“If I didn’t have bad luck, I’d have no luck at all.” How often have you heard someone say that? It is an ironic statement intended to bring some humor into painful circumstances. And when bad things happen, if we can laugh, even in our sorrow, we are certainly better off.
Years ago Rabbi Harold Kushner wrote a best-selling book called When Bad Things Happen to Good People. As Rabbi Kushner clearly stated, the title of his book was not WHY Bad Things Happen to Good People; instead it was WHEN Bad Things Happen to Good People. Misfortunes afflict everyone, he said, but trying to determine their origin is particularly vexatious when truly good people do nothing to warrant these problems. And it may be a fruitless exercise, especially if we imagine that God will not allow bad things to happen to good people.
That issue most definitely is addressed in the book of Job. However, it says absolutely nothing about WHY bad things happen to good people. The first two chapters of this strange and outstanding biblical book tell us that every one of Job’s misfortunes, of which there were a plentiful plethora, were directly attributable solely to Satan. However, that is merely a literary device, and should not be taken literally. In fact, you have no only my permission but my encouragement to ignore that dubious notion altogether. The real point is this: Nowhere in the 42 chapters of Job does it even hint at why bad things happen to good people. But it does say a great deal about what our attitude should be WHEN they happen.
Nevertheless, that is not our main focus for today. We addressed that last Sunday, and will do so again next Sunday. But today we are looking at when good things happen to either good or bad people. Specifically, we are talking about what is universally known as “good luck.” The very word luck implies happy happenstances, as opposed to unhappy happenstances. “Happenstance” means things which occur by chance. We are all aware of instances in our own lives where good came our way due to nothing we did to elicit it or deserve it. It just happened.
St. Augustine declared, “All good comes from God.” I used to believe that statement, because the concept behind it seemed to elevate God, and I was (and am) highly in favor of that. However, as I have reflected on Augustine’s statement, I have had to conclude it is an overstatement. For example, a couple in northern California were walking their dog, and they found some rusty cans sticking up out of a hillside they own. Inside the cans were 1,427 gold coins, minted between 1847 and 1894, worth over ten million dollars. Potentially that was very good luck, although it could also be a curse to the couple if they don’t handle their newfound wealth well. We have all read about that with certain lottery winners. But did God give them all that gold? I seriously doubt it. But if so, why them, rather than someone else? Surely their discovery just happened, a word based on the root word happy.
Jeff Baumann was standing a few feet away from the bomb which exploded at the finish line of the Boston Marathon last year. He lost both legs, but not his life. In a story he wrote for Parade Magazine, the Sunday newspaper supplement, he said this: “I was lucky. That’s how I tried to look at it. I was standing next to a bomb, and I survived.” How we deal with chance, meaning either good fortune or misfortune, is essentially a matter of attitude, of perspective. That is particularly true of bad luck, but also of good luck. If we assume either that we deserve good or bad luck, if we think chance has it “in” for us, either for good or ill, almost certainly we will come up with some very skewed thinking. Everyone and even every thing is subject to chance; there is no getting around it. Supposing that God controls chance creates far, far more theological dilemmas than it could ever solve. Life is chancy, Christians. Get used to it.
I know a man who has been a friend since our young childhood in Dixon, Illinois. John Gerlach and I were both fortunate to have been born in Dixon. It was and is a very fine community. It also was home to another boy, many years older than we are, named Ronald Reagan, although he was not born there. (John Gerlach, by the way, is far happier about that particular Dixon association than John Miller. He even made a big contribution to put Dutch on a horse in a big statue beside the Rock River between the Peoria and Galena Avenue bridges.)
Recently Lois and I joined John and Joanne Gerlach for an early dinner when they were driving up I-95 to North Carolina. John happened to tell us the circumstances of how he was accepted as a student at Yale. He said he had SATs which probably were too low for any Ivy League school, but he also applied to Harvard and Princeton, both of which rejected his applications. The only reason he made it into Yale, he said, is that there was Yale graduate who lived in northwest Illinois who volunteered every year to interview all northwest Illinois applicants to see whether he thought they had the right stuff to become Yalies. The Yale admissions department had turned down John, but this man went to bat for him, and convinced them to take a chance on him, which they did. John said it was one of the best pieces of good luck in his entire lifetime. Being a graduate of Yale no doubt helped him to be accepted in the Northwestern University Business School, where he got an MBA, and it all launched him into a very successful business career, where he was able to retire in modest comfort (as befits people from Dixon, Illinois) in his mid-fifties. But that kindly Whiffenpoof was his good luck charm.
The other major piece of good luck for John Gerlach was in marrying Joanne Bogle of Fall River, Massachusetts, where Lizzie Borden took an axe and gave her father forty whacks. I had selected Joanne as a young woman John should meet when I knew her at the Fourth Presbyterian Church in Chicago, where I was serving on the ministerial staff. He was out of the country when I wanted to match them up, and when he returned he met her on his own before I had a chance to introduce them, and the rest is history. But it was my idea in the first place, it was very good luck for John, and God had nothing to do with it. God wants to bless every marriage, but He knows it would be divinely foolhardy for Him to try to match anybody with anybody. I, on the other hand, have never managed to learn that lesson.
Remember the mudslide in Oregon which killed over twenty people several weeks ago? There was a story in the newspaper which said that a couple decided to take the mother of one of them shopping a few minutes before the slide happened. Otherwise all three of them might have been killed. Similarly, when there is a plane crash, we hear about people who either were late getting to the airport or had a last-minute situation which prevented them from getting on the flight. Good luck seems really good when the alternative is obviously disastrous.
Here are some verses from our responsive reading this morning. Job is referring to God, and he says, “Though I am innocent, I cannot answer him” (9:15). He wants to talk to God about his incredible string of misfortunes, but God is nowhere to be found. “If I summoned him and he answered me, I would not believe he was listening to my voice” (9:16) Even if I could locate God, says Job, I wouldn’t trust he was really telling me anything despite hearing His voice. “For he crushes me with a tempest, and multiplies my wounds without cause” (9:17).
But you’re wrong, Job! None of these misfortunes was caused by God! They just happened, as good fortune also just happens! It is understandable to blame God when bad things happen, but God is not the cause; chance is the cause. Or, if you object to that concept, then life is the cause. If we live, we suffer, but we also all luxuriate in good luck as well. Sadly, however, it is human nature to remember and to grumble about bad luck more than to revel in good luck.
Without question, Job got it right that his three supposed “friends” had it even more wrong than Job himself did. Of them he said, “I have heard many such things; miserable comforters are you all. Shall windy words have an end? Or what provokes you that you answer? I also could speak as you do, were I in your place; I could join words together against you, and shake my head at you” (16:2-4). In other words, says Job, there are people who always blame the victims when chance rolls its implacable and remorseless dice against them.
But Job was not finished with God, not by a long shot. “Today also my complaint is bitter, his hand is heavy despite my groaning. Oh, that I knew where I might find him, that I might come even to his seat! I would lay my case before him, and fill my mouth with arguments” (23:2-4). Listen closely, because this is important: When we have complaints against God, we should feel free to express them. God can take it. He has had fifty thousand years of getting used to it from people on this planet alone, and who knows how long on how many other older planets? All God asks of us is that we try to understand how chance determines far more than we would ever desire, and more, perhaps, than even God wants. But we are independent beings in an independent world, and --- is there any better way to express it? --- stuff happens!
The Island Packet had a story recently about Helen and Kenneth Felumlee, who were married for seventy years. They lived in Nashport, Ohio. She was 92, and he was 91. Helen died one evening, and the next morning, fifteen hours later, he died. Early that morning he told his children what they already knew but he was still processing as best he could, “Mom died,” and within three hours he too was dead. What extraordinary good luck! Who, especially those who were married for fifty or sixty or seventy years, would not strongly prefer for it all to end exactly like that! But very rarely does it work out like that, does it? Most people are widowed for far longer than fifteen hours. Fifteen months or fifteen years, maybe, but not fifteen hours.
I was going to end this sermon with some quotes from a novel I just read, but I’m not going to do that. I’ll use those quotes next week. Instead I am going to quote from something my sister-in-law sent us a few days ago. Some of you know that my oldest brother Bob died almost two years ago. His wife of 63 years has been writing a weekly column for a number of years. It started out as something she wrote on her computer and then e-mailed it to her children and others. Now it goes to the local weekly newspapers in Fort Scott, Kansas, where she grew up, and in Pittsville, Wisconsin, where she lived for more than two-thirds of her life.
I have told Marilyn that in my opinion she has adjusted to Bob’s death better than 95% of all the widowed people I have ever known, and I have known many hundreds fairly well. When Marilyn sat down to write this piece, she thought she was writing it for herself. Then in midstream she decided she might have been writing it for her two children and their spouses. Then she sent it to Lois and me and to my one remaining brother and his wife. But I choose to think she was writing it for all of us, because it relates closely to Job, Misfortune, Good Luck, and God. It is a paean of praise to marriage. Some of you have been married for many years, some were married for years and then your spouse died, some were married and then divorced, and some never married. Nevertheless, these are wonderful observations for anyone, whether or not you were ever married. Here they are:
I don’t know if any of the following will make sense to you, maybe not, but I feel better just getting it out and writing about it.
I don’t know why, but today I feel so alone. I guess what it is is that no one needs me. But I need someone and that is Bob. As long as we had each other nothing else mattered. Why did I have to wait ‘til he is gone to realize that all we ever needed was to be happy with each other. Not other people, not things, not anything. As long as I had him, I didn’t need anything else. Why did it take me to find this out after he is gone?
I look around my apartment and don’t see one thing that I need or that I can’t live without or that I want. Nothing I have in this apartment can talk to me, laugh with me, sleep with me, no… not anything. I could walk out of this apartment today and I wouldn’t miss anything in it. Why did I think that I needed “things?” What good are they? The only thing that matters is your mate, your soul mate. As long as we had each other, nothing else mattered. For some reason I seemed to think that we would just go on forever, and one day we would just cease to exist. But I thought that day was way down a path that we would take together and, I guess, just die together. It happened to other people, not to us. Then within 24 hours he was gone. Just like that. It is awful not to be wanted. No one doesn’t want me on purpose. It is just that everyone has each other and they don’t need anyone else. Even if someone did need me, it wouldn’t be like Bob needing me, or like me needing him.
I don’t know what brings this feeling on, and it doesn’t happen too often, but when it hits me, that is when I really need Bob. And he isn’t here, and will never be here. And no one can fill that spot. I try to fill it with reading, watching TV, talking to friends on the phone, anything, but I just feel so alone. I guess that is what a marriage is; after a while you become one, so when one is gone, part of you disappears too. I don’t feel whole, I always feel like part of me is missing. And it is. My husband, my other half of 63 years.
I didn’t write this to make you feel sorry for me. In fact I think I wrote it, hoping it brings a little insight into your marriages and that you will reassess your life together and realize what a fantastic life you have with your husband or wife. And that all the little things that irritate you and cause you to have words, get upset with each other, say things you wish you hadn’t, huff off, all those sorts of things. Life is too short; just take each day and see how happy you can make your mate; forget about yourself. If your mate is happy, you will be happy too. If he/she irritates you, just remember he/she is here in the flesh. And that is all that really matters.
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We need not agree with every idea expressed here to appreciate the excellence of the writing or the profound wisdom of the thoughts. Marilyn and Bob knew how much they loved each other, but like virtually everyone else, she could fully comprehend that only when he is no longer there to love. They had remarkably good luck to find each other when they did. Otherwise their lives would have been exponentially poorer without one another.
It is easy, and even natural, to thank God for our good fortune. But when misfortune assails us, where do we turn? Upon that question we shall focus next week.