Romans 8:28
We live in a broken world which Eugene OâNeill knew first hand. OâNeill was an American playwright who was born in 1888. His mother was an emotionally fragile woman who never recovered from the death of her second son who died when he was just two years old. The birth of her third son, Eugene, was a difficult birth and she became a morphine addict. As you can imagine, this did not make OâNeillâs childhood an easy one.
Eugene OâNeill suffered from depression and alcoholism and married three times. He disowned his daughter, Oona, for marrying Charlie Chaplin when she was 18 and Chaplin was 54 and he never saw her again. He had distant relationships with his two sons, one of whom was an alcoholic and the other a heroin addict. They both committed suicide and Eugene OâNeill died in 1953 at the age of 65.
Given the pain in his life, his quote is especially interesting.
Man is born broken. He lives by mending. The grace of God is glue.
Although he went to a Catholic boarding school, he seemed to have faith only that we needed faith. OâNeill was unsuccessful in a pursuit of faith himself but he knew a biblical truth: We are born broken.
The Genesis account of creation teaches us that men and women are fallen. As Paul much later wrote in his letter to Rome,
all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God,
Before the fall Adam and Eve enjoyed an open relationship with God. In Genesis 2:25 we read:
The man and his wife were both naked, and they felt no shame.
The picture painted here is that they were completely open, had nothing to hide, were one with each other and they enjoyed fellowship with God.
But then after eating the forbidden fruit, Genesis tells us:
Then the man and his wife heard the sound of the Lord God as he was walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and they hid from the Lord God among the trees of the garden. 9 But the Lord God called to the man, âWhere are you?â
10 He answered, âI heard you in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked; so I hid.â
11 And he said, âWho told you that you were naked? Have you eaten from the tree that I commanded you not to eat from?â
12 The man said, âThe woman you put here with meâshe gave me some fruit from the tree, and I ate it.â
13 Then the Lord God said to the woman, âWhat is this you have done?â
The woman said, âThe serpent deceived me, and I ate.â
The consequences of Adam and Eve eating the apple in disobedience to Godâs directive to them was that they became separated from God. They hid from him when they heard him in the garden. They became separated from each other. When God asked them if they had eaten from the tree, they stood apart and Adam accused Eve of the sin. And they became separated from themselves. When they heard God in the garden, they knew shame and covered themselves.
In this colossal act of disobedience, Adam and Eve moved from living in harmony with God and each other to being broken people, fragmented people needing to be made whole.
When we move past the Genesis stories and into the history of Godâs interaction with Abraham and his descendants, we see in painful detail, over and over again, the consequences of our separation.
Because of the jealousy of Sarah, Hagar and Ishmael were rejected and thrown out into the wilderness. Isaacâs son Jacob conspired with his mother against his brother Esau. Jacobâs sons conspired against their brother Joseph and sold him as a slave to Midianite traders. Move past Genesis into Exodus and we see the rebellion of Israel as they worshiped a golden calf even while Moses was receiving the law from God who had delivered Israel from Egypt. Eliâs sons used God to make money and gain power and then the man God chose to replace Eli, Samuel, also had sons who turned away from God and did evil. Saul, David and Solomon and the kings who followed them were broken people.
The world around us is broken. Read the newspapers of a hundred or two hundred years ago and watch the news today and not much has changed. Technology allows brokenness to be expressed in new ways, but it is the same old brokenness. In fact, the stories of the Bible themselves are repeated in each new generation, even though they are thousands of years old.
The history of man and the history of the church is a history of broken people.
We live in a broken world full of broken people. And yet there is within us a longing for wholeness. We want to be healthy and whole but struggle with our brokenness. We are fragmented, like the picture of the man on the cover of the bulletin with a piece of his head missing. We are broken but want to be made whole.
It is not just Christians who want to be whole. This is a human need everyone has to be whole and there are competing ideas of how to do this.
Probably the dominant idea today is the popular philosophy that says we are basically good people and all we need to do is become more enlightened and we will all live in peace and harmony. Yes, it is true that there is a lot of suffering and violence around us, but if we keep becoming more educated our good nature will lead us to a utopian world.
What is so amazing to me is how long this idea has dominated despite all the empirical evidence that it does not work.
The origins of this philosophy lie with the Chinese philosopher Mencius who lived from 371-289 BC. He developed his entire philosophy from two basic propositions: the first, that Man’s original nature is good; and the second, that Man’s original nature becomes evil when his wishes are not fulfilled. When a man does evil, it is not the fault of his original, good nature.
This idea of the natural goodness of man took hold in Europe starting in the 14th century and in the 19th century took over and enlightened men and women entered the 20th century convinced that man was basically good and all that had to happen was to enlighten him and we would have a peaceful existence.
But then came WWI. It had been understood that terrible things happened in other parts of the world, but in the educated West, manâs natural goodness would prevail because of enlightened education and culture. When the Germans began to use poisonous gas as a weapon and the British soon retaliated (taking advantage of the prevailing west to east winds) and over 7,000,000 of the sons of the educated and enlightened West were killed by gas and bullets and bombs, you would think that this philosophy would have been reconsidered.
But it continued and then came WWII with the people of Goethe and Schiller and Beethoven and Bach setting out to exterminate the Jewish population of the world. I read a book called, Hitlerâs Scientists, and what people donât fully realize is that this extermination of the Jews had excellent scientific, Nobel prize winning minds behind it. Enlightened people began to understand the genetic link to disease and theorized that by eliminating the Jews who they speculated carried diseases, the human race would be strengthened.
After all the horrors of WWI and WWII, certainly we would give up this idea that man is basically good and begin to search for a better understanding of how to journey toward wholeness. But no. This is a philosophy that will not die. All the evidence in the world can be piled up: sex trafficking of women and children, business corruption, sports drugging, women being raped in South Asia by the men who had just rescued them from the tsunami; pile up all this evidence and people persist in believing that men and women are basically good.
The intellectual leaders of this philosophy who think the world would be fine if everyone was as enlightened as they are ignore the vicious wars they fight within universities over the issue of tenure.
A belief that we are basically good and need only to be more enlightened to become whole clearly does not have evidence to support it.
We are broken people who live in a broken world and it is in Paulâs letter to Rome that we discover how to become whole. What we cannot do ourselves, God will do for us. That is the good news in Romans.
Let me give a very quick overview of Romans to show how God makes broken people whole. Paul begins his letter dealing with the problem of being separated from God. Chapters 1-5 deal with the good news that Jesus died for our sins and we received his righteousness. Because of what Jesus did for us, God sees us as if we had never sinned.
We were separated from God but through the sacrifice of Jesus for us, we are drawn into an intimate relationship with God. We are made whole in Godâs eyes.
Chapters 6, 7 and the first half of 8 deal with the next problem. Even though God sees us as having never sinned, we still continue to sin. As hard as we try, we continue to sin. How can we become whole when we continue to live broken lives? We are separated from each other and separated from ourselves.
And as God provided Jesus to draw us to himself, the Holy Spirit was sent to live in us and to work to make us whole. What we are unable to do for ourselves, God does for us. Our sanctification is the process in which we are put together the way God meant us to be and we become increasingly whole.
Then in 8:18 Paul begins to talk about the future glory that will be ours when we leave this earthly existence and come fully into his kingdom. All the pain and suffering we endure is worth it because of the glory of the kingdom of God that awaits us. In that day we will become whole. We will become in all our being the man or woman God intended us to be when he created us.
This leads us to Romans 8:28 where Paul gives even more good news. We donât have to wait until we die our physical death and come into his kingdom to become whole. Even though we still live in a broken world, we are able to live as whole people. We can enjoy life in the kingdom of God, here and now.
If you want to enjoy life in the kingdom of God, if you want to journey toward wholeness, Romans 8:28 is a key verse.
And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose.
When I think of a person who embodied wholeness, I think of Christy Wilson. He was professor of missions at the seminary I attended and worked for many years in Afghanistan. One of the things that first impressed me about him was that he prayed for the students of the seminary by name, each week. There was a directory with pictures, so he knew the names of all the students on campus, as well as their wives and children, if they were married. Prayer for him was central to his life.
He came to speak several times at the church I attended during seminary and I would watch him talk with people afterwards. Someone would talk to him and he would say, âLetâs pray about that now,â and they would bow their heads and pray in the midst of the crowd after a service.
A couple years before I came to Morocco, he spoke at the church I attended in Princeton, New Jersey. After the service, I spoke with him about a couple of mutual friends. One couple had worked in Morocco for fifteen years, the other in Algeria, Egypt and the West Bank of Palestine for almost twenty years. They both were forced to return to the US because of health problems with their children. I complained that it seemed the devil was winning, taking these two couples away from where they had been effectively working.
His response was immediate and joyful. He said, âOh no. Now they will be able to do things they wouldnât have been able to do if they had stayed in North Africa.â He said, âWhen I was forced to leave Afghanistan, I came back to teach at Gordon-Conwell and was blessed to interact with fine students like yourself.â
In his own life, when he was kicked out of Afghanistan, he was able to trust God and allow God to make good come out of it. This experience enabled him to view what others might see as defeat from the light of the kingdom of God intruding into this world. His absolute confidence in the power of God to make good come out of bad allowed him to be a whole person, at peace in difficult moments.
Christy Wilsonâs faith was modeled after the faith of Jesus who experienced peace in the most traumatic of times.
When Jesus was at the Last Supper with his disciples, the night he was to be arrested, the circumstances around him were whipping up a storm that would make a cork in the ocean fly around like a madman. The religious leaders were gathering the soldiers who would come to arrest him. Judas was making arrangements with the high priests to betray Jesus. Jesus knew what was in store for him and what turmoil his disciples would face. Jesus had worked for three years with his disciples and now they were to be put to the test and how they would respond to the test was not certain. But listen to what Jesus said on that night
Peace I leave with you; my peace I give you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled and do not be afraid.
Where, in the midst of all the emotional turmoil that he knew was coming, did Jesus get peace? How was Jesus able to be at peace and have peace to give when he knew he was to be arrested and crucified?
Frederick Buechner wrote an essay titled, A Journey Toward Wholeness, which inspired this sermon. This is what he said about the peace Jesus offered.
The kind of peace the world gives is the peace we experience when for a little time the world happens to be peaceful. It is a peace that lasts for only as long as the peaceful time lasts because as soon as the peaceful time ends, the peace ends with it. The peace that Jesus offers, on the other hand, has nothing to do with the things that are going on at the moment he offers it, which are for the most part tragic and terrible things. It is a peace beyond the reach of the tragic and terrible. It is a profound and inward peace that sees with unflinching clarity the tragic and terrible things that are happening and yet is not shattered by them. He loves his friends enough to be more concerned for their frightened and troubled hearts than he is for his own, and yet his love for his friends is no more where his peace comes from than his impending torture and death are where his peace will be destroyed. His peace comes not from the world but from something whole and holy within himself which sees the world also as whole and holy because deep beneath all the broken and unholy things that are happening in it, even as he speaks, Jesus sees what he calls the Kingdom of God.
Jesus was able to have peace in the midst of all that he knew he would suffer because he rested in the sovereignly of God that allowed him to be whole in the midst of his broken world.
Buechner writes of his grandmother, Naya, who he went to visit with his wife and child in a nursing home where she sat in a dark room in a corner. She was 94 years old, just a few months before her death, and she wrote a letter to him afterwards in which she described herself as âan old crone in a dark little room.â She was a remarkable woman and part of what made her wonderful is that she was not bitter because of what age had done to her but was able to look at herself and not be affected by the circumstance in which she found herself. Who she was was more than an old crone in a dark little room and because she knew that, she was whole.
Buechner writes that âshe lived out of some deep center within herself that was out of reach of circumstance.â There was a part of her that was so centered that her aging and physical ailments did not drag her down and the joy of seeing her grandson and his family was a pure joy, not tainted by the realization that she would probably never see them again, at least in this world. She was able to see life, not as fragments, but as a whole.
When we are at peace at some deep center within ourselves that is out of reach of circumstances, then we are able to be at peace with God, with ourselves and with the world and are able to see the Kingdom of God which is pushing into this age.
Romans 8:28 faith sees the creativity of God, the power of God and the love of God and knows that it is greater than any difficulty we face.
Because of Godâs creativity, power and love, he is able to make all things – not just some things – not just little, inconsequential things – but God is able to make all things work together for good.
What does this mean? It means that there is nothing you can do that God cannot redeem and make good. When you understand this, then you can be at peace no matter what happens.
And it means that you will view other people differently because you will see them also as people whose lives can be transformed as the kingdom of God comes into their lives.
There is no situation beyond Godâs ability to work good and there is no life beyond Godâs ability to transform.
Romans 8:28 is the key to seeing the Kingdom of God in this world of brokenness.
In May 1989 I was on a business trip to Minneapolis and had some extra time. I went into a store to get some shampoo and toothpaste and on the way out saw a raggedy man who asked for a quarter. I hardly ever give money to people on the street, but I do buy them a meal and I asked this man if he wanted something to eat. We went to a nearby restaurant and sat down. He was wearing worn, ripped blue coveralls with his hairy chest showing. He had long black curly hair and an overgrown reddish beard. His fingernails were thick and black with dirt.
He ordered a Black Angus hamburger, baked potato and a root beer float. I tried to talk to him but could only get out that he had come from the Bay area (San Francisco) and lived in the BART (the subway system). He was unable to speak sentences, only phrases.
The root beer float came and disappeared. The root beer was slurped down, the straw licked, ice cream eaten in big gulps. The hamburger arrived. He poured on ketchup until it oozed everywhere. He ripped it in half, ketchup leaking out on his hands and plate and bit and stuffed it in his mouth. It went down with almost no chewing. He wiped his hands and mouth on his overalls. It was like watching an animal eating raw, bloody meat. Blood on his hands and beard as he ate.
He smashed the baked potato down with his hands and took all eight packets of butter, one by one, scrapping off the butter with his fingernails onto the potato. His eyes never really focused. He put the sour cream on the smashed potato and butter and picked it up with his hands and pushed it into his mouth with melted butter and sour cream dripping onto his beard.
When I wrote in my journal that night, I asked if he was made in the image of God? He seemed more animal than human.
This was such a strange experience for me. It was not the first time I had bought someone a meal and watched them eat, but I was pushed into a mood that made me acutely aware of what I was seeing. I saw all around me with an intensity that has never been repeated. As I drove back to my hotel I noticed a cloud hanging over a tall building, massive, substantial, majestic, crying out to me saying, âThis is important! Notice me!â Everything I saw was screaming at me to pay attention and I desperately wanted to stop driving and just stand there and observe and listen.
It wasnât until I read this essay by Buechner that I was able to put this memory in perspective and I am still trying to do that more fully. I think what happened is that, for a moment, I was able to see life as a whole rather than as fragments. I was able to see this man and see beneath the dirt and abuse and sadness of his life the Kingdom of God waiting to burst forth and bring
healing and wholeness.
This is how, I believe, Jesus saw the world. He saw the world and all in it as fallen but with buried treasure in it to be discovered. So he taught about the Kingdom of God using parables about a field with buried treasure in it, about bread with leaven in it, about a mustard seed, a pearl of great price. When he was walking along with his disciples and they all saw a man born blind, Jesus alone saw him as one who would be blessed because the Kingdom of God was about to burst out in his life and restore his sight.
The world is holy because the Kingdom of God is bursting through and has the potential to burst through at any point, any time, any place. Tragedy and suffering as well as triumph and celebration are holy because the Kingdom of God is straining to burst through.
This makes a huge difference in how we view people around us. To be whole is to have Jesus at the center of our lives and when Jesus is at the center of our lives, we live life leaning forward in expectation of his kingdom, the Kingdom of God, breaking forward in the lives of people around us. The homeless man I met in Minneapolis becomes more than the sad wasted life I observed. He becomes a person, created in Godâs image, carrying the holy potential of having the Kingdom of God burst into his life making him whole.
A woman who is almost 80 and who has lived her live carrying bitterness like a precious heirloom becomes a woman on the verge of coming into life and wholeness when the Kingdom of God bursts open into her world.
A man who has lived his life with wealth, privilege and power and has used and abused people to get where he is becomes a man who has within him a buried treasure that might at any time burst open bringing love, repentance and a life of service to God and his fellow man.
A woman who has wasted her beauty in a life of hard living, her body abused by alcohol and violent boyfriends, her voice raspy with years of smoking becomes a woman on the verge of being made whole as the Kingdom of God bursts into her life.
There is no person on the face of this earth who is not capable of being set free. This means we have to be careful who we despise and who we view with disgust. All are invited to the wedding banquet Jesus will host for us and in every living being, the Kingdom of God is on the verge of bursting through.
When we pray for healing, we pray that the Kingdom of God will burst open in that personâs life and bring the healing that will come to all when the Kingdom of God comes in all its fullness.
When we pray for a country, we pray that the Kingdom of God will come with power, bringing wholeness to a broken land.
There is no event, no relationship, no person, no circumstance that exists outside the potential of being made whole when the Kingdom of God bursts through.
And there is no circumstance in your own life that God cannot redeem and make whole.
And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose.
There are many stories of brokenness in the lives of our congregation. Visitors come with their own stories of brokenness. But deeper and wider and greater than any of our stories is the kingdom of God straining to enter into this world of brokenness and make all things whole.
That is a transforming perspective. Think about the people in your life, family, friends. Think of the people with whom you work who cause you pain. Think of the people who annoy you begging on the streets. There is treasure buried in them. At any moment they might be transformed by the Kingdom of God bursting open into their lives just as you were also transformed.
I call you to surrender this morning as you come forward for communion. Let go of the worries and anxieties that overwhelm you. Let go of the prejudices you hold against others. Surrender to the potential of the kingdom of God that is straining to be released in your life and in the lives of all around you.
