Half Truths, Part 1: Everything Happens for a Reason

 Friends, today I’m starting a new sermon series, where I’ll be drawing from a book titled Half Truths by an author named Adam Hamilton. Adam is a fellow United Methodist minister, the senior pastor of the Church of the Resurrection is Leawood, Kansas. He’s very active in the American Methodist scene, and it’s likely you’ve heard his name or seen his face before, either on social media, or at General Conference, where he’s been a delegate every session since the year 2000. He’s also a prolific author, and one of his specialties has been writing books that can be easily used to support a church book group or a sermon series, like this one. In Half Truths, Adam takes a look at five different Christian cliches. Some folks think these phrases are in the Bible, and I can assure you, none of them are. We tend to spout these phrases in times of grief, and they can be useful to a point, but they quickly become personally and theologically problematic, at best, and at worst, they can do real harm.

The phrase we’re looking at today is: everything happens for a reason.

We tend to hear this phrase at times of grief and calamity. It’s the longer way to say “it was God’s plan”. The caveat I’ll give you for all of these phrases is this: sometimes, they help. They aren’t all bad all the time, and I’m not telling y’all we should never use them. When you’re going through a hard time, and you need a catch to get you through it, and “everything happens for a reason” is the hand under your shaky ground, by all means, lean on it. But when you’re tempted to use this phrase to console someone else who’s having a hard time, or to respond to a tragedy in the community or out in the world, you may want to think twice.

This week, I saw this phrase, and similar ones, used a lot to talk about the shooting death of conservative Christian activist Charlie Kirk. Kirk’s death hit our culture in a heavy and complicated way. He was only 31 years old, and a dad of two young children. The latest information I have about the person who shot him is that it was yet another young white man with more access to firearms than common sense. Kirk’s beliefs were very controversial. He endorsed our current President, and has been politically outspoken. He was strongly opposed to LGBTQ rights, especially transgender rights, and abortion. He favored unrestricted access to guns, and said at one point that some firearm deaths are “inevitable” in order to keep gun rights. He spoke against the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s, as well as feminism. His legacy will be a complicated one. Many young Christians have expressed feeling emboldened in their faith by how openly and unabashedly he talked about his, and young Republicans have expressed feeling empowered seeing a very young man make a real difference in the political scene. But his words also did harm to communities that are already struggling under the weight of discrimination and harassment. In the midst of these tangled lines of grief, I saw folks on both sides of the aisle say “everything happens for a reason”. Some folks meant that in a hopeful or positive way: maybe God needed Kirk in heaven, maybe God will set the man who killed Kirk on a path to redemption, maybe Kirk’s death will be a wakeup call that will spark a movement against violence and toward peace. But the folks who disturbed me the most were the ones who said “everything happens for a reason” with a hint of Schadenfreude, the intimation that Kirk deserved this. Let me say this as clearly as I can: followers of Jesus do not rejoice in violence. You have every right to believe everything Kirk said, nothing Kirk said, or something in the middle, and he had every right to speak his mind. He didn’t deserve to die for it, and hate only begets more hate.

I hear “everything happens for a reason” thrown around a lot after a senseless death, like Kirk’s. I also hear it after large scale tragedies that defy any other explanation: wildfires, earthquakes, tornadoes, floods, hurricanes, droughts. Our brains are ruled by logic, and we search desperately for order in the universe when our world has been turned upside down. This must have happened for a reason. Only God could know what that reason was, but it must have been a good one. And our hearts, seeking justice and righteousness, long to see benevolence in chaos. There must be something good here. I might not be able to see it, but surely God can. God had divine reasons for allowing this to happen, some cosmically huge plan that I’ll never see, but it’s there.

“Everything happens for a reason” holds up as a half truth because it suggests one genuine fact: actions have consequences. Charlie Kirk died for a reason. It’s easy to convince our righteous hearts that the “reason” was because of some good outcome that God will orchestrate. The harsher, but more authentic reality is this: God didn’t want this, either. Kirk’s death happened because of human action. He died because it’s very difficult to survive a gunshot wound, and his body shut down.

One of the biggest pitfalls of “everything happens for a reason” is that it lets humans off the hook for our behavior. That may be merciful, but it isn’t loving. True love, the Divine love that Jesus teaches us, holds people accountable for their actions. In the year 2023, the CDC reported that 46,728 people died in the United States because of guns. A minority of those deaths were accidents, cause and effect of people being in the wrong place at the wrong time, another hard truth for people to swallow. 58% of those deaths were folks that took their own lives, and 38% were folks that deliberately ended another person’s life. Human choices ended those lives. Human choices also allowed folks who would do harm to be able to get guns in the first place. Now, I know we’re not of one mind in this room about the hot issue of gun rights. We’re going to have all kinds of experiences and beliefs about guns, and that’s ok. Diversity of mind is a beautiful thing. But one thing is clear: saving lives has to start with people. When we point to those statistics and say “everything happens for a reason”, we disempower ourselves. We aren’t helpless. Our fate isn’t sealed. God didn’t plan violence, and doesn’t want it. We made it. And that means we can stop it.

I also find myself very troubled by the way we paint God when we say “everything happens for a reason.” Just like I expect we all have different opinions about gun rights, I also expect we have different opinions about what my college professors used to call “Divine forethought”. Do we have 100% choice and free will to make whatever we want happen in this life? Does God plan out every single detail about us in the Book of Life, ranging from the big stuff like when and how we’ll die, to the small stuff like what we’ll eat for breakfast? Or is it something in the middle? You don’t have to agree with me on that, or with one another. Several of the founding fathers of this country believed in something called deism: God created the world, but leaves it alone. Every single decision is entirely ours. By contrast, our Presbyterian friends inherited the beliefs of one of their most prominent forefathers, a man named John Calvin, who believed in predestination: God may not have every iota of your life planned out, but God has predestined you for righteousness or unrighteousness, for eternity in the Good Place or eternity in the Bad Place, and your works are merely a reflection of what God already has planned for you. Our forefather, John Wesley, the third bowl of porridge, believed in something called “prevenient grace”: whatever you do, wherever you go, God goes out before you, and blesses you on your way. Wherever you find your own beliefs, one thing we know for sure is that God is love. God doesn’t make terrible things happen to us to teach us some kind of lesson, or to make a better thing happen later. That’s not who God is.

And that’s not who we are. We are brave servants of God and one another, and Jesus is our teacher. He shows us that everything doesn’t happen for some kind of Godly reason. Everything happens. And then we can use whatever it is to show compassion. In this morning’s Gospel story, the Pharisees are on Jesus’ case, again, this time because they see him hanging out with people they don’t like: tax collectors. The pay day loan sharks of First Century Palestine, the folks who profited off of their poorest neighbors in order to get kickbacks from Rome. Those folks made terrible mistakes and got in with bad people. But Jesus forgave them, welcomed them, and wanted to teach them about making better choices. He took the something that happened, the tax collecting, which was never God’s plan, and used it to show compassion to children of God, in the same way, so says Jesus, that a shepherd would use the bad moment of a sheep getting lost as a good opportunity to make sure that sheep got to safety and never got lost again. Jesus teaches us that bad things happen, sometimes by coincidence, sometimes because of nature, and often because people make bad choices. And even if we couldn’t control the first part of the story, we can help write a better ending, an ending where love and human compassion win. We can find the lost sheep, and celebrate.

So, for today at least, I’ll morph that cliche from “everything happens for a reason” into “It happened. What do we do now?” Now, I’m going to love and support my neighbor. I’m going to choose peace. I’m going to mourn the loss of life, and empower free speech. I’m going to protest for common sense gun regulations, and use the power of my vote to support candidates who share my values. And, no matter what, I’m going to choose compassion.

Amen.