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Phil Blackwell

“The Coherent God”
Romans 8:26-39
Rev. Philip L. Blackwell

My mother always used to say, “Don’t worry, Phil, everything will turn out all right.”  Of course, she was wrong; not everything works out fine.  You know the voice from the bleachers, “Okay, guys, 15 to tie and 16 to win; you can do it.”  We hear it a lot on the north side these days.  But then, they lose by 14.

Everything does not turn out all right in our lives in small ways and big ways.  We know that to be the truth.  So, that is why I find this verse so challenging, “We know that all things work together for good for those who love God.”  Really?  If things go badly does that mean that we do not love God enough?

My wife and I have a friend who gave us this, a brief version of the scriptural passage, “God works for good in everything.”  It hangs on our wall at home and haunts me every time I glance at it as I pass by.  It does not comfort me but challenges me.

The one who gave it to us is not naïve.  His daughter, Bonnie, was killed fifteen years ago as she crossed a street in downtown Indianapolis.  It was a rainy, grey late Friday afternoon, and she had the right-of-way, but that made no difference when a bus driver, not seeing her, turned left and ran over her.

Bonnie was married, had a good start to her career, and was a faithful church member; she had everything going for her.  And then, she was dead.  She officially was pronounced dead on Saturday, her father’s birthday.  The next day was Mother’s Day.

“God works for good in everything.”  Really?

The father used that verse as his mantra.  It was what got him through.  How did he make sense of it?  How did he understand Paul’s affirmation of faith in light of the tragic death of his daughter?

First, not all things are good.  Being hit by a bus is not good.  Contracting a serious disease is not good.  Having a relationship shattered is not good.  Losing a cherished job is not good.  War is not good.  Earthquakes are not good.  Refugees dislocated by drought is not good.  Poverty, homelessness, violence, racism . . . how long can we make the list of things that are not good?  And the Apostle Paul is not polyannic about any of this.  No, not all things are good, but what good can come out of even the most tragic circumstance?

Bonnie’s father speaks for himself.  “At the very time Bonnie died, and ever since, I have looked for ways that good might come out of our tragedy.  My primary motivation in doing so is my belief that God works for good in everything.  God does not cause a lot of things to happen.  They just simply happen.  And the reason they happen doesn’t have to be determined.”

So, what good came of Bonnie’s death?  First, the family donated all useful organs for transplantation, and now there are people alive who would not be.  Second, for four years they drew together a team to build houses under the guidance of Habitat for Humanity in Indianapolis, a project dubbed within the family circle “Bonnie Builds.”  Third, they established an endowed scholarship at DePauw University in Indiana where Bonnie attended in order to send students on winter term service trips like the ones Bonnie loved to go on.  Fourth, the father has written some books and articles and led some seminars on what he found to be true.  And fifth, it changed his outlook, and that of the family and close circle of friends, as to what is really important in life.

None of that expels the pain of Bonnie’s death, but none of those “goods” coming out of this tragedy were automatic.  It took the belief among people who loved Bonnie so dearly that God might work something good out of something so obviously bad in order for people to see the possibilities.  The love of God, trust in God, the basic baseline belief that God will not mock us, no matter how bad things are . . . it can direct us in ways that lead to good.

It is strange how it works together, an unexpected coherence that brings together life and death, and life again . . . the transplants, the new homes, the scholarships, the sharing of the story, the new eyes to see and ears to hear and hearts to feel and hands to serve which bring life out of death.

I got an e-mail from the Steppenwolf Theater last week, a personal e-mail.  I thought maybe they needed someone to play an aging pastor with gray hair who had not given up yet on saving the world, but instead they wanted my opinion on the Book of Job.  Two of their troupe are working on a play about Job, and they are asking several clergy what we see in it that is important.  They will quote me in the “Playbill” if I say anything interesting.

Well, the Book of Job present a perfect script for debating the validity of the verse that Paul writes, “All things work together for good for those who love God.”  But, first we must disregard for our purposes today the first two chapters and the last chapter of the book, the parentheses written in prose in which God and the Devil make a bet on whether or not Job will crack under the strain of all of his suffering.  This is a storyline that does not reflect well upon God, gives the Devil equal billing, and reduces Job to a helpless puppet who loses everything – family, friends, land, and livestock; he is reduced to a boil-covered beggar who, however, never loses his composure and ultimately is rewarded by God with the return of all of his loses many times over.
But turn the page to the poetry of Chapter 3 and here is Job unhinged.  There is nothing patient about this man.  For the next 36 chapters he rails against God over the unfairness of life and curses the very day of his birth.  “Let the day perish in which I was born, and the night that said, ‘A man-child is conceived.’  Let that day be darkness!  May God above not seek it, or light shine upon it.”  How is that for an opening line!  “Why did I not die at birth, come forth from the womb and expire?”  Nothing good can come out of my life, screams Job.

He has done nothing wrong, but here he sits on a scrap heap, a laughingstock to his friends, dogs licking his oozing sores, with nothing to protect him but his indignation.  He tells God to go away.  “I loathe my life; I would not live forever.  Let me alone, for my days are a breath.”  Then Job turns Psalm 8 on its ear.  The psalmist sings of God’s loving attention to something as small as a human being in the magnitude of the whole creation.  “When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars that you have established; what are human beings that you are mindful of them, mortals that you care for them?” (Ps.8:3,4)  Job twists it inside out.  “What are human beings, that you make so much of them, that you set your mind on them, visit them every morning, test them every moment?”  Can’t you at least turn around, God, so that I can swallow my spit?

What we have here is a lover’s quarrel with God.  Job loves God and will not let go of God.  Job wants to hold God accountable.  If Job did not love God there would be no quarrel, just resignation to the pain and unfairness of life.  Loving God makes things harder for us because we cannot settle for simple answers to the hard questions of life . . .Why me?  Why this?  Why now?

Job’s three friends, for their part, echo the conventional wisdom.  “Job, if you are suffering this much then it must be because God is punishing you.  Tell us what you did wrong to deserve this; we are dying to know.  And then confess to God, and everything will turn out all right.”

But Job is innocent.  His suffering is unrelated to any sinfulness on his part.  And his faith will not let him give up until he works out an understanding of how this all fits together, how everything coheres in the love of God.

It is a wonderful book for us to have.  How courageous of the ones who assembled the Bible to include such a radical screed of indignation directed toward God.  Job gives us a vocabulary to curse God and still remain within the context of faith.

This lover’s quarrel is one-sided until God finally responds to Job’s cries for understanding.  God actually gives no explanation but places Job as a human being in the enormity of all creation.  “Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?” God asks and goes on in a series of questions to contend that much of life is beyond human understanding, that things are more complex than we first thought.  What truth we can discern, that all things work for good for those who love God, for instance, is revealed along the frontier of our knowledge.  And in the end Job is satisfied

Loving God does not mean that we will understand everything that happens in life, but it does insist that we struggle to make sense out of our world.  It is based on the premise that, no matters what happens to us, God does not mock us.  That is a statement of faith; that is a conclusion of love.  The other option is to concede that nothing means anything, that life is without shape or form and it is just one dreadful thing after another.

That now is a question that the people of Norway will need to answer, as well as all of us looking on from a distance.  After the deadly bombing of a government building and a mass shooting at a youth camp run by the ruling political party, how many of us thought, “Al-
Qaeda”?  There would be a precedent for that immediate conclusion, of course; stereotyping is a quick way of making sense of things.  But first reports suggest that the killer is a blue-eyed, blond hair, right wing, police officer-impersonating, 32-year old, Norwegian male Christian fundamentalist.

And if it turns out that it was someone whose love for God as shaped by our Christian tradition led him to commit his murderous acts, what does that say about how we love God?  This is a gut-check time for God lovers as much as Oklahoma City, Ruby Ridge, the Koresh Compound, and Kool-Aid in Guyana.

Some of us were talking the other day about the tenth anniversary of 9/11 being on a Sunday.  What will we do within our own congregation that morning, and what will we do as a community of various world’s religions in a public way?  Do religious people have a word to say on 9/11?  Words will be spoken, and if last year is any indication, belligerent acts will be done, some in the name of God.  The ninth anniversary did not go well; the tenth poses a major problem and a major opportunity for us.  How can we understand the tenth anniversary as both a time to look back and remember, but also as a time to look forward?  What good can come out of the 10th anniversary?

And someone said, “Do you remember for those few days after 9/11 when there were no airplanes flying and no baseball games being played, and frankly, not much work being done, how nice people were to each other?  Travelers stuck in the wrong city, people standing in lines to buy things, even strangers on the el being remarkably kind to one another.  There was an essential humanity that was reached even in the most strenuous of times.  There was a deeper meaning to life that was revealed under the extremities of the crisis.”

The love of God calls us to struggle to find the meaning of life not only in the midst of a crisis, but in the midst of daily life, when everything goes back to normal.  How can it be that everything works for good, that everything coheres in a God who is for us?  What a brave proclamation of Paul in a world of fear and doubt, his world and ours – if God is for us then who can be against us?  Nothing can separate us from the love of God because God’s love is so strong even when ours is weak.  Not death, not life, not angels, not rulers, not things present or things to come, not powers, not height, not depth, not anything else in all creation can separate us from God’s love.

It is in the context of such fierce loved offered by God that we seek to find how all things work for good and how we are called to participate in that good work.  Amen.