lawn. We nearly busted a gut laughing.
But Mr. Wallacavage refused to accept the truth. Instead, he escalated—installing motion-activated sprinklers all over the yard. Running late for church, he forgot his own trap and cut straight across the lawn. As far as we know, the raccoon never got wet. But the sprinklers definitely worked.
Mr. Wallacavage was absolutely right about one thing: something was wrong. He just misunderstood what it was.
St. Paul tells us the same thing about creation. We all recognize that the world is broken. Every generation has. The question is what is wrong and where hope is to be found.
Listen to how Paul describes creation in Romans 8. Creation itself is groaning. Not just sighing or complaining, but groaning together—the rare Greek word systenazei—like a vast cacophony of labor pains. He purposely echoes Genesis 3:17-19, where the ground is cursed: “Cursed is the ground because of you; in toil you shall eat of it all the days of your life; thorns and thistles it shall bring forth.” The earth itself bears the weight of human rebellion.
Yet Paul does not leave us in despair. Creation was “subjected to futility” (mataiotēs—the same word the Greek Old Testament uses for the vanity of Ecclesiastes), but not willingly, and not finally. It was subjected in hope. Like a seed buried in the cold earth, waiting for the harvest that has already been secured in Christ. The curse points forward to redemption.
In the first century, this message cut against the grain. Many in Rome were influenced by philosophies that saw the body as a prison or an embarrassment from which the soul needed to escape. Middle Platonism taught the soul’s true calling was to ascend away from the physical. Paul’s vision is radically different: God is not abandoning creation but renewing it.
We have never known more about the human body and never agreed less about what it is for. Our modern world offers two popular “answers” that can sound superficially like Paul’s words but miss the heart of the Gospel.
The first appears in some popular end-times theories: the world grows darker, the faithful are whisked away, and the rest burns. Whatever one thinks of it as storytelling, the underlying theology treats creation as disposable packaging. The goal is escape. As N.T. Wright has long pointed out, this is the opposite of biblical hope. The Bible does not climax with souls fleeing earth for a disembodied heaven. It ends with heaven coming down to earth—a new heavens and new earth, a cosmic renovation, not an evacuation.
The second answer needs no Bible at all. It says the “real you” is your mind, your feelings, or your consciousness. If it feels true, it is true. Consider transhumanism: upload the mind, treat the body as upgradable hardware. This is modern Gnosticism—a half-truth. It rightly sees that something is deeply wrong with bodies that sicken, age, and die. But it diagnoses the wrong patient. The problem is not the body itself, but the age marred by sin—an age of groaning and waiting.
For Christians, we do not seek redemption from the body, but the redemption of the body. Look to the empty tomb. The same body that died was raised, glorified, transformed, yet continuous. Jesus is not going back into the ground. He is the firstfruits. Every aching joint, every fallow field, every creature’s groan under futility is aimed at that same harvest.
Paul tells us the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory about to be revealed. Creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the children of God. When we are glorified, creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God.
So what do we do now, in the meantime? We live as people of the resurrection. We care for this groaning creation—not as something to escape or despise, but as something God loves and will renew. We care for our bodies, our families, our neighborhoods, and God’s creation. We groan, ye. But we groan together with creation and the Spirit, who intercedes with sighs too deep for words. The labor pains are real, but they are birth pains. New life is coming.
Brothers and sisters, don’t spend your life installing bigger sprinklers for the wrong problem. Christ did not come because creation was a mistake. He came because sin had wounded what God still loves. The answer isn’t escaping creation; it’s its redemption.
The Joy of the Gospel 