In Everything God Works for Good

A sermon preached by Father Dwight D. Duncan, ssc, Rector, St Matthias, Dallas, Texas
28 July 2002 - The Tenth Sunday after Pentecost (Year A, Proper 12)

Scripture: Romans 8:26-34


"We know that in everything God works for good with those who love him, who are called according to his purpose." (Romans 8:28)

So claims our apostolic father Paul, as we just heard in today's second reading. But is that something you know: that in everything God works for good with those who love him? If you did, you probably would be able better to deal with and weather the stuff that comes your way. But it is precisely the stuff which comes our way which not only makes life difficult for us, but also our embrace of Paul's faith-conviction.

Wonderful it is if indeed this is so: that in everything God works for good with those who love him. Wonderful this would be whether ever we know it to be so or not. For all those things to be rectified which seem such nonsense to us: disappointment, pain, suffering, disaster, separation, death. Wonderful!

And yet, for me ... and for you ... who have to live this life and experience disappointment, pain, suffering, disaster, separation and finally death ... more wonderful indeed if I, and you, could move through life with this faith-conviction: in everything, God is working for good with me. How might it be possible to make a break-through to such a conviction?

I'm going to tell you how it happened for me, or began to happen. Perhaps this might assist you. My assumption always has been that, as ordinary a person as I am, if something has helped me, it may help some others. So, here goes.

I had some great secondary school teachers. To this day, I am amazed at the concentration of superb faculty at that rural Virginia consolidated high-school, 8th through 12th grades all together, from which I graduated in a class of sixty: Fluvanna County High School.

The teacher who informed and formed my mind the most was Mary Tyler Baker Baber, a daughter of the Virginia aristocracy and intellectual elite, who loved all people and had a passion to pass on knowledge. She instructed us in the intricacies of the English language, grammar and writing. She immersed us in world literature and philosophy. And for four years, she drilled me and a few others in Latin, requiring us not only to translate but to read some of the great works of Rome's writers ... and to discuss and debate their thoughts. She was a fascinating, hard, exhilarating task mistress.

From her, as well as other of my teachers, I learned that while understanding something might not make you like it, yet understanding could help you deal with it or live with it better than could ignorance. Further, since words, whether spoken or written, are a primary means by which we humans come to understanding, words are very important, not only the individual words used to express some thought, but the way in which they are put together and the context in which they are set.

These insights turned out to be very important for my spiritual development. How so? Well, as most of you know, my Christian journey began in a community other than our Anglican Catholic one. In that community – which, thank God, took Scripture seriously – we were encouraged to memorize scripture. Memorization of scripture is very good; when you don't have a bible around to read, you have some of it in your head, and you can feed on it there.

The problem with this, however, is that most of us can only memorize snippets of scripture. And a snippet not only might not convey the whole thought of a passage, but is removed from its context. The result can be an incorrect or at least inadequate understanding of some portion of God's word. And an incorrect or inadequate understanding might do a soul more harm than good. As it did me, for a while.

You see, one of the earliest passages of scripture to capture my attention and fascination was this one we have before us today. In the King James Version, which was the only one allowed in the church of my youth, the verse reads thus: We know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose. The snippet of that which I was required to commit to memory was this: "all things work together for good to them that love God."

As I entered into the wrestlings with faith of my mid to later teens, that snippet of our scripture passage fought against the deepening of my faith, for what I saw happening in people's lives, and in the life of the world, seemed to contradict its claim. It looked to me that the one thing certain was that all things did not work together for good, not even for those who did love God.

Then one evening, in the summer following my first year of college, I was visiting with Mrs Baber, now old enough to enjoy with her a good bourbon and branch water. We were talking about the struggle of faith, in the face of so much within the human condition that seems to weigh against it.

Inevitably, I brought up today's passage of scripture, my snippet of it: "all things work together for good to them that love God." With loving amusement, tinged with some exasperation, Mrs Baber said, "Oh, for goodness' sake, Dwight. What did we teach you? Consider all the words and the way they're put together and in their total context. Get me my bible and let's go to work."

So we did. And by the time I left that night, Mary Tyler Baker Baber, a lover of words and the way they can be strung together to penetrate reality and a lover of God who walked with him in the Anglican branch of his Catholic Church, had turned this passage for me from an obstacle to faith to an avenue into faith. Look with me at this passage, as I did with Mrs Baber.

We know that in everything God works for good with those who love him, who are called according to his purpose. For those whom he foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, in order that he [the Son, Jesus Christ] might be the first-born among many brethren.

St Paul bases the veracity of his claim that in everything God is working for good with those who love him not upon some romantic premise that everything is beautiful in its own way and our problem in believing this is due to an inability to perceive this. No, his claim is staked upon what God's purpose is for every man and woman.

What is that purpose? Paul speaks of it as a conformation of us to the likeness of Jesus. In other words, God's purpose is to restore us rebellious and thus disordered creatures to our true selves, creatures who are the type of creature he would be if he were a creature. We see God this way in Jesus. In the Christian lexicon, the word for such a creature is saint: a whole person, a person within whom all shadow and disorder has given way to light and order and integration and health.

But God's drive to restore us to this is actually that he might secure an even more wonderful result than our being whole. Paul speaks of this larger purpose as being so that Jesus might be the first-born of many brethren. In other words, the Father wants with him in the pleasure of heaven not only his Son, but an innumerable company of creatures like his Son. He wants all of us, together with him, enjoying forever the party which heaven is.

BUT until the disabilities which Sin works within our spirits and psyches are healed and overcome, we cannot bear the dynamic of such a glorious life. So God works within the details of this our present life, like a physician as well as an athletic coach, to heal us and to fashion us into that creature of glory which we in truth are.

Now consider those two images: physician, athletic coach. Any of us who have dealt with either know that their efforts on our behalf – whether their efforts be things which in their wisdom they know they must do to and with us OR must allow to us--we know that some of their efforts on our behalf will be experienced by us as pleasure, others as pain. But in all of them, they are working to achieve our ultimate good: health, victory.

So it is that in everything – everything of our life, God is, working in each thing to draw us up into himself and into that self he has always had in mind, that self which will be capable of heaven. As St Paul puts it: in everything God works for good with those who love him, who are called according to his purpose.

THAT is the truth. Wrap your mind and your heart around it. Cleave to it. And not only will you be better able to weather both the pleasure and the pain that will come to you in this life, but by them and through them, you and God will restore you to the likeness of his Son, that likeness which will open to you the gates of heaven.


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