Trinity 17 – 4 October 2009
Shakespeare
once wrote, “When I was at home, I was in a better place, but travelers must be
content.”[1] Home always is a better place and when people
move, they seldom feel at home. When we
are more content in the home of our past then we are in the present, it is easy
to think that our life is just a strand of meaningless events having no purpose. I suspect that the Israelites felt this way when
they wandered in the wilderness. They
were supposed to leave
This truth is weighty and vast because
it means that our history, the past and present events of our life, is
meaningful and purposeful. This truth is
sweet and delightful when we remember those parts of our history that bringing
joy and delight. However, this truth is
difficult to swallow when we consider those parts of our history that are
painful and distressing. For instance, Edith
is not our first child. In December of
2004, seven to eight weeks in pregnancy, Emily had a miscarriage. I will always remember the day we found out, we
had lost our baby and those memories are not sweet or joyful, they hurt like a
dagger piercing the heart. I honestly do
not want to find this tragic event meaningful, I want it to be a random,
pointless accident of history. Yet, it
is not for God has used this death in numerous ways; he has dressed this
tragedy with divine purpose. Emily and I
learned that parental love stretches all the way to a child’s conception for we
love our unborn child just as much as we love our three born children. We learned that life is a delicate gift, a
gift that only God can give and a gift only God can sustain. We were taught how to pray, or to be more
specific we were taught that our prayers up to that point in our life were
light and shallow addressing only life’s surface issues. Without the premature death of our first
child, we would not have had Edith, who was born one year later. If I had not lost my first child, I do not
think I would have been prepared to be a father. Finally, we learned, as no event will ever
teach us, the importance of Jesus’ resurrection and his promise to restore to
life and to body all those, including unborn children, who die in faith. Surely C.S. Lewis was right when he said, “God
whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our
pains: it is his megaphone to rouse a deaf world.”[3]
Did
God cause the death of our child? No,
for if God does not desire the death of a sinner as the Prophet Ezekiel said,
then he surely does not desire the death of an unborn child. Yet, in the hands of God, the tragic facts of
life are turned into a beautiful garment, a garment we cannot live without
because that garment is Jesus Christ.
History is meaningful and purposeful because all history is a working
out of God’s redemptive plan through Christ.
All
of history is a shadow of Jesus Christ.
History
is the story of God’s purposeful process of salvation and his story of how he
prepares his people for their salvation.
Furthermore, our history - all of the events in our life, all of our
moves, all of our joys and all of our sadness – is part of God’s purposeful
process to bring us to his Son, Jesus.
Our lives are not stories full of random acts of chance, they are
purposeful stories that finds their meaning in and through Jesus Christ. I think Shakespeare was right when he wrote,
“When I was at home, I was in a better place.”
Our home is the embrace of Jesus Christ, and when we see history as one
great big, flashing arrow pointing to him, then we will surely find the best
place to be and when we rest secure in the embrace of Christ, we can be content
in all of our travels and all of life’s events.
[1]
Shakespeare, “As you like it,” The Works of William Shakespeare, Oxford
University Press:
[2] Nahum
Sarna, Exploring Exodus, Shocken
Books:
[3] C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain