Pentecost 9A, 2026

9th Sunday after Pentecost/Proper 12

In the name of the Father, and of the +Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Brothers and sisters in Christ: grace and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.

Our second reading this morning is one of my favorite passages from the entire book of Romans. There is a very good reason that this section is one of the top suggestions for funerals. This is a wonderful explanation of God’s Promises to us.

Today I want to focus primarily on verse 28:

Romans 8:28 ESV

28 And we know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose.

This has been one of those verses that you pick up on as you’re reading the Bible, and it just gives you some comfort. At least it does that for me. It becomes a very interesting verse when you look at it in the Greek. I’ll be leaning on Dr. Lenski heavily this morning.

“We know” - the way Paul begins this section is a confident statement. In Greek, it means “to know by means of the knowledge of faith and not by mere intellectual investigation.” [Lenski, 550] This is not just book knowledge; this is something Paul and his team were deeply confident in.

“that for those who love God” - when you first start to pull this sentence apart, this portion can seem a little troubling. This describes a particular people; they have the quality and character of loving God. And the word here for love is ἀγάπη - which is “the word for the highest type of love, that of comprehension coupled with corresponding purpose.” [ibid.] Put more simply, these people we understand that He alone is the source of all goodness, and we then set our will to the same purpose as His—trusting Him, thanking Him, and seeking to do what pleases Him… following His call in our lives.

Now we need to be cautious here. It would be easy to think that what God is doing is somehow dependent upon our love for Him. That is NOT what Paul is saying. Remember: we are only capable of love at all because God first loved us. And we receive God’s love through faith (which God also gives to us). God’s action toward us ALWAYS comes first, and it is always motivated by His never-failing love for us, and it is always given to us by grace, meaning we don’t deserve it. Always. In the verse just before this one, Paul called us “saints”. We are not saints because we love God. We are saints because of what the love of God did for us. [ibid.]

The Interpretation of St. Paul’s Epistle to the Romans The Consolation of Hope and Divine Assurance, 8:18–39

God’s loving providence takes perfect care of those who love God. The idea is just as natural as that a father should keep his own beloved and loving children.

“all things work together for good” -

The Interpretation of St. Paul’s Epistle to the Romans The Consolation of Hope and Divine Assurance, 8:18–39

all of them without exception operate together to produce “good” in the sense of what is beneficial for [those who love God]. This includes every kind of painful experience in Christian lives, all those that press groans from our lips and make us groan inwardly in unuttered and unutterable distress. Some of the things that Paul has in mind he states in v. 38, 39. ...

[“work together” in Greek is συνεργεῖ [which is where we get our word “synergy” from]. One naturally understands this to mean that all things “work together,” work hand in hand, one thing working in mutuality with the rest to bring about good for [those who love God]. And, in fact, this is what we find in our experience. When we look at the final beneficial outcome for ourselves, the strangest, often the most contradictory occurrences seem to have cooperated to produce this unanticipated result. Of course, God’s hand was behind this cooperation; the good result is due to him.

“for those who are called according to his purpose” - again, “Our love is the blessed effect of God’s purpose and call. The one involves the other.” [Lenski, 553] Did you ever think that God’s purpose for your life, His call to serve Him, and His love for you are all wrapped up together?

How many philosophers and thinkers have spent years trying to answer the question of purpose? What is the purpose of my life? What is the purpose of life in general? They wrestled so long with that because they didn’t want to wrestle with the God they refused to acknowledge. Certainly there must be a different answer, they thought. If they had only turned to the Bible...

God’s call is universal and identical for all human beings. Obviously, not all human beings will listen to God’s call. Those who do not, will not be able to realize God’s purpose for them… and they will not be able to enjoy what God has in store for them.

There are many stories that spell this out. But I want to share with you a recent story. A story that most of you know, at least in part. So I would like to share with you the highlights, all put together for you in one place, so you can see what I see in this story.

On December 7, my amazing friend Pastor Steve Mathews got really sick. He passed out and hit his head on the granite countertop and was on the floor. All his wife Dawn knew was that his arm had been sore earlier in the week. She couldn’t lift him, and couldn’t get him to respond. She called the ambulance, who arrived and couldn’t get a blood pressure reading - it was dangerously low. They took him to the closest hospital - Morganton, where they worked on him for a couple of hours. Eventually they admitted they couldn’t figure out what was wrong, so they sent him by helicopter to Baptist in Winston-Salem.

Dawn had a friend from their church with her, and she drove Dawn to Baptist. On the way there, the Baptist medical team called her with the news that they figured out what was wrong - Steve had a flesh-eating bacteria, necrotizing fasciitis. The prognosis was not good. They put him in a medically induced coma, pumped him FULL of IV fluids to get his blood pressure up, and connected him to an ECMO machine - a device that took over the work his lungs were supposed to be doing. Steve was kept in a coma until New Year’s Eve. Each day, Dawn waited as they fought to save Steve’s life. It became clear that his life was going to come at the cost of his limbs. First they amputated his right arm (the arm that was sore in the first place), then his legs, and finally his fingertips on his left hand. When Steve woke up on New Year’s Eve, he was shocked to discover that he had lost so much of his body.

What I’ve just told you is the tragedy of the story. I was there for several pretty significant episodes in Steve’s journey while he was in a coma. For most of that time, Dawn didn’t know if Steve was going to survive another day. It was literally one day at a time.

Now let me share with you what else was going on while Steve was fighting for his life. The day after he arrived at Baptist, one of the members of their church started a “GiveSendGo” crowdfunding fundraiser to help them out. In just a few days, they raised over $20,000. So much, so quickly, that the GiveSendGo team called Dawn to tell her they were following their story, and would be praying for them. This is a Christian company.

Dawn and Steve live between Valdese and Lenoir, so for Dawn to commute between home and Winston-Salem was a LOT of driving. But since they do a lot of mission trips for the Southern Baptist Convention, the missions team contacted them and said “we have a house in Winston-Salem for missionaries, but it’s empty right now, so you can live in it as long as you need.” She now had free housing 10 minutes from her husband, big enough to host other family and friends who would come to stay with her for support.

Dawn was initially sending updates to friends and family by text message, but it got really tough for her to keep up, so she took her updates to Facebook, where she got all of her prayer warriors on one page, and they - we - all started to share it across Facebook. It exploded. She now has hundreds of “friends” that she’s never met, but who have been praying for her and her husband since mid-December. Just from my own circles, I know there are many from this church, my fellow NALC pastors and people from other churches I know, many of my old Air Force friends, and even people from my hometown in PA who have been following their story and praying for them. Dawn told me a few months ago that a journalist in Dallas, TX picked up this story and reported on it on their TV station in that city.

One person who picked up the story is a prosthetics expert and surgeon. He saw Steve’s story on Facebook and reached out to Dawn. He told her he wanted to work with Steve once he was recovered enough to start getting artificial limbs. Dawn and Steve later found out that this doctor is considered the leading prosthetics doctor in the United States. He treats Paralympics athletes, several of whom have won medals in their sport.

When Steve finished his treatment in Winston-Salem, they moved to Huntersville for some rehab work, which was to prepare him for the prosthetics journey. In both locations, connections through the church provided housing for Dawn and their sons. Steve worked hard at rehab and in the prosthetics facility. His progress was amazing.

He’s now on his second set of prosthetic legs, which changed from a stationary ankle, to now an ankle that bends, which gives him a more natural stride. He’s still on his first prosthetic arm, but he gets a little better with it every day. He’s not completely independent, but he does really well.

After Steve came home, they discovered that their deck had quite a bit of rotting wood, and needed serious work to replace those boards. One of his friends works for a company that makes composite decking materials. He went to his company, and the company donated enough material to redo the whole deck. I loved that when we were unloading the trailer, we needed to use Steve’s tractor, but no one knew how to drive it but Steve. So he hopped on with his one good hand and drove the tractor. Amazing.

Speaking of his homecoming, Dawn was convinced she was going to throw Steve a good homecoming party. So she started planning, and inviting people and getting some musicians together. As she was doing that, she got another phone call from the GiveSendGo people. They had been following the story, and the company leadership decided that Steve and Dawn would be the recipients of what they call “radical charity”. Basically the company dipped into their profits (as they do periodically) and gave their family another $12,000 on top of what the fundraiser brought in.

Steve is quick to tell people that after he woke up, he asked on of his nurses in the ICU if she ever saw cases like his. She said it was uncommon, but she had seen cases like his before. Steve asked her how many of them survived it. She told him that he was the first she’d seen in 15 years.

It would be easy to call this an absolute tragedy and leave it at that. This is probably the worst thing that’s ever happened to someone I know and care about. I wouldn’t wish this on anyone. But as I look back on EVERYTHING that happened - the bad and the good - I can’t help but see the amazing things that God has done in the midst of all the trauma and tragedy. Even if the only thing God did was to surround Dawn with the amazing love of family and friends that she had throughout Steve’s ordeal, that would be wonderful by itself. But everything else that happened, and continues to happen, it’s a clear example to me of what Paul is talking about: “for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose.”

If you talk to Steve, you will not hear him complain about how much he’s lost. You will hear him talk about how much God has done. You will hear him talk about how steadfast his wife has been and how many blessings he’s had. You will hear him lift up examples of the little and not-so-little miracles that God worked around him and for him in the face of this tragedy. You will hear him talk about how God has brought people into his life who have done truly good things for their family and for God’s Kingdom. This is not to say that Steve doesn’t recognize what he has lost, or that he’s ignoring it. But the good things just have been piling up so high, and both Steve and Dawn are so strong in their faith that they have leaned heavily on God throughout… and that was a key element to them coming through this ordeal with their faith and their relationship with God and each other in tact and arguably even stronger than before.

Brothers and sisters: we’ve had a pretty rough couple of months, and we’ve seen a lot of loss in our church family. And it’s ok to be sad; that’s natural. But this is also the time for us to lean on God, and to listen for His call to us. We are called to support one another, to bear one another’s burdens, to weep with those who weep, and to rejoice with those who rejoice. When we listen to His call, we become part of what Paul is referring to when he says “all things”. We can be a part of God doing good in the midst of tragedy and loss. And if we let Him pull us closer to Him, we will see more of that good that He wants to do for us...that He loves to do for us.

How is God using you for good? I pray that we are all listening for His call and that we are open to how He wants to use us. When He is at work among us, there is a LOT of good that can be done. Let’s all pray for Him to use us.

In the name of the Father, and of the +Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.