young parents and that old lady that it would all work out. Like Abram, I struggle to trust God s promises; I usually manage it.

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1 IT LL ALL WORK OUT February 28, 2010, Second Sunday in Lent Genesis 15: 1-12; Michael Lindvall, The Brick Presbyterian Church in the City of New York Theme: We can trust God that it ll all work out, but not necessarily as or when we want. O God, by your word to us in Scripture, speak the word we need to hear, not simply what we want to hear. By your word to us in Scripture, show us what we ought to do, not just what we want to do. And now may the words of my mouth and the meditations of my heart be acceptable in your sight, O Lord, my Rock and my Redeemer. Amen. I have uttered the words of today s sermon title more than a few times. I ve spoken them to my own children in the teary throes of one of those serial crises that punctuate adolescence. I have spoken them to distraught parents of 4-yearold s when their little one was not admitted to the school of first choice. I have uttered them to 83-year-old ladies being discharged from the hospital to a nursing home they really do not want to go to. It ll all work out, or so I have promised, words spoken in my most irenic and confident voice. More than a few times, as the words left my lips, I ve thought to myself, Lindvall, are you so sure? Are you really so sure that it s all going to work out? That s the very question Abraham is hinting at in the Bible passage from the Book of Genesis that Allie just read so eloquently. Three chapters earlier, God had called Abraham, a man later deemed ancestor in the faith by Jews, Christians, and Muslims alike. God had called this Abram, as his earlier name is pronounced, to leave his home in Haran, a lost town somewhere in what is now eastern Turkey or northern Iraq. God called Abram to go to a new place, the land of Canaan, where he would become, God promised, father of a great nation, no less. Abram obeyed God s call, and now in Chapter 15 today s story having wandered all over the Middle East and encountered no small amount of troubles, Abram has planted himself in Canaan just like he was supposed to. But there s a problem, a problem with that promise God made back in Chapter 12, the I will - 1 -

2 make of you a great nation promise. Abram, as he points out to God, has no children. His only heir is some shoe-string 3 rd cousin named Eliezer of Damascus. How can you be a father of a great nation if you have no heirs? In response, God takes Abram out into the night and has him look up into the night sky. See all those stars, Abram? So shall your descendents be. The next verse in the story is the turning point. Abram believed the Lord; and the Lord reckoned it to him as righteousness. That is to say, Abram trusted God when God told him that it would all work out. The Bible says that this act of trust was reckoned to Abram as righteousness. Reckoned as righteousness is an odd phrase, an enigmatic construction. It means that the relationship between God and Abraham was made firm, make good, made forever, made solid simply because the man trusted God. Simple trust, nothing else, is what sets the man right with the universe and right with the Lord of the universe. This point about simple trust will have a long, piercing history in theology. A millennium-and-a-half later, the Apostle Paul will pick up the very phrase in his Letter to the Romans. A millennium-and-a-half after the Book of Romans, Luther will take up Paul s point about Abram and hone it to the sharpest edge of the Reformation: namely, that a relationship of profound trust in God is what it s all about. This relationship of trust between Abram and God, a relationship formally named a covenant, is next sealed in what is to modern people a startlingly bizarre ceremony. Abram sacrifices two animals and two birds, cuts the carcasses of the former in half, lays this gore on the ground, and promptly falls asleep. As darkness falls, God, symbolized by a torch and a smoking firepot, passes betwixt the halved carcasses and the covenant is sealed. Nobody has any idea why it s both a torch and a firepot. What scholars do know is that in those days this singularly strange ritual seems to have been a standard way to seal the deal between two parties. Today we have shiny-shoe lawyers and mass paperwork-signings around mahogany conference tables; back then it was this outdoor abattoir. The covenant is sealed, the deal is done, the relationship is formed. Abram agrees to trust God and God promises that it will all work out. Earlier in the day, before the stars and the slaughter, Abram had clearly been wondering whether it really was going to work out. Just like me confidently promising my children and those - 2 -

3 young parents and that old lady that it would all work out. Like Abram, I struggle to trust God s promises; I usually manage it. But I have come to understand that there are some, well, caveats about how God works it all out. I can think of at least two conditions to this fundamental trust that it ll all work out. The first caveat is that even though it may all work out it doesn t necessarily work out according to my schedule. God promised Abraham descendents as numerous as the stars in the desert sky. Well, it would be a long, long time, before Abraham s children Jews, Christians, Muslims even, would number like the stars. And here we are, some 3,500 years later, and God is still adding stars to Abram s constellation. We baptized five more little stars last Sunday morning, five more children of Abraham. Here s an historical illustration of something taking a long time to work out. I love a good murder mystery, and to my thinking, one of the greatest detective novelists ever was as Englishwoman named Josephine Tey. Josephine Tey s second-best murder mystery was titled The Daughter of Time. That title is a turn on an old saying, Truth is the daughter of time, a venerable and graceful way of saying, it ll all work out eventually. It s an unusual murder mystery because the two murders the detective investigates occurred 500 years earlier. In 1483, Prince Edward V, still a young boy and contested heir to the throne of England, disappeared along with his little brother from the Tower of London. They were never seen again and assumed murdered. Suspicion fell on their uncle Richard III who had assumed the throne earlier in the year. A century later, Shakespeare wrote his famous play about these events. If you ve seen the play, you know that the bard made Richard into one of the all-time monsters of history, a judgment that has stuck until recently. Modern scholars have come to doubt Richard s guilt. In her detective story, Miss Tey examines the evidence. The book argues persuasively that Richard III was not guilty of the murder of the little princes. Miss Tey says that 500 years of mistaken history have vilified an innocent man. Like any mystery writer, she argues that in - 3 -

4 the end, the truth will always come out. Truth is the daughter of time." In other words, it s all work out, in time. The point is, sometimes it takes a very long time. There is yet another venerable proverb to this effect. The Greco-Roman philosopher-poet Plutarch quoted it in the First Century B.C. Two thousand years later Wordsworth borrowed it from an obscure German and popularized it in English. It is usually rendered as, Though the mills of God grind slowly, yet they grind exceedingly fine. You and I are children of impatience living in a culture of the instantaneous. s are too slow, so we have instant messaging. We microwave food and drive too fast, all because we want it to work out now, not later. The first caveat is that this yearning for the instantaneous fix is not a desire invariably granted by God. So yes, we dare trust God that it ll all work out, even though not necessarily according to our schedule. The second caveat to trust that it ll all work out is the bald fact that even though it may indeed work out, it often doesn t work out the way I want. God promised Abram descendents. What Abram and his wife Sarah doubtless had in mind was a passel of children right now. What they got was the one child, Isaac. Later there would be more descendants. In time, a lot of time, there would be the nation of Israel. And much later, there would be children of Abraham called Christians and then Muslims. This is surely not anything like what Abraham ever imaged. So yes, it may indeed all work out, but remember, it often it works out in ways you never imagined and might not much like. There s an old Chinese folk tale about a farmer who owned only one horse. He depended on the horse for everything: to pull the plow and to draw the wagon. One day a bee stung the horse and in fright it ran away into the mountains. His neighbors said, We are really sorry about your bad luck in losing your horse. But the old farmer shrugged and said, Bad luck, good luck, who is to say? A week later his horse came back accompanied by twelve wild horses and the farmer was able to corral all the fine animals. The news spread and his neighbors returned to said, Congratulations on this fine bonanza. To which the old man again - 4 -

5 shrugged and said, Good luck, bad luck, who can say? The farmer s son decided to make the most of what certainly looked like good fortune and started to break the wild horses so that they could be sold. But he got thrown from one of them and broke his leg. At the news of this accident, his neighbors came again, saying, We are so sorry about the bad luck of your son s fall. And of course, the old man said, Bad luck, good luck, who can say? Several weeks later, war broke out among the provinces of China. The army came through the village conscripting all the young men, but because his son was so badly injured, he did not have to go. Today s New York Times Magazine carries a fascinating article about depression. I have seen depression close up in friends and parishioners, and it s nothing anyone would ever want to experience. But the article boldly insists that for all the horrors and potential tragedies of clinical depression, good may often come from it. The author writes that depression might be worth it if it helps you better understand social relationships those are insights that can come out of depression. Even pithier is the article s statement that Wisdom isn t cheap, we pay for it with pain. Never would anyone who has been there say that depression is an example of it all working out. But the hard truth may be that beyond the depression, it actually can work things out. A few other examples: John Milton was disinherited by his father because of the young poet s Protestant views. He was expelled from Cambridge for fighting. He married a 16-year-old bride he never got on with and wrote in favor of legalized divorce. Milton went blind at the age of 49, and then, after all this, wrote Paradise Lost, arguably the greatest poem in the language. Scientist Louis Pasteur, one of the fathers of microbiology, had five children, only two of whom lived to adulthood. Their loss inspired his research work in vaccination. At the age of 46, Pasteur was paralyzed by a stroke but continued his work. In 1885, he saved the life of a nine-year-old boy named Joseph Meister by vaccinating him against rabies after the child was attacked by a rabid dog

6 Verdi was rejected by the Milan Conservatory for want of musical ability. But his musical career did work out rather well anyway. Tolstoy flunked out of school and the tutors hired by his wealthy parents gave up trying to teach him anything. Yet his writing career did finally work out. Dickens was able to go to school a total of four years of his life but became perhaps the greatest novelist in the English language. Another life that worked out as no one would have expected. So in spite of it all, I dare say to you, say to myself, Trust, trust that it ll all work out. It ll all work out for five-year-olds jockeying for on-going schools. Not one of my three kids went to the college I chose for them. But it worked out. It ll all work out for the devastated teenager who thinks the world is about to end because of a flunked test or a break-up with a boyfriend. F s can serve as a fine reminder of the importance of homework, and it s not like you were never going to marry him. It ll all work out for the 83-year-old lady discharged from the hospital. The food in the nursing home may be lamentable, but there s a sweet-tempered aide to help with things, and the kids won t worry, and there are some friends to play whist with twice a week. It often doesn t work out according our schedules. It doesn t always work out in the way we imagined or would first desire. Yet we dare to say the words and trust God anyway. In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen