Not the plan

Proper 25 A 2008
(Deut 34: 1-12; Ps 90; 1 Thess 2: 1-8; Mt 22: 34-46)


Where is God when things don’t go according to plan?

I knew a good man, a hardworking man, who did his imperfect best to do the right thing. He loved his family, he showed up to work on time. When he fell on his face he picked himself up and kept going. After all his hard work, all he wanted was to leave the daily grind and retire, buy a little bit of a boat and go fishing when he wanted. Instead he died at age 61, four years short of retirement. When he died he was worried about his family and worried about being laid off. That man was my father.

At age 50, amidst soaring prices and a shifting economy, I understand Dad in a way I did not when I was 16.

Today, in this season of change, the fading of the seasons and the waning of the church’s year, God in the Bible asks us to stand within the mystery of incompletion. Who are we and who is God when the plan doesn’t work out, when our deepest desires don’t come true, or they don’t come true in the way we wanted and expected?

No one deserved seeing the Promised Land more than Moses. My God, the risks he took, the miles he walked, the faith he had to call upon or to ask of God! The text says that “never since has there arisen a prophet like Moses, whom the Lord knew face-to-face.” And yet Moses does not get to cross over, does not get to the land to which he led those people. What’s with that? Isn’t there any justice in God’s realm?

And the Gospels have told of the ugly public arguments Jesus had with religious folk who agree on one thing—they are threatened and angry with Jesus. Today there seems to be some base-line agreement between Jesus and a Pharisee: “Love the LORD your God…love your neighbor as yourself.” But it’s not enough and it’s not the last word. Jesus challenges them about the identity and authority of the Messiah. And I am chilled by that last line—they did not “dare to ask him any more questions.” This is not the end of a friendly debate. The time for talk is over, the time for betrayal and violence is near.

Who are we, and who is God, in the midst of disappointment and struggle, and when things do not go according to plan?

I struggle with this. I am comforted that the Bible struggles with this too. I am also comforted that we all, gathered together today, struggle with this as well.

I think that one response is to ask “who have we become?” in our journey to where we are now. And who is God, the God of the journey, the God who has revealed the divine Face and the divine Presence to us along the long road we’ve walked?

Moses had walked a long road with the people God had chosen. The people and Moses were not the people of God from the very outset. They were chosen yes, but they had not been forged, they had not been molded, they had not been broken and re-made over and over again into the people prepared for the newness of a new land. And Moses had not become Moses, had not become that prophet who knew God face-to-face. He had not yet been shaped by those conversations. He had not risked. He had not yet failed and picked himself back up again.

And they had come to know a God who walks the road with them, who thirsted for them just as they thirsted for water, hungered for them as they hungered for bread, longed to be their God just as they longed to be a people belonging to God.

And the Gospel today? It is the tale of an incomplete journey, one that we know will lead to terrible loss, and beyond that loss to new life that no one at the time could imagine. But the road needed to be walked. And when the disciples were called upon the bear their own witness in the face of hostility, did they remember Jesus’ own lonely stand before angry religious folk and take strength?

My brothers and I gathered this past May for the first time in many years. In the midst of our incomplete journeys, our victories and defeats, we remembered a man whom we called Dad whose life and story shapes us still—shapes us and empowers us to take the next step, to not lose heart, to take the adventure even if our own journeys are incomplete.

The God of the journey calls us to be together and shapes us in the same way. Even now we are being forged and shaped into the people of God, the people of the crucified and risen Lord who is still on the road. We may walk lightly on that road and walk with faith, in God’s companionship and with one another. We may trust the end of the journey to the One who began the journey in the first place.