Hilton Head Island, SC – April 16, 2017
The Chapel Without Walls
Mark 16:1-8; Hebrews 2:1-9
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text – Now in putting everything in subjection to man, he left nothing outside his control. As it is, we do not yet see everything in subjection to him. – Hebrews 2:8b&c (RSV)
This Easter sermon begins with an observation which may bring satisfaction to your heart, if not outright joy. No one knows who wrote the Letter to the Hebrews. Perhaps like you, and definitely like me, that person could quote scripture passages, but he couldn’t remember book, chapter or verse numbers. In his defense, there were no chapter or verse numbers for the Hebrew Bible, the Old Testament, back then. But there were biblical book titles and books.
Early in what much later was enumerated as the 2nd chapter of Hebrews, the writer quoted Psalm 8, but apparently he didn’t recall that it was Psalm 8 he was quoting. Just so you know what sort of an astonishing biblical whiz I am, I knew he was quoting from Psalm 8 even if he didn’t know it was Psalm 8. But then, I have preached from Psalm 8 at least thirty or forty times over fifty years of preaching. Any doofus who preached from Psalm 8 that often and can’t remember where those verses come from has no memory at all and shouldn’t be preaching at all.
Anyway, in declaring that God allowed humanity to put everything in subjection under our feet, the writer of this strange and very influential New Testament letter said that although in creating the human race, God nevertheless “left nothing outside his control” (2:8). If we humans are little lower than the angels and are crowned with glory and honor, with the ability to “put everything in subjection under [our] feet (2:7-8a)”, then how is it possible God “left nothing outside his control”?
It has taken me three-quarters of a century to come to this conclusion, but in my old age I have evolved into believing that God controls essentially nothing that happens in or beyond the world, nothing. Nature controls much of it, but God doesn’t control nature. He allows it to function independently of His direct intervention, just as He allows us in our nature to have free and independent wills to do whatever we choose to do.
If that is true, then why isn’t the world a complete and utter mess? Well, some people believe it is. I am not one of them, and I hope you aren’t, either. If human beings do anything that is good and productive and wholesome, it is the result of God’s spirit moving within us, inspiring us either to do what we know is right or what He leads us to believe is right. By no means is this a mechanistic process, because God is not a mechanistic God. It is a spiritual process, because, as the Bible says, God is spirit, and His spirit can move us to do His will without forcing us to do it.
Roughly half a century ago, I read a definition of the providence of God. I don’t know who wrote it, or exactly when I read it, but the definition has stuck with me ever since. It is what I believe the doctrine of providence means. Providence means that ultimately God can use whatever happens and whatever choices human beings make for His own purposes. God doesn’t cause any of these things to occur, because since the dawn of creation or the Big Bang or however you want to describe it, God causes NOTHING. We certainly are not on our own, but we’re not under God’s thumb, either, not by any definition or description.
Now I shall give you what I think is an excellent illustration of how God’s providence operates, even under unspeakably horrible situations. I was told this story very recently by a 94-year-old lady I have come to know. She told me that seventy years ago one of her cousins became a nun in the Roman Catholic Order of the Sisters of Mercy. The girl was from a family of four daughters, and my friend said she was the least likely of the four to become a nun. She waited until she was 25 to do so. Back then, most young women went into the convent in their teens, but not this particularly free “free spirit.”
When the postulate was ready to take her first vows, he mother and sisters drove several hundred miles to witness this momentous event in their committed Catholic family. One the way, all four them were killed in a car accident. God did not cause them to go see the young woman take her initial vows as a nun, nor did He cause the accident. It just happened, as many things like that do. But in God’s providence, great good came from that undeniable tragedy. Here’s how.
My friend’s aunt owned the house in which she and her three unmarried adult daughters lived. Each daughter was working, and each had a small life insurance policy through their employment. My friend’s father had power-of-attorney for his sister and nieces, and he sold the house and cashed in the insurance. Because nuns take vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, he turned the assets over to the Sisters of Mercy. In case the cousin ever decided to leave the convent, the money would be there for her. She lived in the convent for almost seventy years, and she died a couple of years ago.
It was 1945 when the nun’s mother and sisters were killed in the car accident. I am going to guesstimate, in an admittedly arbitrary fashion, that their family’s estate was then worth $50,000, with the house, the three insurance policies, and other miscellaneous assets. That wasn’t very much in today’s dollars, but it was a very sizeable amount back then. Up until the Great Recession of 2007-08, there used to be a famous “Rule of Seven” in investments. It suggested that if anyone put any amount of money into safe, conservative investments, and never took any interest from the investments, the money would double every seven years. Thus, by that general rule, the hypothetical $50,000 was worth $100,000 in 1952, and $200,000 in 1959, and so on.
In 2015, when the nun/cousin finally died, the initial estate would have been worth approximately $6,400,000. The nun didn’t need any of it, because all her needs were taken care of by the convent for all those years. The convent never spent any of the assets, because they kept the money in trust for her should she ever leave the order. The result of this is that now the Order of the Sisters of Mercy has $6,400,000 they wouldn’t have if that young woman had never chosen to enter the convent and her mother and sisters had never chosen to drive several hundred miles to observe her taking her vows as a postulate and the two teenage boys in the other car hadn’t chosen to be exactly where the accident occurred. And when there is a decreasing number of young women going into religious orders but a rapidly increasing number of elderly nuns who need to be taken care of in their old age, that long-ago tragedy, which no one would have wanted or deliberately caused to happen but happened nonetheless, the Sisters of Mercy providentially have a large nest-egg, the income from which shall help care for the cousin’s convent sisters forever.
God caused none of that to happen. I would be amazed and theologically confounded if God wanted it to happen. But things happen, and by His providence God can use whatever we choose to do and whatever happens for His own purposes.
Anyone who has heard me speaking from this pulpit or in other places is aware that I have been hugely dismayed, along with millions of other Americans, by the 2016 US presidential election. Last November 8, Donald J. Trump was elected President of the United States. In December he received 306 votes in the Electoral College, whereas his main opponent received only 232 Electoral College votes. However, Mrs. Clinton received three million more votes than he did. Donald Trump received only 46.4% of the total votes cast, and Mrs. Clinton got 48.5% of the votes. Minor party candidates received 2.1% of the total votes cast. If a particular two of those minor parties had not fielded candidates at all, or if there were no Electoral College, without question Hillary Clinton would now be President. But they did, and there is, and she isn’t.
In the providence of God, it is conceivable that Donald Trump could turn out to be an acceptable President, or maybe a good President, or even an outstanding President. Stranger things have happened in the long and unpredictable history of the human race. But clearly God could use the election of Donald J. Trump for His providential plans and hopes and dreams for the world, because God can use anything that occurs in the world for His plans.
This is the first Easter after the political hopes and aspirations of millions of American citizens died. Shall they, like Jesus, ever be resurrected?
On what chronologically was likely to have been an April day in some year between roughly 29 and 33 CE, or “AD” if you prefer, a Galilean prophet and preacher was put to death on a Roman cross. The people who engineered Jesus’ death, and the Roman governor who ultimately but probably reluctantly acceded to it, chose to do what they did. It may have been carefully planned, or it may have been a haphazard happening, but it happened. They made it happen; God most certainly did NOT make it happen. Things like that happen, nevertheless.
Three days later, the closest followers of Jesus became convinced that, contrary to everything they could ever have expected or imagined, God raised Jesus from his grave. They could not know it; no one can know it. But they chose to believe it.
The resurrection of Jesus Christ is an article of faith. It is not nor could it ever be an historical fact. If it were proven to be factual, that would connote the revivification of a corpse, and not a true resurrection at all. The word “resurrection” of necessity requires faith, and nothing but faith. There is no proof for what the Bible says about Jesus’ resurrection, nor can there be.
By the leap of faith of the earliest New Testament Christians, the Church of Jesus Christ came into being. And now, two thousand years later, more than a third of the world’s population are followers of Jesus. Perhaps there are almost three billion of us.
God caused none of that to happen, but it happened. In the providence of God, what the Church believes about Easter has changed the world. It has not always been for the better; sometimes the Church has made terrible mistakes and decisions. But only the most anti-religious of observers would ever claim that the world is far worse off because of the choices of the Easter People. In the main, the decisions of the great majority of the Christians throughout history have rendered God’s world to be a better place than otherwise it would be. After all, the providence of God means that God can use whatever happens and whatever human beings choose to do for His own purposes. God doesn’t control much of anything in the world, and probably virtually nothing at all. Still, because He is God, He uses what we do and the choices we make increasingly to turn the world into His kingdom, even if God is unlike most human rulers in most respects.
James Russell Lowell was one of America’s best-known and most-loved poets. In 1845 he wrote a long politically-oriented poem called The Present Crisis. It was written as an attempt to thwart the United States Congress and its then-bellicose-president James K. Polk from engaging in a war with Mexico. For Lowell, the fear was that a victory over Mexico and the admission into the Union of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California might result in those territories becoming slave states. That the flinty Massachusetts Yankee could not countenance.
One of the many stanzas of The Present Crisis became the opening stanza in a hymn found in many recent Mainline Protestant hymnbooks, including ours.
Once to every man and nation/ Comes the moment to decide,
In the strife of truth with falsehood/ For the good or evil side;
Some great cause, some new decision/ Offering each the bloom or blight,
And the choice goes by forever/ ‘Twixt that darkness and that light.
Despite the poem, the nation went to war, and as a result, those four territories eventually did come into the Union as free states, not slave states. The Mexican War was a major factor in the USA becoming an imperial power from the nineteenth century to the present time. If it is possible for any nation to be an exemplary imperial power, America has accomplished many exemplary things with its extraordinary power. If any country has power, in the providence of God that power can always be used wisely rather than foolishly.
A much larger and tragically far more devastating war lay in the near future for the United States. There are many factors which could have prevented the American Civil War, but by 1860, every feasible alternative had been tried. In that year, Abraham Lincoln was elected by a far smaller percentage of the popular vote than Donald Trump received in 2016. And the very skewed outcome of the Election of 1860 almost guaranteed shots to be fired somewhere. As it turned out, they were fired about fifty miles from here as the crow flies but not as the road goes.
Good Friday in 1865 was April 14, as Good Friday this year was April 14. That evening, in Ford’s theater in Washington, John Wilkes Booth took the life of Abraham Lincoln, though the President did not die until the next morning. Edwin Stanton, the Secretary of War, was there when Lincoln expired. He was one of the “Team of Rivals” who most strongly resisted Lincoln’s leadership during the war. Yet when the greatest American ever to live breathed his last, Stanton declared, “Now he belongs to the ages.”
Easter is Easter only if we believe it is Easter. The New Testament Church chose to interpret the crucifixion and resurrection in a particular way. God did not require them to do that; He did not twist their minds or hearts to conclude that. He never does anything remotely like that. But they forged ahead and took their leap of faith.
This is admittedly a very unusual Easter sermon. The doctrine of providence normally is not associated with Easter. But, as with many other realities in human life and history, providence often --- maybe even always --- turns tragedies into triumphs.
The New Testament Church came into existence only because a small group of the disciples of Jesus chose to believe that, contrary to all the laws of nature and reason, a man was brought back to life from the inescapable bonds of death.
What do you choose to believe, either about providence or about Easter?