Straight Lines or Circles?

Straight Lines Or Circles?--October 24, 2016

 

"He [Epaphroditus] was indeed so ill that he nearly died.  But God had mercy on him, and not only on him but on me also, so that I would not have one sorrow after another." [Philippians 2:27]

Let’s put it this way:  God is considerably more efficient than we are.  God, you could say, has a way of getting a whole flock of birds for every stone—not just one or two.

We tend to have a much narrower, much more limited, view of things.  We often will look at an event and figure that there is—at best—one “thing” that God is trying to accomplish through it.  And we tend to assume that the “one thing” God has in mind will be obvious and dramatic, when sometimes it turns out that God has been accomplishing all sorts of outcomes through a single turn of events.

So, for example, when someone who has been ill gets better, quite often we look at the situation and say, “God healed them because God had something more for them to do in life,” and we leave it at that.  We tend to assume that the patient, the one who had been sick, is the only one God is really interested in within that situation, and so their healing must be directly related to something God is going to do with that one person, and only that person.  End of story. Start dusting the chalk off your hands and move onto the next problem, professor.  Right?

Or maybe, it’s more complicated that than.  Maybe wonderfully complicated.  Maybe, because God turns out to be a whole lot cleverer than we are, God is arranging a whole web of connections through the one event.  Maybe God’s designs are more intricate than simply saying, “Domino A knocks over Domino B.” 

Paul sees this in this more involved, more intertwined, sort of way.  His friend and co-worker in the gospel, Epaphroditus, had been sick to the point of death.  Now he is better and recuperating.  But Paul doesn’t just say, “God is going to collect a favor from good old Epaphroditus for this one day, and that’s why God healed him.”  Paul doesn’t limit the consequences to the healed man alone, but to Paul himself.  “God had mercy on him,” Paul writes, “and not only on him but on me also.”  That is, Paul can see at least in a glimpse that God is doing more than just helping one person’s life (Epaphroditus’ obviously) through this healing.  God is showing mercy not only to the sick man, but to those whose hearts are fraught with worry over Epaphroditus.  God is being merciful to Paul, too, by restoring Epaphroditus to health, because it just would have broken Paul’s tired heart to lose such a friend at this time.  And God is being merciful to the Philippians, who are going to benefit by Epaphroditus’ coming to visit them, and who would be sorrowful, too, if something happened to him.  And if you think about it, if you look down the chain of historical events, the Christians in Philippi are a part of a great web that stretches across two thousand years to include you and me.  We have all benefited because this one man, Epaphroditus, was healed.  God had all of us in mind, and all of us are part of God’s “design” (if you want to call it that) in healing Epaphroditus.  You can’t boil it down to a simple, one-directional, straight line from motive to cause to effect, like, “He must have been healed because God was rewarding him for good behavior.”   That kind of thinking just seems too… linear… and too narrow for an infinite God’s purposes.    God is so much bigger than a single straight line.

So… consider the day in front of you.  Some blessing, some bit of good news, may have already come to you.  Your sick friend is going home from the hospital, and the prognosis is good.  Or a relative who has been out of work for a long time is, at long last, hired for a new position.  Or someone speaks a word of encouragement to you out of the blue.  You might first think, “Oh, that’s nice.  It was nice of God to look for me and my needs by having them write me this note.”  But if we can follow Paul’s thinking, we can recognize that there may be something else at the same time that God, in all God’s wisdom, is accomplishing in the very same situation. The person who wrote you the encouragement needed to know that their note-writing was helpful for you, and is spurred from your note to write to another ten people in the next month… who find themselves so encouraged they come back to church on a Sunday… and their grandkids are there now, too, with them!  The relative who gets the new job is not only helped by having a new source of income, but also now supports some local ministry like the food bank or clothes closet with his money, and now yet more people’s lives are touched with the graciousness of God.  The friend who had been in the hospital says something to the nurse before being discharged that sparks a new wave of faith in the nurse’s life and gets the whole family to come to worship.  God may be accomplishing a hundred small (but important) things alongside some obvious thing that is going on.  We just don’t know what that hundred is.  But it is clear that God’s Spirit ripples out in circles that are so much bigger than a simple connect-the-dots straight line.

Today, let us have our eyes open for ways that God’s fingerprints can be seen in our lives—and how that will make a difference for others that are in our lives in ways we cannot predict.  Today, let us see how grace heals not just you or me, but the whole world, beginning with each of us. Let’s see the ways that mercy will ripple out in this day.

Lord God, we can so often only see a narrow line of cause and effect, when in fact you are infinitely beyond our ability understand your purposes.  Help us today to see more deeply and widely how you are already at work drawing others to yourself, through many moments and means.