You planned something bad for me, but God produced something good from it, in order to save the lives of many people, just as he’s doing today.
I know the plans I have in mind for you, declares the
Lord; they are plans for peace, not disaster, to give you a future filled with
hope.
We know that God works all things together for good for
the ones who love God, for those who are called according to his purpose.
If you’re just joining us today, we are in the middle of a series on “Faith
that’s Bigger Than a Bumper Sticker.”
We’re taking a look at supposedly “Christian” platitudes and cliches
that easily could fit on a bumper sticker, and are both popular and wrong.
Why does it matter? Why am I putting
any effort into debunking these phrases?
What harm do they do? A lot,
actually. For one thing, I want you to
have a faith that’s rooted in the Scripture and the living core of Christian
tradition, not some phrase you read on a bumper sticker. Further, every time we use these phrases, we
are saying things about God that aren’t true, which violates at least two of
the ten commandments – not taking God’s name in vain, and not lying. That’s what is at stake, here! Finally, not only do they present a picture
of God that is inaccurate, but also one that causes more harm in God’s name
than good.
We’ve debunked several of these sayings over the last several weeks, and
today we take on the biggest and most popular whopper of them all – “Everything
happens for a reason.” May we pray.
Did you bring your brain with you this morning? Never check your brain at the door. God gave you a brain, and God wants you to
use it – not only out there, but in here, in church, too. There’s an old rabbinic saying that “A
shallow mind is a sin against God.” God
gave us brains, and God wants us to use them.
We like answers. I don’t know that
we’re as eager for understanding, however, as we are for answers. I had a middle school teacher who would give
us a quiz every Friday on the chapters in our textbook we had covered that
week. It didn’t take long for us to
realize that each quiz, always 20 multiple-choice questions, were taken from
the back of the book, where there was also an answer key for each quiz. To score well on the quiz, you only had to
memorize the sequence of letters for the questions.
So, each week, I had all the answers, but that doesn’t mean I understood
anything. Answers always came easily for
me. I skated through school and even
finished second in my high school graduating class, and never really had to
study the entire time.
The thing about easy answers is that they work really well until they are
challenged. In college, my propensity to
get by on easy answers was challenged by one Dr. Berry – my academic advisor
and the chair of my major, whose classes I had at least once every semester. From her, I learned quickly that I was no
longer going to get by on easy answers, and I was faced with a choice – either
learn how to study and wrestle with tough material, or flunk out. I learned how to study, and it’s a good thing
I did, too. Grad school was even more
challenging, and now in my work as a pastor, I am faced almost daily with
situations and circumstances and questions, from the very things happening in
your lives, that won’t be satisfied by a stock set of easy answers.
“Everything happens for a reason” is the ultimate easy answer in the life
of Faith. Many belief systems have their
own version of “Everything happens for a reason” – astrology? It’s all because of the alignment of planets
and stars. Karma? What goes around comes around. Fate?
It was meant to be.
Depending on your worldview, fate, or karma, or the stars, or “god,” all
act about the same, and of course, reach the same conclusion: behind it all,
there is meaning. Again, we like easy
answers. “Everything happens for a
reason” is an easy and ultimate explanation for that which is
inexplicable. Easy answers, however,
quickly turn into a filter through which all of life is sifted. If we already have the answer in mind before
we ask the questions, we end up with some rather strange explanations.
Consider the pastor who said during the children’s message, “I’m thinking
of something that lives in the trees, eats nuts, and has a long, bushy
tail. Anyone know what I’m thinking
of?” One little boy finally put up his
hand and said, “Well, it sounds an awful lot like a squirrel to me, but I’m
sure the answer is Jesus.”
“Everything happens for a reason” is a ready-made easy answer to many of
life’s questions, but it’s the wrong answer, and when it’s challenged, it
crumbles. Tragedy strikes, and in our search for meaning and comfort, we tell
ourselves and one another that God must have some purpose for the
suffering. You know, “God’s ways are not
our ways. God has a plan, even if we
don’t understand it. We can’t see that plan
right now, so just trust God.” Sounds
pious, doesn’t it? Logical, even! And so, whatever happens to us must be the
will of God, right? Well, not so fast.
Don’t settle for easy answers, especially ones that turn God into some sick
monster. Think about these things. God gave us a brain and God expects us to use
it.
We believe everything happening to us is part of God’s will because of two
other things we misunderstand about God: God is in control, and God has a plan. Hear me carefully: Yes, God is in control,
and yes, God does have a plan. But,
those two things are easily misunderstood.
We keep using those words, but they do not mean what we think they mean.
So first, the idea that “God is in control.” I hear this, and I immediately get an image
of God sitting in a giant control booth somewhere, overseeing everything,
pushing buttons and pulling levers – orchestrating everything that happens to
us. Got a cold? God did that. Hurricane?
Yep, that was God, too. Drunk
driver? Not her fault, but, you guessed
it – God! That’s not what we mean when
we say God is in control. It’s a
misunderstanding.
God is in control, but God is not
controlling. God doesn’t control us or manipulate us like
puppets on a string. As we said a few
weeks ago, God is not the only force at work in the world. We are at work, other people are at work,
nature is at work, evil is at work.
Sometimes the reason something bad happens to me is that I made a bad
decision. God didn’t do that to me, I
did it to myself! Or, you may run a red
light and broadside my car in an intersection.
God didn’t do that to me, you did!
God doesn’t make us do anything, but instead gives us the freedom to
choose. We make good decisions and bad
decisions, but those are our decisions to make freely, without any force or
coercion from God. God gave us this
freedom because God is Love, and we are made by God in love and for love. We are created in the image of God; we have
the capacity for love, God tells us to love God and our neighbor, but in order
for love to be genuine, it must be freely chosen.
You can’t force someone to love you.
God doesn’t force us to love God or anyone else. God asks us to choose love, which runs the
inherent risk that we might choose all sorts of things that are harmful to
ourselves and others. We might make
choices that displease God or work against God’s will. Part of the risk in giving us freedom is that
we might and probably will misuse our freedom to do the very things that break
God’s heart.
Perhaps we would prefer a God who oversaw the world in such a way that
nothing bad ever happened, that nothing outside God’s will ever took
place. That would mean that God would
have to take away our free will to ensure that we never make a bad or harmful
decision, and the moment that is taken away, we are no longer human, but
puppets. Yes, God could have set up the world in such a way that God retained
absolute control over everything, but God didn’t. In such a world, God would control us as puppets, instead of relate to us as humans.
It doesn’t mean that God’s not Almighty and powerful, but it does mean that God has self-limited some
portion of God’s control and power in order for Love to remain supreme. If you were to place two attributes of God on
a scale – love and control – you would see that love outweighs control. God’s love is a higher priority than God’s
control. God sacrifices control in order
to practice love. The result of that is
things happen that grieve and hurt God just as much as they do us.
Those of you who are parents and grandparents know you can’t control your
kids. You couldn’t even if you wanted to! I’ve known parents who have tried, and the
moment their kids leave the house they usually go wild – I’m talking on video
on spring break in Cancun, wild. Your
children will be free, they will make their own decisions, you can’t force them
to do what’s in their best interest. At
times their decisions will harm them and us, frustrate you, grieve you. What choice do you, as a parent have? You tell them, “I love you. There are consequences to your actions. But I will always love you.”
So the phrase, “Everything happens for a reason” only works if God is
manipulating us like puppets on a string.
It breaks down when we realize that we humans have been given a great
deal of freedom to make our own choices, and that those choices have real
consequences.
So what about God’s plan? Again, I
think we misunderstand the idea of God’s plan.
Maybe we think of God’s plan or God’s will for our lives as this
carefully written book, penned before we were born, with everything that will
ever happen to us noted ahead of time on its pages, and though we don’t know
what’s on the next page, God does, and our story unfolds, in its own way, just
as God intended.
That’s called a script, not a
plan. God has a plan, not a script. God’s plan
for us actually has very little to do with whether we eat Cheerios or Corn
Flakes tomorrow morning, and more with an overarching concern for our
well-being. God’s plan is less about
micromanaging and every choice we make and more an enduring, loving disposition
toward us that always has our best interests in mind.
God’s plan for us can be summarized in Jeremiah 29:11: “plans for peace,
not disaster; to give us a future filled with hope.” That’s a good plan! And it’s also a God-plan. But, a lot happens to us that works against
that plan. Things that work against peace,
that promote disaster, that lead to despair.
That car accident? Your job
loss? That fight with your spouse? The 20,000 people who die each day of
hunger-related diseases? The young girl
who was raped and murdered on her way home from school – if all of that was
part of God’s plan, it means God wrote those events into the lives of all those
people, which is not the action of a loving and just God, but a sadistic madman.
None of those things are part of God’s divine plan, but when we fall back on
“it happened for a reason, then we’re saying God caused it. Is it any wonder that fewer and fewer people
want anything to do with such a god? It
is easy to see why so many people have turned away from God when they have been
taught, by Christians, that every disappointment, every loss, every painful
tragedy are the will of God.[1]
Friends, that’s not God. If murders
and rape and wars and genocide and terrorist attacks and accidents and disease
are part of God’s plan, then I’m not interested in the god with that particular
plan. You shouldn’t be, either, because
that’s not who God is.
Personally, I take great comfort in knowing that all of those things aren’t from God, aren’t part of God’s plan or God’s will for me. It makes it easier for me to turn to God when
those things do happen, because I know that God is not the one who put them in
my life.
So, where is God when it all hits the fan?
Where is God when our lives crumble to pieces around us? God is where God has always been – rescuing
something good out of the jaws of evil. Though God doesn’t cause pain, God can still bring
healing out of it. God can bring light
out of darkness, hope out of despair, life out of death. This is called redemption. God can enter
into the worst possible situation, and bring something good out of it. God doesn’t have to cause it in order to
redeem it. God is in the life business –
the abundant life business, the life-out-of-death business. God didn’t do it. But God can still use it.
In the life of faith, don’t
settle for easy answers. Don’t be fooled
into believing it all happened for a reason.
God gave you a brain, God wants you to use it.
The message of Christianity
is not that we will have a life free from tragedy – we should have to look no
further than Jesus himself for that to be clear. But just as important, let’s realize that God
is not the one who writes tragedy into our life’s story. The world does that. Life does that. We do it to ourselves and to each other. But not God.
When we suffer, God
suffers. When we weep, God weeps. When we are grieved, so is God. God’s heart breaks right along with ours.
So yes, everything
happens, but it’s certainly not for a reason – at least not one that God
caused. God is Love, whose will is ever-directed to his children’s good. God doesn’t introduce unjust suffering into
the lives of his children any more than you would torment your children. But with God, suffering never gets the last
word. God may not have caused it, but
if there’s any good to come from it, God will find it and bring it out, and
redeem it.
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