Plans
a sermon given by the Rev. Roger Paine
on the Second Sunday in Advent, December 10, 2006
at The First Parish in Lincoln
“For surely I know the plans I have for you,” says the Lord...”
– Jeremiah 29:11
“You can wander into the wrong classroom, and hear great poems lovingly spoken by the wrong professor. And you find your soul...”
– Robert Bly
READINGS:
1. Our first reading (which was read for our service by two of our seventh grade students, Parker Mundt and Chris Pease) is selected from the Psalms and from the books of Jeremiah, Isaiah, and Luke:
The plans of the Lord stand firm forever, the purposes of his heart through all generations. “For surely I know the plans I have for you,” says the Lord, “plans for your welfare and not for harm, to give you a future with hope. Then when you call upon me and come and pray to me, I will hear you. When you search for me, you will find me if you seek me with all your heart.”
In the sixth month, God sent the angel Gabriel to a town in Galilee named Nazareth, to a virgin pledged to be married to a man named Joseph, of the house David. The virgin's name was Mary. The angel went to her and said, “Greetings, you who are highly favored! The Lord is with you.”
But she was much perplexed by his words, and wondered what kind of greeting this might be.
The angel said to her, “Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God. You will be with child and give birth to a son, and you are to give him the name Jesus. He will be great, he will reign over the house of Jacob forever, and of his kingdom there will be no end.”
And the wolf shall live with the lamb, the leopard shall lie down with the kid, and the calf, the lion and the yearling together, and a little child shall lead them. And you, child, will be called the prophet of the Most High; for you will go before the Lord to give light to those who sit in darkness and to guide our feet into the way of peace. May your unfailing love rest upon us, O Lord, even as we put our hope in you.
– Psalm 33:11, Jeremiah 29:11-13, Luke 1:26-33, Isaiah 11:6, Luke 1:76,79, Psalm 33:22
2. Our second reading is a poem by Robert Bly called “People Like Us.”
People Like Us
There are more like us. All over the world
There are confused people, who can’t remember
The name of their dog when they wake up, and
people
Who love God but can’t remember where
He was when they went to sleep. It’s
All right. The world cleanses itself this way.
A wrong number occurs to you in the middle
Of the night, you dial it, it rings just in time
To save the house. And the second-story man
Gets the wrong address, where the insomniac lives,
And he’s lonely, and they talk, and the thief
Goes back to college. Even in graduate school,
You can wander into the wrong classroom,
And hear great poems lovingly spoken
By the wrong professor. And you find your soul,
And greatness has a defender, and even in death
you’re safe.
We are taught in divinity school that one approach to giving a sermon
is to tell you, right at the start,
what the point is –
and then spend all the rest of the sermon trying to make that point.
This assumes, of course, that we know what our point is... but let me tell you what I think it is:
we all need to make plans, to plan what we want for tomorrow,
what we want for the months and years to come – and – no matter what we plan,
no matter how good our plan may be, it will be too small for us to live.
Why? Why would even the best plan we can make still be too small for us to live?
Because life throws surprises at us.
Some of the surprises are wonderful, and some of them are like roadside bombs.
So we need to leave room in our plans for the unexpected –
we need to be prepared to improvise, to rise to the unforseen occasion,
and as many of you know very well, it’s often when we are surprised
and have to dig deep, that we learn there is much more to us than we ever quite knew.
So we need to leave room for the unexpected, but to start with, we make the best plan that we can.
And to do that, you need to know what you really want.
What do you want to do this afternoon?
What do you want to change about the way you spend your time?
How much do you want your business to grow next year?
And there’s the question of the month we’re in: “What do you want for Christmas?”
We all want peace on earth, but I’m asking you for your un-lofty answer to that question:
what do you want wrapped up and under the tree with your name on it Christmas morning?
Some of us have trouble with the word “want” because we think it feels inelegant and grasping.
You ask us, “What do you want for Christmas,” and we say, “Oh, I don’t really want anything.”
So let me try to give the word want a make-over.
Because you can’t make a good plan until you know what you want.
The bible is full of people who want something.
Abraham’s wife, Sarah, wants a child of her own.
Moses wants to see the Promised Land.
Jacob wants the blessing that belongs to his older brother.
David wants Bathsheba.
Joshua wants victory.
Peter wants to be the best disciple.
Some of their wants lead to great things and some cause a lot of heartache,
but one way or the other, it is their wants that make these characters come alive –
they are more real, more human, because of what they want.
We know them better, and may even identify with them, because of what they want.
In the “Fifty Families” gift program that Tucker Smith organizes for us every Christmas,
social workers at Bay Cove Human Services send her lists of what their families want –
and when you see what a little girl wants, and what her mother wants, they come alive.
A five-year-old girl wants a Disney princess dress-up trunk.
Her mother wants a Target gift card so she can roam the aisles and choose what she most wants.
So what we want is a vital part of who we are – and you have to know what you want to make a plan.
There’s a campaign going on right now to raise money for a good cause by using what we want.
It’s the (RED) campaign – the word (RED) is in parenthesis as a symbol of people embracing a cause.
It’s the brainchild of rock star Bono and Kennedy family member Bobby Shriver,
who have gotten six global companies to design some of the trendiest things
people want for Christmas in various shades of red.
Apple has a new red iPod Nano, the Gap and Armani stores have clothes and accessories in red,
Motorola has a slim red Motorazr phone, Converse has red sneakers,
and a share of the profits from all of this will go to fight AIDS around the world.
People want these things because they’re cool – and they know it’s for a good cause.
Bono and Bobby Shriver wanted to do something about the AIDS epidemic.
Their plan could raise tens of millions of dollars this month – and more down the road.
When we know what we really want, we come alive – and we can make a good plan.
Now I’m going to throw a theological monkey-wrench into our nice little planning process.
What if none of what we do is actually up to us?
What if it’s all scripted ahead of time?
In our first reading this morning, we were told that God has a plan for us.
“‘For surely I know the plans I have for you,’ says the Lord.”
The people who wrote the bible believed that everything that happens is God’s plan.
That was their world view.
Matthew and Luke present the story of the birth of Jesus as God’s plan from start to finish.
The angel Gabriel tells Mary that she will bear a son and give him the name Jesus.
Her marriage to Joseph is arranged.
Did Mary ever have a choice?
Did her son ever have a choice about what he did with his life?
Do you or do I?
Are the plans we make for ourselves and our families just an illusion?
Is God’s plan the only one that counts?
That’s what the people who wrote the bible believed,
and the wonderful thing about it is that it forces us to come to terms with what we believe.
The bible shouldn’t ever close a discussion, it should open one.
And I believe that Mary was a free young woman – free to send the angel Gabriel packing.
It’s important, for me, to believe that Mary had a choice – that she was free to say yes or no –
because without that choice, the “yes” she gave loses its power.
I also believe that her astonishing son was born free.
I want to know that their choices were their own.
The idea that everything that happens is God’s plan must have worked for the writers of the bible.
But it doesn’t work for me.
I am sure that God is at work in the world – by making good use of what we’re willing to give.
And I believe that God has a very light touch – leading us, but never forcing us, in the right direction.
At the end of the day, our plans – and what we do with them – are our own.
What God helps us do is leave room for surprises and improvisation – for moments of grace.
That’s what’s going on in the poem by Robert Bly that I chose for our second reading:
A wrong number occurs to you in the middle
Of the night, you dial it, it rings just in time
To save the house. And the second-story man
Gets the wrong address, where the insomniac lives,
And he’s lonely, and they talk, and the thief
Goes back to college.
Is it mere chance, or is something more going on – a very light touch of divinity –
when the thief ends up in the wrong house?
Or when the student walks into the wrong classroom:
Even in graduate school,
You can wander into the wrong classroom,
And hear great poems lovingly spoken
By the wrong professor. And you find your soul,
And greatness has a defender...
The moments of grace in life – our sanctified moments – are always unplanned.
We can’t make them happen.
They happen by surprise – we stumble into them.
And if you want to, you can see the light touch of God at work, using what we’re willing to give.
The Harvard philosopher, Alfred North Whitehead,
believed that God has no fixed plan, but rather a vision for the way the world might be,
and what happens to that vision depends on what plans we make.
What happens also depends on how well we understand that no matter how good our plan may be,
it will be too small for us to live
because at some point we will have to face the unexpected and dig deep.
And, like many before us, we may learn there is much more to us than we ever knew
During the last 20 years of his life, the great artist, Renoir, was crippled by arthritis.
His fingers were twisted, his shoulder was stooped.
Some of his biographers say he strapped a brush to his arm so he could keep painting.
It got so bad that near the end of his life, he could walk only with a great deal of effort,
and one day he said,
“I give up. It takes all my willpower, and I have none left for painting.”
But he knew what he wanted most: he wanted to paint.
So he gave up trying to walk, he saved the energy that took and used it to paint – from a wheelchair.
In the last year of his life he painted “The Women Bathers.”
His son, Jean, called it “the tremendous cry of love he uttered at the end of his life.”
Life throws surprises at us.
Some of them are wonderful, and some are roadside bombs.
A crippling arthritis was not part of Renoir’s original plan – but there it was.
It forced him to see that his original plan was too small for him to live.
So he rose to the occasion by sitting in a wheelchair – and picking up his brush.
We all need to make a plan – the best one you can – and leave room for surprises.
For moments of grace.
For the light touch of divinity.
I think that’s the point of this sermon.
But as every minister knows, you see things that we don’t,
you hear things we didn’t even know were there,
and often what you see and hear between the lines is just what you wanted –
and that’s the beauty and the grace of what we’re all doing here.
Amen.