Racial Justice Sunday
READING: Romans 8:18–25

There are moments when creation’s groaning breaks into public consciousness. Many of us remember the shock of hearing that the Sycamore Gap tree had been deliberately cut down. A tree that had stood quietly for centuries- holding walkers’ memories, framing photographs, witnessing weather and war and ordinary passing lives- was suddenly gone. What people expressed was not just anger, but grief. Something was more than property had been destroyed. It felt like an injury to the land itself, a reminder of how easily what is iconic and life enhancing  can be undone by a single thoughtless act. Creation, it seemed, had been wounded- and people felt it in their bodies.

We experience something similar watching a clip narrated by David Attenborough: footage of a coral reef once alive with colour, movement, and sound, now bleached and silent. He speaks slowly, without accusation, letting the images do the work. Fish gone. Structure collapsed. A living community reduced to fragments. It is not dramatic in the usual sense—but it is devastating. No quick fix. No easy reversal. Just the quiet truth of loss. Again, it feels like more than environmental damage: like creation itself is groaning—not in spectacle, but in exhaustion.

And then there is another kind of groaning- the one we feel collectively when images arrive from war-torn places: streets reduced to rubble, families searching for one another, people injured and dead, communities hollowed out almost overnight. Often there are no words, only a tightening in the chest, a turning away from the screen, a sense that something terrible has happened. It stops being distant news. It becomes the sound of shared humanity breaking under the weight of violence. Creation groans here too- not only in damaged land, but in broken relationships, traumatised bodies, and lives cut short.

In today’s reading, the writer recognises this sound. “The whole creation has been groaning in labour pains until now,” he writes to the church in Rome. Paul does not deny suffering or explain it away. He listens to it. And then he dares to say something both bracing and hopeful: this groaning is not meaningless.

For Paul, creation is not background scenery to the drama of human life. It is at the centre. Creation waits. It longs. It suffers. And crucially, Paul insists that creation was subjected to futility not of its own will. This matters profoundly on Racial Justice Sunday.

It tells us that suffering is not always the result of personal failure or moral deficiency. Much suffering is inherited, systemic, woven into our histories and structures people did not choose. Racial injustice belongs here. It is one of the ways creation experiences what Paul calls bondage to decay: when some bodies are treated as more expendable than others; when some voices are more readily believed; when some histories are remembered and others erased.

Paul refuses to blame the wounded, hurt and marginalised for their wounds. And so must the Church.

On this  Racial Justice Sunday, we are not invited to congratulate ourselves on how inclusive we now are, or rehearse easy answers to past and present wrongs . We are invited instead to attend- to be present—to listen to where creation and its people are still groaning today. That includes listening to the experiences of those whose lives are shaped by racism, exclusion, and inherited inequality, including within the Church itself.

Paul then speaks of creation waiting for “the revealing of the children of God.” This  is about the recognition that change can happen . That with the help of God there could be a world in which all people are finally seen as they truly are—bearers of God’s image, not problems to be managed or threats to be contained.

As Rowan Williams has often suggested, salvation is not God inventing new value, but God unveiling the value that was always there. Racial justice, at heart, is about this unveiling: allowing truths long hidden to come into the light, and allowing the Church itself to be changed by what it sees.

St Paul is honest about the cost of this change. Believers, he says, groan inwardly too. Faith does not exempt us from discomfort; it deepens it. We groan because we can see more clearly where the world— its people and its land- is not yet healed. We groan because love has made us attentive.

This matters. Groaning is not failure or weakness. It is what prayer sounds like when words are not yet sufficient. It is what happens when we stand alongside people in pain without trying to fix them, explain them, or hurry them along.

Paul is careful, too, about Christian  hope. “Hope that is seen is not hope.” Christian hope is not optimism. It is not the confidence that things will quickly improve. It is the decision to stay engaged even when change is slow, contested, or costly. Racial Justice Sunday is not a solution. It is a commitment to patience that does not give up.

Paul’s insight is striking: “the redemption of our bodies.” Not escape from the body, but its renewal. This matters because race is lived in bodies- bodies that are read, feared, celebrated, controlled, or ignored. The gospel does not bypass this reality. It insists that God does not abandon his people , but is alongside and loving of all creeds, ethnicities, faiths, cultures and colour. If bodies matter to God, then how bodies, how people, are treated must matter to the Church.

So today, the call is not to resolve creation’s groaning, but to refuse to turn away from it. To stand where pain is real. To listen longer than feels efficient or easy.  To allow ourselves to be unsettled. And to trust—without sentimentality—that God is still labouring towards new life, still shaping us so that we may live more truthfully with one another and with the earth we share.

Paul does not tell us how long this waiting will take. He tells us how to wait: truthfully, patiently, together. Creation is still groaning. We are still groaning. But this, Paul insists, is not the end of the story. It is the sound of life refusing to give up.

There is a Japanese tradition called kintsugi. When a bowl is broken, it is not thrown away. The cracks are not hidden. They are repaired with gold. The bowl is made whole again—not by pretending it was never broken, but by honouring where it broke.

The bowl still holds water.
But now its history is visible.

This is one way of imagining what St Paul is saying in Romans 8.
Creation is not discarded because it is fractured.
People are not abandoned because we carry wounds.
Communities are not written off because we have been broken by violence, racism, or loss.

The gold does not erase the crack.
It tells the truth about it.
And it says: this is still worth holding.

That is radical justice.
Not pretending the bowl never broke—
but refusing to throw it away.

Photo Credit: rmacuatro (envato.com)