Sermon: "What Is There to Lose?"

WHAT IS THERE TO LOSE?
Romans 8:26-39
September 3, 2006


"All things work together for good for those who love God."
That verse reminds me of some of the sayings that we've come to know; little phrases or mantras of wisdom to get us through-- proverbs that others have passed onto us. Maybe you can think of some too:
"God doesn't give us anything we can't handle."
"It must be God's will."
"There's a reason for everything."
"What doesn't kill you makes you stronger."

Or when someone dies, people may say: "They're in a much better place." "God must have needed them more than we do." "They were just too good for this world." And many of these statements are spoken by people who have good intentions, who want to help, who just need to say something. But all too often, these statements don't work, do they? And if they don't, then sometimes we might feel guilty about questioning their truth....
"God doesn't give us anything we can't handle." Have you ever questioned that? I have! What about all those people in psychiatric wards and institutions? What about when someone takes their own life? What about the death of a spouse or a child? What about a fatal car accident?
"It must have been God's will." How is it God's will that a child suffer and die? How is it God's will for someone to get cancer? How it is God's will for anyone, much less a young person, to die in a car accident??
"There is a reason for everything." Is this true? Is there a reason for the senseless suffering and horrors that happen in the world? Do we believe in a God whose will it is to kill a child? A youth? Or to make good people suffer? Is THAT God's will? And if that's God's will, what kind of God are we talking about? Certainly not one who created all that is good and right and holy. Certainly not a God who is Good, who is Love, who is Compassion, who is Mercy. How can any form of evil be God's will?
"What doesn't kill you makes you stronger." Well, I've seen plenty of people who aren't physically dead but who are walking around dead inside, traumatized by some event, some loss, some senseless tragedy. It doesn't seem to make them stronger.
The thing is, with all these statements, there are times that they ring true, but there are plenty of exceptions to all of them as well. I'm convinced that we hear the worst blasphemies when someone dies:
"God needed them more than we do." Isn't that pretty selfish of God to give us someone so precious and then snatch them away?
"They're in a much happier place." Well, that's true, but maybe right now I can't be happy for them because I want them HERE, and God knows that.
"They were too good for this world." What does that say about you and me that are still here?? Or the people that get to live long and healthy lives? Does that mean that we're not good enough for heaven?
When my friend died suddenly from cancer at the age of 39, I told God he was mistaken if he thought I could handle this. It was the first time I really doubted that God knew what he was doing, especially if God thought taking Sandie away from her family was ok for any of us. I went through a real faith crisis. People said God wouldn't give me anything that I couldn't handle! I prayed for her, she had young children who needed her. She was a good person, with a lot of good gifts to offer the world, a very loving person. There was no good reason for her to die. At the time, I couldn't handle it. I felt betrayed.
Have you been there? When you realize that all those proverbs that you memorized don't stand up to real life? When you face the exceptions to those words of wisdom?
"We know that all things work together for good for those who love God and who are called according to his purpose." One might think that if they are bombarded with tragedy then maybe they don't love God enough. Maybe they're not good enough. Another difficult passage is the verse following that, verse 29: "For those whom he foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, in order that he might be the firstborn within a large family. And those whom he predestined he also called."
When I was in college, and most of you know I went to a Christian college, my roommate was from the Christian Reforemd tradition, who believe in predestination. According to my roommate, they believed that God predestined people for heaven and some for hell, that no matter what we do in this life, if we are predestined for hell, we're doomed anyway, and so the best we can do is simply... well, hope for the best. We got into a lot of heated arguments, because as I said, how can God be good and loving and just and create people with the intention of sending them to hell?? Why would God assign heaven or hell to someone ahead of time? So that a murderer or rapist could go to heaven, while a saint goes to hell, just because God predestined it that way?
We never came to an agreement, but in my studies sine then, I've come to realize and be assured that that's not what Paul OR God intended at all. Paul never meant, I don't believe, for those words to be taken as a doctrine that God chose some and didn't choose others as if we're all a part of some cosmic game of chance. In actuality, the verse says that God foreknew us and predestined us to be conformed to the image of Jesus Christ. When the Bible speaks of God knowing humans, it means that God has a relationship with humans, a purpose for us and a plan. Look at the Old Testament. God had a plan all along, and people kept messing it up, kept throwing it back into God's face-- because we and they have a choice to refuse our destiny. But it is the destiny of us all to be God's children, to live according to the example of Jesus Christ. We have the opportunity to claim that and run with it or to throw it away and do our own thing.
From the beginning, God marks all of us as God's own at our baptisms. We are marked from birth as God's children. What we do with that is up to us. We are free to blow it, or to embrace it. And in time we have the opportunities to choose for ourselves whether we will claim our destiny or choose something else that will always be so much less. The whole context of Paul's letter to the Romans focuses on the struggle between doing God's will in this world and doing our own or somebody elses'. It's about the hell we often go through in order to finally claim our destiny.
"All things work together for good for those who love God and who are called according to his purpose." That doesn't mean that if we behave, we won't face trouble. A few years after pauls' letter to the Romans was written, Christians in Rome would be led into the coliseum, torn apart by wild animals for entertainment. They would huddle in the middle of the arena and pray and sing and maybe even weep as the animals move toward them while the people in the stands cheer and call for their blood. Looking into the jaws of death, those Christians would possess a peace that passed understanding, because they knew who they were, and to whom they belonged and no one can take that away. I bet they were scared! I bet they were scared to death, even in the midst of that peace of knowing God's presence; even in believing that they would soon be with Christ. We can stand firm on faith even while our legs are trembling, when our stomachs are churning and our world seems to have fallen apart. When there are no good answers to our questions.
Why do good people suffer and die? We don't know. But we do know that God understands the horror of that, for God showed up in the flesh of Jesus Christ-- the essence of goodness, holiness and perfection-- the essence of God. And Jesus' reward for staying true to the Gospel he lived and proclaimed seemed to be a vicious death at the hands of his enemies. But God raised him from the dead to say, "death never wins. Evil never wins."
Jesus walked through the fire ahead of us, to show us that life conquers death, and by his spirit, we, too, can triumph over death. If I've learned anything by growing up-- and I'm still working on it!-- it's that life is messy and unpredictable, life doesn't fit a set of easy rules, that if you do this, this will happen, and if you don't do this, that won't happen. It's not that simple, in fact, life is sometimes very hard and disappointing, but that doesn't make the promises any less true. Human proverbs don't stand up to the reality of this world, but God's promises ultimately do.
Verse 35 says, "as it is written, for your sake we are being killed all day long, we are accounted as sheep to be slaughtered." It's a quote from Psalm 44, verse 22. It's a psalm of God's people trying to do God's will in a world that seems awfully allergic to it! It's a psalm of unshakeable trust in God no matter what, it's about how trying to do God's will in this world will put us at odds with the rest of the world, but we will go on trusting God nonetheless.
My friend John in Florida once said to me, "The impossible just takes a little longer." And that's one of my new proverbs. The impossible just takes a little bit longer....
because.... "who will separate us from the love of Christ? Hardship, distress, persecution, famine, nakedness, peril or sword? No... in all these things we are more than conquerers through Him who loved us. For I am convinced (and Paul ought to know!) that neither death nor life nor angels nor rulers nor power nor height nor depth nor anything else in all of creation will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord..."
What have we got to lose?