Want to Hear God Laugh?
Want to Hear God Laugh? by Rev. L. John Gable
July 22, 2018
Have you ever heard the saying, “If you want to hear God laugh…tell Him your plans”?
I am reminded of that as we near the end of our study of Romans and listen as Paul lays out his travel plans. Recall, prior to this Paul has never visited Rome; as we read back in chapter 1, he has thus far been hindered from making it there. So now in anticipation of a planned visit he is writing this letter to more formally introduce himself and present what is surely his most comprehensive explanation of Christian theology, this compelling explanation of Christian teaching we have been studying since last January.
As he started to explain in the passage we read last week, up to this point Paul has been committed to planting new churches in as yet unreached cities in Asia Minor and Greece. As he writes, “I make it my ambition to proclaim the Good News, not where Christ has already been named, so that I do not build on someone else’s foundation….that is the reason I have so often been hindered from coming to you. But now, with no further place for me in these regions, I desire, as I have for many years, to come to you when I go to Spain” (15:20-24). And with that Paul lays out his travel plans. He intends to leave Greece, from where he is writing this letter, and make his way to Jerusalem, then on to Rome, on his way to Spain.
Why Jerusalem? He has been collecting an offering for the “saints” there, primarily Jewish converts, from the Gentile converts in the churches he has planted in Turkey and Greece. The Jerusalem church has been undergoing persecution and Paul wants this financial offering to be not only a measure of support but also a demonstration of the unity of the Church, Jew and Gentile, which has been the underlying theme of this whole letter.
Why Rome? Being the capital of the Empire it was important to Paul, and to the spread of the Gospel, that this message be clearly presented and the church be strengthened there.
And why Spain? Because, in the first century, Spain was the end of the then “known world.” Paul is doing his part to fulfill the Lord’s Great Commission “to make disciples of all nations”, that is, to the ends of the earth. (Matt. 28:19)
So, Paul’s got it all planned out. Want to hear God laugh?
In the letter of James we read about the futility of such planning. “Come now, you who say, today or tomorrow we will go to such and such a town and spend a year there, doing business and making money. Yet you do not even know what tomorrow will bring” (4:13-14). James is addressing the problem of human arrogance. As much as we may not like to admit it, plan as we may, there are some things over which we have absolutely no control.
Peter Marshall used to tell the legend of the merchant of Baghdad who one morning sent his servant to the market in the middle of the city. The servant returned, pale and trembling, and the merchant asked him what was wrong. The servant told him he accidently bumped in to someone in the market and when he looked up he saw Death, in a dark hooded robe, pointing at him. He asked the merchant, “Please, let me borrow your horse so that I can flee to Samaria where he can’t find me.” The merchant agreed. Later that day the merchant went to the crowded market himself and saw Death standing to the side. He asked, “Why did you frighten my servant in that way?” Death responded, “It was I who was shocked to see him in Baghdad for tonight I have an appointment with him in Samaria.”
Despite our best calculations there are some things which are simply out of our control, so we deceive ourselves, and ultimately defeat ourselves, when we presume otherwise. Such human arrogance makes it relatively easy for us to cut God out of the equation of our lives. If we do all of our own planning, then when things go as planned we credit ourselves; and when they don’t go as planned we throw up our hands in frustration. Caught up in our own pursuits, thinking ourselves to be the masters of our own destinies, we forget all about God.
So what is the remedy James offers to such hubris? Simply to add the simple phrase, “If the Lord wishes”. This is more than a cute colloquialism, but it certainly is the source of the phrase we often hear, “God willin’ and the creek don’t rise.” James simply states that the antidote to human arrogance is the inclusion of, “If the Lord wishes, we will live and do this or that”; not unlike Jesus’ prayer, “Yet not My will but Thine be done.” This simple phrase is the acknowledgement that God is ultimately in control of our lives, not we ourselves. Does that mean we shouldn’t plan? That we should just sit back and take each day as it comes and see what happens? Absolutely not, but it is the acknowledgement that despite our best attempts at planning, “life sometimes gets in the way.”
Clearly Paul had it all planned out, but for Paul, as is often the case for us, things didn’t work out exactly as planned. We know what happened to him, his story is recorded for us in the book of Acts. He makes it to Jerusalem with the collection for the saints where he is warmly greeted by believers before being arrested for causing a disturbance and immediately taken in to custody by the Roman authorities. To summarize his travails, for the next seven years, effectively for the remainder of his life, Paul presents his case and his defense of the Gospel of Christ to governors and kings until he finally makes his appeal for an audience before the Emperor Caesar and, with that wish granted, he is transported, not as a freeman but in lock and chain, at Rome’s expense rather than his own, to the capital city where he would live out his days under house arrest and eventually be martyred. Some speculate that he eventually made it to Spain, but there is no record of that.
From one perspective, things didn’t work out at all the way Paul had them planned. His life, like many of ours, was one series of interruptions after another. Yet from another perspective, God used every one of those interruptions for His Kingdom purposes beginning with Paul’s conversion on the road to Damascus. In that unintended encounter this Pharisee’s Pharisee became the greatest evangelist the Church has ever known. Paul certainly never had that on his radar screen. Then throughout his ministry he suffered persecutions and imprisonments which he surely felt kept him from traveling and planting new churches, yet from an “upper story,” Kingdom perspective those interruptions mandated the “down time” necessary for him to have time to write the letters which now constitute the majority of what we call the New Testament.
G.K. Chesterton aptly writes, “An adventure is just an inconvenience misunderstood, and an inconvenience is just an adventure misunderstood.” From our limited human, “lower story”, perspective we don’t know how any of the “interruptions” in our lives are going to play out, so rather than throwing our hands up in frustration over losing control over something we never had control over in the first place, we would do better to pause and ask, “I didn’t see this coming, but where can I see God at work in this?” What we too readily call “interruptions” to our plans might better be called “Romans 8:28 moments” in which “God can work all things together for good for those who love Him and are called according to His purpose.”
As I was reflecting on this passage last summer while on study leave up in Door County, Wisconsin, I looked up at a beautiful painting of a sailboat our friends have hanging in their condo. It reads, “Trust that the wind knows where it is going.” I don’t actually believe it is intended to be a spiritual piece of artwork, however, if we were to interpret “the wind” as being the Holy Spirit of God, which in both the Hebrew and the Greek it actually is, then the message is clear, “Even when we don’t know where we are going, or when our plans have been thrown off course, we can still trust that the Wind, the Holy Spirit of God, knows where it is going”, which means we get to simply go along for the ride of what God is doing. Such is the life of faith and the antidote to human arrogance in things over which we have absolutely no control.
Given our limited perspective, how are we to know how to interpret the interruptions in our lives? Perhaps you know the story of the man in China who raised horses for a living. When one of his prized stallions ran away his friends gathered at his home to mourn his great loss. After they had expressed their concern, the man asked, “How do I know whether what happened is bad or good?” A couple of days later the runaway horse returned with several strays following close behind. The same friends gathered again at his home, this time to celebrate his good fortune, but again he said, “How do I know whether this is good or bad?” That very afternoon the horse kicked the owner’s son, breaking the young man’s leg. Once more the crowd gathered to express their concern and once more the father asked, “But how do I know if this is bad or good?” Only a few days later war broke out in their region and the man’s son was exempt from service because of his broken leg. Again the friends gathered…I’ll stop there, but the story could go on and on. Really, how do we know whether any particular event is for good or for bad, whether this interruption in our plans is to our detriment or our benefit? We can’t, can we? So rather than throwing up our hands in frustration or shrugging our shoulders in indifference, in those moments we learn to live the life of faith, acting in ways that are faithful and responsible in the moment and trusting God to use us as He works His purposes out in the great flow of history.
I look at my own life and ministry. My first call to ministry after seminary was to an associate pastor position in Mansfield, Ohio. After six wonderful years a chaplaincy position opened up at Hanover College, Kris’ and my alma mater. We thought that would be a wonderful place to live and raise our children, so I applied and was given some pretty good assurance that I would get the job, but at the last moment the board of trustees decided not to fund the position. We then began to look at church openings and I became the finalist for a senior pastor position in Marshalltown, Iowa. Marshalltown just happened to be where my father was born, so we knew the stars had aligned, but again on the night we expected a call offering me the job, instead the call came saying that the former pastor had decided he didn’t want to leave after all. Those two disappointments led us to Waterloo, Iowa, to a church that was experiencing years of decline. I was told by the then interim pastor, “This church isn’t dying, they are just dying to be loved” and we thought, “We can do that!” We spent the next six years with that wonderful congregation who loved us as much as we loved them. It was then that a friend told us about a church that might be a good fit for us in a suburb just north of Milwaukee. It was a call to follow the founding pastor who had retired after 36 years and I was about that same age. All of my colleagues said, “That will never work!”, but as it turned out we spent 13 wonderful years in ministry there, fully intending to serve out the remaining years of my ministry and retire there; that is until we heard about an opening at an historic Presbyterian Church in Indianapolis with a long history of witness and service, and you know the rest of that story.
I have never been one to try to lay out a career path for myself, but looking back I can clearly see the hand of God at work in my life and ministry, and we have been blessed all along the way. Even without planning, I pray I have been used and useful and that God has been honored.
Lest there be any misunderstanding, these passages are not intended to advocate against planning; that would be foolish. But they do advocate for trusting God to use even the interruptions in our lives for His Kingdom purposes.
So, do you want to hear God laugh? Tell Him your plans.
Do you want to laugh along with God? Tell Him your plans and then watch what He does with them.