When my married seminary classmates would encourage me toward the blessings of holy matrimony, to deflect their interest in my family future, I would quip: "Misery loves company." There is a certain truth to this. If we find ourselves in a difficult position and are entirely alone in it, it is quite hard to bear. If we can share our burdens with others, then it becomes easier to bear our trial. Of course, marriage itself enables us to share our struggles with wife or husband and family. After hurricane Ike damaged electrical transmission lines in the Houston area, the shared sense of misery, when the heat and humidity returned, made it easier to bear. While we lacked air conditioning, we commiserated with each other and shared remedies for the stifling heat and humidity. Those deprivations would have been much harder to bear if we had not had such a large company with which to share them. Nature itself groaned under the burden of the storm and we felt it.

The creation has been made subject to decay by the fall. The context into which Adam and Eve were placed was damaged by their abuse of the creation. They used the fruit of the tree in a way that God had forbidden. They spread the results of their disobedience to the very instruments of their piety. Their corruption infected the paradise God had presented to them for their bliss. We live with that misery for which we are responsible every day. We feel it acutely right now in southeast Texas with our torrential rains. The skies would not deliver floods of water except from our perversity.

Yet the creation groans in anticipation of our ultimate reconciliation with God, because the seeds of its renovation have been sown into it by our renovation in baptism. Creation was made for our benefit. It still stands at our disposal and under our dominion. It serves us. Even the divine command to use a creature such as water in connection with the all-creating Word foretells a time when nature will no longer groan with us, because we will no longer be burdened. Baptism begins the renovation of water itself. The glory of the creation breaks through from the font. Through baptism, we live in the full possession of glorious freedom; the freedom of the heir who has inherited his estate.