The God of Improbable Outcomes

If you’re anything like me, this pandemic has caused you to be hyper focused on probabilities. For a while there when COVID was spiking back in the holiday season, there was a number that really shocked and scared me. It said that if you lived in Chicago and were attending a gathering of ten people, there was a 60% chance that one of those folks was infected with the virus.

That’s a high probability of transmission and was a reason that I and probably many of us here decided that this would be a Zoom holiday season with family and friends. It wasn’t an easy decision to make, but with a 60% chance of infection, I am not going to play those odds.

I’m willing to bet that even when making other decisions in our lives we do a lot of odds calculations and go with the choice that gives us the best odds of avoiding unnecessary pain and suffering. Like when I’m leaving for a trip, I try to give myself the best chance of avoiding rush hour traffic in Chicago because for me, sitting in traffic is painful.

Or to flip that, we also make decisions to do things so that they not only avoid pain and suffering, but have the opportunity to do the most good. Like when we were transitioning from serving our meals at Grace Place and deciding when and where our South Loop Community Table Meal should be served, we picked a location and time that gave us the best chance of serving the most people. So now we’re at Second Presbyterian Church which is located near a bus and a train and is walkable from the Loop where many of our guests of the meal who are experiencing homelessness are coming from. We also stuck with serving our meal on Sunday night, which is a time in the week when many other community meals and soup kitchens are taking a break.

You see, probabilities affect much of what we do, and I don’t think there is anything wrong with that. In fact, I want to affirm decisions that we make that increase our odds of avoiding needless pain and suffering and promoting the most good. But, if there is anything we can learn today from our scripture lessons is that our God is a God of improbable outcomes.

Let’s start by taking a look at our first reading from Genesis. At 99 years old, God makes the covenant with Abraham promising that he and Sarah will be exceedingly numerous and that they will be the ancestors of a multitude of nations. If God wanted a higher probability of success with fertility, maybe making a covenant with someone younger than 99 would have been the best bet, but remember we worship a God of improbable outcomes.

Paul, in our reading from Romans today even elaborates on this story and the audacious covenant that God would make with Abraham and Sarah when, in Paul’s words, Abraham’s body was as good as dead, and Sarah’s womb was barren. But even in the face of such odds, Paul describes Abraham and Sarah as hoping against hope that they would bear a child in their old age, and their trust and faith remained steadfast in the covenant that God made with them. They were fully convinced God would do what God had promised.

But before we get too far ahead of ourselves admiring the faith of Abraham and Sarah, we have to remember our reading of this story from this past summer to know that this is actually the second covenant that God made with Abraham and Sarah, and between that first and second covenant, they got impatient with God’s first improbable covenant and took the odds into their own hands and had Abraham conceive with Hagar. Even after this second covenant, when the Lord visits Abraham, Sarah laughs to herself as she overhears the Lord say to Abraham that she will bear a son. And the Lord even asks, “Why did Sarah laugh, and say, ‘Shall I indeed bear a child, now that I am old?’ 14 Is anything too wonderful for the Lord? At the set time I will return to you, in due season, and Sarah shall have a son.”

All this to say, that even Sarah and Abraham who receive not one, but two direct covenants with God about having a son in their old age still have their doubts and take matters into their own hands to create their own more probable outcome. But God is still a God of improbable outcomes and eventually Isaac is born against all odds. Our doubt, or desire for more probable certainty will not prevent God from creating life in places where we thought death had surely prevailed, creating love where we thought hatred had prevailed, creating light where we thought darkness had prevailed, or creating goodness where we thought evil had prevailed.

For as we sing in the hymn by Desmond Tutu, “Goodness is stronger than evil; Love is stronger than hate; Light is stronger than darkness; Life is stronger than death; Victory is ours, Victory is ours through God who loves us. Victory is ours, Victory is ours through God who loves us.”

Now that is a hymn for the God of improbable outcomes. So what does our Gospel today from Mark have to say about this God? Well for one, Jesus tells his disciples that he must undergo suffering, he must die, and that after three days will rise from the dead. And this suffering, death, and resurrection is too improbable for Peter to handle so he rebukes Jesus, to which Jesus rebukes Peter right back and says, "Get behind me, Satan! For you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things."

Maybe what Jesus is saying is that our ways of doing things are not God’s ways. Having our mind on human things is doing everything to keep things under control, and so we hope that God too is someone who controls everything, but the love of God is anything but controlling. While we might make our decisions based on probability, or make calculated decisions to avoid suffering, Jesus will not dial down his ministry to spare his own life, or even to ease his suffering. Jesus loves with reckless abandon and does not control our response to this love and thus we kill him because his vision of God’s kin-dom and his commitment to the healing of humanity literally knows no limits. But not even death can control or contain God’s love and life giving power, and Jesus has in fact risen from the dead making for us an improbable covenant that we too will experience resurrection.

Despite this improbable covenant, we are sure to doubt God’s victory over death, evil, hatred, and darkness and make decisions like Abraham and Sarah that attempt to take this covenant into our own hands and make the outcome probable, but God is still a God of improbable outcomes.

Jesus is asking of us an improbable, if not impossible thing, to follow him by denying ourselves and taking up our crosses. Jesus goes on to say, “For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it.”

This improbable challenge sets out for us the cost of discipleship, and while there is Christian persecution in this world, many American Christians erroneously try to claim this persecution for themselves as we have seen most recently for not being allowed to gather for in person worship during the pandemic, but as one biblical scholar put it, “What makes the ministry of the Markan Jesus counter-cultural, and therefore the object of earthly hostility, is not that it is “Christian” per se but that it abides no impediment to the immediate restoration of the broken and outcast.”

Our efforts to make things probable and predictable are not entirely bad, but we also have to acknowledge the ways in which our probable and predictable lives are most times an attempt to save ourselves from having to hope against hope and trust in God’s improbable outcomes for our lives and the life of this world. We can easily talk ourselves out of improbable divine things with some probable human things we would rather put our trust in. But, as we will soon see come Easter, death, evil, hatred, and darkness have already lost and we need not give them any more power because victory is ours, victory is ours through God who loves us. Amen