Beyond Understanding

Beyond Understanding
Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, Rejoice.
Let your gentleness be known to everyone. The Lord is near.
Do not worry about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God.
And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding,
will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.
Philippians 4:4-7

By Everett Wilson, Pastor
You may have been told that it is a sin to worry, but that point needs clarifying.
1. It is not a sin for the unconverted to worry, because their whole life is acclimated to sin; worry is natural for them and should be expected of them.
2. If we are to believe Time magazine, which we can more often than not, worry is a created response in all of us, believers and unbelievers alike. It is built in to our nervous systems and related to the “fight or flight” syndrome. It is as natural to worry as it is to feel hungry.
We get into trouble on this subject when we begin to believe that better education is a cure for worry. The theory goes something like this, and I don’t think I am making it up: We worry because we are afraid, and we are afraid because we do not understand.
On the face of it, it’s a neat explanation. Its application even seems to succeed sometimes, as when we convince a child that darkness doesn’t change the world one bit—that the bedroom with the lights out is exactly the same as the bedroom with the lights on. The darkness changes nothing.
Of course, convincing the child doesn’t make the fear go away. The child did not decide to be afraid, and we don’t decide to worry. We just do.
Neat explanations neither solve problems nor saves sinners. Sometimes the things we understand best are the very things we are most afraid of! And we can’t help it!
Oh, we sometimes can. Dr. Seuss’s little hero, the one who kept running into a pair of “pale green pants with nobody inside them” can’t talk himself out of his fear:
“I do not fear those pale green pants
With nobody inside them.”
I said, I said, and said those words.
I said them. But I lied them.
Then he understands the pale green pants, and becomes their friend, and everything is just fine in Dr. Seuss’s world.
But this is not Dr. Seuss’s wonderful world. This is the world under the dominion of the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work among the sons of disobedience. We are not up against rational good will. We are up against irrational wickedness.
Sometimes our worry is more sad than sinful. Excessive, disabling, persistent worry when there is nothing real to worry about may be the symptom of a mental illness called Generalized Anxiety Disorder. You may be sure that Paul’s command not to worry was not a command to mentally ill people to stop being sick! Rather, it is a reminder to the rest of us that
Þ worry does no good,
Þ worry changes nothing,
Þ it is more useful to think than to worry, and
Þ It’s a lot to better to pray than to think!
In fairness to mentally ill people, it’s probably better to read Paul’s command to mean “Do not choose to worry about anything.”
The best example I know of choosing to worry is what happened in our country in the three months following September 11, 2001. After the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks, a great many people were worried, so chose to drive rather than fly. One result of this choice was that it put so many cars on the road that a thousand more people died in automobile accidents from October to December of 2001 than in the same months of the year before.
Actually, Paul’s commandment not to worry isn’t directed at everybody in the world, but at Christians, We are those who can believe that God has the whole world in his hands, who really can understand that there is actually nothing to worry about.
Christians may still worry. I know that because I even worried about this sermon as I was writing it! The difference is that the world has no alternative but to worry. Because of our faith, however, we can choose not to!

Not an Explanation
Explanations do not end worries. The trouble with the neat explanation I began with is not so much that it is wrong but that explanations aren’t what we want or need. If you have a headache, you don’t want a diagnosis nearly as much as you want a cure. It’s interesting to know what your problem is, but much better to be rid of it!

So I am not here to explain God to you. God does not even explain himself.
Þ When God made the universe, he didn’t point to it and say, “This explains me.”
Þ When he made the first humans in his own image, he didn’t point to them and say, “This explains me.”
Þ When he called Abraham to begin the long history of salvation, a history of which we are a part, he didn’t say, “This explain me.”
Þ When he allowed scientists to split the atom, he didn’t point to their laboratory and say, “That explains me.”
Þ Even when Jesus was born in a stable, was laid in the manger, was nailed to the cross, and later stood outside his empty tomb, God did not say, “This explains me.”
If he wasn’t explaining himself, what was he doing? And my preaching colleagues and I are not explaining God; what are we doing?

Sometimes I explain things in response to questions or to correct misunderstandings. We need some explaining for the practical reason that there are so many false explanations floating around, and we have to say “Not that! Not that either! Or that!” But explaining is not my primary job. God did not come into the world to explain the world, or even to explain himself, but to offer us a salvation we may accept by faith.


An Experience, not an Explanation
I side with Paul that the gift of God is not an explanation but an experience. God offers himself. If all he had to give was an explanation, then we would have to be smart enough to understand him. We will never be that. We may believe him, though, even if we can’t understand him. The primary question of the church is not, “Do you understand God?” but “Do you believe in Jesus?” Do you accept the gift of God?

If you insist that understanding is necessary, you want the gospel to be less simple than it is. What keeps us is not how much we know, but what God has given us: the peace of God which surpasses all understanding. The gospel describes the gift in other ways as well, but this description will do for this morning.
The peace of God is not the same as peace with God. We are at peace with God and with one another because Christ has settled the peace for us, on the cross. The peace of God is the experience of himself that God himself enjoys, and he includes us in it no matter how wild the world is. As Paul says in Romans 8, nothing can separate us from the love of Christ! The peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will keep our hearts and minds in Christ Jesus our Lord.
Just about exactly 100 years ago G. K. Chesterton wrote a novel, The Man Who Was Thursday, about a mysterious secret society in which the leaders were code-named by the days of the week. The man who was Thursday told the story, but the man who was Sunday was the most mysterious of all. When Thursday finally asks him straight out who he really is, he answers with another riddle. “I am the peace of God.”
The novel doesn’t explicitly solve the riddle; I think you have to know the Bible to solve it. “I am the peace of God,” means, I think, You can’t begin to understand me. You may trust me, but you cannot understand me. I am the peace that is your resting place beyond all turmoil, confusion, and hostility.
For many people this is too simple. Since God won’t explain himself since he cannot explain what he alone can understand, we get many crazy explanations from people who claim to speak for God.
Here is not an explanation, but an offer: the peace of God coming to you through faith in Jesus Christ. The peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus our Lord. Amen.