“Those Glorious Unintended Consequences”

Sermon Delivered By Rev. Dick Stetler – May 8, 2016

Centenary United Methodist Church

Acts 16:16-34

 

    This morning we are going to discuss the agony and ecstasy that we experience while trying to make our best decisions. We know the spontaneous, almost knee-jerk decisions when we come across an option that we really like.  We also know the periods of self-doubt where we think, "What if I'm wrong?" "Will she say 'yes'?" "This decision could be a real game-changer if I am reaching for too much too soon."  All of us have been there during such moments.

    The other day I watched a clever commercial on television.  A man was telling his friends, "I am never getting married."  The right one comes along and he does.  Next, he said, "We are never having children."  His wife delivered a child. Next, he says, "We are never having a second child."  She says, "I'm pregnant."  Next, he said, "We are never moving to the suburbs."  The last sequence finds him washing his car in the driveway of his new suburban home. 

    Decision-making can be quite a seesaw.  There are times we may doubt if we ever have control over our destiny.

    In my earlier days, moving from one church to another was always approached with a lot of anxiety.  We were always completely happy and satisfied with where we were.  Each move was very painful because we had to leave behind our friends, our accumulated memories and our community. 

    After retirement, I made a promise to myself that I would never take another church. After six months, the telephone rang and Centenary was offered to me. The only issue was that the church was located on the island of Bermuda. We were not sure where the island was located.  However, it took me ten seconds of deep soul-searching and prayer to say, "Yes" to this next adventure.  Why did I do that when I had already made a decision never to accept another church?

    The point in mentioning these two anecdotes is that in spite of how many decisions we make, life appears to take us to places we could never have anticipated.  Unless we sabotage our lives with some self-defeating behavior, everything in life tends to work out whether we travel north, south, east or west.   We might even ask ourselves, "How important do we think our decisions really are?" 

    In our Scripture lesson we find a very curious episode that took place during one of Paul's missionary journeys.  He and Silas encountered a woman who was clairvoyant. Apparently, she was successful at foretelling the future.  As soon as they met her, she began to proclaim to everyone, "These men are servants of God!  They can teach you how to live in ways that will save you from many of the world's traps and pitfalls!" 

    Hearing her say this once was tolerable, but she continued with her verbal advertisements for a number of days.  Paul became so irritated with her that he made a knee-jerk decision. He turned around, looked at her and said, "In the name of Jesus Christ, I order you to come out of her."  Instantly, her clairvoyant ability left her.  However, there were unintended consequences from his decision.

    The woman's handlers were furious.  They had been using her ability to make a lot of money for themselves.  They dragged Paul and Silas before the authorities on exaggerated charges based on what they had been teaching. These claims were supported by other citizens.  The Roman authorities tore off their clothes, had them flogged and put into prison. The jailer put them in one of the inner cells where he further secured them in chains.  

    At midnight, Paul and Silas began praying and singing hymns to God as other prisoners listened.  Now imagine this . . . a massive earthquake occurred that was severe enough to cause their shackles to pull away from the wall and to cause the door of their prison cell to spring open.  They could have reasoned, "This is an act of God to free us. Let us get out of here!"  That did not happen.  Both Paul and Silas made a decision to stay in their cell.    

    Paul was a Roman citizen.  He was acquainted with the Roman laws and he knew that the jailer might attempt to kill himself if his prisoners escaped.  That is exactly what happened.  The jailer drew his sword and was about to end his life when Paul shouted,  "Don't harm yourself; we are all still here."  This decision to speak up resulted in another set of unintended consequences.

    The jailer was so grateful that he took them home and treated them like long-lost friends.  After feeding them, Paul and Silas sat among his extended family and talked to them about the compassionate, loving attitudes that Jesus taught during his ministry.  Their words were not about a God who thundered with more "Thou shalt nots."  This was a message of how much God loved them.  This new message taught each of them to allow their spirits to care for others with kindness and forgiveness.  They all found happiness unlike what they had previously known.

    One of the strangest aspects of life is that after experiencing all our sweat and tears about what decision to make, once that choice has been made, it can easily take our lives in a direction that was not on our horizon. We may make a wonderful decision, but our lives might be changed quite drastically from the unintended consequences that result.  

      I remember in the mid-eighties working with a team during the recovery phase of the massive floods that took place in one of West Virginia's worst disasters.  A mother of a ten-year-old and two teenagers had made a decision to evacuate their beautiful home when the alarm was first given.  Her husband was still at work. 

    A wall of water came out of nowhere and hit their home, leaving only the foundation. Everything from their shed and garage was carried away.  Our group of volunteers helped her family to become settled in one of the trailers supplied by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA).  Several months later we met her again while delivering more supplies to the area.  During our meeting this is what she told us:

During our time in that trailer, my husband and I discovered how beautiful our children have become.  They actually had personalities.  They even knew how to communicate with each other and to us.  Our family had grown increasingly isolated from each other since our children had their own bedrooms. We had not recognized that with our coming and going my husband and I had lost touch with our children's lives. When we had to learn to make do with what we had, I became a mother again and my husband was once again a father.  The loss of our home along with all our possessions was a heart-wrenching experience.  In hindsight, however, it was a gift that enabled us to recognize that our family had once again become a family. 

    This story could be repeated over and over again after most disasters.  Some of you have told us stories of what happened when storms knocked out the electricity for an extended period of time.  People used their gas stoves and cooked their thawed meat. Everyone came together with the food they had prepared and rediscovered how neat their neighbors were.  They became more than the people that you waved to as you were leaving for work.  It took Fabian, a hurricane of mythic proportions, to bring people together.  

    Perhaps many unintended consequences are masks of God that invisibly provide guidance in the way such experiences impact our journey.  Such episodes provide detours that cancel the control we once had over our lives.  We find unintended consequences rushing toward us, kindling our fears of how unprepared we are. 

    We wind up in places that we could never have anticipated.  We find intimate, healing friendships in places we would have never looked.  We find opportunities coming at us that suddenly appeared out of nowhere. Life can present us with moments that evoke our worst fears, but after the storm, that magical rainbow appears. 

    With this being Mother's Day, most mothers could easily say with informed authority from their own experiences, that the destiny of their children resulted from unintended consequences.  Parents could not possibly plan the ports-of-call each of their children are going to enter during their journeys.

    No matter how competent mothers are in the training of their children, all they can do is attempt to provide a platform and framework of values from which to launch them.  Ninety percent of what happens next is up to the choices their children make and the results that come from all those glorious unintended consequences. 

    In their wildest imaginations, Paul and Silas could never have seen what resulted from their decision to take Jesus' message into the Greek and Roman worlds. Paul may have saved Christianity from being folded back into Judaism.  They took Jesus' message into cultures where reading, writing and monumental achievements in architecture and government were present.  The absence of Hebrew traditions and their religious heritage made it easier for Gentiles to find Jesus' teachings life-changing.

    When we learn to interpret our journey as a grand adventure, it helps to have faith that the rushing river of change will take us to places that will enhance our productivity.  There is no need to struggle.  There is no need to be afraid.  We may not always have control over what will happen next, but we can be reassured that we are loved and safe one hundred percent of the time while being swept downstream.  Those glorious unintended consequences should tell us that our loss of control never really mattered.

    The older we get the more we understand that life has often been one unintended consequence after another.  Something quite invisible appears to have stitched every piece of our lives together in a marvelous tapestry. It was our willing and creative responses to those glorious unintended consequences that have kept us enthusiastically alive, eager to share with others what we have experienced.