Sermon Notes — July 27, 2025
Romans 8:24-30
July 27, 2025
“Bless the Broken Road”
Dr. Mary Beth Bernheisel
I am pleased to report this morning that I learned more new things this week! First, I learned how to play mahjong – let me rephrase that. I was taught how to play mahjong. Whether I actually learned to play mahjong remains to be seen. I mostly learned how to keep score in Pickleball, although we’ll have to see if I still remember it the next time I play. And perhaps most relevant to our being together here this morning, I learned this week that Romans 8:28 does not say what I thought it said.
Have you ever had anyone ask you what your favorite verse of the Bible is? Sometimes I’ve heard people talk about having a “life verse.” At one point in my life if you had asked me what my life verse was – or my favorite verse – I would have quoted Romans 8:28. I mean, it’s a great verse! “We know that all things work together for good for those who love God, for those who are called according to his purpose.” What a blessed assurance, especially for times when life is chaotic and confusing – for times when everything feels like it’s out of our control. All things work together for good. It all works out in the end. The cosmic puzzle pieces will eventually all fall together because we love God and we are doing God’s will.
Well, now, that just feels good, doesn’t it?
All of the swirling chaos eventually falls into place and things just – work out!
But the catch is that the apostle Paul – who wrote this letter to the Christians in Rome – Paul writes almost exclusively with the community in mind. His letters are to churches – not to individuals – entire Christian communities – about how they as a whole should live together, especially in the face of external pressures. Sometimes those external pressures were false teachers, as was the case in the church in Galatia. Sometimes those external pressures were the culture itself, as was partly the case of the churches in Rome. In Rome there were probably only several hundred or so followers of Jesus at the time that Paul wrote his letter, compared to the roughly one million residents of Rome who worshiped Caesar. The followers of Jesus living in Rome met in each other’s small homes while their neighbors worshiped in grand temples. And to make it even more difficult, not all of these house churches in Rome did things the same way. So not only did the early Jesus followers stand out from the culture, they weren’t even on the same page with each other. Surely at some point they had to look around and ask themselves, “How do I know if this is really worth all the trouble?”
So while Paul’s letter to the Romans has often been used by Christians as a blueprint for personal salvation, at its heart it is a guide for living as a community of people who pledge our allegiance to King Jesus.
Will you pray with me and for me?
Bless the Broken Road was written in 1994 although it probably wasn’t on the radar for most of us until Rascal Flatts recorded it in 2005. And the genius of the song is that almost everyone can relate to it on some level. Because hindsight is 20/20, right? We can all point to things that didn’t work out the way we wanted them to, and compare them to the way things did work out, and say with confidence that this – what I have now – is way better than what I was hoping for back then. That time you got let go from a job and ended up on a different career path that fulfills you in ways that you never imagined. That time someone broke your heart and it freed you to find the person you were really meant to be with. Bless the broken road.
As followers of Jesus, we know this on an even deeper level. Whether by choices that we make or circumstances out of our control, we are broken people walking a broken road in a broken world. We have personal stories of grief and sorrow and mistakes and things we wish we had done differently. And we live in a broken world where children are hungry while 1% of the world population holds almost half of the world’s wealth. But the promise of God fulfilled in the person of Jesus Christ and in the power of the Holy Spirit is that God is always working to make all things new.
Back when I was 25 and I knew everything, I got my first real job. I was a Case Manager for the Mental Health Association in Lancaster, CA. Lancaster is in the far northeast corner of Los Angeles County, in the High Desert, and we lived there because Jay was stationed at Edwards Air Force Base. My boss’s name was Judy, and in long conversations with Judy, I found out that for a time she had exchanged letters with Viktor Frankl. Viktor Frankl was an Austrian psychologist and holocaust survivor whose most famous book is called Man’s Search for Meaning. Judy and I talked extensively about Frankl’s work and his experiences and the things that they discussed together, and those conversations with Judy gave me a chance to better articulate my understanding of bad things happening to good people – that God doesn’t cause bad things to happen; instead God can and does work to redeem the bad things – God can and does make all things new, God can and does bind up the broken, God can and does give a garland where before there were ashes.
How grateful are we that we have that assurance. That God is always at work to make all things new – us – the cosmos – our lives – the world. We could stop there and that would be enough. No matter how chaotic and heartbreaking and out of control life seems, God is always working to make things new.
And maybe that’s where I might have stopped if I hadn’t decided to read NT Wright. If you’ve never heard of NT Wright, he’s an English New Testament scholar with a focus on the Apostle Paul and his letters. Sometimes he just goes by Tom Wright, so if you’re unfamiliar with NT Wright, perhaps he’s your casual acquaintance, Tom Wright.
I have a fair number in commentaries in my library, but I found this week that I was a bit low on commentaries addressing the Book of Romans, so I boogied on over to Amazon to look for something to augment my meager collection and found Wright’s book called Into the Heart of Romans: A Deep Dive into Paul’s Greatest Letter. It was free on Kindle, so I downloaded it and almost immediately realized that it was a commentary not on the whole book of Romans but on the eighth chapter of Romans. Two-hundred plus pages on one chapter of Romans. I flipped over to the section where Wright talks about the text that Jim read for us today and this is what Wright says about Romans 8:28
One of the frustrations of being an elderly exegete (interpreter) is to find the text refusing to say what you thought it said sixty years ago. (N.T. Wright)
Wright also found later in his career that Romans 8:28 did not say what he thought it said. It says something far richer and far more glorious. Before we go there, let’s review where we’ve been so far.
We begin with the song that reminds us of the gift – the blessing, if you will – of looking back on the broken roads we have traveled and how they have brought us to where we are today.
As followers of Jesus, we hear a deeper message in the song. A message that reflects the common interpretation of Romans 8:28 – that God is actively working to make all things new – to heal what is broken – to redeem what is lost – whether the brokenness is a result of error or simply circumstance, whether the brokenness is personal or communal.
But we can go even deeper than that, Wright tells us, if we reclaim the translation of the verse from the Revised Standard Version. And in the RSV the scripture reads like this:
We know that in everything God works for good with those who love him, who are called according to his purpose.
Look at that translation compared with the one that we might be most used to, the NRSV. That translation says:
We know that all things work together for good for those who love God, who are called according to his purpose.
There are two big differences between those translations.
The first one is the difference between who is working. In the NRSV we read that “all things” are working together for good. But in the RSV we read that “God” works for good. We might say that of course when we read the NRSV we understand that it’s God who’s working and not just things that are working, but that shift in word order can change the way we think about the verse and its meaning. Things aren’t just coming together for good. God is working to make things come together for good.
But this is the really good stuff. Look at the difference in the prepositions. In the NRSV we read that things work together for good for those who love God but in the RSV we read that God works for good with those who love him.
That makes a difference! In one we’re reading that all things work for good for those who love God. And in the other we’re reading that God works for good with those who love him.
God works for good with those who love him.
We start by asking what is the ultimate good? If God is working for good and those who love God are working with God, what is the good that we are working for? Well, if Paul were here he would tell us that the ultimate good is the redemption of all things – the whole world restored and renewed just like it should be, just like God intended in the first place.
God works for good…and that good is the redemption and restoration of the world.
And God is working with those who love him.
Perhaps you’re asking yourself whether you fall into that category. Sure, you say, I love God, but does God know that I love God? Have I made my love of God clear enough to God so that God knows without a doubt that I love God? What do I have to do to make sure that God knows that I love him?
And if Paul were here this is what he would tell you: He would tell you, first of all, that humans are always going to love God imperfectly, and God already knows that, so don’t sweat it too much. What really matters is that God loves you, and that’s a given. Second, he would tell you that as disciples of Jesus Christ you demonstrate your love of God by entering into the pain of the world and praying for its restoration and redemption, not simply as an individual but as a part of a whole community, the church, that is praying for the same thing – the restoration and redemption of the world. Note the difference…you don’t earn the love of God by entering into the pain of the world with your prayer. That’s a given. God loves you. God loves us. And out of that love God calls you – God calls us – to enter into the brokenness of the world and pray for its redemption.
Last Thursday I was down in the gym with a whole lot of you who gave up a big part of your day to unpack all of the items that we are going repack into backpacks when we leave the sanctuary today. I didn’t get to be part of the unpacking, but I got to come down after lunch and count, which is harder than you might think. We have more than 350 backpacks in the gym, waiting to be filled with school supplies that you have donated money for, so that our neighbors in our local schools will be able to start the school year with everything that they need. That’s really amazing.
As we were wrapping up I happened upon a conversation among several folks talking about other concerns as we get ready for this new school year. There were concerns about the future of the federally funded National School Lunch Program, which provides free and reduced breakfast and lunch for qualified students. What if funding for that is cut? Or goes away altogether? And that’s just the beginning. There are questions about the future of Meals on Wheels and Second Harvest Food Bank, which provide food for the most vulnerable in our community. And it all seemed so big and so overwhelming. How do you enter the pain of the world when the pain of the world is so big?
Paul tells us that the Spirit comes to help our weakness. We don’t know what we should pray, but the Spirit himself pleads our case with unexpressed groans. (Romans 8:26)
Paul is talking about moments like these when the pain of the world is so big that we don't even know what to pray for. He tells us that the faithful response is to enter into that deep pain anyway, to make it our own, and allow the Spirit to pray on our behalf for the things that are too much to pray for with our own words. And – and – and this is the most important part – to pray together – to pray in community. All of these pronouns are plural. I am not responsible for praying for the deep pain of the world by myself, and you are not responsible for praying for the deep pain of the world by yourself. We join together in prayer and we let the Spirit interpret the deepest fears and desires of our hearts to God. Sometimes that prayer looks like silence in the face of pain. Sometimes prayer looks like conversation with each other – what is God asking us to do? Sometimes prayer looks like work – every pen and pencil and notebook dropped into a backpack is a prayer for the day when every child will have everything that they need.
That’s how we work with God, who is always working to redeem the world. We call out from the deep and pray for God’s kingdom to be on earth as it is in heaven.
I invite you to pray with me now. We’ll start in silence, allowing the Spirit to pray in us and through us. And we will conclude with our Affirmation of Faith in song, Beauty for Ashes.