Back in my graduate school days, my friend Jay and I jointly took possession of a decrepit 1967 Dodge Coronet (not near as nicely kept as the one in the picture), left to us by another student who finished his degree and went on to other things, including a newer and better car. With mechanic skills honed on Jay’s old Rambler and my Chevy Vega, we took on the task of making this extra vehicle driveable through hours spent in our apartment parking lot huddled over the Dodge’s engine compartment or laying on the pavement under it.
Our working understanding of our DIY auto repair was that we could estimate a repair time as follows, “Replacing that starter should take about an hour and a half… unless there are complications.” You guessed it. There were always complications. It was a great life lesson. Learning to expect events in life to get complicated and messy taught us much about the world.
As we move toward the end of Paul’s story in Acts, it gets complicated. In our text for this coming Sunday, Acts 23:12-35, the mess generated by a possible riot in the previous chapter only gets worse as Paul’s enemies arrange to have him killed during a prisoner transfer.
Yet God steps into the complications in a way that’s a bit of surprise to us. It turns out Paul has a sister (who is not mentioned elsewhere in Scripture) who has a son who is in the right place at the right time to hear of the plot against Paul and intervene. As I will say in the sermon, it smacks of some of the incredible coincidences Charles Dickens often used to move his stories along. But for Paul is not a fictional device, it’s the way God works.
God is in the mess, in the complications. We may or may not, this side of the Kingdom, get a surprising glimpse of how He’s going to work it all out. Yet the presence of Paul’s nephew at precisely the right place and time to save Paul’s life gives us just such a glimpse to assure us that it really is going to happen, that God will at some point cut through the tangled knot of our circumstances to bring us the good He wills for us in Christ.
The Cross of Jesus shows us, of course, that God’s surprising intervention may not happen just when we would like it, but it will be there, just as it was for Jesus on Easter morning. The complications will melt away in the serendipity of God’s grace working on our behalf.