Genesis 17:1-8, 15-16
March 19, 2000
Sermon preached by Rev. Donald Ng at the First Chinese Baptist Church of San Francisco.
One of the games that I grew up playing was Monopoly—the game of capitalism. When it was my turn I would take the dice in my hand and warm them with my breath and then yell out “Double.” You have to have luck to land on the properties you want to buy, get extra rolls, and pass “Go” to collect $200.00. And once I built hotels on Park Place and Boardwalk, I need luck for the others to land on my properties!
Then came mah jong. I grew up seeing and hearing it when the Chinese women came over to play. It was all very foreign until Marjorie and Charcoal started teaching us how to play and get lucky. You get lucky being the “East” starter and you’re playing the East round and then you pick up a set of the “East” pieces. Triple value points!
Since coming to San Francisco, I have eaten more fortune cookies in the past year then I have had in the past 20 years. And like you, I can’t resist to crack open the cookies and to see if my lucky fortune will forecast long life and prosperity. Do any of you play the numbers printed on the back?
We have lived through a century in which science, modernity, and technology led many of us to believe that we are the sole masters of our fate. But when it comes down to it, most of the time, we call the things that happen to us, “luck.” Our lives are at the mercy of good and bad luck.
But the Bible asserts another view of what happens in the world. Nowhere in the Bible is there the notion of luck. Luck is a pagan and secular idea. The Bible believes, not in luck, but in providence, the conviction that God moves in and with the world, drawing the world toward divine ends.
Wishing Good Luck
The biggest craze on TV these days is the show, “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?” You’re trying to decide whether the Nobel Peace Prize is awarded in Stockholm or Oslo. You know that Alfred Nobel was Swedish. So you go with Stockholm. But Oslo has a familiar ring to it. The only “life-line” you have left is “50/50” when two of the four answers are removed. You use it and the two answers left are Stockholm and Oslo. You feel lucky. You stay with Stockholm. It’s your final answer.
You lose. The correct answer is Oslo. Your luck ran out. The Nobel Prizes for Physics, Economics, Chemistry, and Medicine are, in fact, awarded in Stockholm. But not the Peace Prize. It’s presented by the Chairman of the Norwegian Nobel Committee in the presence of Their Majesties the King and Queen of Norway in Oslo.
It feels like as modern people today, we no longer believe in a purposeful, intervening, directing God. What we believe in is luck. We have a 50/50 chance to be lucky. Luck has become our way of explaining ourselves, explaining our world, explaining the good and bad things that come our way.
A few years ago, Rabbi Kushner wrote in his popular book, When Bad Things Happen to Good People, that in this life, God does not will bad things to happen to people. Bad things happen mostly because of bad luck. When your time is up, it is up. Nothing is meant by the good or bad things that happen to us. It is all a matter of chance.
This explains the popularity of the gambling industry and the recent passage of Prop 1A for Indian casinos in California. Pretty soon Casino San Pablo off Route 80 will have 1000 slot machines! Lotteries have been tremendously successful here in America. Despite the rather ridiculous odds against anyone winning a lottery, millions play them when paying for their expensive gasoline. All of them are hoping for a chance to get something for nothing.
And even when we apply our intelligence about the laws of probability that over a long enough period of time, patterns are repeated, we still believe in chance. Take for an example that if you flipped a coin a hundred times, it will not be by luck that half of the times it will come up “heads” and half “tails.” Although we know that this is a rule of probability, we still think that it’s luck.
Were Abraham and Sarah Lucky?
In today’s Scripture, you can say that Abraham and Sarah were originally pretty unlucky. Abraham was somewhere around 100 years old and Sarah was 90 but they were still not able to have their own child.
My mother in her “village understanding” of the things that happen to us might have said to Abraham and Sarah, “Probably you or your earlier generations didn’t do something that you should of, now you are unlucky. That’s the reason why you can’t have a baby.”
In the story of God’s promise to Abraham, God comes to Abraham to tell him that God has plans for his family. Here was a man without a family, old, toward the end of his life, a time of life when most people would be planning for retirement. But God still had plans for him.
God takes the initiative and said to Abraham, “I am God Almighty; walk before me, and be blameless. And I will make my covenant between me and you, and will make you exceedingly numerous.”
This is not luck or chance. God had plans for Abraham and Sarah to be blessed with a great family that would be a blessing in the world. When Sarah conceived Isaac, we might say that it was incredible good luck. But Abraham and Sarah spoke about it as providence, as a part of the guiding purposes of God.
When Abraham fell on his face, God made a covenant that Abraham will be the ancestor of a multitude of nations. This covenant between the Lord and his people was not hammered out through negotiation, nor was it an agreement between equals. God takes the initiative in making all of the promises:
I have made you the ancestor of a multitude of nations.
I will make you exceedingly fruitful.
I will make nations of you, and kings shall come from you.
I will establish my covenant between me and you, throughout the generations.
God didn’t leave anything up to chance. Abraham and Sarah were not just lucky to happen to be there when God was giving out blessings. God initiated this covenant of grace with Abraham and Sarah and therefore with all of us.
Are You Lucky?
Are you lucky? Recently, the National Safety Council urged news organizations and law enforcement authorities to stop speaking of “accidents” on our highways. Rather, they thought that it is more accurate to speak of these events as “crashes.” If someone is driving 90 miles an hour down the highway, and has a wreck, is this really an accident? The use of the word accident implies that someone was proceeding along responsibly and then, zap, from out of nowhere, had an accident.
Crash is more honest for the things that happen to us rather than accident, which absolves us of any ethical responsibility. Sometimes when we say, “It was just bad luck,” this is an attempt to absolve ourselves of responsibility for our lives.
Our current infatuation with luck gives us excuses to not take responsibility for our lives and for our world. If the world is all a matter of luck, of chance, then what can we or anybody do about it? Really nothing!
In the biblical message, there is no such thing as luck, chance, or random happenstance. What there is– is God, moving, caring, hearing, acting behind the scenes of our lives. What there is– is providence, the quiet conviction that, by God, our world is moving somewhere, toward some good end predetermined by God.
And as God made a covenant with Abraham and Sarah to become a part of his larger plan, God continues to make covenants with us to take responsibility for our lives rather than to say that it was only luck. Our lives are busy moving somewhere, whether we take responsibility for their direction or not. We are busy opening doors and closing others. We have made certain decisions in our past and invested our time and energy in ways that make certain futures possible for us and others impossible. But behind all of this is God’s unfolding plan for our world.
Some of us may have said that the reason why we trust in luck is because God has abandoned the world. God either cannot or will not do anything to intervene in the world. How can this be when God himself takes on such a specific and personal initiative as renaming Abram Abraham and Sarai Sarah! How more involved and caring can God be!
How can this be when the Lord said to Jeremiah, “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, and before you were born I consecrated you; I appointed you a prophet to the nations.” (1:5)
How can this be that God has abandoned us to chance when “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being.” (John 1:1-3)
In story after biblical story there is this affirmation of providence that flies in the face of our contemporary tendency to describe our lives as the workings of good and bad luck. As Christians we ought not to say, “good luck.” Rather, affirming providence, we ought to say, “God be with you.”
A Donkey, a Rooster, and a Lamp
A Chinese teacher took a trip to a strange land. He took a donkey, a rooster, and a lamp. Since he was Chinese, he was refused hospitality in the village inns, so he decided to sleep in the woods.
He lit his lamp to study his language books before going to sleep, but a fierce wind came up, knocking over the lamp and breaking it. The teacher decided to turn in, saying, “All that God does, God does well.” During the night some wild animals came along and drove away the rooster and thieves stole the donkey. The teacher woke up, saw the loss, but still proclaimed easily, “All that God does, God does well.”
The teacher then went back to the village where he was refused lodging, only to learn that enemy soldiers had invaded it during the night and burned the houses. He also learned that these soldiers had traveled through the same part of the woods where he lay asleep. Had his lamp not been broken he would have been discovered. Had not the rooster been chased, it would have crowed, giving him away. Had not the donkey been stolen, it would have cried out. So once more the teacher declared, “All that God does, God does well!”
What we call luck is really the absence of any known human reason for why an event should turn out one way rather than another. Christians believe there is a reason, a rationale behind all the movements of our world. That reason is called the love of God.
God Be With You
You and I are not the result of luck or happenstance.
God is the reason why we live so that we may “walk before God.”
God is the reason why we live so that God may make a covenant with us.
God is the reason why we live so that we may become exceedingly fruitful for God’s sake.
God is the reason why we live so that when we are filled with the thought that life is a crap shoot, that we can seek God’s forgiveness from trusting in fate and not in him.
5.
God is the reason why we live so that God may give us new names too to begin again.
God’s love is the reason why we live. We look for evidence of that love, that is the reason for all things. We believe that this world is meant to mean something, to add up to more than the mere probability of chance.
And when we feel that our hearts have grown cold and far away from God’s love and reason for our lives, we pray that our lives might once again be transformed. We want our lives to have the purpose to worship God and God alone. We lift God’s name, his holy name, Jehovah God, Elohim, The Great I am, the Risen Lamb, God of Abraham, Sarah, and Isaac.
While the world is moving toward God, we ought not to say, “Good luck.“ Rather, affirming God’s providence, we ought to say, “God be with you.” Turn to your neighbor right now and say to him/her, “God be with you.”