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God Helps Us in All Things

The Rev. Thomas W. Simmons

As interesting as the parables of our Gospel lesson are this morning, I find our Epistle reading particularly compelling. Romans eight is just so rich and relevant to our mission of Building Christians for Service. I guess that’s why I’m preaching it these three Sundays.

It reminds me of 10^th Presbyterian Church, the biggest and most happening church in Philadelphia.  I visited there two times in Seminary: once when I had first arrived at school and then four years later when a friend joined the staff. 

On my first visit, the pastor, Dr. James Montgomery Boise, was preaching through the book of Romans. He preached a very detailed expository sermon on three or four verses from chapter three. Well guess what? When I went back Dr. Boise he was still in Romans. I think he was up to chapter fourteen by then.

I thought to myself, at St John’s we’ve been through the entire Bible in the three-year lectionary cycle and they haven’t been out of Romans!  Those Presbyterians!  But it certainly does illustrate the great richness of the book of Romans.  So I think it’s entirely appropriate, in memory of Dr. Boise who recently passed away, to spend a few weeks in Romans chapter 8.

In fact, I’d love to have two Sundays just to preach today’s lesson. In it Paul describes how “God helps us in our weakness,” as he says in the first verse of our text. He focuses on two weaknesses in particular: 1) our weakness in prayer and 2) our weakness in dealing with “all things” that life throws at us.

I had intended to spend some time looking at each, but as I worked on it, I knew I needed to focus on just one: dealing with “all things” that life throws at us.  

Paul says God makes “all things work together for good for those who love God and are called according to his purpose.”  “ All things…for good” You know, life is beautiful and there is much to enjoy and be glad for, but we also know that life can be pretty ugly.

The world is a chaotic and dangerous place.  Tragedy is indiscriminate and strikes without warning. Those trapped miners and their brave rescuers in Pennsylvania know that in a very personal way.  As do the parents of these poor abducted children.  I think that’s the “all things” Paul is talking about here.

We saw it last week in our lessons.  Evil is sown like weeds into the world and the creation itself is subject to futility, decay and death.  People do evil things to us and we do evil to others and it hurts.  We all bear the scars that result. 

So we take precautions to try to control our lives and protect ourselves. We buy insurance, buckle our seat belts, move our investments into cash, look both ways before crossing the street and tell our children not to talk to strangers.  We work very hard to control our lives and environments, to reduce the variables, to “leave nothing to chance.”   We are control freaks!

I think it’s a cultural thing for us.  For the last few centuries, probably since Isaac Newton defined the physical and mechanical laws that govern the universe, we in the West have steadily tried to push back the frontiers of chaos and unpredictability.  We have come to believe we can bend the world to our will. 

And we have accomplished much. We have put a man on the moon, created unprecedented prosperity and made life safer and more secure than anyone could have dreamed a century ago.

But how much control do we really have? Consider the economy, one of the most chaotic and unpredictable forces of nature.  Just a few years ago people were marveling how we had transcended the ups and downs, the scarcity and psychology of the market.  But now that song has changed!

It seems the more we push the edge of the envelope, trying to understand and control the world around us, the more we confront the randomness, relativity, chaos and utter unpredictability of the universe. Or perhaps it confronts us!

Scientists are abandoning the Newtonian mechanics most of us learned it in high school science and are probing deeper into relativity and chaos theory. They are experimenting with fractals, dynamics, interconnected systems and irreducible complexity.  We are learning in some disturbing ways that life and the world is far more erratic and unpredictable than we had earlier imagined. 

We are learning, as Karl Popper, the brilliant scientist and philosopher, said in his lecture Of Clocks and Clouds, that the world is more like a cloud than a clock.  Clouds symbolize systems that are highly variable and erratic. 

At the other end of the spectrum are clocks, which are very orderly, uniform and predictable.  All of us are serious devotees of the clock.  We allow it to completely regulate our life. We wear clocks on our bodies and we hang them like the cross in some of the most prominent places of our homes. In fact, I was “racing against the clock” last night to finish this sermon!

But no matter how hard you try, does you life “go like clockwork?” Alas, to my frequent irritation, my life runs more like “cloud-work.” We are always at the mercy of the unknown, the unpredictable, the uncontrollable – the children.  Each day is as variable as the movements of the clouds of the sky and life never turns out as you expect. C’est la vie!

So here we are in our unpredictable, chaotic and often dangerous world.  How should we respond? Paul directs our attention to God and his sovereign control of the cosmos. “If God is for us, who is against us?” Paul is issuing a challenge: come on chaos, evil and death. Bring it on! “If God is for us WHO is against us?”

God is victorious! And he transforms the worst that they can do to our benefit.  You see this on the cross, where evil appeared to win its biggest victory. The Son of God, weak and helpless, appeared to be done in by his enemies! But God turned this defeat to crowning victory through the resurrection. He does the same thing in countless ways in all of our lives. 

“He makes all things work together for good,” with a simple goal in mind: that you and I might “be conformed to the image of his Son.”  If you love God and are called according to his purpose, this is what God is achieving in your life.  And he is using “all things” – the good the bad and the ugly – to shape our characters to increasingly resemble Christ’s. That’s how God is Building Christians for service.

And though your life is messed up, weak and chaotic, God’s purpose is as sure as eternity. You see God came up with this plan before you were born. “Those whom he foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of this Son.” In God’s mind, from eternity past to eternity future, the outcome is secure.  So we can be secure, too, in the insecurity of our world.

One of my favorite writers, Leonard Sweet asks, “Can you surrender to life’s surprises?  Can you entertain epiphanies that come out of the clouds?  Or do you try to wrest control of life and turn clouds into clocks?”

Finding peace and being successful in life is not a matter of getting control of life, as so many think.  It is trusting God even while life is out of control, because God helps us in our weakness. 

When viewed in this light, I think it’s clear that the Christian life is not an in-control life, but rather an out-of-control life. It is lived by disciples who will take the risk of placing all of life in the sovereign hands of God, knowing that he makes “all things work together for good...” so we might “be conformed to the likeness of Christ.”   AMEN