Sermons
August 3, 2025 (Proper 13)
Because
Romans 8:18-30
Years ago a teacher of mine told a story about another teacher, probably a college professor, who gave a final exam to his students. After the usual set of multiple-choice questions, there was a final item, an essay question. It was one word at the top of the page: “Why?”
Most of the students pondered the question for some time, and then started writing. They wrote, and they wrote, and they wrote…except for one girl in the back. She was the first person done with her exam, and after she turned it in and left the room, the professor was overcome with curiosity about what she had written in answer to the last question.
To his one-word question, “Why?” she had answered, “Because.”
He gave her an A.
It’s probably the most commonly-asked question in the history of questions. “Why?”
We want things to make sense. We look for patterns, for cause and effect, for a way to explain the things that happen to us. But there just aren’t always patterns, cause and effect can’t always be clearly determined, and not everything can be explained.
People tend to find that disturbing, so we look for ways to make things make sense. People of faith often say certain things in situations where something has happened that doesn’t seem to make sense.
“It was God’s will.”
“God needed another angel.”
“He only takes the best.”
“Everything happens for a reason.”
But you know, I don’t think I’ve ever had anybody say, “It was God’s will” or “Everything happens for a reason” when they’re talking about something good that happens.
Ralph just got a promotion at work. More responsibility, a bigger office, and better pay! Does somebody say, “It was God’s will”? Or do they say, “Congratulations, you earned it”?
The Chiefs won the Super Bowl in an absolute blowout. “Well, everything happens for a reason.” Sure it does. The reason could be that they played better than the other team, or maybe there were a series of referees’ calls that favored the Chiefs when the opponents might think they were unfair.
But do we say that when something good happens? Not usually. As a rule, a statement like “Everything happens for a reason” actually means, “Bad things happen to us for a reason”—and that reason is something only God knows.
About a week after my 21st birthday, I was listening to the news on the radio one morning as I was getting ready for the day. There was a report of a shooting that had taken place the night before, and the victim’s name sounded familiar. I hadn’t looked at the newspaper yet, so I went to see if there was a story there that gave the person’s name. It did: the victim was an acquaintance of mine from when I had lived in the dorms. He’d been shot in the head, so there wasn’t really any hope; but he hung on for a couple days before finally passing away.
Even though I didn’t know the young man all that well, his death shook me up. The next weekend I was home, and I went to Sunday school. For some reason I was the only person there that day, and I told the leader, a longtime family friend of ours, what had happened. And I asked her the question that has haunted billions of people as long as there’ve been people: “Why?” Why did this happen to David?
She didn’t have any better answers than I did, than anybody else did. When it finally came down to it, it just seemed senseless.[1]
If Marilyn had said, “Well, everything happens for a reason,” I think it would have made me feel worse. What she said was, “I don’t know.” Sometimes that’s all that can be said.
“Everything happens for a reason”? I just don’t know that it’s true. It’s sure not what the Bible says.
Now there are places in the Bible where somebody offers an explanation of a horrific incident, like when the Assyrian Empire destroyed Israel. That’s in 2 Kings 17. The first six verses describe the siege and fall of Samaria and the nation of Israel. Then in verse 7 a commentator steps in: “This occurred because the people of Israel had sinned against the Lord their God…”
The end of 2 Kings describes the fall of Jerusalem and the southern kingdom of Judah, but there’s no editorial comment explaining that. Instead, we can turn to chapter 28 of Deuteronomy, which is placed in Moses’ mouth as a warning to the people what would happen if they did not keep God’s commandments.
Deuteronomy 28 starts with a brief description of the blessings that awaited the people if they did keep the commandments. Fourteen verses of blessings, and then fifty-four verses of curse and calamity. And it starts out with, “If you will not obey the Lord your God…” but before long it changes to “…because you did not obey the Lord your God.” At that point it begins to sound like an eyewitness account of the horrors the people experienced when Babylon laid siege to Jerusalem, destroyed it, and carried most of the people off to exile—all because the people had not obeyed God’s commandments.
But one thing I learned in seminary is that the Bible, and particularly the Old Testament, doesn’t speak with one voice. The Old Testament can almost be seen as different points of view arguing with one another. The clearest example of this is the book of Job, but it happens throughout the Old Testament.
We have Deuteronomy 28 and 2 Kings 17 on one side of the question of why Israel and Judah, the lands God had given to God’s people “forever,” had been conquered by foreign lands. On the other side we find Psalm 44, which seems to describe the same events, and then says,
“All this has come upon us,
yet we have not forgotten you,
or been false to your covenant.
Our heart has not turned back,
nor have our steps departed from your way,
yet you have broken us in the haunt of jackals,
and covered us with deep darkness.”[2]
It seems not everyone agreed that conquest and exile were God’s punishment for the people’s sin and idolatry.
We want to know “why?” when something bad happens to us or someone we care about. And there are people around who will try to provide explanations.
After Hurricane Katrina, one of the better-known TV preachers allowed as how the hurricane was God’s punishment on the city of New Orleans for their immoral behavior. When an earthquake devastated Haiti, either that same preacher or another one in a similar position said the earthquake was punishment for the Haitian people having supposedly made some kind of pact with the devil when they successfully fought for their freedom from enslavement—over 200 years ago![3]
I think we’re right to be skeptical of claims like those. But I also think we should take with a grain of salt any simple answer to the question. Everything just doesn’t happen for a reason!
But I don’t want to leave you with that, with the sense that because stuff happens that can’t always be explained, we are just at the mercy of the randomness of the world, nature, and people who we can’t control.
It’s true that things happen, and sometimes they seem senseless, and they hurt. The good news is that no matter what happens to us, whether it’s good or bad, explainable or tragically senseless, we’re not left alone with it.
That’s the good news of Romans 8. God doesn’t leave us alone in our trouble; even when we find we can’t pray—and if you’ve been through an especially hard time, you know that not being able to pray properly is something that often happens in times like that—we have help.
Not only that, but even though God doesn’t cause our troubles, God can find ways to bring some good out of them. (I would caution us all, however, to keep in mind that the good God may bring out of our difficulties can often be seen only in the rear-view mirror, and it truly doesn’t do a whole lot of good to tell someone who is struggling that “something good will come out of this.” That’s really not any more helpful in such a moment than saying, “Everything happens for a reason.”) But if we lean on God’s presence and strength, and trust that God will bring us through our hard times, we may well be able to look back and see the good that God brought forth from them.
Maybe we can see how the loss of a loved one brought family members together who had had a misunderstanding. Or maybe we recognize that God was at work through the friends who offered kind words or a shoulder to cry on, the people who brought sacks of groceries when we weren’t sure how we could afford them that week, or the medical professionals who took care of us and looked for ways to treat a baffling condition.
It’s a promise I think we can lean on as we walk through the dark valleys of life: God is with us, and while God didn’t give us the trouble we’re enduring, we can trust that God is at work even in them.
Some of my church ladies in Iowa used to go to weekend-long quilting retreats at a nearby campground. They were religious retreats, so there were devotions every morning and evening. One of the ladies came back from one of these retreats and related a devotion from the weekend to me.
“A little girl was sitting at her mother’s feet as she worked on an embroidery project. The little girl looked at the back of the work, and asked, ‘Mama, why is it so ugly? All those knots and strings running every which way, and there’s no pretty picture at all.’
“Her mother said, ‘Be patient.’
“Before long the piece was finished, and Mama turned it over and showed the child the front of it, a lovely picture of a stream, and trees, and flowers. ‘You see, if you can only see the back, it looks ugly; but out of all that came this pretty picture on the front.’”
Maybe we can imagine that that Mama is like God, turning the knots and tangles and broken threads of life into something that ends up being a blessing not just to us, but to others.
[1] In the years since this happened, I have learned a little more about the incident from a mutual friend. It turned out that David and our mutual friend had been having a party when the killer showed up, drunk and waving a gun around; David had taken him away from there to protect his other friends, and then was shot when he refused to let the killer take his motorcycle so he could go find an ex-girlfriend he evidently wanted to hurt. It’s still senseless, but David had acted heroically and probably saved his friends and that ex-girlfriend. The killer was eventually caught and is now imprisoned for life.
[2] Psalm 44:17-19. This passage, plus the cry to God at the end of the Psalm, “Why do you hide your face?”, are quoted in Rabbi Heschel’s dedication of his two-volume work on the Hebrew Prophets, “to the martyrs of 1933-1945.”
[3] The Haitian Revolution lasted from 1791 to 1804, and was the only time when an enslaved people successfully freed themselves and created an independent country.