Sermon: Travail

Texts: Joel 1:8-10, 17-20; Romans 8:18-27

Date: September 18, 2011

Rev. Dee Eisenhauer, Eagle Harbor Congregational Church

            In the movie “Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home” the intrepid Captain Kirk and the crew of the Enterprise find that Earth is being threatened by a huge alien ship that is communicating a deafening message in a language nobody can understand.  Something about the sound pattern rings a bell, though, and when Lt. Uhura tries running it through a simulator that plays it as if it were underwater, the sound becomes recognizable as whale song.  The scientists on earth didn’t figure it out immediately because the whales had been extinct for more than a century.  The probe is apparently calling out for its citizens, the whales, whose race had arrived on earth before the humans, and the ship’s energy field is wreaking havoc on the planet while they fruitlessly search for their brothers and sisters. 

            It takes the humans a while to catch on that the sound they are hearing is not a threat per se but a desperate calling out for the lost.  Having seen this film recently, when I read the Romans text about the whole creation groaning, I thought immediately of the sound of the whales.  That’s why I wanted you to hear Paul Winter’s “Trilogy” song a moment ago, which combines the song of the whale, the wolf, and the eagle, with some answering notes from human instruments.  They are all mournful sounds to my ear—even though they might not be intended to communicate sadness by the singers in the wild kingdom.  Their songs help me reflect on what the whole creation groaning might sound like. 

            Is the creation groaning?  That’s a question posed by some Bible study writers who have provided discussion guides for this week’s selections from the Season of Creation lectionary.  The creation’s groans are not something to which I have given a great deal of thought.  Our attention is usually taken up with the human element in creation, and within that slice of creation’s pie our attention is by and large dominated by the much smaller circle of the humans we know and love.  It’s interesting—though not entirely welcome—to be challenged to attend to a much wider sphere.  We can hear the groaning of our own knees, know well the suffering members of our families and circles of friends are experiencing, but can we tune into the groaning of creation? 

            Many generations ago the prophet Jeremiah, a very emotional spokesperson for God, spoke about the sorrow of the land.  ‘How long will the land mourn?’ because of the wickedness of God’s people, he asks. (12.4).  Jeremiah claims that God  hears the groaning of the land:  “They made it a desolation; desolate it mourns to me.   The whole land is made desolate and no one lays it to heart.” (12.11)  Joel also describes the ground mourning, the animals groaning.  “Even the wild animals cry to you,” Joel says. 

            Recently a group of baboons beside a busy highway in eastern Uganda became furious after a speeding truck killed a female from their troop.  They surrounded her body in the middle of the road and held a ‘sit-in’, refusing to move for 30 minutes and blocking the highway completely, even when witnesses threw food.  On that occasion, the groaning of creation became a public protest.      (New Internationalist, June 2003, p.8)  But such a thing is seldom seen by humans; we miss much of the groaning of creation.  As Jeremiah says it, “The ...land is made desolate and no one lays it to heart.”  It’s not that we are not moved by compassion when we hear a story like this one about the baboons; we don’t “lay it to heart” because it is generally off our radar screen. 

            Is human inattention to the groaning of creation a matter of accident or intention?  Are we frequently deaf to creation’s groans because that’s just the way it is, or because that’s the way we want it?  Probably a bit of each.  I think we have been conditioned to tune out the resonance of the earth, whether what we might hear is a glorious expression of praise or a heartrending wail.  This may be a particular handicap of Western culture, whose attitude toward the land is to see it as a thing to be used for our benefit until it is used up. 

            I’ve been reading a series of books by Orson Scott Card about Alvin Maker.  It’s a fantasy series that recasts the history of the white settlement of the U.S. with an element of magic.  Real historical characters appear in highly imaginative roles.  The early part of the series focuses on the conflict between the new settlers—the Whites—and the native population—the Reds.  The Reds believe that the Whites are killing the land and leaving behind a corpse.  One of the main characters, Ta-Kumsaw, sees it this way: “The White man brought death and emptiness to this place.  The White man cut down wise old trees with much to tell; young saplings with many lifetimes of life ahead; and the White man never asked, Will you be glad to make a lodgehouse for me and my tribe? Hack and cut and chop and burn, that was the White man’s way.  Take from the forest, take from the land, take from the river, but put nothing back.  The white man killed animals he didn’t need, animals that did him no harm; yet if a bear woke hungry in the winter and took so much as a single young pig, the White man hunted him down and killed him in revenge.  He never felt the balance of the land at all.  No wonder the land hated the White man!  No wonder all the natural things of the land rebelled against his step.”

The author has a poetic way of describing the Red’s way of living on earth as being in tune with the greensong of the forest.  The hero of the series, Alvin, is mentored by Reds for a time and begins to hear what they hear while they travel in the American wilderness.  “He could hear something else, a kind of music, a kind of—green music.”  At first Alvin tries to talk sense to himself, telling himself that “there wasn’t no way music could have a color to it, that was just plain crazy.”  At the same time, he was longing to hear it, see it, smell it again once it came to him.  It gave him endurance he had never imagined before, to put his usual consciousness on the back burner and give himself to the green music.  Going through the wilderness with the Reds, even in the dark he discovers that they find their way easily through the wood, “because it wasn’t their own eyes or their own mind finding the way, it was the land itself drawing them through the safe places in the darkness.”  When he’s moving in the greensong, he enters a dreamlike state in which the green of the forest guides his footsteps and fills his head with the music of the earth.

            After a long period of travel with the Reds, they come to settled farm country, “each farm carved out like a gouge in the greenwood forest.  Here the trees were all disciplined, lined up in rows to mark off one farmer’s field from another.”  The whole valley is scarred by plowing, broken like an old horse.  “This was civilization, one household butting up into the next one, all elbows jostling, all the land parcelled out till nobody had no doubt at all who owned every inch of it, who had the right to use it and who was trespassing and better move along.”   Alvin is surprised by how much his perception of what used to look like home has changed.  Suddenly, farm and town country looks to him like the end of the world.  And the green music of the forest is so broken and feeble in the settled valley it can hardly be heard as they walk down the hard-packed road.  Alvin finds through the rest of the long story that wherever there is settlement, the green music becomes almost too weak and jumbled to be heard at all.  He feels clumsy and slow and out of sorts until he can get back to a wild place again. 

            I know this all very stereotypical, unsubtle fiction.  But I’m intrigued by the way the author expresses a spirit of harmony with the earth in auditory, musical terms.  It makes me wonder whether an inability or unwillingness to tune into the groaning of the earth, as well as the green music of the earth, might be connected to being too settled, too civilized.  The theme for this week’s Creation series lectionary is Wilderness/Outback.  Our Bible study curriculum included a description of how wilderness appears in the Hebrew and Christian scriptures.  The Hebrew word midbar, translated “wilderness” in English, is literally a desolate and deserted place.  It carries with it a sense of that which is beyond the limits of settlement and human control.  It is a place that is disorderly and may be dangerous; but also a place to remember, a place for refugees to flee, a place of opportunity, and a place of God’s transforming power.  Just as Alvin Maker hears green music and experiences a different kind of strength and creativity when he leaves settled country, wilderness in the biblical narrative often serves as a setting for change and transformation for either an individual or a community.  Jesus himself was driven by the Spirit into the wilderness after his baptism as he wrestles with his vocation far from the distractions of civilization and the comforts of home.  What he needed to accomplish spiritually could only be done in a wild place outside the limits of human control.

            In the vision of author Orson Scott Card, it seems that the downside of the settler’s community had a lot to do with wanting to be in control; to discipline the trees and plants, to force the earth to yield what people wanted from timber to crops to gold.  The native peoples found their drive for control lethal for the people who lived there first, and eventually for the earth itself.  While that primal American conflict between White and Red is to some degree unhappily concluded, the conflict in the human soul that compels us to strive for control and settlement is one of those never-ending stories.  Many of us still want to control every aspect of our lives that can possibly be controlled.  We even now long for a completely settled, predictable life.  We’re pleased as punch to line up anything that might fall into line: jobs, shrubs, fences, rankings, airline passengers, soldiers. 

            Is it possible that such mania for control stifles the green music and the  groaning of the earth that we might tune into if we ventured out into the wilderness? 

            But why on earth would we want to tune in—who wants to hear any more groaning?  I know I get awfully tired of bad news from day to day.  I’m not sure I want to hear it if the creation is groaning.  But I have to admit that the fact that I might not want to hear it doesn’t mean that it’s not going on.  If we live cut off from the rhythms of the earth to such a degree that we don’t acknowledge the harm our kind causes, we might well pass the point of no return on preserving a habitable place to live.  I don’t know the name of that disease people can have where they don’t feel any physical pain, but I know it is extraordinarily dangerous, to not feel it when your own body is being burned or cut or crushed.  To be oblivious to the suffering of mother earth is no less dangerous; it’s just slower and less personal. 

            Suppose we acknowledge what Paul writes in Romans—in the old King James translation, “For we know that the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now.”  “Travail” is a fascinating word.  There are several definitions.  One meaning is to torture; there was once even an instrument of torture named the Travail.  Another meaning has to do with work, particularly of a painful or laborious nature.  And speaking of laborious, travail is another word for labor, as in giving birth.  That’s the way more contemporary translations have rendered Paul’s verse.  NRSV: “We know that the whole creation has been groaning in labor pains until now, and not only the creation, but we ourselves...”  Eugene Peterson’s free translation, the Message, puts it this way:

All around us we observe a pregnant creation. The difficult times of pain throughout the world are simply birth pangs. But it's not only around us; it's within us. The Spirit of God is arousing us within. We're also feeling the birth pangs. These sterile and barren bodies of ours are yearning for full deliverance. That is why waiting does not diminish us, any more than waiting diminishes a pregnant mother. We are enlarged in the waiting. We, of course, don't see what is enlarging us. But the longer we wait, the larger we become, and the more joyful our expectancy.  (Romans 8:22-25)

            I got to thinking about the connection between the travail of labor and the danger and possibility inherent in wilderness.  I remember preparing to give birth to our first daughter.  We had a whole written birth plan after our childbirth class.  I was so nervous, having never experienced giving birth before and only knowing for sure it was going to hurt.  But for me, naturally inclined to be a control freak, the thing that worried me even more than the potential pain was the possibility of losing control of my body and myself during the birthing process.  I hated that idea.  It scared and disgusted me.  Yet I had heard and read so much about that very moment of wild travail being a truly transcendent experience for countless women.  So there was a lure as well. 

            Well, for medical reasons the birth plan pretty much went out the window and drugs and doctors were firmly at the helm when little Emma made her debut.  I never got to that fearful and fascinating borderland that day.  But I do think it is a metaphor for a place to which we are called as people of faith.  True creativity, bona fide generativity is not a painless process.  It is not a passage in which settled and civilized people can remain in total control.  The travail of the creation is bound to be some kind of wilderness experience in which we go through danger, pain, exhilaration, and genuine newness all at once.   We groan with and for the creation, but it is pain with a purpose; it is creating the possibility of healing and newness of life for ourselves and the whole creation. 

            We do not hover above the earth; we are a part of it as earth is part of us.  When Appalachian mountain tops are blown off to uncover the coal, drowning streams and filling valleys with sludge, we should flinch.  When oil spills into oceans we should feel nauseous.  When wetlands are paved to build another big box store, we should feel the pressure as if the parking lot were steamrollered over our own feet.  The creation groans; it is entirely fitting that we feel it and groan with it. 

But not just to moan and groan; that accomplishes little.  If the travail of the creation is to be something beyond tortuous pain, the will to harness travail as creativity must be present.  That means a will to join our strength with all those who are laboring to halt wanton destruction of earth, water and air.  Feeling the travail of the earth is pointless if it does not become the travail of hard work for a fruitful purpose. 

            The creation groans but it also sings, it makes green music that is breath-takingly beautiful.  We were created to live in harmony with this symphony of planet earth.  We’re not going to hear it or experience its power if we stay where we are, every inch of our private acre settled.  As we venture into the wilderness, driven there, like our brother Jesus, by the Holy Spirit, I am convinced we will be changed.  We don’t know quite what it might be like to make all of our choices with a global, creation-centered ethic as a foundation.  It’s a strange land indeed that stretches out before us, if we leave behind our settled, controlled, controlling, oil-slicked, over-consumptive life.   It will definitely be travail—painful, laborious, sweaty, creative work. Scary.  Exhilarating.   Wild.

            Listen again to Paul’s promise: “I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory about to be revealed to us.  For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the children of God…”  Paul speaks of the hope for a new generation of God’s children engaged with our current challenge, willing to go where no humans have gone before.  Wouldn’t it be something, sisters and brothers, if we—you and I--were among the children of God being revealed in a renewed creation? 

Thank you, God, for making planet earth

A home for us and ages yet unborn.

Help us to share, consider, save and store.

Come and renew the face of the earth.

Card, Orson Scott Red Prophet New York: TOR Fantasy, 1988, p. 36

Ibid, p. 276

Wren, Brian “Thank You, God” New Century Hymnal, #559, v. 5