PEOPLE'S CHURCH OF DOVER

Romans 8:24-28                                                                     God's Purpose and Us

Sermon July 20, 2008:  People's United Church of Christ, Dover, DE:  The Rev. Dan Griggs

 

            As your pastor you have granted me the high privilege of getting to know you in ways that few others know you.  People feel they can open their hearts to their minister, that they can talk about their joys, their deep sorrows, and the things that worry them.  Over the years, as I've talked with couples I've come to realize how true the old saying is, "Opposites attract."  In many marriages you find that one partner is assertive and the other partner is more accepting.  I make it a point to talk about that with couples in pre-marriage counseling, because sometimes it takes some work to find a balance that's fair to both partners. 

            I've also learned that in every family somebody is the designated worrier:  if that one worries, the rest of the family can go about their business.  This "designated worrier" role really showed itself in one married couple I counseling some years ago.  They were both deeply committed Christians, and they were both charismatic; but all their married life he had worried about nothing and she had worried about everything.  They had it down to an art.  Identify any subject—money, for example:  he would do the banking, write the checks, scrimp where there was a short-fall, and go on with life.  But she would follow him around everywhere, her eyes wide with anxiety, her hands gripped in fists of worry.  We talked about this pattern during the time I was their pastor, and I suggested to her that she might do something to rise above pervasive worry.  It's a gimmick, but other people have found it helpful.  Instead of worrying all the time, she could train herself to do her job as family worrier at one particular time each day—maybe between 7:00 and 8:00 in the evening.  She should set that time aside, designate a place to sit with paper and pencil, and focus on all the things she was supposed to worry about—write them down, jot down thoughts and fears:  don't do a half-way job, worry like she was supposed to.  But at 8:00 the session would be finished:  she should put the paper away, get up and go watch television or take a walk or whatever she and her husband liked to do after work, except—she would not permit herself to worry any more that day.  This way she didn't have to give up her role in the family that she had played for fifty years, but it would no longer dominate her entire day.  She tried it, and I think she had some success with it.  But why was she such a worrier?

            People worry because life looks so big and we feel so small.  We fear we'll be overwhelmed.  People have felt this way in every generation all the way back to the primordial origins of the human race.  Paul the Apostle knew how people worry, so in his great 8^th chapter of Romans, writing about how the Holy Spirit is our guarantee of hope, he said this:

 

 

For more than nineteen centuries Christians have taken great comfort in these words.  What they tell us unequivocally is that God's purpose is to bless us.  God's purpose is to bless you. 

 

            The intimation that we are small is true.  Our solar system isn't merely drifting through space in an ever-widening spiral around the galaxy we call the Milky Way:  chance, probability, happenstance and accident all have a part in the way the cosmos works in our private experience.  However, as small as we are, we are not merely victims of mindless fate:  God has a plan.  In the Letter to the Ephesians it's called "the eternal purpose"[1] of God.  God's plan is magnificent in its conception, grand in its design, and hopeful in its intention for you.  Let me outline what we know of God's eternal purpose. 

            We don't know why God wanted to create the universe, nor why God evolved a solar system whose third planet could sustain water both above the freezing point and below.  What we know is that our earth supports life, and that by God's first grace we live.  The Bible calls it a "garden" originally, a place of lush beauty and providence.[2]  But you know human nature as well as the writer of Genesis:  we are grasping, self-concerned, thoughtless beings.  By our selfishness, whatever experiment God set up in that "garden" went wrong, and it has damaged both us and our "garden."  We are now involved in a long decline of both nature and the quality of our lives.  Weeds have filled the vineyard, and vines have spilled over the wall.  Morning-glories have taken over this greenhouse where roses and lilacs once bloomed.  Cats which were introduced to take care of the mice have grown fat and lazy, and they sit on your car and leave little cat prints.  So now our job is to drain the swamp, but I find that I am up to my waist in alligators[3]—political, social, economic, racial, language and gender.

            So God developed a project.  Something had to be done to reclaim the beauty and truth of this earth and its inhabitants.  To be sure, it would only be a patch-job, and it would have to be messy; but it would eventually get the job done.  Ephesians says that this was God's "eternal purpose in Christ Jesus."  That was what Jesus was doing on the shore of Lake Galilee, and on the dusty plains of Judea, and what he was doing on the cross–as untidy as it was, he came for us.  It was an act of grace, and by it we find our reconciliation with God—forgiven, reclaimed and called back to friendship with our Origin and our Destiny.  God's plan was to redeem the whole world, to reclaim the "garden," to rebuild the greenhouse, to drain the swamp.  And since the resurrection of Jesus Christ, that project has been going forward toward its certain conclusion.  This is God's eternal purpose, painted across the Bible canvass with the grand strokes of the master-painter.  God's purpose is to bless you.

 

            But given the grand scale of all this, we seem so small and unimportant.  We tend to agree with a French Canadian woodsman whom Thoreau met at Walden Pond.  He was almost childlike in his view of the world and humankind's place in it.  When Thoreau told him Plato's definition of a man as a two-footed animal without feathers, the woodsman showed Thoreau a plucked chicken:  "This must be a man!"  And he said the other difference is that the knees bend the wrong way.[4]  Are we just poultry with the knees turned backwards?  Are our prayers stopped at the ceiling like so many colored balloons lighter than air?  I think of the prayer Jimmy Stewart prayed in the movie "Shenandoah," with the family gathered around the dinner table:

 

 

Is our relationship to God like a chicken's, or like we're the only ones doing anything here and God has gone to Miami Beach? 

            No, not at all.  God is here, and God's purpose is to bless you.  That great plan was all set in motion out of love for you.  The vastness of that eternal purpose demonstrates just how far God is willing to go to extend to you a hand of invitation.  So your life is really like a great ocean-going ship that's traveling through the St. Lawrence Seaway to Chicago.  After speeding across the Atlantic it seems to be halted in the locks.  Great gates have closed behind and before.  It's driving engines idle, and the great propellers are still—it looks like it's going nowhere at all.  And yet, all the time, water is entering the lock and the great ship is rising.  The opposite gate opens and the vessel emerges from the lock to continue its journey, now on a higher water level.[5]

            God's eternal purpose is directed toward you.  The whole point of God's plan is your blessing:  it is to lift you up to a higher level of life, so that you may go forward in hope.  This is the purpose of God which Paul means when he says:

 

 

You are called "according to God's purpose."  So all things work together for your good. 

 

            But now, we need to make a distinction between true "good" and merely "what I want."  There's a sense and a non-sense about this passage, and a lot of people are broken on the non-sense, like a ship on the rocks.  God never said everything would be pleasant.  God never promised that we would be able to enjoy everything.  The New Testament promise of eternal life never meant that I will not die. 

            Leslie D. Weatherhead was the pastor of City Temple Methodist Church in London during the Second World War, when the German bombs fell on that city night after night in successive waves of terror.  He has written of how many Christians in London coped with that horror by trying to turn the Bible into a fantasy promise.  They read Psalm 91:10 literally:

 

 

 

 

On the night when the bombs fell and their home was spared they felt that their religious faith was justified, no matter how terrible was the loss of life and property to their neighbors.  But on the night when the bomb destroyed their own house they lost both their house and their faith, because their beliefs were based on a fantasy-reading of that psalm.[6]  God never said you would be spared all trouble.  God did say that in every trouble you face, God would struggle beside you and even respond to your mistakes and your sins with grace. 

            The contemporary church historian Martin Marty told a story about a woman who didn't like her apartment.  She wanted to move.  She knew of just the place she wanted to live:  it was in a beautiful setting with good security, beautiful carpets and ample closet space.  The only problem was that another woman was already living there; so, believing in the power of prayer, she began to pray for her dream apartment.  She prayed that the other woman would get evicted—after all, she wasn't a Christian.  And sure enough, the woman lost her job and had to move.  This good Christian lady then moved in, and told all her friends how God had destroyed someone's financial stability to give her what she wanted.  Dr. Marty disagreed both with her interpretation of the events and also with her selfish attitude toward life and God's grace.  That's not how God does things:  she confused coincidence and probability with divine providence.  God never promised to destroy someone else so that you could have what you wish for.  That is the non-sense of Paul's words "all things work together for good…." 

            But the sense of the passage stands firm.  God's purpose is to bless you.  You are not just a chicken with backward knees, lost in the vastness of the cosmos.  The whole point of God's plan of redemption is your blessing.  The world throws us a lot of curves.  Sometimes we're tempted to give up on God's promises.  Sometimes it's our own fault, and sometimes we're victims of chance or ill will.  You don't get to retire when you wanted to—or you're forced to retire earlier than you intended.  You live your life for your children, but they all grow up and move far away,  and your life is left empty.  Forrest Gump was right:  Things happen.  God never said they wouldn't.

            Still, God's purpose is to bless you.  God has transformed land and sea, sent Jesus who lived and taught and died and rose again, created a communion of people who have heard the invitation and welcomed it—all because God wants to bless you.  In your pain, God is there beside you.  In your fear, God will give you strength to do what you must.  In your illnesses, God reaches out to you with a hand of healing.  In your victories, God rejoices with you.  In your success, God crowns your achievement with a deeper satisfaction.  In your depressions, God offers you a way to hope.  In your forgetfulness, God never forgets you.  In your sin, God forgives you.  And in your death, God opens a door to that greater promise—Life. 

            Christian, believe that God's eye is ever on your good.  It's what the gospel is finally all about.

AMEN