There are a couple of reasons we’re doing this sermon series
on “The Bible’s Greatest Hits”. The
first one is obvious. These are the most
popular Bible verses for a reason.
They’re great verses. They have a
lot of meaning. It’s important that we
look at them.
But another
reason for doing it is that sometimes these are Bible verses we take for
granted. We read them without actually
thinking about what they say. Sometimes,
we’ve heard them so many times that we don’t even think about whether we really
believe them. We say we do, but do we
really, at bottom, believe them? Or do
we just say we believe them because it sounds good?
Our Bible verse for today is number
four on the biblegateway.com list of most popular Bible verses. It’s Romans Chapter Eight, Verse
Twenty-eight. The Apostle Paul wrote,
“We know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who
have been called according to his purpose.”
“In all
things God works for the good of those who love him.” Do we believe that? Some of us, at least, would say that we
do. It sounds good. We’d certainly like to believe it, right?
But then we
think about things. Just this week,
there was Hurricane Matthew, which killed hundreds of people in Haiti and did a
lot of damage in this country. Is that
one of the things God is working in for the good of those who love him? Just a couple of weeks ago there was terrible
flooding in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Is that
one of the things God is working in for the good of those who love him? We hear about all kinds of things like that
all the time. Fires, storms,
earthquakes, all kinds of things. Do we
really believe that God is working in those things for the good of those who
love him? Can we have that much
faith? Can we have that much trust in
God?
We can
bring it closer to home, too. I know
some of you in our parish have lost children.
Others have lost spouses. Others
have lost brothers or sisters or other people close to you. Do we really believe that God is working in
those things for the good of those who love him? I mean, we’d like to. It would provide an explanation for something
that we’d like an explanation for. We’d
like to think that, when something terrible happens, there is some way in which
God is going to bring good out of it.
But do we really believe it? Can
we have that much faith? Can we have
that much trust in God?
Now, we
need to pause here for a minute and note that there’s a difference between
saying that God caused something and saying that God is going to bring good out
of it. I’m not saying that God
specifically decided to make a hurricane hit Haiti. I’m not saying that God specifically caused
any of us to lose a loved one, either.
But as we’ve said before, if we believe in an all-powerful God, we have
to believe that God could have prevented all those things, and in fact that God
could prevent all bad things from happening, if God chose to do so. And God, sometimes, does not choose to do so.
Sometimes
we explain this by saying God allows us free will, and that does play into it, but
Hurricane Matthew was not the result of some human being’s will. So how do we explain that? Well, sometimes we say God allowed it to
happen because God is going to bring good out of it. That’s a comforting thought. It makes us feel better. It makes us feel like, well, there is a
purpose to this terrible thing that happened, even if don’t understand what
that purpose is. But again, the question
is, do we really believe it? Do we
really think that’s true? Can we have
that much faith? Can we put that much
trust in God? Or is this just something
we say because we’re trying desperately to cling to something that might give
us meaning to a situation and give us hope for the future?
We know
that there are a lot of things about God that we don’t understand. We know that God is good. We know that God sees the future and we
don’t. We know that God thinks
long-term. After all, the Bible tells us
in a couple of places that a thousand years are like a day to God. And so, we’d really like to think that
somehow, in the long run, all these terrible things we see and hear
about--whether we’re talking about the world or our country or our friends or
our families or even our own lives--we’d like to think that somehow, all these
terrible things make sense in the grand sweep of eternity, and that somehow God
is going to use it all for good and for God’s glory. But again, is that actually true? Do we actually believe it? Can we have that much faith? Can we put that much trust in God?
Well, I
want to tell you a story. It’s a true
story, a story that happened in my family.
Maybe you can think of a similar story that’s happened in your family.
My mother
was born in Youngstown, Ohio in 1925.
She was the fourth of five children born to Josef and Mary Nadenicek, immigrants
from what is now the Czech Republic. Her
father, my grandfather, Josef, was a Presbyterian minister in Youngstown.
On January
1, 1929, Josef Nadenicek passed away. My
mom was three years old. She has no
memory of him whatsoever. That, in and
of itself, left a hole in my mother’s life that she has never really been able
to fill, even all these years later. My
grandmother did not want to talk about him a lot--I suppose the pain of it was
very hard on her, too--but my mother has tried to learn all that she could
about him, trying to fill that hole in some way.
And of
course, along with the emotional pain, think about the family situation. There was my grandmother, a single mom with
five kids to raise. And of course, less
than a year later, the depression hit.
And there was my grandmother, doing everything she could to try to
scrape up enough money and enough food to raise five children in the middle of
the depression. She did all kinds of
things. She took in washing, she looked
after kids, she did anything she could to get enough money for her family.
Eventually,
she moved the family to South Dakota, where she had relatives. They settled in Yankton. That’s where my Mom grew up. She went to college in Springfield, got a
teaching certificate, and got a job teaching in Delmont. That’s where she met my Dad, who was farming
with his father about five and a half miles west of town.
Well, you
can probably figure out the rest of the story.
My mom and dad met, started dating, and eventually got married. They had three sons, one of whom, obviously,
is me. They have had seventy years of
married life together so far. Mom and
Dad have a wonderful love story. But
without my grandfather dying young, none of it would have happened.
When my
grandfather died, on January 1 of 1929, my grandmother must have thought it was
about the worst thing that could’ve happened.
Now don’t get me wrong, my grandmother was a woman of great faith. But still, she would not have been human if
sometimes she had not asked God, “Why?
Why did you let such a terrible thing happen? Why did you not heal my beloved Josef? He had so much to offer, not just to me, not
just to our family, but to his congregation and beyond. Why did you let it happen this way? Why did you not do something?”
I don’t
believe for a second that God is responsible for my grandfather dying. But God did bring something good out of
it. The good God brought out of it was
not apparent right away. In fact, it was
seventeen and a half years after my grandfather died that my mom and dad got
married.
Seventeen
and a half years is a long time, by human standards. How different was your life seventeen and a
half years ago? That’d be early
1999. I was a lawyer in Wessington
Springs and had no thought that I’d do anything else. How different will your life be seventeen and
a half years from now? That’ll be early
2033. Some of us won’t even be
here. If I’m still around, I’ll be
seventy-five and retired. Seventeen and
a half years seems like a long time to you and me. But as we said, God thinks long-term. That seventeen and a half years between my
grandfather dying and my mom and dad getting married was nothing to God.
It can be
hard to believe that God will bring something good out of every situation. It’s especially hard when we don’t see that
good right away. And of course,
sometimes it takes even longer than seventeen and a half years for it to
happen. Sometimes it takes a lot
longer. We may not even live to see the
good that God is going to bring out of a situation. But that does not mean the good will not
come.
Can we
trust that? Can we have that much
faith? Can we have that much
patience?
The Apostle Paul wrote that “hope
that is seen is no hope at all. Who
hopes for what they already have? But if
we hope for what we do not yet have, we wait for it patiently.”
It takes
patience. It takes hope. It takes faith. And it takes trust. “In all things God works for the good of
those who love him.” The Bible says
that. The Apostle Paul wrote it. Can we believe it? Can we trust God that much?
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