When Life Doesn't Turn Out as Planned
When Life Doesn’t Turn Promises, Promises 1:1-18 Out Ruth as Planned Genesis 21: 8-21 By By Rev. Jeffrey V. O’Grady June 25, 2017
Rev. Jeffrey V. O’Grady Pastor January 14, 2007
San Marino Community Church
1750 Virginia Road San Marino, CA 91108 San Marino Church (626) 282-4181Community • Fax: (626) 282-4185 1750 Virginia Road www.smccpby.com • [email protected] San Marino, CA 91108 (626) 282-4181 • Fax: (626) 282-4185 www.smccpby.com • [email protected] All rights reserved. These sermon manuscripts are intended for personal use only and may not be republished or used in any way without the permission of the author.
To the made preserve Turn the quality of Planned the spoken word in thisRev. written adaptation. June 25, 2017 extent possible, effort has been When LifetoDoesn’t Out as Jeffrey V. O’Grady, Pastor
The game ended. The roaring stadium fell silent, empty of fans, a desolate place of crushed popcorn boxes, and drinking cups, and trampled programs. The coach entered a solemn, deadly quiet locker room. Helmets are on the floor, jerseys pulled off and piled up for the wash. “I just want you guys to know that I’m real proud of the way you played this afternoon,” he said. “Real proud! We didn’t win, but we did prove to a lot of people what we could do. It was a moral victory.” But later, on the way out, a second string tackle turned to the quarterback and asked, “What’s a moral victory?” “It’s what the coach tells you when you lose the game,” the quarterback said. “It’s what a coach says to a team when he knows it’s his last season.” Now if you can’t fool a twenty-year-old football player about defeat, who can you fool? When they read the scores on the nightly news, nobody ever talks about “moral victory.” They just post the scores and those with the highest numbers win. Those with the lowest lose. Coaches tell players anything to get them to go out and knock heads the next week. They’ll call it a moral victory and say, “The score didn’t reflect what really happened,” and, “It’s not who won or lost but how well you played the game.” But the fact is a coach remains a coach only when the win-lose record is in his or her favor. The morning after the election, there are boxes of unused victory buttons, and bumper stickers and baseball caps in the hall. The balloons and confetti are still in the rafters, unlaunched, and there are desperate attempts to smile as if the lost election doesn’t hurt. “I want to thank you all for all that you’ve done. We didn’t win but we made our point, I think? I’m sure if we just had a few more weeks, we might have turned things around . . . if it hadn’t been for that FBI investigation at the eleventh hour . . . I want to thank everybody for everything. Someday we will look back on this as a good experience.” Defeat. Failure. So how do you deal with defeat, when things don’t go as planned? I can use a cheap rationalization; it was “a moral victory, a good learning experience.” I can blame it on some other person or even claim no knowledge or responsibility for the failure. 2
June 25, 2017
When Life Doesn’t Turn Out as Planned
Rev. Jeffrey V. O’Grady, Pastor
In Genesis, Adam said, “The woman you gave to be with me, she gave me the fruit of the tree and I ate.” And Eve said, “The serpent whom you created, he gave me the fruit to eat.” Rationalization and blaming is nothing new. It’s as old as time itself. Most of us know the experience of defeat. You interview for the job and think it goes well, and come out full of hope. But then the phone rings and the voice on the other end says lots of complimentary things before they say, “We wish you well in your job search.” You begin to feel a little humiliated in the eyes of people important to you, and you begin to even doubt yourself. Rejection has a way of distorting your worldview. Life can feel like it’s filled with “Catch 22” situations where you just can’t win. And it can leave you feeling like a victim of circumstances beyond your control, which brings me to this story about Hagar and Ishmael. It is a story about a woman and a child who receive what they need most from the Lord. When Sarah gave up hope of ever having a baby, she said to her husband Abraham, “You ought to get to know my servant girl, Hagar, better.” So Abraham did and Hagar had a son. They named him Ishmael and he became Abraham’s heir. Then later on Sarah had a child herself, Isaac, and suddenly there was a big problem at home. The older boy would inherit everything. But God had promised everything to Sarah’s boy. And Sarah couldn’t stand seeing the two boys on the same level, even when playing together. You can just imagine baby Isaac pulling on big brother Ishmael’s hair and Sarah rushes into the nursery during the squabble to comfort Ishmael. “Your little brother doesn’t know that it hurts you, Ishmael” she says. “He’s just a baby.” A few minutes later another scream from the nursery and Sarah rushes back in. This time it is Isaac who is bawling. She asks Ishmael, “What’s just happened?” “Nothing,” says Ishmael. Soon Hagar and Sarah aren’t getting along. Finally Sarah says to Abraham, “Send her away!” She wanted the mother and that little boy out of her life forever. This is a difficult report about the ethics of Sarah and Abraham. Sarah can’t simply celebrate the birth of her son and enjoy the gift of it all. Abraham doesn’t care enough about Hagar and her son, so he has a lunch packed for them and sends them out into the desert. Life is just sometimes unfair. It wasn’t right. It wasn’t fair. Hagar deserved better. Soon the water runs out and so does the food. Life begins to feel like a losing proposition. The boy 3
June 25, 2017
When Life Doesn’t Turn Out as Planned
Rev. Jeffrey V. O’Grady, Pastor
collapses under a tree. Hagar goes away a little distance and tries to hold herself together. She’s exhausted, bitter, rejected, confused, and hopeless. It isn’t right. It isn’t fair. And you can begin to understand why the Black Lives Matter movement has taken shape. When you’re mistreated and denied access to the things that sustain life, you begin to seethe with anger. And you can see why Cesar Chavez, a farm worker and civil rights activist, co-founded the United Farm Workers Union, because he was fed up with the way fruit pickers were being treated. And you can see why marginalized people and those treated as second-class citizens feel defeated all over again. Asian students outperform other students and yet, though better academically qualified for admission are denied because there are too many Asian students in the class already. It isn’t fair, the way some people are treated. The starting line in the race for success unfairly rewards some and disadvantages others. In a time when tribalism seemed to dominate the landscape, when God’s people had enemies among the Philistines, the Midianites and the Ammonites, all who probably spoke Semitic languages, some say that the Ishmaelites were actually brothers. This is a story about God’s protection and care for those who have suffered defeat time and time again. And it is a story that underscores what the story of Cain and Able established: that we are not to be our brothers’ keepers so much as to be our brothers’ brother! Maybe this is a word for us in the midst of our tribalism today. My enemies are not God’s enemies. Hagar, thrown out of the house, wandering in the desert with no food and no water, hears a voice in the wilderness, “What’s the trouble, Hagar?” “My boy is dying under the tree and you ask me what’s the trouble?” she replies. “Hagar, you look scared. Do you think there is a wilderness so barren, so trackless, so deep and so dark that I can’t find you there?” asks the Lord. “Do you think there is some place in all creation where I cannot find you and take care of you? I am still God. Now come on, get up. Take that boy of yours in your arms. I’m going to make him into a great nation,” says the Lord. So Hagar gets up and hugs her boy and then she saw something she had missed before! A well of promising life water in the desert. Her feelings of rejection, and bitterness, and anger had distorted her view of reality. Suddenly God opened her eyes to something 4
June 25, 2017
When Life Doesn’t Turn Out as Planned
Rev. Jeffrey V. O’Grady, Pastor
she had not seen right there in front of her. She filled her water skin and gave the boy a drink. They had lost her inheritance, through no fault of their own, but God was with them. God is not only with the insiders but also with the outsiders. God is with me not only when I win but also when I lose. There is no wilderness so barren or distant that God cannot find me or sustain me. Tom Long tells the story of a mild argument with an ethicist friend who was making a case for a certain kind of equity justice, “ . . . namely that a truly just society is one in which justice is like the blindfolded statue and every person is treated exactly the same. She backed up her argument by telling him about an incident with her two young children. When she discovered them fighting over a candy bar, she told her older child to divide the candy bar in half, one piece for herself and the other for her sister. When the older child did as she was told, the mother then invited her younger daughter to pick which of the two pieces of the candy bar she wanted for herself. It was a nice solution since the one doing the dividing was not the one doing the picking, thus putting incentive in the system to be completely fair in doing the dividing. Society (Tom’s friend argues), would benefit from such fairness, impartiality, and equality.”1 “That may work for dividing Hershey Bars and Social Security benefits, but it is less successful in plumbing the character of human need and desire,” argues Tom Long. “At our depths we do not desire to be treated with impartial indifference; we wish to be known, understood, treasured, treated as we are in our very particular humanity. In fact, the candy bar incident does not reflect how a mother actually treats her children. She does not show her love blindly and equally, dividing things right down the middle. If one of them has the flu, she does not desert the child after a few minutes to give precisely the same amount of time to the other. If one of them comes home from school crying because her friends have treated her badly, that is the one who gets an extra helping of motherly affection. In the law courts we may desire that justice wear a blindfold impartially dispensing benefits in equal proportions. But we want parents, and we want God as our heavenly parent, not to wear blindfolds, but instead to see us in all our needs and particularities with the eyes of tenderness and love.”2 1 Long, Thomas G., “The Love of God” (Journal for Preachers Vol. XL Num. 4 Pentecost 2017) p. 21 2 Ibid
5
June 25, 2017
When Life Doesn’t Turn Out as Planned
Rev. Jeffrey V. O’Grady, Pastor
“God is not like the planet Venus, distant and cold, shining monochromatic love on all peoples,” writes Tom Long. “’God loves all people’ is not where we start. ‘God loved Abraham [and Sarah]’ is where we start and ‘God loves all people’ is the astounding omega point of this love story in the Bible.”3 God loved Isaac and Ishmael. God loved Sarah and Hagar in all their particularity and neediness. God loves Jacob as well as Esau. The God which is described in the Bible is not some sentimentalized version of love that floats around in popular culture, some vague principal, but instead is a very personal and freely given love that searches for us in whatever wilderness we find ourselves, in whatever defeat we may have experienced. In Ephesians the Apostle reminds us, “Remember that you were at that time without Christ, being aliens from the commonwealth of Israel, strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world,” perhaps just like Hagar felt. “So he came and proclaimed peace to you who were far off and peace to those who were near; for through him both of us have access in one Spirit to the Father. So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are citizens with the saints and also members of the household of God, built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the cornerstone.”4 Life may be unfair, and we will experience defeat and failure along the way. But God is faithful and just, and is not blind to our travails and struggles. God loves you and me, not generally as a blanket principal, but loves us in all of our particularity and individuality. You are no longer a stranger or alien, but a citizen with the saints of the household of God. You are adopted into the family of the Lord. You too will inherit. So get up and fill your water skin. Don’t be blinded by your disappointments and rejections. Believe that God is present even in the deserts and wildernesses of this life, and get up to continue the journey; for the Lord intends to include you in a great nation. It’s called the Kingdom of Heaven. Thanks be to God.
3 Ibid.
4 Epheisans 2:12, 17-19
6
Rev. Jeffrey V. O’Grady Pastor January 14, 2007
San Marino Community Church
1750 Virginia Road San Marino, CA 91108 San Marino Church (626) 282-4181Community • Fax: (626) 282-4185 1750 Virginia Road www.smccpby.com • [email protected] San Marino, CA 91108 (626) 282-4181 • Fax: (626) 282-4185 www.smccpby.com • [email protected] All rights reserved. These sermon manuscripts are intended for personal use only and may not be republished or used in any way without the permission of the author.
To the made preserve Turn the quality of Planned the spoken word in thisRev. written adaptation. June 25, 2017 extent possible, effort has been When LifetoDoesn’t Out as Jeffrey V. O’Grady, Pastor
The game ended. The roaring stadium fell silent, empty of fans, a desolate place of crushed popcorn boxes, and drinking cups, and trampled programs. The coach entered a solemn, deadly quiet locker room. Helmets are on the floor, jerseys pulled off and piled up for the wash. “I just want you guys to know that I’m real proud of the way you played this afternoon,” he said. “Real proud! We didn’t win, but we did prove to a lot of people what we could do. It was a moral victory.” But later, on the way out, a second string tackle turned to the quarterback and asked, “What’s a moral victory?” “It’s what the coach tells you when you lose the game,” the quarterback said. “It’s what a coach says to a team when he knows it’s his last season.” Now if you can’t fool a twenty-year-old football player about defeat, who can you fool? When they read the scores on the nightly news, nobody ever talks about “moral victory.” They just post the scores and those with the highest numbers win. Those with the lowest lose. Coaches tell players anything to get them to go out and knock heads the next week. They’ll call it a moral victory and say, “The score didn’t reflect what really happened,” and, “It’s not who won or lost but how well you played the game.” But the fact is a coach remains a coach only when the win-lose record is in his or her favor. The morning after the election, there are boxes of unused victory buttons, and bumper stickers and baseball caps in the hall. The balloons and confetti are still in the rafters, unlaunched, and there are desperate attempts to smile as if the lost election doesn’t hurt. “I want to thank you all for all that you’ve done. We didn’t win but we made our point, I think? I’m sure if we just had a few more weeks, we might have turned things around . . . if it hadn’t been for that FBI investigation at the eleventh hour . . . I want to thank everybody for everything. Someday we will look back on this as a good experience.” Defeat. Failure. So how do you deal with defeat, when things don’t go as planned? I can use a cheap rationalization; it was “a moral victory, a good learning experience.” I can blame it on some other person or even claim no knowledge or responsibility for the failure. 2
June 25, 2017
When Life Doesn’t Turn Out as Planned
Rev. Jeffrey V. O’Grady, Pastor
In Genesis, Adam said, “The woman you gave to be with me, she gave me the fruit of the tree and I ate.” And Eve said, “The serpent whom you created, he gave me the fruit to eat.” Rationalization and blaming is nothing new. It’s as old as time itself. Most of us know the experience of defeat. You interview for the job and think it goes well, and come out full of hope. But then the phone rings and the voice on the other end says lots of complimentary things before they say, “We wish you well in your job search.” You begin to feel a little humiliated in the eyes of people important to you, and you begin to even doubt yourself. Rejection has a way of distorting your worldview. Life can feel like it’s filled with “Catch 22” situations where you just can’t win. And it can leave you feeling like a victim of circumstances beyond your control, which brings me to this story about Hagar and Ishmael. It is a story about a woman and a child who receive what they need most from the Lord. When Sarah gave up hope of ever having a baby, she said to her husband Abraham, “You ought to get to know my servant girl, Hagar, better.” So Abraham did and Hagar had a son. They named him Ishmael and he became Abraham’s heir. Then later on Sarah had a child herself, Isaac, and suddenly there was a big problem at home. The older boy would inherit everything. But God had promised everything to Sarah’s boy. And Sarah couldn’t stand seeing the two boys on the same level, even when playing together. You can just imagine baby Isaac pulling on big brother Ishmael’s hair and Sarah rushes into the nursery during the squabble to comfort Ishmael. “Your little brother doesn’t know that it hurts you, Ishmael” she says. “He’s just a baby.” A few minutes later another scream from the nursery and Sarah rushes back in. This time it is Isaac who is bawling. She asks Ishmael, “What’s just happened?” “Nothing,” says Ishmael. Soon Hagar and Sarah aren’t getting along. Finally Sarah says to Abraham, “Send her away!” She wanted the mother and that little boy out of her life forever. This is a difficult report about the ethics of Sarah and Abraham. Sarah can’t simply celebrate the birth of her son and enjoy the gift of it all. Abraham doesn’t care enough about Hagar and her son, so he has a lunch packed for them and sends them out into the desert. Life is just sometimes unfair. It wasn’t right. It wasn’t fair. Hagar deserved better. Soon the water runs out and so does the food. Life begins to feel like a losing proposition. The boy 3
June 25, 2017
When Life Doesn’t Turn Out as Planned
Rev. Jeffrey V. O’Grady, Pastor
collapses under a tree. Hagar goes away a little distance and tries to hold herself together. She’s exhausted, bitter, rejected, confused, and hopeless. It isn’t right. It isn’t fair. And you can begin to understand why the Black Lives Matter movement has taken shape. When you’re mistreated and denied access to the things that sustain life, you begin to seethe with anger. And you can see why Cesar Chavez, a farm worker and civil rights activist, co-founded the United Farm Workers Union, because he was fed up with the way fruit pickers were being treated. And you can see why marginalized people and those treated as second-class citizens feel defeated all over again. Asian students outperform other students and yet, though better academically qualified for admission are denied because there are too many Asian students in the class already. It isn’t fair, the way some people are treated. The starting line in the race for success unfairly rewards some and disadvantages others. In a time when tribalism seemed to dominate the landscape, when God’s people had enemies among the Philistines, the Midianites and the Ammonites, all who probably spoke Semitic languages, some say that the Ishmaelites were actually brothers. This is a story about God’s protection and care for those who have suffered defeat time and time again. And it is a story that underscores what the story of Cain and Able established: that we are not to be our brothers’ keepers so much as to be our brothers’ brother! Maybe this is a word for us in the midst of our tribalism today. My enemies are not God’s enemies. Hagar, thrown out of the house, wandering in the desert with no food and no water, hears a voice in the wilderness, “What’s the trouble, Hagar?” “My boy is dying under the tree and you ask me what’s the trouble?” she replies. “Hagar, you look scared. Do you think there is a wilderness so barren, so trackless, so deep and so dark that I can’t find you there?” asks the Lord. “Do you think there is some place in all creation where I cannot find you and take care of you? I am still God. Now come on, get up. Take that boy of yours in your arms. I’m going to make him into a great nation,” says the Lord. So Hagar gets up and hugs her boy and then she saw something she had missed before! A well of promising life water in the desert. Her feelings of rejection, and bitterness, and anger had distorted her view of reality. Suddenly God opened her eyes to something 4
June 25, 2017
When Life Doesn’t Turn Out as Planned
Rev. Jeffrey V. O’Grady, Pastor
she had not seen right there in front of her. She filled her water skin and gave the boy a drink. They had lost her inheritance, through no fault of their own, but God was with them. God is not only with the insiders but also with the outsiders. God is with me not only when I win but also when I lose. There is no wilderness so barren or distant that God cannot find me or sustain me. Tom Long tells the story of a mild argument with an ethicist friend who was making a case for a certain kind of equity justice, “ . . . namely that a truly just society is one in which justice is like the blindfolded statue and every person is treated exactly the same. She backed up her argument by telling him about an incident with her two young children. When she discovered them fighting over a candy bar, she told her older child to divide the candy bar in half, one piece for herself and the other for her sister. When the older child did as she was told, the mother then invited her younger daughter to pick which of the two pieces of the candy bar she wanted for herself. It was a nice solution since the one doing the dividing was not the one doing the picking, thus putting incentive in the system to be completely fair in doing the dividing. Society (Tom’s friend argues), would benefit from such fairness, impartiality, and equality.”1 “That may work for dividing Hershey Bars and Social Security benefits, but it is less successful in plumbing the character of human need and desire,” argues Tom Long. “At our depths we do not desire to be treated with impartial indifference; we wish to be known, understood, treasured, treated as we are in our very particular humanity. In fact, the candy bar incident does not reflect how a mother actually treats her children. She does not show her love blindly and equally, dividing things right down the middle. If one of them has the flu, she does not desert the child after a few minutes to give precisely the same amount of time to the other. If one of them comes home from school crying because her friends have treated her badly, that is the one who gets an extra helping of motherly affection. In the law courts we may desire that justice wear a blindfold impartially dispensing benefits in equal proportions. But we want parents, and we want God as our heavenly parent, not to wear blindfolds, but instead to see us in all our needs and particularities with the eyes of tenderness and love.”2 1 Long, Thomas G., “The Love of God” (Journal for Preachers Vol. XL Num. 4 Pentecost 2017) p. 21 2 Ibid
5
June 25, 2017
When Life Doesn’t Turn Out as Planned
Rev. Jeffrey V. O’Grady, Pastor
“God is not like the planet Venus, distant and cold, shining monochromatic love on all peoples,” writes Tom Long. “’God loves all people’ is not where we start. ‘God loved Abraham [and Sarah]’ is where we start and ‘God loves all people’ is the astounding omega point of this love story in the Bible.”3 God loved Isaac and Ishmael. God loved Sarah and Hagar in all their particularity and neediness. God loves Jacob as well as Esau. The God which is described in the Bible is not some sentimentalized version of love that floats around in popular culture, some vague principal, but instead is a very personal and freely given love that searches for us in whatever wilderness we find ourselves, in whatever defeat we may have experienced. In Ephesians the Apostle reminds us, “Remember that you were at that time without Christ, being aliens from the commonwealth of Israel, strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world,” perhaps just like Hagar felt. “So he came and proclaimed peace to you who were far off and peace to those who were near; for through him both of us have access in one Spirit to the Father. So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are citizens with the saints and also members of the household of God, built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the cornerstone.”4 Life may be unfair, and we will experience defeat and failure along the way. But God is faithful and just, and is not blind to our travails and struggles. God loves you and me, not generally as a blanket principal, but loves us in all of our particularity and individuality. You are no longer a stranger or alien, but a citizen with the saints of the household of God. You are adopted into the family of the Lord. You too will inherit. So get up and fill your water skin. Don’t be blinded by your disappointments and rejections. Believe that God is present even in the deserts and wildernesses of this life, and get up to continue the journey; for the Lord intends to include you in a great nation. It’s called the Kingdom of Heaven. Thanks be to God.
3 Ibid.
4 Epheisans 2:12, 17-19
6
