A Sermon from First Church, Scarborough…
A sermon offered by the Rev. Ian F. “Jack” Steeves in the public worship of the First Congregational Church of Scarborough, Maine on Sunday, July 29, 2007. The principal reading was Romans 8:26-30.
“We know that God works together in all things with those who love God who are called according to God’s purpose for good (Romans 8:28).”
“Working Together with God”
There have been bleak times in the course of human history and in our personal histories. The great human sorrow of present time is hopelessness. Hopelessness reigns wherever men and women, believers and seekers, do not know that God is present in their lives, for hopelessness says, the world cannot be helped and I cannot be helped. Most often we hope for only an improvement in our situation that comes through some exercise of human energy and not for a solution. There are many days when I am weary and worn beyond words. I have a “hope problem.” Last Sunday, today and for the next two Sundays services, I am going talk and I ask you to think about one four-letter word. The word is “hope.” We worship the God of things that are not yet, the God of things that are yet to be. That is both true and easy to say, and I have just done so; but hope, real hope, Christian hope, is not quite so easy to come by.
The Bible recognizes that there is such a thing as the truly tragic. Pain is real. Loss is real. Oppression is real. Evil is real. It is not illusory or unreal. Not every cloud has a silver lining. There is such a thing as the truly tragic.
While the tragic is real, and suffering and evil are real, the Bible says, they are not ultimate. They are not final. Christianity offers no real theoretical explanation for evil. It does point to the cross and says, there is no evil so dark and so obscene – not even the crucifixion – but that God can turn it to good.
God can turn all things to good. God is the essential source of Christian hope, and hope is expressed, as read this morning, in Romans 8:28. – “We know that in all things God works together for the good of those who love him [God] who have been called according to his [God’s] purpose” (NIV).
Unless this verse is understood correctly it can be very misleading. Misunderstood, it lets us off the hook. I want us to take a risk and go a little deeper. An alternative translation I find more compelling and more interesting. It reads the Greek words so that they say: “We know that God works together in all things with those who love God who are called according to God’s purpose for good (bold print and italic emphasis added).”
Here’s what I find instructive. This alternate translation suggests a role and a responsibility for those of us who love God and receive God’s call to work together with God to take the injustices and oppressions and the evils of the world and transforms them into good. The alternative translation says that we have a role to play. It does not let us off the hook.
What it means to love God and to be called by God is that we are the ones invited to work with God to make certain that evil does not have the last say but that evil is redeemed…that it is turned into something good. This is our work and responsibility.
It begins with you and me. It begins with our mistakes, errors and sins. We are real. Sin is real, too. We hurt one another, and are hurt ourselves by others. We hurt creation. We hurt God. We hurt ourselves. We hurt those we love the most.
Sin is real but it is not ultimate, even in our own lives. Forgiveness is real and it is ultimate. Loving God and being called to God’s purpose means working together with God, cooperating with God, to redeem our own sins and failures, and our own pasts.
We might add “all of the past,” to include the communal or corporate sins of the church. The Christian church has often been the perpetrator of great injustices and oppressions. Church history is ripe with the sordid details.
The list of things in my past that I feel really guilty and bothered about has diminished in number, and I am working with God to redeem those. I have come to realize that some of things I used to feel guilty about were the wrong things to feel guilty about, and I let them go. Other things I feel guilty about are actually at the heart of my spiritual life. They have taught me humility and patience and tolerance and forgiveness. Having been forgiven a multitude of sins, errors and mistakes, and knowing that I have been forgiven, makes it imperative that I forgive others. There are a couple of things that I have not been able to get passed as yet – and I discover that they are more often sins of omission (of not doing or not saying something that I should) than sins of commission (of doing or saying something that I should not). I find myself worrying more about the former than the latter these days, and about the times I have not been brave enough or dedicated enough to my Lord and His people.
The goal of our lives, as I understand it, is not to avoid sinning but to live so fully, more fully, that God can work together with us to redeem our sins in the people we are becoming. There is hope for all of us.
Hope is not passive waiting but active expecting. We do not just wait hoping. We do something as we wait hoping. Years ago (1969), Loren Eiseley (“The Unexpected Universe”) painted a haunting portrait of a star-thrower. It is a story and an image that has long remained with me. Walking on a beach (Costabel), Eiseley comes across a solitary human figure stooping over a starfish. “‘It’s still alive,’ I (Eiseley) said. ‘Yes,” said the stranger and with a quick yet gentle movement he picked up the star and spun it…far out into the sea… ‘It may live,’ he said, ‘if the offshore pull is strong enough…The stars throw well. One can help them.’” So Eiseley and the stranger went along the beach stooping down, picking up the starfish, and throwing them back into the sea in the hope that they might live. Later, pondering their deeds, Eiseley wrote, “Somewhere…there is a hurler of stars, and he walks, because he chooses, always in desolation, but not in defeat” (“The Unexpected Universe,” pp. 69-91).
Hope is always to be held close to the things that would deny it. Hope is never an escape. It cannot be an escape. Hope always brings us back to the huge and terrifying problems of our time. Some one has said, “Expectation makes life good.” To be expectant, even in days with vast and seemingly unmanageable problems is to act like a star thrower in expectation of life rather than being overwhelmed and defeated.
The only hope we have is in front of us, leading and guiding us to a time and a place and a condition where neither we nor anyone else has ever been (period). The “good old days” may well be in the past, the “good life” is not. The good life, whose object, like that of hope, is a future good, is difficult but still possible to obtain. It enables us to live now that which we seek.
As a young boy, I observed the celebration of the Lord’s Supper. In the congregation of my childhood, Communion was originally held only four or five times a year. Later the custom changed to the first Sunday of the month, every month of the year. It was a simple service with the congregation as spectators. The minister was the only one who spoke. The table (never called an “altar”) was covered with a white linen cloth, and the stacked, silver trays that contained the little glasses of grape juice (always purple, never white) glistened in the morning light. There was no flagon or chalice. There were two silver plates with carefully cut and cubed white bread (always store bought), covered with white napkins. The minister stood behind the table, the deacons (always males) stood to his right and left. What was most impressive was the speaking of St. Paul’s Words of Institution: “For as often as ye eat this bread and drink this cup, ye do shew the Lord’s death till he come” (I Corinthians 11:26, KJV).
That one sentence moved the service and the thinking worshipers from a memorial of the past to a hope for the future. We understood that we ate and drank the meal because Jesus had commanded us to do it in memory of him. The phrase that impressed me more was the forward-looking words, that we were to “eat this bread, and drink this cup,” showing the Lord’s death, “till he come.” “Till he come” was about the future. In those words, describing our central Christian act, I realized that ours was meant to be a faith for the future and not just of the past. The only way to get to the future is by hope, for hope moves us from here to there.
Hope is so strange a thing in a world like ours that, I sometimes wonder that God must be constantly surprised when God’s people, in all their diversity and conditions, can and do hope. The words will stand for this morning. We will pick them up again, next Sunday morning. I leave you with a re-write of a verse from Paul’s love song (I Corinthians 13). If the Apostle was writing today, rather than 2,000 years ago, he might conclude, not “And now abideth faith, hope, love and the greatest of these is love,” but rather, “And now abideth faith, hope, love and the greatest of these is hope.” Amen.
