July 24 - Proper 12, Year A (RCL)
There are some bible verses
which have become almost clichés,
words which have passed
into our everyday speech. They are quoted
when people
are at a loss for words, when they don't quite
know what to say
and so pull something
from the dark recesses of their mind,
something
which was drilled into them
as a Sunday school verse long ago
and which they have rarely thought of
since.
They don't know what to say, so they draw on something
religious, innocuous
or so it seems -
after all, you can't go far wrong
if it's in the bible.
But sometimes
they get it wrong,
and what seems innocuous, what seems safe
can in fact be
the worst thing
in the world.
And it's one of those things, one of those sentences
which is so often quoted
that we heard in our reading
from Romans today.
“All things work together for good for those who love God.”
It sounds good. A hopeful statement
that reassures us
that in spite of all appearances
God is still in control,
that God has got something planned, something good,
even if it feels as though we’re living in a nightmare,
if it feels like our world
has crumbled
around
our feet.
And for a moment
we can believe it.
But then reality sets in,
and we’re just not so sure.
How can it be for good
if your marriage breaks down,
or someone dies,
or we’re faced with a deadly illness?
If all things work together for good for those who love God,
either this God isn’t worth loving,
or the apostle Paul is just wrong.
First, God isn’t worth loving.
Because why love a God
who has some great plan for good,
but who doesn’t bother sharing it with us,
so that we become just some sort of pretty much dispensable cog in some great plan.
And even if we were to love God
what about all the other people
who don’t love God, or don’t love God enough?
Is God so self centered
that he only cares for people who love him?
Can we just give up on them?
And what if we can’t love God enough?
What if
the reason things are going badly for us
is that somehow we have failed,
that we haven’t been faithful enough in our prayer?
“All things work together for good for those who love God.”
If we take it as it seems,
it appears that when things are difficult for us,
either God has failed us
or we
have failed God.
And the problem with both of those is
that they directly contradict
what we find in other places in the bible,
and even here in the book of Romans.
God has failed us? Treats us as some disposable cog?
That makes no sense
of the words of Jesus, when he points us to the birds of the air and the lilies of the field,
and how much more
God will care for us,
and those famous words
about how God loved the world so much - the world - that’s us - that he gave his only son.
It makes no sense to say
God has failed us.
And us failed God?
Well yes, of course we have,
all of us.
None of us
can love God enough
can love God enough
to win us his love and favor.
But we don’t have to.
That’s the whole point of grace.
Grace means
that we don’t have to do it.
Everything we receive from God is a gift,
a free gift. We don’t have to do anything.
So, if God doesn’t fail us, and we haven’t failed God
is Paul wrong? Should we just white out this sentence
from our bibles, and find something more useful to say?
In some ways, I think the answer is yes. Yes, we should find something more useful to say.
“All things work together for good”
was never intended as a comforting proverb
for people who are struggling
with a difficult life.
Paul
didn’t just put that sentence out on its own,
he didn’t have it listed
as one of the great sayings of Jesus,
or the ten top memory verses.
Paul never intended it
to be quoted in isolation, away on its own. He wrote it
as part of a bigger argument, a much bigger argument.
What Paul was doing in his letter to the Romans
was trying to encourage the Christians living in Rome, trying to show them
that they truly belonged to God
and were not second class Christians
just because they didn't live in the holy land, because they weren't Jewish like Jesus was.
They belonged to God
as fully
as those who, like Paul himself,
grew up with the Torah, the Hebrew Scriptures,
they belonged to God
as fully as those who walked in the footsteps
of Jesus.
And they belonged to God
even when the people around them
laughed at them
and spit on them
and abused them
for being foolish enough
to follow Jesus.
The letter to the Romans
is a realistic letter,
a letter which is honest
about the difficulties and the struggles of life on earth.
There's no whitewash here,
no pretending
that everything will be better
if only
we love God more.
Life on earth is
scarred by sin,
and life on earth is scarred by evil.
God is no fairy godmother
ready to fly in with mice and a pumpkin
and carry us off to a fairyland
where everything is wonderful. Christian faith
is not about escaping
from the reality
which is human life on earth.
That's something we have to wait for, to wait for, until Christ comes again,
until the kingdom of God comes
in all its fullness.
And until then, we wait. We wait, and we struggle, and we groan.
But we do not wait alone. We do not wait
alone.
Because what Paul wrote, in his letter to the Romans
is that in the times
when we do not know
how to pray
the times
when we are so overwhelmed
by the struggles and pains in our lives
God's spirit
will do our praying.
God's Spirit
will struggle and groan and sigh alongside us,
God's spirit
will bring to God
the deepest fears and longings
of our hearts, the things we don't even know
how to pray for,
and we will not be
alone.
Nineteen years ago
last week, my house caught on fire. It totally gutted my room. I was home, but I escaped fine with just a mild case of smoke inhalation. But I lost
pretty much everything. I was in seminary at the time
and there were people
who tried to tell me to “find the good in it;”
there was a seminary professor who used me as a sermon example
of how one can discover
that material things
are really not that important
in the greater scheme of things; there was even one woman
who asked me if I thought demons had caused the fire. I said no, it was an electric heater.
But the people who were the most help to me
were the people
who had suffered themselves.
They were the ones
who encouraged me to come to chapel,
who sat with me
week after week
in the darkest corner,
and prayed the words
I simply couldn't
get out.
For two months
I sat in silence
and they prayed.
And in their praying, they were mirroring
the prayerful work of the Spirit
praying the words
that I had no words
to pray,
sighing alongside me
my wordless sighs.
And I was truly
in the presence
of God.
At our most helpless, at our most prayerlessness,
God's Spirit
is with us
and God's Spirit
prays for us.
God
is at our side
even
when we most doubt it.
God
is for us, and nothing,
nothing,
can separate us from God.
And that points to something that I discovered
when I was preparing this sermon.
You know that the bible wasn’t originally written in English.
It was in Hebrew, and Aramaic, and most of the New Testament, as far as we know
was in Greek.
And there is no
original manuscript.
The best we have is copies,
copies made carefully by hand on parchment,
handed down through the generations and as they parchments fell to pieces, copied and recopied.
And sometimes, just sometimes,
someone misspelled a word they copied,
or put the period in the wrong place, or even left out a word.
And most of the time
it really made no difference.
We know, because we have many of those copies, and we compare them with each other.
And sometimes too, the process of translating from one language to another
can leave us with some fuzziness.
Sometimes
we only have one word in English
to cover two or three ideas in another language,
or vice versa.
And this verse, this one verse, is one of those places
where it seems some copying errors crept in, plus a bit of fuzzy translation.
And according to the experts,
maybe what Paul wrote
was not in fact,
“All things work together for good for those who love God”
Maybe it was
“God works in all things for good with those who love him.”
Its just a matter of a couple of prepositions and what is the subject - a matter of sentence diagraming, if you like.
But it makes all the difference in the world.
Instead of us as the recipients of God’s work,
we’re partners. God is working to make all things good, to set things right,
with the help of those who love him.
We can seethe truth of this in the story of Rachel Epstein, the holocaust survivor who visited us a few weeks ago.
Her parents were taken away by the Nazis because they were Jewish. She and her brother only survived
thanks to the willingness of their neighbors, who were Roman Catholic, to take them in.
In the midst of terrible evil, God worked good
through those who loved him.
God is working to make all things good
with the help of those who love him.
It’s not a platitude
supposed to bring comfort to those who are struggling.
Instead, its an encouragement to all of us
to work alongside God
to bring good in this world,
working alongside God
encouraged and supported by the spirit,
and knowing that nothing, nothing at all
can separate us
from the love of God.
One of their songs
on the album, “All that you can’t leave behind”
written ten or so years ago
asks a question
which seems to be at the heart of our reading from Romans today.
They sing,
“When you look at the world
What is it that you see?
People find all kinds of things
That bring them to their knees”-U2, “When I look at the world”
When you look at the world
what do you see?
The front page of the newspaper yesterday morning:
Talks on the national budget stalled, and the threat of another recession. Somali refugees
dying of hunger.
Drought sweeping across the southwest.
Closer to home, mourning for an 8 year old boy abducted on his way home from day camp,
and someone drowns on Fire Island,
and the usual run of traffic accidents and DWIs.
When we look at the world
through the eyes of the newspapers,
its clear
that not everything
is going well.
And even when we ignore the newspapers
we can't escape the feeling
that something,
somewhere
has gone drastically wrong.
weather patterns, snow and sun and rain
all seem to be different,
as if the climate had changed
while we weren't looking.
Friends and family
struggle with cancer and disease,
and for all that we live longer, and on the whole, better,
than our forebears did, if we're honest, life is more luxurious
but not necessarily
better.
When you look at the world
what do you see?
There are times when it feels like
the whole of our world
is weighed down,
by some great burden. All around us
we see suffering and struggle,
not only human, but in the whole of creation.
You can almost hear the groans of the earth
as day by day,
the balance between good and evil, health and disease, growth and destruction,
is disrupted.
Sometimes
it seems
like God has walked out
and left us
to our own devices,
has abandoned us
to the uncertainties
of luck and fate, as if, no matter
how much we pray,
things will never get
any better.
But this isn't
anything new. It's not just a problem
of the twenty-first century, not just something
which suddenly happened
along with the coming of TV.
The apostle Paul wrote about it
almost 2000 years ago.
When he looked at the world,
he saw something
pretty much like ours, although perhaps it seems more intense for us
because thank to TV and the internet we can see
just what is happening
all cross this struggling world of ours.
But even in the time of Paul, back in the first century,
Paul could see enough to write:
“Creation has been groaning in labor pains until now
and not only the creation,
but we ourselves groan inwardly
while we wait.”
Creation has been groaning, as if in labor pains
and us with it, for as long as human beings have recorded. Life
is a struggle, to a greater or lesser degree, and I don't think there are any of us
who don't wish it were otherwise.
But from the perspective of Paul in his letter, this struggle
is part of a much bigger battle, a battle on a cosmic scale,
and we and the whole of creation
are just unlucky enough
to be caught up in it.
It's kind of out of fashion
unless you go to certain fundamentalist churches
to talk about things
on a cosmic scale,
especially to talk about
any sort of battle
between good and evil.
We've retreated from the simplistic world
of God the old man with a snowy beard
battling Satan
in a red wetsuit and pitchfork,
but at least that picture
helped us get some sort of handle, some sort of perspective
which helped us live
with the struggle. It gave us some sense
that both the problem
and the solution
were bigger than we are,
and that even when we can't see a way forward
one might be there
in the grand scheme of things.
Of course, there were other problems
with that picture of old man God and the fiery devil,
not least of which
was a tendency
to become fatalistic, resigned to a world of unfairness
where ordinary people
absolutely no control
and can do nothing to change things.
But there were helpful things, too, elements of truth
which we have tended to throw out along with the simplistic pictures,
and they are elements of truth
which we need to reclaim for today.
One of those elements of truth
is the reality
of evil.
Whether or not
you buy into the creation and fall story of Genesis,
either literally
or figuratively,
it tells us some important truths,
truths about a God who created us and loves us,
and leaves us free
to make our own decisions,
and about a force which will work destruction in our world
with
or without
our help.
Creation
is caught up
in futility, writes Paul, in that evil and destructive force
and we are caught up in it too.
But – and this is a big but –
for all that God
leaves us to deal with the consequences
of our own actions,
God has not abandoned us.
God has not abandoned us
but has promised
that there will be a time
when those destructive forces
are overpowered
but God's love, and God's justice,
when all tears will be wiped away, and sorrow and dying will be no more, to use the language of the book of Revelation, when
the glorious life
which we see in the resurrection of Jesus Christ
will be our life as well, and we'll be caught up into the glory of God
forever more.
And meanwhile, we wait.
We wait, along with creation, wait, and groan with longing
for that day, when we shall live in the glorious freedom
of God. It sounds
too good
to be true. It's nothing
like we've
ever seen.
And that's Paul's point, in our reading today. Because that's precisely
the character
of hope.
Hope
is believing
in what we can't yet see,
trusting in what
is just beyond our grasp.
But in spite of all of that, hope isn't just plain craziness, though it may look like it
sometimes. Hope isn’t just
blind faith, though sometimes
it comes close.
Hope is about
taking what we know about God
the love which is so evident
in creation,
the passion
of a God who would give up life for our sake,
the example of a resurrected life
which can be ours
someday,
hope is about taking all of these,
and living out their promise
in our lives.
And it means
always
being open
to the possibility
that God might act
to relieve suffering,
that God might act, even
through us,
to make things better.
All the time I've been writing this sermon,
two things
have been running through my head.
The first
is Louis Armstrong
singing “What a wonderful world”
and as he looks around
at the sky of blue
and clouds of white,
he thinks to himself,
“What a wonderful world.”
His hope
is built
on what he sees,
and what he chooses to see
is the evidence of creation ― a wonderful world.
Yet Louis Armstrong's vision
doesn't seem to extend
to the struggles we face
in our lives and our world.
And its here
that I keep remembering
the words of Martin Luther King
in his speech,
“I have a dream.”
You all
probably know it better than I do.
He ends his dream, not just with a vision
of racial equality
but the vision of a world
which is no longer groaning, waiting
for the coming of God,
but has seen God's glory
in all
its fullness.
Here are some of his words:
“I have a dream today.” He says, quoting from the prophets, “I have a dream
that one day every valley shall be exalted, every hill and mountain
shall be made low,
the rough places
will be made plane, and the crooked places
will be made straight, and the glory of the Lord
shall be revealed,
and all flesh shall see it together. This
is our hope . . . . With this faith
we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair
a stone of hope. . . . With this faith
we will be able to work together
to pray together, to struggle together, to go to jail together, to stand up for freedom together, knowing that we will be
free one day. . .
[that] we will be able to join hands and sing
in the words of that old Negro spiritual
“Free at last! Free at last! Thank God almighty
we are free
at last.”
Our situation is different, our struggles are different.
But our hope is the same, the hope of a God
whose love
leads us into hope
and resurrected life
and freedom.
“When you look at the world
What is it that you see?
People find all kinds of things
That bring them to their knees.”
When you look at the world,
see the struggle
and the groaning
and the pain, but see too
the promise
and the love
and the hope,
and give thanks to God
while we wait.
© Raewynne J. Whiteley 2010