July 15, 2018 “Serendipity” – Acts 23:12-35

Acts 23:12-35
“Serendipity”
July 15, 2018 – Eighth Sunday after Pentecost

The Artful Dodger put his hand in Mr. Brownlow’s pocket, stole his handkerchief and handed it off to Charley Bates. The two of them ran off. Poor Oliver simply stood there. Mr. Brownlow looked round and decided he was the thief. Oliver was taken before the magistrate. But Mr. Brownlow changed his mind. Seeing the boy was gravely ill, he took Oliver home, rescuing him from the den of thieves into which he had fallen.

It turned out Mr. Brownlow was Oliver’s relative. He was saved by a member of his own family, whom he never knew existed. A random robbery works out with a surprising twist in one of Charles Dickens’ most famous stories.

In our text today, Paul the apostle was also saved by a relative appearing at just the right moment. Before verse 16 we never knew he had a sister. Now her son appears, Paul’s nephew, in just the right place at the right time to help Paul escape an assassination plot.

We’re not told how the nephew learned of the plot. Verse 13 says more than forty men were involved. Their fanaticism is not surprising in our time of fanatical terrorists. They had taken an oath not to eat or drink until they had killed Paul.

Their conspiracy was simple. They went to the chief priests and other Jewish leaders and asked them to create a pretext to get Paul out in the open. They would ask the Roman commander to bring him to another interrogation by the Sanhedrin. On his way to that meeting, the forty assassins would ambush and kill him.

Somehow Paul’s young relative heard the scheme and went to the barracks to tell Paul. Paul sent him to inform the commander. The boy went and begged the tribune not to give into the Sanhedrin’s request. The plot was thwarted.

It’s a great story, but you might be wondering what the significance is. What do we learn to help us spiritually? What does this fortunate coincidence, this serendipity of Paul’s nephew in the right place at the right time, teach us about God? The lesson is just the fact that that coincidence happened. Paul was rescued from an almost certain death by the blessed coincidence that his nephew just happened to hear of the plot. The boy appeared at the crucial time to save Paul’s bacon at the last moment. It almost looks like a miracle.

Charles Dickens’ novels are full of miraculous coincidences and turns of fortune. In A Tale of Two Cities a man on trial is saved by an identical double who appears in the courtroom. In Great Expectations, separated friends just happen to be at the same place at the same time exactly ten years after they first parted. David Copperfield’s fellow student in childhood reappears years later as a lawyer, ready to help David. The author arranged his stories so that his characters were constantly surprised with fortunate coincidences.

God arranged Paul’s story. Back in verse 11 we read a few weeks ago that Jesus told Paul he would go to Rome and testify for Him. The story we just read today shows us God making sure it would happen. What look like accidental circumstances were really the hand of the Lord, the divine Author, moving His story forward as He intended.

Forty years ago in 1978 I ended up in a graduate school class with only three students in it: my best friend, myself, and a young woman I didn’t know very well. You guessed it. That woman, whom I got to know better as the term went on, became my wife. I believe the divine Author arranged our story and that class to make that happen.

Miracle or chance? You have stories like this, I’m sure. To those looking from the outside, from the perspective of science and statistics, these “miracles” are nothing remarkable. Statisticians will tell you there is nothing miraculous about receiving a perfect hand of 13 spades at the bridge table. Any other hand has just the same statistical probability of being dealt. It just seems remarkable because it’s the one everybody wants. It’s all just mathematics and chance. It’s not anymore remarkable that Beth was in that class than that she was in some other that didn’t include me.

The Roman tribune Lysias did not stop to ponder anything remarkable in Paul’s deliverance. In verse 27, his main concern was that Paul was a Roman citizen. He could not allow a citizen, even as a prisoner, to be murdered under his care. In verse 29, he explains that he discovered the charges against Paul are all questions of Jewish law. Those meant nothing to a Roman soldier. He sees nothing miraculous in the nephew’s timely warning. Lysias kept Paul safe in order to keep his own job.

It’s a difficult question for our faith. Every time chance and circumstance turn out well, and we may say that God has shown up. But there are many occasions when things turn out bad, even really bad. Why was our poor friend Kerry’s car headed toward that other one on highway 99 last week? Why was that gravestone loose when little Sabrina climbed on it yesterday? Why did Takayo’s husband David go in for a simple procedure Friday morning, but is still there for tests two days later?

Consider how it all looked to Paul. He was in jail. Yes, the Lord appeared to him and promised he would go to Rome. Yet here he is, surrounded by insane assassins who swear not to eat or drink until he dies. As we will see, even his seeming rescue takes him farther his goal. Lysias sent him a few miles away to Caesarea, where he spent nearly three years of prison time before he got any nearer to the empire’s capital.

Those days and months and years couldn’t have made much sense to Paul. How often did he rattle his chains and wonder what God was doing? Just like you are I might look at the setbacks and detours of our lives and wonder the same. What is God doing? Think about John the Baptist in our Gospel lesson this morning, sitting there in that prison wondering what God was doing with him.

The fact is you and I will not see God at work in the events of our lives most of the time. Days and months and years may go by with no miracles, no providential surprises, no great signs that Anyone up there cares diddly about us. It is during those long stretches of dullness that we are meant to remember what happened for Paul and know and trust that God is gracious and kind, even when He is not immediately visible.

Some critics judge Charles Dickens to be merely a cheap hack of an author. All those fortunate coincidences in his stories are too unrealistic. He employed simple-minded and sentimental tricks to keep plots moving and his readers engaged. We should turn to later, more realistic writers like Thomas Hardy who offer a truer, more bleak perspective on life.

But other critics, like G. K. Chesterton, who understands him better, argue that all those fantastic coincidences reflect how Dickens actually saw the world. He believed in God. He had Christian faith. For him, behind all that happens in life there is a gracious, kindly providence weaving together what only seem to be separate and unconnected happenings. His stories are like the Bible. Along with the entertainment they offer, they call us to faith, faith in a Hand which turns the world for good purpose. Faith like that sustained Paul in each prison cell he inhabited.

With Paul, you and I must trust in God’s guiding hand, even though we only get little glimpses of Him behind the scenes. That’s not being unrealistic. We catch sight of what’s really real in the miracles of the Bible and in the occasional present-day miracle or gracious coincidence. It all truly does fit together. It all makes sense in ways we cannot see right now.

Life gets terribly messy, but we catch glimpses of God’s beautiful and even simple design. As Paul sat under guard at Herod’s palace in Caesarea, as we read in the last verse of the chapter, he knew he had just seen another glimpse. However it would work out, God wanted him alive and had brought his nephew into events just when he was needed.

The greatest glimpse we get of God’s great plan for us is in the story of His own Son here on earth. In Jesus we see God’s work most clearly, and have the very best opportunity to understand. But even that looks complicated. Why all this business of suffering and being tortured to death on a Cross? Why didn’t God simply forgive us? Why can’t God just be really nice all the time? Why is life and Christian faith so messy? It seems the Lord could use the principle I learned in the Boy Scouts, KISMIF, “Keep it simple. Make it fun.” Why all this dying and sacrifice and suffering and pain?

Corrie Ten Boom is famous for a Christian testimony arising out of her imprisonment in a Nazi concentration camp. In her book, Tramp for the Lord, she offers another picture for grasping how God’s plan lies behind the complications and difficulties of our lives. She tells about visiting a hospital for polio patients. At first she couldn’t even bring herself to speak to them. She told the doctor in charge, “I think I am unable to talk. I just want to go off somewhere and cry.”

Moments later she changed her mind and went and stood by the bed of a man who could barely breathe. She tells how she talked about God sending His Son Jesus Christ to suffer for each of us. Then she wrote,

I finished speaking and from my bag took a small embroidery. On one side was stitched a beautiful crown. The other side was quite mixed up. “When I see you on this bed,” I said, “not speaking, not moving, I think of this embroidery.” I held up the back side of the embroidery. “Your life is like this. See how dark it is. See how the threads are knotted and tangled, mixed up. But when you turn it around then you can see that God is actually weaving a crown for your life. God has a plan for your life and He is working it out in beauty.”

As I told the children, that is how it is. Almost always we see only the backside of what God is up to. It is too deep and complicated for us to grasp much of it, because we are ourselves are deep and complicated creatures. Yet every now and then, our vision clears, the serendipity of God’s love appears, and we catch a glimpse of the beautiful side, the side where it all weaves together in a precious pattern of grace.

The Cross of Jesus Christ is God’s great “Cross-stitch” in His embroidery of our lives. As we look at it, we see all the ragged ends of ourselves hanging out there. Sin, pain, despair, hopelessness, all the ugly threads of our lives dangle there as Jesus dangles on the Cross. It’s an ugly picture. But on Easter morning God flipped it over. When the sun came up and Jesus walked alive from His grave, it all made sense, so much so that He could tell His disciples that He had to suffer, had to die, in order to enter His glory. The beauty of rising up to new life in the joy of the Resurrection absolutely required that horrible tangle of pain we call the Crucifixion.

Before his own complicated path of suffering finally brought him there, Paul wrote a letter to Rome and explained all this to Christians there in words you may read in Romans 8:18. He said, “I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us.” The beauty of God’s design is there. We only glimpse it now and then, in a gracious serendipity, but it is there. May you trust in that beauty, because you trust in our beautiful Savior, Jesus Christ.

Amen.