I never feel the hast of modern life so much as when I am in the presence of something great, and I have no guide to help me and too little time or patience to absorb something of what I am looking at.

Several years ago, I stepped into a room of the National Art Gallery on Trafalgar Square, and four walls were covered with Picasso originals. I hardly know what to do with one Picasso original. Four walls of originals are the visual equivalent of a tsunami, and in fifteen minutes we had to move on to other rooms of originals where we spent even less time. My haste and ignorance felt dirty. And the Picassos were not there the next time I went back.

This spring I reread Dostoyevsky's masterpiece The Brothers Karamazov for the fourth or fifth time, and for the first time I felt like I didn't get lost. I thought I heard in translation the story Dostoyevsky was trying to tell, and I closed the book and thought to myself, "I have to do that again. There is so much there."

From time to time I take down Thomas Aquinas' Summa Theologica and read what Aquinas had to say about human happiness or love or justice. The English words are seldom difficult, but the ideas are relentless. Every word carries meaning. Every sentence builds ideas. Every paragraph grows out of the previous one and prepares the way for the next one. Ten paragraphs of Aquinas will exhaust unsuspecting readers.

Dostoyevsky's novel is more than 900 pages long. Aquinas' book is more than 1200 pages long. I point that out to prepare us for another masterpiece that we can read in less than ten minutes, and whose meaning 2000 years' study has not exhausted. I mean the eighth chapter of Romans. We have read the opening fourteen and the last nine verses of this chapter. Today we turn to the middle 16 verses. Join me there for the experience of reading what we will still be finding fresh and meaningful a decade from now.

Experiencing the Trinity
Let's just read these 16 verses and stop to reflect on as much as we can take. That may help you sense their inexhaustible meaning. If I were to put a title on verses 15-17, I would call this paragraph Experiencing the Trinity. The apostle doesn't set forth this unique and offensive Christian doctrine by means of a serile intellectual exercise. He does it in the only way that we will ever begin to grasp it. He helps us experience the Trinity. Let's listen carefully to what he says.

For you did not receive a spirit that maeks you a slave again to fear. If your experience of God and religion is one of persistent fear, you have to ask yourself if you have encountered the Holy Spirit. Paul offers the alternative this way. But you received the Spirit of sonship. And by him we cry, "Abba, Father."

We hear people use the word God often. Sometimes they use it devoutly, sometimes profanely, sometimes carelessly. Carry out your own test and see if I'm right when I say that we seldom hear anyone except a Christian refer to God as Father. We have family feelings toward our Creator. That is evidence of the Holy Spirit's reality in the Church. Verse 16 says, The Spirit himself testifies with our spirit that we are God's children.

As is fitting in a family, we children of God have an inheritance to look forward to. Verse 17 says, Now if we are children, then we are heirs - heirs of God and co-heirs with Christ. This inheritance differs from what we expect to receive some day from our parents. We expect it from them when they die. The inheritance we expect to receive from God comes to us because He is a generous Father and because of who our Brother is. We are co-heirs with Christ. It is for His sake that we have hopes of receiving a heavenly inheritance.

We would like to know what this inheritance is. Verse 17's conclusion calls our heavenly inheritance the glory of Christ. We are co-heirs with Christ, he says, if indeed we share in his sufferings in order that we may also share in his glory.

Before we look more closely at this inheritance, do you remember Romans 3:23? For all have sinned and fall short of ... what? The glory of God. Our inheritance is a restoration of the humanity we lost by our rebellion against God.

You might be troubled that Paul said we may share in Christ's glory if indeed we share in his sufferings. Let me share something with you that may help. An English Christian of the 19th century wrote the following.

"The conformity with the sufferings of Christ implies not only the endurance of persecution for His name, but all the pangs and all afflictions undergone in the struggle against sin either within or without. The agony of Gethsemane, not less than the agony of Calvary, will be reproduced however faintly in the faithful servant of Christ," (J.B. Lightfoot, Epistle to the Philippians). He made two helpful points.

First, suffering doesn't just mean persecution; it also means resisting temptation. Christ suffered both ways, on the Cross and in the desert when the devil tempted Him. That makes a share in the sufferings of Christ accessible to all of us.

Second, the suffering need not be as severe as Christ's suffering on the Cross or as His temptation by the devil. Raised eyebrows can be a form of persecution, and refusing to speak harshly to someone who has spoken harshly to us can be a form of resisting temtpation. In either form at whatever intensity suffering has a compensation.

The Redemption of Matter
He states the compensation neatly in verse 18. I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us. The New Testament letter of Hebrews 12:2 says that Jesus for the joy set before him endured the cross, scorning its shame. The glory and the joy that await us sustain our faith and courage in times of persecution and temptation.

Verse 19 begins with a surprise to give substance to the glory that awaits us. The surprise is that the apostle doesn't talk about us but about Mother Nature. The creation waits in eager expectation for the sons of God to be revealed. Verses 20-22 tell us why nature is waiting for the sons of God to be revealed.

For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God. We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time.

New Testament writers say very little about nature. That makes the sensitivity of this passage to the struggles of nature all the more impressive. The idea of nature's groaning captures something of those struggles.

Five years ago, Carole and I visited the Wild Animal Park in Escondido, CA. One of the naturalists put on a demonstration with an owl that had been in captivity for many years. In fact, the guy told us the owl was about 20 years old, and it was unusual for an owl to live that long. He said, "The average age of owls in the wild is about 7-8 years. If they damage an eye or break a leg, they can no longer hunt, and they starve or become prey to another animal."

Our abuse of the environment has certainly made the groanings of nature louder. John Grisham in his novel The Testament describes the beauties of the Pantanal region of Brazil, whose flood plain is the size of Colorado. One of his characters describes the threat to the Pantanal from mining and logging upstream from the rivers that water it.

Part of us ourselves, of course, is part of Mather Nature, namely our bodies - beautiful, useful, unpredictable, subtle, changing, agin. Verse 23: Not only so, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly. Never mind the big stuff. Have you had any aches and pains lately that have made you groan?

The rest of verse 23 makes the turn from the groans of man to the glory of God that awaits us and all creation. We ourslevees, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for our adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies. Christianity exalts the human body, because Jesus Christ was God in a human body. As a result, this beautiful, useful, unpredictable, subtle, changing, aging collection of genes and joints is tagged for redemption, and along with us all nature.

"One short sleep past, we wake eternally.
And death shall be no more: Death, thou shalt die."

This is the future. This is the hope proper to those whose destiny is bound up with Jesus Christ, says verse 24. For in this hope we were saved. Hope is a tricky business, say the rest of verse 24 and verse 25. But hope that is seen is no hope at all. Who hopes for what he already has? But if we hope for what we do not yet have, we wait for it patiently. Ironically, the body's determination to break down teaches us patience.

Of course, we want fifty-year-old experience in a twenty-year-old body. Lacking that, we become more patient. We work smarter. And we hope for the redemption.

A Prayer Mystery
The next two verses are strange. See if you read them the same way I read them. In the same way, the Spirit helps us in our weakness. We do not knwo what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groans that words cannot express. And he who searches our hearts knows the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints in accordance with God's will.

We do not know what we ought to pray for. That makes prayer meetings a less certain thing. What makes them a more certain thing is not within our control. Even though we don't know it, the Spirit within us is praying for us in a way that human words cannot express. Do you think this is what a prayer meeting looks like to God?

Here are these Christians going on and on about what they want, and the Holy Spirit is saying to the Father, before whom all hearts are open and all desires known, "O Father, just ignore most of it. Listen to me. I know your will, and I will pray for them according to your will." And the Father listens to Him every time.

We can learn to pray according to the Father's will, although not as fast as we think. In the meantime the Father apparently has an infinite tolerance for and delight in the babblings of His children. Let's just not get too impressed with our prayer life.

The Grand Design
On the other hand, let's be very impressed with God's grand design that overarches our lives and which the apostle expresses memorably in verses 28-30. We begin with verse 28, which is justly famous and oft-quoted. And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose.

It's not hard to pick out the juicy parts. First is all things. Nothing we experience eludes God's power to turn it to good purpose. That may be difficult to see whne your life hits a wall. Whether we see it or not, all we experience falls within this promise.

Second is God works. How? and how fast? are questions we ask and to which answers are slow in coming. The apostle's proposal is that whatever circumstance we find ourselves in, we can count on God's active presence in that very circumstance.

Third is for the good. If we who are evil seek good for our children, how much more will the One we call our Father in heaven seek our good, especially in those times where we have a hard time seeing any good at all.

Fourth, this promise is made to those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose. It is an invitation He makes to all and a promise He makes good on to all who accept the invidtation to identify themselves with Jesus Christ.

Fifth is his purpose. God's purpose, which directs the complexitites of our lives toward the good God intends. The apostle now outlines that purpose in verses 29-30.

For those God foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the likeness of his Song, that he might also be the firstborn among many brothers. And those he predestined, he also called; those he called, he also justified; those he justified, he also glorified.

People ask me if I believe in predestination. The Bible teaches predestination, and I believe it. What I do not believe is the Calvinistic understanding of predestination. I do not believe that God had "in mind the predestination of individuals (either to glory or to damnation)" (Fitzmyer, 522). What he had in mind before the foundation of the world was a People of God.

God chose Israel and the Church to embody in human flesh the presence of God in our human history and the love of God for all humanity. God did not choose in order to exclude; He chose in order to include more and more people in the blessings He wants to give to all humanity. I'll say much more about this, when we get to Romans 9.

The powerful reality here is the links in God's action. Paul says God foreknew. Did anyone get left out of the next step? No. Those He foreknew He also predestined. Did the next step fail? No. Those He predestined He called. Did the next step fail? No. Those He called He justified. Did the next step fail? No. Those He justified He glorified.

Persecution and temptaion do not break those links. Our groaning and the groaning of nature doe not break those links. Our inability to see the future does not break those links. Our inability to pray as we ought does not break those links. To step inside those realities is to be linked to the heart of God from eternity across time to eternity.

I have tried not to be hasty. I have tried to be a good, though inadequate guide to these immortal lines of scriputre and their immortal ties to the heart of God. I promise you will go back to them in the not too distant future, and it will be as if you were reading them for the first time, even if you remembered all I said. Having warned us not to be too impressed with our prayer life, we should thank God for Jesus Christ who gave us all this.