Past Sermon

Sermon Title: "God's Providence, or Good Luck? "
Date: March 12, 2006
Minister: Rev. Charles E. Ensley, Jr.

Lesson:  Mark 8:31-38

Last weekend, another minister at the confirmation retreat told me that just before he was to leave from home, a tire on his SUV blew out while driving five miles per hour through a Von’s parking lot.  He had just enough time to take it by the tire dealer and get the new spare installed before leaving to pick up kids and drive up the mountain to Pilgrim Pines.  “Aren’t you lucky,” I said, “that it happened in the Von’s parking lot and not while you were driving 70 miles an hour on the 91 freeway?!”

That got me to thinking.  Was it really luck, after all, that his flat tire occurred in a relatively harmless location versus a potentially high-speed freeway accident?  Let me tell you another story in which you can judge the difference between good luck and God’s providence.

In the summer of 1972, I was serving as a seminary intern at different churches in upstate New York.  Hurricane Agnes might have gone unnoticed out here, but its heavy rains and a broken dam in Pennsylvania caused some eleven feet of flood waters to race through some low-lying New York countryside and little communities.  On one Sunday morning, I was to preach at two churches, with 30-to-45 minutes in between.  After preaching at the first church, I was driving the ten miles to the second church when I came up a rise on a rain-slickened, winding country back road and lost control of my car.  It slide across the highway, into the drainage ditch, and slammed to a stop against a post.

The rain began to come in through the now-broken side window.  There was window glass scattered throughout the car.  I was a bit dazed and, sitting there behind the steering wheel, wondered what in the world I was going to do out there in the middle of nowhere, on a road I had never traveled before.  (Remember:  this was 1972; there were no cell phones yet!)

Within a minute or two, a fellow pulled up in a pick-up truck.  He asked how he could help.  I told him I was supposed to be preaching at a church in the next town in a few minutes.  He told me he would take me there.  I pulled my robe out of the back seat, shaking out the broken glass.  On the way to the church, he told me he would call the garage owner in the next town and have my car towed there.  Maybe someone would take me there after worship.  We made it to church on time, he did as he promised, and I never saw nor heard from him again.

Now was it simply good luck that he came upon my accident that Sunday morning, within minutes of it happening, or was it God’s providence that put him in what had to surely be my right place at the right time?  I prefer to believe it was the latter.

In Rabbi Harold Kushner's phenomenally popular 1981 book, When Bad Things Happen to Good People, he says that in this life, God does not will bad things to happen to people.  When bad things happen to people, it is mostly a result of bad luck.  Our faith is in the hands of a vast roulette wheel.  When your number is up, it is up.  Nothing is meant by the good or bad things that happen to us.  It is all a matter of chance.

A number of years ago, Christian therapist Wayne Oates wrote a wonderful book entitled Luck:  A Secular God.  Oates claimed that modern people no longer believe in a purposeful, intervening, directing God.  What we believe in is luck.  Luck has become our way of explaining ourselves, explaining our world, explaining the good or bad things that come our way.

How do you explain the phenomenally popular gambling industry around the world?  Or the lotteries that have been immensely successful here in America over the past three decades?  Despite the rather ridiculous odds against anyone winning a lottery, millions play them every week, all hoping for the chance to get something for nothing, or for a five dollar ticket.

Not only Biblical faith, but also science questions the notion of luck.  Paschal noted that science shows there are certain laws of probability, but never anything in the world that could be called chance.  Chance, luck is only what appears when we observe circumstances at close range.  Over a long enough period of time, when certain processes are repeated, patterns are discerned.  Thus, there is probability but not chance.  When we observe the natural world, there does appear to be a kind of randomness.  But with sustained observation, we discern patterns even in the randomness.  When you flip a coin a hundred times, it will not be by luck that half of the times it will come up “heads” and half “tails.”  There are rules for randomness, rules called probability.

Thus, it is ironic that the person going into a casino to play a slot machine believes that, if he is fortunate, he will have “good luck.”  However, those who build and finance the casinos do not believe in luck at all.  They have not invested their millions on something as insubstantial as luck.  They can tell you exactly, down to the cent, what your chances are of winning.  They can tell you exactly what they will earn from your dollars played in their casino.  When you win, it is not by “chance” but rather by definite laws of predictable laws of probability.  In casinos, the only people dumb enough to believe in luck are the customers!  And I mean no offense to any here who enjoy going to Las Vegas to play a few games.  Just be aware that it is the odds of probability you are playing, and not a game of luck.

The word “luck” never really appears anywhere in the Scriptures.  The word “chance” appears only a couple of times in the New Testament.  This is odd, since these were very popular words in the Greco-Roman world.  The Greeks were always ascribing things to the Fates, those women who sat at their spinning wheel in heaven and, when their thread broke, broke the lives of some poor mortal here on earth.  Our lives, said Homer, are mere playthings of the gods.  It’s all a matter of luck, being jerked around by good or bad luck.

Be well assured that our lives are busy moving somewhere, whether we take responsibility for their direction or not.  We are busy opening doors and closing others.  We have made certain decisions in our past, invested our time and energy in ways that make certain futures possible for us and for others impossible.  Our current infatuation with luck is one with our modern sense of impotency, our contemporary unwillingness to take responsibility.  If the world is all a matter of luck, of chance, then what can anybody do about it?

Which makes all the more notable the Biblical view that there is no such thing as luck, chance, or random happenstance. What there is is God—moving, caring, hearing, acting behind the scenes of our lives.  What there is is providence—the quiet conviction that, by God, our world is moving somewhere, toward some good end predetermined by God.

You see this in today’s Gospel lesson, in which Jesus makes the first of three predictions that he will suffer and die, and on the third day rise from the dead.  Peter is shocked.  ‘This is not good PR, Lord!’ he exclaims.  ‘We just got these guys together.  We’re starting to build momentum.  Stop with the death talk.  Nobody wants to hear that.  If you keep talking about it, they’ll be scared they’re going to suffer and die too.’

Was there a way out for Jesus?  Could he have played it cool, low-key, under the radar of the Jewish religious leaders and the Roman rulers?  Make no waves; upset no one, especially the authorities.  Could Jesus have escaped death, married Mary Magdalene, have a couple of kids and die of natural causes at the old age of 73?  (They died younger back then.)

Instead, Jesus rebukes Peter.  Rebuke:  that is a harsh word.  This is not a matter of playing it by luck, laying low.  God had a plan, and Jesus knew what that plan was.  Peter did not, or at least did not understand it. 

In story after Biblical story, there is this affirmation of providence that flies in the face of our contemporary tendency to describe our lives as the workings of good and bad luck.

Providence is that care and guidance of God over God’s creatures.  I believe that providence can be discerned in this life, but usually only in the backward view, never in the forward.  That is, it is difficult to speak of God’s guiding in terms of what happens to us at this moment or what will happen to us tomorrow, but we are more able to discern the loving hand of God in that which has happened to us in the past.  I did not know that truck driver would come upon my accident that June morning 34 years ago, but I certainly did believe shortly afterwards, up to the present day, that it was a matter of God’s providence.

I’m not so sure I believe in “good luck” any more, and I purposely find myself saying something else to someone as we close a conversation or walk away from another.  At the hospital bedside of someone facing surgery, after I have prayed with them, I am certainly not going to say “Good luck!” as I walk out of the room.  That would negate the whole value of the prayer to God I had just offered.  As Christians we ought not to say “good luck.”  Rather, affirming providence, we ought to say, “God be with you.”  Thus, we can say adieu, or adios, the French and Spanish words for “God be with you,” but never “Good luck.”

What we call luck is really the absence of any known human reason for why an event should turn out one way rather than another.  Christians believe there is a reason, a rationale behind the movements of our world.  That reason is called the love of God.  We look for evidence of that love, that reason in all things.  We believe that this world is meant to mean something, to add up to more than the mere machinations of chance.  The world is moving toward God, toward eternal embrace by the One who created us and means to have us, the One we remember this Lenten season who loved the world so much that he have up his only Son for us.

 

(Portions of this sermon adapted from a 3/19/2000 sermon

by William H. Willimon entitled “Good Luck?”)