Andrea Steinkamp: "The Uncommon Good: Human Flourishing" (Sermon for October 27, 2024)

We know that from the beginning until now, all of creation has been groaning in one great act of giving birth. – Romans 8:22

Friends,

This week we’re continuing our pre-election sermon series, The Uncommon Good, which is inspired by the work of Yale University professor of Theology and director of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture, Miroslav Volf, and his book, A Public Faith. During these weeks of pre-election angst and anxiety and messiness, we are exploring what it means to live out a public faith in troubled times. We’re tackling the topic of human flourishing this week, and as I’ve thought about what we might explore together this morning, the question that keeps coming to mind is, How should we think about human flourishing while living in apocalyptic times? The only thing I’ve landed on with certainty is that thinking about human flourishing apart from the flourishing of the natural world is a dead-end street.

Perhaps that’s because in recent weeks we’ve borne witness to the destructiveness of climate-change fueled superstorms that behave in ways heretofore unimaginable, touching parts of our landscape thought to be out of the way of their impacts. Perhaps it’s because it’s late October and the stretch of 80-degree temperatures and abundant sunshine we’ve been experiencing here in NYC, while lovely, is also unsettling, because it’s so unnatural.       

Despite the tendency of western thought and our western Christian tradition to set humans over and above the natural world, engaging with it only as an object to be exploited for our good, in Paul’s letter to the Romans, there are hints that another understanding might have grounded the life and animated the faith of the earliest Christian communities.

Pastor Andrea