September 22, 2024 — Eighteenth Sunday After Pentecost
Kahu Gary Percesepe
Recently, Tom Nelson shared his journey to an awakening sense of the purpose of his life. What he shared was so important, I invited him to preach some Sunday and to my delight he said yes!
But when I got home, it struck me that there is a difference between saying life has a purpose, and saying God has a plan for my life.
In today’s Gospel, Jesus promises his disciples that he will suffer. This is not what his disciples have planned! They are planning on using proximity to Jesus as a technique to help them achieve greatness. In response, Jesus calls to him a little child and blesses the child. Why?
Children tend not to make plans. Life is fresh and sometimes frightening to them, and every day seems new and strange. To become as a little child means letting go of the idea that there is some kind of divine plan that locks down the meaning of your life, so that if you miss it you’re doomed. For a few moments, think through with me the notion that God has a plan for your life.
Someone once said, “If you want to make God laugh, just have a plan.” Heavyweight boxer Mike Tyson once said, “Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face.” Today’s reading from James affirms that we all have our ways, our plans, and our strategies for getting what we want in the world, but those ways, plans, and strategies are quite different from God’s.
Here are some reasons to be skeptical of the widespread notion that “God has a plan for my life.”
Scripture affirms that God’s good purposes are being worked out among us in our time and our history, but the bible frequently shows how our efforts are sometimes improved by or even resisted by the unseen hand of God moving behind the scenes. In Genesis, Joseph could say to his brothers who tried to kill him and ruin his life, “You planned something bad for me, but God produced something good from it.”
God keeps working God’s plan, despite our human mistakes.
There are moments when God appears to disrupt our plans, to achieve a greater sense of purpose in our lives. I thought I’d be a philosophy professor and author for the rest of my life until I got punched in the face when I entered the arena of American Evangelicalism. I got fired by a conservative college for publishing a book that included the writings of LGBT+ folks. I questioned what I thought was God’s plan at the time, and spent some time mired in self-pity until I realized leaving that place was the greatest thing that could have happened!
Listen, there are even times when God appears to disrupt God’s own plans! Jonah is told by God that God is going to destroy the wicked city of Ninevah, which is just dandy with Jonah, because he hates Ninevah, too. But then, after Jonah preaches a one sentence sermon of doom telling Ninevah what God plans to do, the whole city repents! And what does God do? God changes God’s previously announced plan.
In other words, we’d better be careful applying the word plan to God. We’d better leave room for God to be God. When we state that God has a plan for our lives or a plan for anything, we must allow for God’s freedom and sovereignty. What’s troublesome about announcing that God has a plan is that this eliminates God’s freedom, reducing the world to a deterministic, robotic scheme of what humans are meant to do. We should also be suspicious of the historical uses of the language of “God’s plan” as justification for patriarchy, slavery, and colonialism. Was it really God’s plan that men dominate women, that white people enslave black people, that Hawaiian people surrender their land, their language, and sovereignty?
It’s disturbing that so many who think that “God has a plan for my life” wind up troubled and fearful, careful every step of their lives to not take a step forward until they are 100% sure they are taking the exact step that God has put into the master plan. What happens when they awaken to the realization that they’ve taken a misstep?
Listen, we mess up all the time! When we do, the important thing is not to think we have defeated God’s divine plan but rather to cling to God’s gracious desire to redeem our deeds and our lives. As Luther said, “God can ride a lame horse or shot with a crooked bow.” God can take our messes and weave them into a beautiful work of art.
“What has God planned for my life” is not a big enough question. We ought to ask, “What might God’s dream be for this nation? For this congregation? What is God calling us to dream together? What is God’s dream for our world?”
Don’t fall in love with what you believe is God’s plan, fall in love with God. It’s not important to love what we think is God’s plan, the important thing is to love God. God didn’t give us a plan. God gave us Jesus Christ. Amene.