I was sitting in the waiting room at my oncologist’s office, an imposing volume of Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics on my lap, waiting for what my medical team euphemistically calls maintenance chemo.
On almost every visit, I’m the youngest person in the waiting room— a point of irritation which I often express to the Lord with less than sanctified language.
But on this day, an Indian family was sitting across from me, a middle-aged husband and wife.
Their daughter, no higher than my elbow, snuggled in between them.
The little girl’s eyes looked hollow with exhaustion, her once tan skin almost translucent, and her dark hair already nearly as thin as mine.
As the mother brushed the girl’s hair with her hand and whispered assurance into her daughter’s ear, I noticed a silver cross hung from her neck and lay draped against her blouse.
For her part, the girl calmly looked at the glossy pictures of far away places in a wrinkled back issue of a travel magazine.
When a nurse with a clipboard called the family’s last name, they stood up and gathered their things.
“Good luck,” I said to them.
I’d only meant by it a show of camaraderie, like we’ve all been drafted as teammates for a sport none of us wants to play.
“Luck?” the girl’s mother said like she hadn’t heard me right.
I nodded and gestured to the infusion lab, “Good luck.”
The mother shook her head with a look.
It was just shy of disdain— surprise, I’d say.
She glanced at the book on my lap and then looked at me, as if wondering why anyone would read such a book— Church Dogmatics— if they were not a believer.
“Good luck,” I said again, thinking maybe their English was the problem.
This time the girl’s father shook his head.
“We’re Christian,” he explained, as though he was unpacking a lesson as elementary as the Golden Rule, “We don’t believe in luck.”
And with his arm around his little girl, rendered rail thin by life-saving poison, they walked into the infusion lab as though from another world.
I should’ve known better than to speak of luck.
When I was a chaplain at Trenton State Prison, every Friday I made the pastoral rounds to those in solitary confinement. Don’t let the Shawshank stories mislead you. For the most part, the men in solitary were the most unpleasant, unrepentant lot you could imagine. All claimed to be innocent. All stretched the edges of my Christian mercy, and all were surely that way before they were isolated for all but an hour a day.
On one of my first shifts, after I got buzzed through the double lock-up doors, I presented my identification badge to the officer in charge, Officer Baltimore, and he began to sign me into the register. Officer Baltimore was built like a linebacker. The only thing bigger than his torso was his smile. I introduced myself. He called me reverend. Come to think of it, he may be the first person ever to address me by my office. At the time, the title made me uncomfortable and so, feeling awkward, I tried to change the subject.
“Not very lucky are you, getting this assignment?”
“Lucky?” he said, surprised, “You know, reverend. Surely, you know? Chance has got nothing to do with it. There’s a reason I’m here. I don’t know it, YET, but there’s a reason I’m here.”
We were within arm’s reach of one another but it was like we were worlds apart.
Harvard geologist Stephen Jay Gould argues that you can look to two different pieces of art in Florence, Italy to grasp our two, often overlapping, sometimes colliding, worlds, the world of the Bible and the world after the scientific revolution. Gould writes:
“Scene one: A painting by the 15th century artist, Michelino, hangs in the great cathedral of Santa Maria Del Fiore. It shows the entire universe on a single canvas, the earth occupies the center, symbolized by Florence. At Dante's right, the souls of the damned move downwards to the inferno, while those to be saved slowly mount the spiral of purgatory. The seven semi-circles at the top are the seven planets of Ptolemy's earth-centered system.
For scene two: Take a short walk to the Franciscan Church of Santa Croce, and find the tomb of Galileo. The face of the statue of Galileo looks upward toward his now expanded heaven. Galileo holds a telescope in his right hand, and in his left hand, he holds a small insignificant sphere.
Earth.
In just two centuries, the Earth had been displaced from centrality to the peripheral status of a little hunk of stone suspended in the midst of inconceivable empty vastness.”
The same year Galileo died, Robert Boyle, a wealthy student touring Europe, read Galileo's Dialogue Concerning Two Chief World Systems. In reading it, Boyle fully accepted Galileo's heliocentric worldview— our world is not the center of the universe.
Later, when Boyle wrote his famous Disposition about Final Causes of Natural Things, Boyle ridiculed people who still believe God would create something so vast as the universe and something so huge as the sun simply to glorify himself by means of this inconsequential place called Earth.
As a result, Boyle developed a mechanistic view of the universe; that is, the universe is not the sustained handiwork of the Almighty but a great, impersonal, clanking machine, grinding away without recourse to purpose or meaning or direction.
Tellingly, Boyle’s Disposition didn’t do away with God outright. He instead took the Holy One of Israel, smoothed out all his primitive rough patches, and turned him into the god that most Americans with a bachelor’s degree now believe, a kind of divine Steve Jobs who did such a good job in building the universe that he’s now relocated to some celestial Key West. He’d love it if you called from time to time and he hopes to see you one day on the sandy beaches of the great by-and-by but, otherwise, he’s retired.
This is the officially sanctioned and rigorously enforced assumption of the world in which we live and it even encroaches into our theological speech. For example, Rabbi Harold Kushner in his regrettably still popular book, When Bad Things Happen to Good People (FYI: “No one is good but God,” said Rabbi Jesus), is adamant that there is no agency behind the unfortunate events that befall us in our lives. When bad things happen to sinners, it could be caused by other sinners or it might be a simple twist of luck, a glitch in the matrix, or your turn through the gears of this “inconceivable empty vastness.”
What it most definitely is not, Kushner insists, is God.
We modern people have moved from the simplistic realization that not everything that happens in the world happens because God willed it to the even narrower and more dogmatic assertion that God will not and cannot do anything.
I remember as a young pastor—
Betty, a curmudgeonly matriarch in my congregation, suffered a prolonged stay at the University Hospital in Charlottesville due to leukemia. Several times a week for several weeks I drove the forty minutes or so to visit her and at the end of each visit I’d take her hand and pray. And, of course, I prayed the types of prayers that mainline liberal pastors are implicitly taught to pray. I prayed for God to guide the hands and minds of her doctors and nurses. I prayed for the Spirit of God to give her comfort and peace and patience. I prayed for her family to exercise constancy in the face of the decisions thrust upon them.
I remember one evening I was about to launch into just such a prayer when Betty’s needle poked hand clenched my own so hard she left fingernail marks and she gruffed at me in her best altar guild growl, “You drove all this way over the mountain to pray another limp, namby-pamby prayer? Pastor, if you’re not going to pray for the Lord to heal me then get the hell out of here.”
It was a more profound lesson than anything I learned in seminary.
A lesson rendered more powerful when, against the doctors’s forecast, she was healed.
Rabbi Kushner’s book, When Bad Things Happen to Good People, is not intelligible in a world with a purposeful, intervening, directing God, but that book remains a bestseller with many imitations right behind it. Is it any wonder then that so many Christians act as though Christianity is little more than our continuing the movement begun by the dead Jesus? We’ve swallowed the worldview handed to us and accepted it on its own terms. We may not be walking around with a telescope in one hand and a hunk of rock in other, but we’ve all largely— if quietly and subconsciously— accepted the premise that if the sun is at the center of the universe then God is not on the scene.
Philosophers today call it the immanent frame; we’re enclosed by the material universe and there is nothing— no one— outside of it.
We must not pussyfoot around the issue.
This is our problem with the Bible.
In the modern world, people think events like suffering or tragedy make belief in God difficult if not problematic. But in the world of the Bible, God claims those very occurrences as occasions for his glory.
“As for you,” Joseph says to the brothers who betrayed him and left him for dead, “you meant evil against me, but God meant it unto good, to bring to pass, as it is this day, to save many people.” Bad things befall Joseph not simply because Joseph is the victim of another’s sin. What happens to Joseph is not chance or happenstance. It’s not simply his turn through the gears of the machine set in motion long ago by the Divine Clock Maker.
It’s not luck.
It’s a different word altogether.
It’s providence.
Providence:
The conviction that by God, despite appearances to the contrary, our world is moving somewhere toward some good, great End, predetermined in the mind of God, though never fully known to us.
Quite obviously, it’s easy to watch the irrational murder and mayhem unfold in Ukraine and wonder if there is any good reason behind anything. And yet, the God who will one day bring history to an end in Jesus Christ is a God who is in control of history. Behind it all, the Bible promises, is not the whim of luck or fate or happenstance. Behind it all is God.
God’s providence.
On Friday I celebrated a service of death and resurrection for Jane Jones and during the funeral we prayed the twenty-third psalm, a text so familiar to us that we neglect to notice how it in no way contradicts what Joseph says to his brothers. The Lord is my shepherd, declares the psalm, who makes and keeps and guides and leads and protects. The Shepherd of Psalm 23 is the subject of all the verbs. Such a Shepherd is the God Robert Boyle believed he had banished, the God who guides.
In Isaiah 45.1-7, the Lord leaves us no room for believing in luck.
It’s a breathtaking account of God’s providence. So much so, it’s hard to imagine a more absolute formula than verse seven, “I form light and create darkness, I make weal and create woe; I the Lord do all things.” Here in Isaiah, what’s left unsaid is that the exiles in Babylon have just taken offense at the Lord’s news that he will use Cyrus— pagan, gentile, ungodly, idol-worshipping Cyrus— as his anointed messiah to redeem the Israelites from captivity.
Taking umbrage with their offense, the Lord responds by claiming sovereignty over everything, all of history. That Yahweh is the Lord of history is precisely what distinguishes him from all the barren deities of the pagans. A god who is the god of agriculture alone, for example, or a god who is the god of fertility only, are by definition not gods over the whole of history. And this context is key to interpreting the verse; otherwise, you’ll end up thinking God creates evil when instead God is claiming final responsibility for everything.
You see, here in Isaiah—
It’s not so much that everything happens for a reason— that still relies upon Robert Boyle’s mechanistic view of the universe. It’s that God’s sovereignty is big enough to include everything— what we do and what God does— and take it up towards the great, good End that the mind of God elected from before all of creation. It’s not simply that all events have one ultimate cause. It’s that God is at work so that all events work towards one ultimate destiny. God’s not speaking of himself as some kind of puppeteer. God’s speaking of his providence, the unseen but majestic hand of God moving and interjecting in history, guiding everything like a Shepherd bound and determined for all he has made to dwell in the house of the Lord forever.
Christians don’t believe in luck because, well, would you want to bet against a God so graciously determined?
The House— the House of the Lord— always wins.
Now, to assert that God in his God’s good providence is at work in the world is not to suggest that the work of God in the world is easy to identify. St. Augustine says that the work of God in our midst is most often a matter of hindsight. As Augustine says, sometimes when you look at your life, it's like looking at chicken tracks in the mud of a chicken yard, these little chicken tracks going this way and that way. It gives no evidence of an agency at work. It just appears messy and chaotic. But through the eyes of faith, gazing back from the perspective of hindsight, says Augustine, you can start to see that the tracks were headed, slowly but steadily towards an End.
You can discern a purpose at work.
Not luck or chance or happenstance.
But the opposite: Providence.
A friend of mine is an Episcopal priest in Texas.
A year ago she lost both her parents in a car accident.
In an essay from this summer she writes,
“Several weeks after the death of both of my parents, I found a photograph I had never seen before. Of course, as the 38-year-old sudden guardian of generations of family photographs, I have stumbled across quite a few of those. But this one was of me.
It was taken by my younger brother. I can tell because the image was taken from a lower angle and is fuzzy. My parents and I are unloading the car in the drop-off section of the Medgar Evers Airport in Jackson, Mississippi. I was to board a plane to head across the country for my first year of college…and I am clutching my childhood teddy bear, a panda I call Matilda.
It was jarring to see my beloved Matilda in the photograph. When I was a child, the Memphis Zoo had a panda bear exhibit, and my grandmother bought me my very own to take home. At four years old, I loved the song “Waltzing Matilda,” and so my most comforting childhood object was born. It was not surprising to me that I took her to college. What unhinged me now was that she had been the first object I looked for in my parents’ home after their death. And I have found myself comforted by her all over again. After thirteen years of marriage, my husband has adjusted to me suddenly bringing a stuffed animal into our marriage bed.
But the photograph was most revealing for what was not there but had also been there all along.
Namely, that even then, God knew about the death of my parents.
People get very anxious when we talk about the will of God in the face of our suffering. We are happy to include God in all of the moments in our lives that have been wonderful or redemptive….But somehow, when it comes to tragedy, we like to say that random things happen for no reason at all.
I am less interested in having a debate about whether or not it was God’s will that my parents would both die in a car accident. Even the phrase “God’s will” can sound like a kind of legal document. So for a moment, let me put the phrase “God’s will” to the side and instead offer this: I believe that God cannot be surprised.
When I see that photo of me from almost exactly twenty years ago, I think to myself that even then God knew, and even then God was preparing us for what was to come.
People mean well when they say that God is uninvolved in the terrible things that happen. But people meaning well does not mean people are well. We all desire for things to fit neatly into the narratives of our own creation, and our spiritual and mental health hugely influence the way those narratives play out. All this is to say, I do not need bad theology when my life is at its worse. It might make the false theologian feel better, but it will make me feel abandoned. When we suggest that God is surprised by the bad things that happen in our lives, then we offer suffering people a creator who has no plan, and no capacity to respond when the bottom falls out. Basically, God becomes me in the photograph. Standing there, gripping a teddy bear, terrified.
When we declare that God is only involved in the good things that happen, we take away divine action in our lives at every level. When we follow such a biblically baseless claim to its natural end, we find a God who does not know what will happen from one moment to the next, a Risen Lord who is somehow taken unawares by the weight of sin that was placed on His shoulders.
In the complicated and surprising work of grieving two beautiful lives, God has made His face to shine upon me. I know this to be absolutely true. God knew this was coming. God has not been surprised.”
Nevertheless!
It is impossible to sit back and watch the heartbreaking, outraging images on our screens and rest content that one day we’ll be able to say, “God was not surprised.”
I’m sorry St. Augustine, but it’s not enough to hear that one day we might look back at the chicken tracks all over our newspapers and discern, as though through a glass dimly, God working all things together for good.
In this complicated life of grief and sin, we don’t want the promise that one day we will learn where God was.
We want to know where God is.
Right now. We want to know with such certainty it’s as good as a promise.
About our text today, Martin Luther says, “To seek God apart from Jesus Christ— that is the Devil.” He means that if we search out the invisible work of the unseen God in our world, if we try to puzzle out God’s providence, we’ll drive ourselves to despair or to insanity. In the here and now, in the midst and mess of all our chicken tracks, we hold fast to where God has promised to be at work.
And God makes that promise in verse twenty-three of this chapter, “By myself I have promised; from my mouth has gone out in righteousness a word that shall not return to me in vain…”
A word, the Lord promises to Isaiah, that one day will bend the knee of every nation and loosen the tongue of every stubborn sinner in praise.
It’s a little word.
A single set of unassuming chicken tracks slowly but inexorably moving forward through the scrum of struggle and suffering of “this present evil age.”
It’s a little word, no more impressive than a stuffed panda.
That word: Your sins are forgiven. The word of grace.
Chances are—
We’ll drive ourselves crazy trying to riddle the invisible doings of the unseen God in a world where all the other evidence would suggest is without God.
Instead, in the here and now, we should seek out God where God has promised to be found: clothed in the Gospel word (“for you”) and as obvious and visible as water, wine, and bread.
So come to the table.
There’s nothing lucky about it.
The odds are even better than flipping a coin.
He has promised that every time, in our present world, this is where you can find him at work.
In you and for you and, then, (possibly) through you.
The House (of the Lord) Always Wins