March 22, 2026

All Things Work Together for Good?

I was eyeballing all these verses in the readings you heard this morning and, as all of you who have gotten to know me might guess, I settled on the one sentence in the whole thing that I found most upsetting: “All things work together for good for those who love God.”

There’s a sizable piece of my brain that just jumps up and screams when I read that.  It says, “Now, I know better than that!”  Things don’t always work out for the good.  And it doesn’t matter how much you love God, sometimes things seem to work out for the worst.  You can’t tell me that among the family and friends of a lovely couple named Arlene and Edward Kozlowski who were killed in a tornado that ripped through their town in Indiana a couple of weeks ago, or among all those whose homes were destroyed, there were none who loved God.  I love God, and some pretty crummy things have happened to me along the way.  I don’t see everything working out for the good.  I see a world of war and global hatred, and a whole lot of downright stupidity.

But, of course, Paul the apostle knew about all this stuff too.  The times were coming unglued even back then when he was writing this letter to the church at Rome.  Paul made a list of some of the horrible things that were breaking out in his world: “hardship, distress, persecution, famine, nakedness, peril, sword.”  He even quotes Psalm 44, verse 22, in words that are chillingly close to the bone in this age of global hatred and war, “For your sake we are being killed all day long; we are accounted as sheep to be slaughtered.”

So, if Paul knows how unfair life can be, and how awful things can turn out, where does he get off saying something like, “all things work together for good?”  I’ve been scratching my head about that for a while, and I think I’ve come up with something.  I found it in these other verses that were read this morning from the Gospel according to Matthew.  It’s a list of some of Jesus’s more pithy parables about the kingdom of heaven.  He speaks of the kingdom as being like a mustard seed that grows into a tree, and like that little bit of yeast in the dough that causes the whole loaf to expand.  The idea, apparently, is that the kingdom is a small thing that might be easily overlooked, but it grows into something amazing.  The kingdom of heaven, it seems, evolves.  It grows over time.

I like that.  It fits with my own experience.  I think I’ve done some evolving and growing myself.  I wouldn’t say I’ve made it all the way to a big oak tree that the birds can nest in, but I feel less like a little nut than I used to.  I’ve had some real set-backs and screw-ups in my life.  I’ve made some whopping mistakes, and at times it’s seemed like for every step forward I’ve taken two or three steps back.  But, if I just take the time to turn around and look over my shoulder, it’s surprising sometimes to see just how far I’ve come.

I think that may be the way the kingdom is.  If, as Jesus prayed, the kingdom will come “on earth, as it is in heaven,” then I think our world must be evolving.  Human culture must be growing, even if almost imperceptibly slowly.  That tiny mustard seed must be sending down roots, and some little pointy green thing must be sticking up out of the ground, even if only a little.  It may seem as though, just when we think we’ve made a little progress, some international conflict threatens to blow us back to the stone-age, but if we just turn around and look over our shoulders, we can see that humanity has come some distance.  We no longer throw witches in the river to test their evil powers according to whether they drown or not.  We no longer turn human beings into commodities to be sold at auction, and forced into slavery.  Even in our church history we can see that evolution.  I learned once about the story of a New England Congregationalist.  His name was David Pond, and he was excommunicated from the Second Church of Christ in Wrentham, about fifty miles from here.  That’s right – thrown out on his ear.  It happened about two hundred and seventy five years ago.  It all started when the church instituted a new policy about hymn singing.  You see, prior to that, when the congregation sang a hymn, everyone sang whatever tune they wanted to.  There wasn’t any printed music, and folks wouldn’t know how to read it if there were.  So people just sang the words according whatever sort of tune they wanted to make up, and they did this caterwauling all together.  I can hardly imagine how it sounded.  So, the new innovation was that the church came up with four different hymn tunes that everyone learned.  And when they sang a hymn on Sunday, they would choose one of the tunes, and ask everyone to sing it together.  And everyone obliged, except David Pond.  “We’ve never done it that way!”  I can hear him saying.  He insisted on singing his own tune.  They pleaded with him; they reasoned with him; they threatened him.  But in the end, he refused, so they threw him out of the church.  They threw him out for singing out of tune!  Can you imagine if they did that today?

Well, he went down the road and joined another church.  That is, until folks back in his old church got wind of it.  They wrote a stern letter to his new congregation letting them know that David Pond had been excommunicated, and that they had no business accepting him as a member.  The brethren in that church replied with an embarrassed apology, and promptly dismissed poor David from their congregation as well.  He went home and pouted.  He pouted for thirteen years, before he finally relented, and came back to church ready to sing in tune with everyone else.

The Congregationalists may not be the ultimate refinement of Christ’s church for all time; we are not entirely the church we could be, but if we look back over our shoulder, we have come some distance.

But this evolving realm of heaven is bigger than just our kind of church, bigger than Christianity.  All of creation is becoming the great tree – the leavened loaf.  I wonder if that’s what it means that “all things work together for good.”  You know that’s a very different statement than it first sounds like.  It doesn’t say, “everything works out for the good.”  Truth is, some things don’t turn out so good. The tornado that ripped through Indiana was not a blessing,  David Pond being excommunicated for singing out of tune wasn’t what I would consider a good thing.  But somehow, all the things that happen, the good and the not so good get thrown into the mixing bowl of history along with a little leavening, and over the long term, something good begins to emerge.  “All things work together,” and the outcome, if not now, at least at some point, is “good.”  In other words, the kingdom is evolving.

The other thing that Jesus said is that the kingdom is like a treasure hidden in a field to be stumbled upon, or a pearl of great value that a merchant might discover by chance.  Maybe the “treasure” is simply this: a growing awareness of the rising dough and the budding tree.  Maybe the “pearl of great value” is the recognition that we, whose eyes have been opened to the power and work of the Lord in the world, are part of something much greater than ourselves – something wondrous and unfolding – something worth devoting ourselves to.  Maybe that’s why it’s “those who love God” who seem to be the recipients of the good for which “all things work together.”  Maybe those who love God are the ones most able to discern that gift – a gift not apparent to the ones who only focus on the set-backs and missteps – a gift disclosed to those who, with the eyes of faith, can grasp the long-term work of the kingdom coming “on earth as it is in heaven.”

William Willimon, the Methodist Bishop and former Dean of the chapel at Duke University, tells of the couple in his congregation who had “wanted a child, prayed for a child.  Then, at mid-life, she became pregnant.  Their joy was overflowing, along with the joy of the whole congregation who rejoiced with them at their good fortune.

“But then the test revealed that the child had Downs Syndrome, a not completely rare situation for those have children later in life.

“What should they do?  Some warned against bringing the baby to term.  These children can be quite demanding and dependent, some said.

“Yet they decided to bring the baby to term.  The baby was born, a wonderful little girl with an unusually appealing smile.

“It was not easy at first.  She had a minor digestive problem that eventually corrected itself, but it made for a fussy, difficult baby for the first few months.  They could not help but worry from time to time about the future.

Willimon says, “We visited them one day and marveled at the joyful, caring, and compassionate way they related to their little girl.  They were obviously going to be wonderful parents.  We noted our delight at their parenting.

“‘I’ve got to admit,’ she said, ‘it was a bit scary at first.  There were days when I wondered if we had made the right decision.  I loved Emily, but still, I wondered if we would be up to the demands for the future.

“‘One afternoon, I was drinking a cup of tea.  Emily had been rather peevish all day, but was at last just sitting quietly in her crib.  I was exhausted and feeling rather down.  As I sat there, drinking tea, and looking toward her crib down the hall, the late afternoon winter sun suddenly shown through the window, falling right upon Emily sitting in the crib, all golden, and red, and wonderfully beautiful.  I just sat there astounded by it.  It was as if this light was a spotlight on her, a kind of embrace of her.  She smiled back at me in the sunlight.  It was as like a vision.  It was like God saying to me, to Emily, to us all, “This is my child in whom I am well pleased.”’

“‘From that day on I have never doubted that she is indeed a great gift of God, a privilege for us to have received.  She is our treasure.’”

That story touches our hearts for good reason.  Perhaps all it takes are the eyes of faith to see the treasure hidden in a field.  Perhaps all it takes is a heart of love to discern the Divine work of making the kingdom a reality in our midst.

Anyway, that’s how I keep my head up in the midst of a world that otherwise seems to be well on its way to hell in a handbasket.  As my father once said, commenting on the book of Revelation, “When I read the great book of life, I got a chance to peek at the last chapter.  God wins.”