Plans
In our Bible Story for tomorrow, King David relies on messengers from the front for information about the battle; and especially for David that day, for news about his son Absalom. Messengers come, two strong runners, first one and then another.
A hundred years from now we’ll all have a microchip planted behind an ear at birth, for identification and more. It will contain the entire corpus of acquired human knowledge, updated automatically, a realtime medical analysis of the body, and will serve instant communication with anyone worldwide and perhaps to friends vacationing on the moon or beyond.
Today it’s text, email, Facebook, for over a century it was telephone, earlier, telegram or letter. Homing pigeons during WW1. Courier service. Signal flags between warships in daytime, signal lamps flashing messages by light during nighttime operations at sea. Morse code and da da daaa da daaa. Smoke signals. The bugler. Drummer boy.
Owl. Hedwig.
Paul’s letters. Mark’s gospel. Campfire stories. Oral legends.
During my entrepreneur years 1978 through 1984 a telex was in my office at home in Harrisburg to communicate with clients in Australia and Canada. The telex was a cumbersome machine the size of a schoolboy’s desk, wired in and heavy cable installed by Western Union in the converted bedroom upstairs over the living room. It was not “direct,” I had to type-punch long yellow tapes with my messages, then dial in the number of the overseas client, and start the tape running tick tick tick tick ... Used throughout the week, it would go blessedly silent every Friday morning. Sunday evenings the telex would start rumbling its obnoxious thump thump thump thump, vibrating the ceiling below and signaling the end of my weekend as offices opened for Monday morning business in Sidney, Melbourne, Canberra, Adelaide. It was also mercifully silent for their four-week summer Christmas vacation from mid-December to mid-January every year when industry closed down.
Just after noon one day years ago the phone rang in the rectory, summoning me to the home of a parishioner whose son had shot himself, in his apartment in a nearby town. The father was at sea and out of reach, the phone call had come to the mother from the police or from the hospital ER. Suicide is a dreadful way to tell loved ones that you’d rather be dead than alive even with them, and I don’t recall there being a note.
The message of my funeral homily was that this was not God’s loving will for -- I’ll call him John, that wasn’t his name. As people were leaving the church after the service, a friend of the family, a member of a different church, corrected me, “Everything that happens is God’s will.” My instant retort, unfortunate perhaps but nevertheless, was, “That’s blasphemy. What’s going on here today was not God’s loving will for this family and for John. Almost nothing that happens in human life is God’s will, and certainly not this tragedy.”
Christians sometimes speak of “God’s plan.” We often hear this when something tragic is going on in the life of a faithful person who is struggling to understand and believes that the dreadful circumstance is God’s plan for them or their loved one, purpose not clear, reasons not understood. This is grievous theology that makes God a cruel and abusive tormentor instead of the Loving One. Worse and often not realized, trash theology becomes Blasphemy against the Holy Spirit when it causes others, onlookers, seekers, to turn away from God in hatred and contempt.
In When Bad Things Happen To Good People, Harold Kushner tries to help us find faith in which we know God as chesed, lovingkindness. Life, fate, free will, the workings of nature and creation can all work against and thwart God’s hope for us. But that verse in Psalm 116 (Good News Translation) helps me know that God does not bring evil down on us; rather that as it says, “How painful it is to the Lord when one of his people dies.” And, though I am not one for picking a Bible verse that says it all, there is one verse that truly does so.
God’s will, God’s hope, God’s plan for us is never tragedy, sickness, pain and sorrow.
A year or so ago the teenage son of Joe’s friend and colleague was near death at the end of a long fight with cancer. The boy’s dad reported in their CaringBridge site that at his last moment he told his parents who were at his bedside, “It’s time for me to go.” And then he said his life verse, “For I know the plans I have for you," declares the LORD, "plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.”
Jeremiah 29:11 says it all. This is my God. I will have, love, worship, serve no other, only Him.
TW+