When Paul (then Saul) was converted on the road to Damascus, the Lord said that he had been selected or chosen to bring the name of Jesus to Israel, the Gentiles, and to their kings. Paul is now on this way to Rome to address Caesar, the greatest king in the known world. More than once, though, Paul was led into strange detours on his way to Rome, on his way to fulfill what he believed to be his calling. He had just spent two long years sitting in a Caesarean jail, where the provincial governor had left him. For those two years, I think it is safe to assume that Paul was not where he wanted to be; after all, he was not on a missionary journey, nor was he in Rome. He was not where he wanted to be, he was not where he thought he should be. He was stuck in the wrong place. And as we read last week, when Paul finally gets on board a ship bound for Rome, he still ended up spending a long time stuck in the wrong place. From almost the moment they set sail, the wind was against them; they were blown off course and eventually shipwrecked. Paul and his traveling companions were marooned and stuck on an unfamiliar, unknown island. He still wasn't in Rome, he wasn't where he wanted to be, and he still wasn't where he thought he should be.

In the words of former Senate chaplain Richard Halverson, "You go nowhere by accident." That little phrase goes right to the heart of our faith. Nothing is wasted in God's economy. There is purpose to it all. Along the way, though, it may feel like we are just wandering around from one dead end ... or one shipwreck ... to the next. But our sure and confident hope is in the sovereignty of a gracious and good God. (As seventeenth century writer John Flavill once wrote, "The providences of God are like Hebrew words ... they can be read only backwards." It is usually the case that we discern the will of God working His perfect plan as we look in the rear-view mirror.) This morning we pick up with Paul, after this raging storm at sea left him shipwrecked on the shores of Malta, where he was to spend another three months. After surviving the trauma and exposure and challenges of the shipwreck, the first thing that happened to Paul in Malta was that a venomous viper bit him on the hand! When the natives of the island first saw it, they first assumed that Paul must be a murderer or worse. After all, he was a prisoner, they may have rightly assumed he was being taken to Rome for justice, and even though the sea didn't get him, divine justice won't let him escape. They seemed to have had an innate understanding of divine order and justice, and that this snake was the divinely appointed executioner. But when Paul didn't "swell up and drop dead," as usually happened to folks bitten by this type of viper, the natives decided that he must be a god instead of a murderer. There's a sermon in itself in this little scene, but let's just say that God has a strange (and sometimes painful) way, at times, of drawing people's attention to His messengers.

There's a sense in which we can all relate to Paul here. As many of you know from (sometimes bitter) experience, it doesn't matter how careful you are, sooner or later one of life's storms will take you by surprise and blow you off course. You will find some disease in your body, or a cherished relationship will hit the rocks, or some financial resource will evaporate, or you are victimized by crime, or you are separated from those you love. And just about the time you think you've made it through the storm and gale to the relative safety and stability of the shore, some idiot snake jumps out of nowhere and bites you! You find yourself stuck, sidetracked into another detour ... you are not where you want to be, you are not where you think you should be, you hurt, you feel exposed and vulnerable and weak. But the biblical vision of the detour is that it is another opportunity to discover more of the grace of God that is waiting on the shores of every shipwreck.

Some of you in this congregation feel "stuck" on the shores of a shipwrecked relationship. You can't figure out how to get this relationship back to the place you want to be. Others of you may be very much in love with someone, but you are stuck apart from them, marooned by an ocean of separation between you. Maybe that person is at work in another part of the world. Maybe the person you love is no longer in this world, separated from you by death. Whenever you are separated from someone you love, whenever you are separated from those you care about, it doesn't matter how good things are going for you where you are, there is always this vague sense of being marooned in the wrong place, isn't there? Some of you are stuck in the wrong place in your relationship with your children. Something went wrong, something was blown off course, somewhere back there; you may not even know what it is. But it's clear that you and your child are not as close as you should be, and it weighs like a heavy stone in your heart every waking moment. Perhaps the place where some of you feel stuck and marooned is at work. You have invested some of the best years of your life for this job, but have now discovered you don't like it ... at all. You would love to quit and do something else, but you there are too many bills, too many commitments, too many people dependent on you, and too few years left. I could go on ... some of you feel stuck and shipwrecked in an ocean of financial debt. Some are stuck in hurts from your past; some are immobilized in the muck of a depression that you cannot seem to escape.

The first and most important thing that all of us have to do (and I say this in way of review from last week), -- whether in the midst of a storm or after you've come through what seems to be a disastrous shipwreck --- the first thing to do is to choose hope. Learning to choose hope, by an act of the will, is one of the most important insights to living life in this storm-tossed world. Ironically, perhaps the best place for us to learn how to choose hope is when we are in the wrong place. As mentioned last time, we can only choose hope if we live with three tenses at the same time: remembering God's faithfulness in the past, envisioning God's faithfulness for the future, and then placing yourself between past faithfulness and future faithfulness ... only then do we understand the present tense. We tend to think that the present is the only thing that we can count on and that the future is uncertain. I suggest to you that, biblically speaking, it is the future we can count on. If you are uncertain about the present, if you are in a dark chapter of your personal story, sneak a peek at the back of the Book. You will read that everything works out fine in the end! In the Bible, the future has already been written, and it's a wonderful ending! It ends with justice, with restoration of what is lost, with the healing of relationships between people and nations, with you and me joining the rest of creation in a grand mutual "A-Ha!" chorus of understanding that "God really is good!" Then we will understand how it all fit together. The story isn't over yet; the future is still on the way. How do you make it, how do I make it, through the storms and shipwrecks of the present? One way is to remember that God is not done writing the story of our life. Theologian Jurgan Moltmann, author of Theology of Hope, said that everything that he needed to know about hope he discovered in a World War II prison. He learned that the men without hope were the first ones to die. "They collapsed," he wrote, "from the inside out." Hope is available, but we have to choose it ... and when we do, when we choose to believe in a future of hope, then we can attend to the day that we have.

When Paul realized that he was going to be in Malta for a while, he began to serve the people who lived there. He didn't stay on the beach and lament his lot; he got to work fulfilling his calling there and then. That is the second most important thing one can do when shipwrecked, marooned, stuck ...: look for opportunities to serve the people where you are. Paul visited the sick father of the chief official of the island. He prayed for him, laid hands on him, and the father miraculously recovered. Word of this healing spread and others began bringing their sick to Paul. The third thing to do when on a detour: Look for the spiritual community that God has for you there. As Paul demonstrated, this is important even if you are only in town for three months (or, as some are wont to do, don't take three months off from the spiritual community during the summer!). Don't sit around during your detour. Don't sit out life on the detour, thinking that you will get involved in community later, that you'll serve others later. You don't have any assurance you will make it to the next place, that there will be a "later." After going to Rome, Paul's next plan was to head over to Spain. But Paul never made it Spain, because Nero killed him in Rome. We may have some great plans and dreams for the future, when we finally get to the place where everything is just right, but tomorrow does not belong to us. All we have right now is today, and the opportunity to be faithful to our calling in the present.

In the present, you may be of real service to someone who is need of healing. You can also receive the hospitality of the people around you as God's gift of community. Now the community you find in a detour may not be the community you wanted, or the community you were looking for. There may be all sorts of things wrong with that community. Paul's friends were elsewhere, the people he cared deeply about were in Corinth and Philippi and Ephesus and Antioch; and he really wanted to be in Rome. But here he was shipwrecked on Malta, and on Malta he received the people there and the hospitality they offered as God's gifts to him. Again, Paul doesn't wallow in the surf and sand and lament his fate. He gets to work with these people. He starts fulfilling his mission, he serves God where he is, and the community comes as a gift. That is how we find it in this church as well. As you commit yourself to an adult class, to the 39ers, to the women's circles, to a bible study, to teaching children, to caring for others as a deacon, to serving on a committee or going on a missions trip ... then you find the community as a gift from God. It seems from the text that Paul had a great time on Malta. When the time came for him to leave, the people honored him by bringing presents and providing provisions. Which leads me to a final observation this text makes about detours: Look for the grace of God along the way. If you cannot discern the grace of God along the way, that grace which literally impregnates every single day of our lives, you may not discern the grace of God at the end of the journey. The grace of God meets us even in (or perhaps, especially in) the detours and shipwrecks.

The great enemy to joy is anxiety and despair. It takes over our hearts, sinks our spirits, and pulls us down deeper into the troubled waters when we torment ourselves with questions that have no answers. "Am I at the right place?" "Am I with the right people?" "Am I with the right spouse?" "Am I going to have enough?" "Am I ever going to make it to the right place?" Since we are never sure, the questions only grow bigger and bigger, and they crowd out our capacity for discerning God's grace and goodness in the here and now. One of the best ways to miss the abundant life God continually offers is to spend all our days and dissipate all our energy trying to get to some mythical "right place." We can spend a lot of emotional and physical time and energy trying to get everything just right, and thinking that THEN we will get on with life. But God never waits for us to "get there." God wants and even expects us to be of use along the way, He wants us to live and serve and experience joy right now, where we are. Wherever we are of use to God, that is the right place for us. Serve God ... and discover the real joy and grace He offers ... where you are right now.