16th Sunday after Pentecost [Pr.20] September 20, 2009 “Series B”
Grace be unto you and peace, from God our Father and from our Lord, Jesus Christ. Amen.
Let us pray: Dear Heavenly Father, we give you thanks for coming among us in the person of your Son, Jesus the Christ, who gave his life to restore us to a right relationship with you, our Creator. Through the power of your Holy Spirit, strengthen us in faith, that we might turn from our selfish ambitions and serve you by serving others, especially those in need. Let our lives be a mirror to others of your redeeming grace. This we ask in Christ’s holy name. Amen.
William H. Willimon began his commentary on our Gospel lesson for this morning with this thought. “From time to time I’ve heard people say, ‘I believe that God has a plan for my life.’ Perhaps they are talking to me about some difficult decision they have to make, and they want to make that decision against the background of their conviction that God has a plan that will work out in their lives…
I’ve had prospective brides and grooms say to me, ‘I knew that God had a plan for the one I ought to marry. It just took me until I was 38 years old to figure out what the plan was.’
I confess that sometimes I wonder that as life in the contemporary world becomes more uncertain, even at times chaotic, as we lose our confidence that we can predict the future and know just what tomorrow will be, maybe people of faith talk more about God having a plan… We can’t often see that plan, and can’t say for sure, when looking at a given event, that God’s plan is being worked out. We nevertheless believe in the ‘plan,’ because we really need to believe that there is a plan.” End quote.
This is a topic that Pastor Burkness and I have discussed at some length during one of our January weeks together at my camp, pretending to be hunters. And I must admit that neither one of us came down on the side of affirming that God has this master plan for an individual’s life, all mapped out from our birth to the grave. Neither one of us find much merit to the concept that God has predetermined the details of a person’s life. There are just far to many problems in subscribing to such a belief.
For example, if God has this great plan for our lives, what does that say about an individual’s ability to choose which direction to take, when they face decisions. If God has this plan for my life, then each decision that I make must be according to God’s design. But I know from my own life, that there have been a number of decisions that I have made that I would rather God forget about, on the day of judgement.
And what about the mass murderers and terrorists that have destroyed so many human lives in our world. I can’t believe that this is according to God’s master plan for life here on earth. Like it or not, evil exists here on earth, and I don’t believe that God is responsible for the twisted decisions that certain individuals make to diminish the life, or quality of life of those who might be affected by their decisions.
This past week, Pastor Blair and I met for an enjoyable hour or so of theological discussion. In fact, Ralph gave me a rather favorable picture of what retirement could by like, as he shared with me the various study and courses that he has pursued, which I don’t have time for. However, in the course of his sharing his excitement over what he has recently learned, we also came to lift up in our conversation a book that we have both read – Karl Mennigers’ book entitled What Ever Happened to Sin?
I believe that the greatest problem facing our church today, is not really the decision of our church to adopt the stance that they took on human sexuality. After all, the church also gave congregations the right to, in good conscience, refuse to call, or consider for a pastor those who differ from their core beliefs on this issue. My concern for the church goes much deeper. I am concerned about how contemporary thinking has influenced the way the church approaches theology and Biblical interpretation, as well as the roll that sin plays in every human life.
The sad reality is, that many people today, as Ralph and I discussed on Tuesday, no longer have a concept of God as the Creator of the universe, and the giver of life here on earth. As I have said before, I do not have a problem with the theory of evolution as the means by which the earth was created. But there is nothing in this current theory of the creation of the universe that would deny that there was a God, who through these means, created the heavens and the earth!
In this sense, God had a plan! How God carried out that plan, I’ll leave to the scientists, as they continue to search for that answer, which may change again, in years to come. For I believe that they will never truly come to understand the true mind and power of God. But we must hold ourselves, as Christians, accountable to the Word of God, as revealed to us through Scripture and its interpretation throughout the centuries. To think that we who live in this modern age can simply reinterpret God’s Word, based on our own political agenda, troubles me.
We are God’s creation! It all starts with that understanding. We are not gods unto ourselves. We owe our being, our very life and existence to God. And I believe that God desires that we enjoy our life fully, and come to embrace and thank God for this tremendous gift of life that we have through him. Even though Ralph may challenge me on this, I believe this belief has been held for nearly 4000 years.
Stemming from this, I believe that we need to recapture the concept of sin. We can not blame God for every action that we take, or for every decision that we make, if it doesn’t turn out the way we hope. When we embrace a concept of God, who not only created the universe, and come to embrace the fact that we owe our very being to him, and his will for our lives, as expressed through the Scriptures, then we have to admit to ourselves that we that many of the decisions that we have made in our lives have not been according to God’s plan for our lives.
I wonder if that Bride or groom in my illustration from Willimon’s story of having waited 38 years to find God’s plan for his or her life, wasn’t more motivated by not wanting to give up personal freedom, to not wanting to risk being vulnerable to risking openness and intimacy with another. The truth is, we make decisions for a variety of reasons, and we cannot simply attribute them to God’s plan for our life. It may well be that we simply screwed up, either missing previous opportunities to succeed, or making wrong choices. Yet we are, by nature, sinful. And that is a label that even I do not like to use in reference to my own bad decisions, but it is the truth. I am a sinner in the eyes of God. And I deserve no mercy for the sins that I have committed against God.
Does God have a plan for my life? Here is where Pastor Burkness gave me an interesting thought to ponder. He asked me, “Was it God’s plan to send his Son into the world to die on the cross? If that was the case, does that not make God a sadist or a masochist? I believe that God sent his Son into the world to reveal God’s will for our lives, to listen to him and reform the way we live, so that we might live in relationship with our Creator. I don’t believe that it was God’s plan that Jesus came into our world to give his life on the cross. I believe Jesus chose to be truthful to God’s Word and will for our lives, and because of human sin, human opposition to God, that the cross was inevitable for him.”
In all honesty, Pastor Burkness and I have had a long history of being good friends, and arguing many points of theology. At first, when this subject arose, I was defiant of his argument. But I have since come to see his point. I believe that God did not send his Son into the world to die, but to reveal God’s will for our lives. We might say that this was God’s plan for our lives.
But, as our Gospel lesson points out, even his closest disciple, after hearing Jesus predict that he would give his life for them, were in the midst of arguing amongst themselves as to who would be the greatest disciple. The truth is, all of Jesus’ disciples were sinful, failing to truly grasp the will of God in their midst.
But in spite of all of this, I believe that God does have a plan for our life. No, I don’t believe that God will choose our wife for us. No I don’t believe that he will make every hard decision we have to make as we live out our life. But I do believe that because Jesus chose to be faithful to the will of God, which led him to the cross, God’s plan of salvation is laid before us. And through the power of God’s Holy Spirit, as those baptized into Christ’s death and resurrection, we are given direction to live our lives in faith.
Will we make mistakes? Yes. Will we always live according to our faith? No. Will our plan for our future life be realized? Maybe. Does God have a plan for our life? Yes! If we are willing to trust in Christ and his gift of life for forgiveness of our sins. That is God’s plan.
Amen.
