4/3 SERMON - Hard Work AND Design

WAY OF SALVATION: THE BIBLE AND THE 12 STEPS - Part 5 of 6

Dear Friends in Christ -

I offer you this exerpt from the sermon I preached at St. Paul's on Sunday, April 3rd . . .
Blessings
Janet+

"One thing I do know, that though I was blind, now I see." - Man Born Blind, after Jesus put mud on his eyes and he washed them in the pool (John 9:25b)

Every once in a while, there’s something that I want to put in my sermon, even though it has nothing to do with the Scripture passages or theme for the week.

I haven’t talked about sports in church recently, so I thought it was time . . . Final Four Basketball is underway. Butler – a team from a small, liberal arts college in the mid-west – has made it to the national championship game for the second year in a row. Certainly the players are incredibly talented. Some are saying they’re lucky. A news analyst commented, “Luck is the residue of hard work.”

“Luck is the residue of hard work.”

I’m wasn’t sure that that had anything to do with our sermon series or today’s Gospel lesson, but I liked the notion that luck could be a side benefit of our hard work, so I thought I would throw it in.

Then I stumbled on an article about Tiger Woods. Remember him? He’s long been known as one of the most talented golfers in the world, ever. Part of the reason he’s so good is that he chose not to rely on talent alone; he added hard work to the equation. At a time when many pro golfers hit the course without a regular workout regimen, Tiger worked out hard. In the early 2000s, he started working out a couple of times a day, piled on the muscle, and bulked up from 160 to 185. With the combination of talent and hard work, he became nearly unstoppable.

But then we all know what happened next. Human failings got the better of him, pulled him under. Tiger himself said that he lost everything that meant anything to him – his wife, his kids, his reputation. Hard work alone didn’t get him where he most wanted to go.

All that made me curious . . . curious about the role of luck in our lives, and curious about quote that I had been turning over in my mind. I wondered if the quote was original to the news analyst. So I looked it up on Google. And I discovered that the original quote, which is slightly different, is attributed to a guy by the name of Branch Rickey, an innovative Major League Baseball executive who was famous for breaking the color barrier in baseball by signing Jackie Robinson for the Brooklyn Dodgers. Rickey was also known to be a man of deep Christian faith.

What Branch originally said is something more like this: “Luck is the residue of hard work and design.”

Ah, now that sheds an interesting light on things, doesn’t it?

Hard work AND design. The combination surely resonates with the 12 Steps we’ve been working through. God’s design is the foundation. Hard work is required to bring us into the fulfillment of that design.

As we work our way through the 12 Steps of AA, the 12 Steps of Healing, the 9th and 10th Steps are the ones we’re reflecting on today. Step 9 is: Wherever possible, made direct amends to such people we’ve harmed, except when to do so would injure them or others. Step 10 is: Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong, promptly admitted it.

These two activities show up over and over again in the twelve steps: “admitting” and “making amends” Fully two thirds – 8 of the 12 steps – involve admitting powerlessness or wrong and making amends for things done or left undone. Holy cow! Any way you slice it, that’s a lot of work, a lot of very humbling, very hard work.

And this is where we come back to design. One of the things that’s amazing about the way God designs things is God’s fearless generosity. When God designed all things in the beginning, he designed them beautiful and full. He poured all of his own goodness into it – power and beauty and knowledge - without concern for what might go wrong. He made man and woman in his own image, sharing with them, granting them god-like powers – free will, creativity, love.

Indeed, God knew even then, that things could – and would – go badly wrong. But his design had space for that, too. And for a perhaps even deeper kind of perfection – redemption – experience of Mystery beyond measure – that from the ashes of disaster, glory burst forth, from death, life can rise.