August 14, 2011
What Will You Say? - Romans 8:28-39
Pastor: Luke Maybry
DownloadI normally don’t follow the stock market very closely, but I have been this week because I do follow politics, and the political story over the last several weeks has been the deficit showdown, which spurned a lowering of our country’s credit rating, which spurned some trouble on Wall Street. Like many of you, I have some money in the stock market, and the question came to me, as I was watching it crash on Monday, what would I do if it completely crashed. What would I say? What would you say? Especially if you’ve invested your whole retirement in it, or if you’ve always preached the benefits of it, and now you’ve lost everything. What would you say? We ask that question all the time, about everything.
It’s called a contingency, and we do it all the time. As long as we have something to say, or something to do, then we’re fine. If I get hurt running, I’ll swim or ride my bike, if I lose my job, I’ll pull from savings to make the payments, if I lose it all in the stock market, then I’ll go back to work. As long as we have an answer. What will you say? Paul knew all about that question. Christianity in Paul’s day was a very small thing, mostly made up of minorities, and women, and poor people, and the lower classes. The idea then, and unfortunately now in many circles, is that you’ll know you found God when you start prospering. It’s sort of a tit for tat type thing, you see. You make God happy, and God will make you happy. So if you’re not happy, then you’ve obviously not made God happy, or you’ve made the wrong god happy. Does that make sense? As far as early Christians went, they had nothing to show for their faith. If prosperity was the mark of true faith, then Christians obviously had not found it, because they were anything but prosperous in Paul’s day.
What will you say when…, then, was a question that Paul would be very familiar with. What will you say when you wind up in jail, for example, as Paul did? What will you say when you’re broke, or sick, or in serious jeopardy, if not because of, then certainly in spite of your faith? To the outside world, Paul did not have an answer to that. He had no contingency. What will you say when…? The main thing, according to Paul, is what God has said. To make a long story short, God has us. God made us, and in Christ, God has saved us, and in the Holy Spirit, God sanctifies us. God does all of that. Whether the stock market crashes, or the doctor gives you terrible diagnosis, or your children, whom you love more that life itself, go hog wild and self destruct and get in trouble, or even whether you end up dead, God has you and God loves you. Or, as I have said countless times and as I have summed up the Reformed Tradition countless times, God is God, and God is good. Almighty God has spoken your name. God has chosen you, predestined you, for ordained, justified you. God has done all of that. God is the subject. We are the object. And the verb is a positive, good verb. Or, as Eugene Peterson once said, we’re the object of a preposition. “God is for us.” And since God created the world and is God over the world, nothing in the world, or on top or of it, or beyond it, or under it, or beside it… nothing can change that. “Gone forever,” writes Paul Achtemeier, “the temptation to assume ill fortune is evidence of God’s rejection of us. Banished once and for all the temptation to conclude that when things go badly, it means God has deserted us. Nothing significant can therefore be against us.”
What will you say when? This is the second time this week that I’ve read this passage from this pulpit and the second time some of you have heard it. I first read it on Monday at Polly Gallant’s funeral. I said then at her funeral that I never knew Polly back in her good years. I knew her when she was sick, very sick. But many of you knew her in her prime. She was beautiful back then. She was energetic. She worked in one of the hottest stores in town (Harris Hart) that sold the hottest clothes in town. She wore those clothes better than anybody else. And she had fun. She and Evelyn Irvin got in to all sorts of trouble back in those days. They were a fit to be tied. Life was good.
But then she got Parkinson’s and the bottom fell out. When I knew her all of that was gone. I saw a lady who could not get out of bed, who couldn’t feed herself, or clothe herself. For years and years and years, she suffered immensely. She ended up the way that nobody wants to end up. It’s easy for me to say that Paul is right, that nothing at all can separate us from the love of God, and that God is sovereign. It would probably be a little harder for Polly to say that. But she did say it, all the way to the very end, and she believed it, and she experienced God’s love in some profound ways. She now knows in ways that we can only imagine.
Now that’s Polly. I’ve never had to worry about many externals threats Polly had to face evil. Parkinson’s disease was and is evil. But what about sin? In many, many ways, the greatest enemy that any of us have ever had is ourselves. That’s the great farce in contemporary culture, I think. Everything is centered around making us happy, but we’re the problem. We have more at our fingertips than anybody ever in human history. And it’s killing us very rapidly. If the dysfunction of the current debt debate shows anything at all, it’s that. What will you say when you self destruct, as most human beings do at some point? America evidently doesn’t have an answer for that. Paul does, even for that.
Ben Chamness, who at one time was the United Methodist Bishop in Central Texas, was fond of telling this story. After Adam and Eve ate the apple, Satan and God had a little meeting. And Satan, thinking that he had won, shoved that apple that Adam and Eve ate in God’s mouth. Satan had managed to make God mute. “What will you say now,” he seems to ask God. Well God couldn’t say anything for a while, but finally motioned to Satan that he had one thing to say, only one word. Satan thought for a minute that surely whatever that word was, it could never change what Satan had brought into the world. What Satan (or the snake) did in that garden was a stroke on pure genius, you see. Had he sent a lightning bolt or something to zap the tree, or zap the garden, then God could have just fixed it, but no, Satan turned Adam and Eve against ultimately themselves. It’s just genius, you see. So how could one word change that stroke of genius? So Satan said, “alright, God, say your word.” Satan took the apple out of God’s mouth, and God said, “Jesus.” That’s all God needed to say. And that’s what God did.
When we come to God’s house, we come from many different places and situations. We bring all of that with us when we come to Church. We just do. One of the reasons that I like to run is so I can escape some of my situation for awhile. That’s why we drink alcohol, or sometimes why eat too much, or whatever it is. We all have escapes, and we arguably need those escapes. But the problem with all of those escapes is that they’re temporary, and they ultimately don’t address that question. What will you say when…? We bring all of those threats to Church with us, not to minimize them, or escape from them for an hour every Sunday morning. We bring all of that to Church and lay all of that at God’s feet, knowing that whatever it is, God is greater. “Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Will hardship, or distress or persecution or famine or nakedness or peril or sword? We’ve always heard that ‘we are being killed all the day long. We are accounted as sheep to be slaughtered.’ No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, not rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.” What will I say when…? That.
In the Name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, Amen.
