What happens when plans change? You have life all planned; then something happens, something that turns your world upside-down, alters it unalterably: a business failure, a bankruptcy, a lost job, a divorce, a health crisis, a death, a retirement account cut into a fraction of itself. We hope God can use our action. Can we believe that God can also use those moments when we are acted upon?  This sermon is about what happens or can happen when plans change.

Harry Emerson Fosdick gave historical examples: James McNeil Whistler wanted to be a career soldier, but he failed at West Point because he flunked chemistry. But now we have Whistler’s paintings. Phillips Brooks, the famous American preacher, wanted to be a teacher but failed miserably in the classroom. Now we have his sermons and his Christmas carol, “O Little Town of Bethlehem.” To our day, Flannery O’Connor’s lupus required a forced return to the South to live with her mother.  She was sure it would be the end, capital END, of her work as a writer, but in fact her greatest work was ahead. Jimmy Carter’s presidency ended in a bitter and decisive defeat after one term, but look at the magnificence of his life as an ex-President of the United States.

You probably have your own stories of how detours have turned into destinations. Maybe you had your heart set on a particular college, but the admissions office said no, and you went to your second choice, which turned out to be a great place for you. Or maybe you dreamed of being a major league pitcher, but never figured out how to throw a curve ball. You wanted to be a dancer, but a weak knee became an injured knee and your plans were changed.

If you look closely, I’ll bet you can see how God has used your altered life! I do not want to be glib. The changes to your life may have been a devastating and humiliating defeat, the losses real and irrecoverable.  But God can use our defeats, our losses, too. God is the ultimate Improviser, who takes our altered lives and alters them toward our highest good.

In the Hebrew Scriptures, Joseph believed in such a God. When young, he had been an insufferable, pompous favored son. His brothers hated him. One day they jumped him and were intending to kill him when a caravan en route to Egypt happened to pass by. They sold him into slavery instead.

Joseph rose from slave to prince of Egypt, the Pharaoh’s right-hand man. One day his brothers came to the palace in Egypt seeking food, for their own country was now in a terrible famine.  They found themselves face-to-face with their brother whom they had sold into slavery. When Joseph told him who he was, they were terrified that he would take revenge on them.  But instead, Joseph said, “Do not be afraid for am I in the place of God? No, you meant it for evil, but God meant it for good.” Or, as Everett Fox translates it: “Now you, you planned ill against me, (but) God planned-it-over for good.”

If you want to make God laugh, the saying goes, tell her your plans. “But this is what I had all planned,” we say to her.

“I know, Hon,” She says.  Who would have thought God a sassy southern waitress?  “I understand why you’d want such plans,” she adds, “I’d want those things for you too.”

“So what happened?” we ask.

“Life changes our plans,” she says.

“What are we going to do now?” we ask.

She answers, “Let me work with you on that, but first let me get your coffee.  White or black?”

“Lots of cream and lots of sugar,” we say. To hell with the diet! “And how about that pastry over there?” we ask, pointing to the counter.

“Sure, Hon,” she says, and heads for the streusel.

Jeremiah the prophet wrote to the Hebrew people carried off into captivity in Babylon. Here is the word of God he heard and passed on to them: “I’ll bring you back home someday.  It will take a while, but don’t lose hope.  In the meantime, this is how to live out your hope: plant gardens, take wives and husbands, make babies, raise families, seek the welfare of the city in which you live—yes, even Babylon—for in its welfare you will find your own welfare.”

Then came the clincher:  “For surely I know the plans I have for you, plans for your welfare and not your harm, to give you a future and a hope.”

And one day, they indeed came home.

Jesus ran into a huge reversal of his plans. He preached the nearness of the kingdom of God and called people to turn and enter it. He hoped everyone would hear what he had heard, see what he saw and join with him in the coming of God’s great kingdom. But that is not what happened. Far from it. Fierce opposition arose, especially among the important people, the big shots, the scholars, the religious leaders in league with Rome. They were saying no. And who were saying yes?  A rag-tag group of nobodies, fishermen, women, children, outcasts, “little people.”

And how did Jesus respond to this huge, unanticipated turn of events? With thanksgiving no less, even amid his ruined plans:

“I thank you, Abba,” he prayed, “Lord of heaven and earth, that you have hidden these things from the wise and learned, and revealed them to babes, the nepioi, the little ones. Yes, Abba, for such was your gracious will, your eudokia, your good pleasure.”

In the face of mounting evil, God was planning-it-over for good. And Jesus trusted in this planning-it-over because he trusted in the final goodness of God, in the faithfulness at the heart of things.

Can we, dare we, trust in this? Hope in this? Believe that God is at work in every circumstance, every, for our highest good? Believe that there is an unseen hand guiding our lives and the life of the world? Not pre-determining, not forcing, but guiding. Even in the midst of defeat and painfully changed plans. This is faith at its deepest.

Conversation with Stephen Shoemaker

Lydia Talbot: Rev. Stephen Shoemaker, welcome to “30 Good Minutes!” It’s wonderful to have you here.

Stephen Shoemaker: Thank you very much. It’s wonderful to be here.

Talbot: Your message conveys the unseen hand of God even in our worst fears, our defeats, and most painfully changed plans. I must ask you, how you personally have experienced that along the way on your own journey?

Shoemaker: Well, I think we have a sense and a hope that God is in charge of everything. I think what we don’t understand is that sometimes God’s will is at work in planning-it-over, not in just an intention but God’s improvising in the midst of our difficulties. I think for me, sometimes depressive episodes have been a time in which I have felt my life altered, but have seen God’s unseen hand guiding, planning-it-over toward my highest good and hopefully the highest good of those around me.

Talbot: Depressive moments? Say more.

Lillian Daniel: I wanted to ask about that, too. I’ve heard people talk about that. I mean, how do you experience God in the midst of a depression?

Talbot: What were those moments, if you could share?

Shoemaker: Well, I think sometimes people go through seasons of depression in which they feel a kind of mental and emotional pain and feel a kind of hopelessness. But I think the resources of faith keep our eyes toward the future in such times as that.

Talbot: Can you give us sense as to the nature of the depression? Career? Family? Loss? What aspect of depression were you struggling with?

Shoemaker: I think that depression has many, many different kinds of etymologies or causes. I don’t think usually it’s just a single one. And many times the things you mentioned merge together in one kind of overwhelming sense of loss or darkness.

Daniel: Or it’s a chemical imbalance.

Shoemaker: Or a chemical imbalance.

Daniel: It makes all those things seem worse than they are. You talked about the Joseph story and the way he got to grow and change. It’s a wonderful story because the brothers show up and they expect Joseph to be the same person he was when he was a kid. He’s become different. Do you think sometimes it’s the family members who prevent us from being able to grow and change because they see us as being the same?

Shoemaker: Well, I think it is interesting that he had to go away from home to do the changing. And I think also the hard circumstances of his life drove him deeper into a more profound place spiritually.

Daniel: You talked about having to leave home in order to change, but we found out when talking to you earlier that you had gone to high school in Charlotte, North Carolina and now you’re a famous preacher there in a well known church. Is it strange to be back doing that in your hometown?

Shoemaker: Well, it is an odd challenge to have your mother and your twin sister in your congregation. They know you far better than you should be known as you try to preach! It has been an interesting challenge to go back to a hometown and perhaps I needed to be 50 years old before that happened because the kind of maturing that you do, the growing that you do, before you return to a home place.

Talbot: Now, your sixth book and your most recent, “On Being Christian in an Almost Chosen Nation,” a reference from Abraham Lincoln. Say more about what that means.

Shoemaker: This is a wonderfully nuanced phrase of Abraham Lincoln. Both preachers and politicians weren’t to assume too much about America being God’s chosen people and Lincoln used this wonderful phrase that we were God’s “almost chosen people.” I think it gives us a kind of reverence that there is an unseen hand, there are the purposes of God being worked out not only on a personal sphere but a sphere of a nation, but we can’t presume upon where the unseen hand is moving or how we can be an instrument of God’s unseen hand.

Talbot: I can’t help but think when you use the phrase “unseen hand of God” that what you’re really sharing with us is an unconditional assurance of hope, the hope that is still there when your worst fears have been realized. Is that part of it?

Shoemaker: It is. A hope that’s not bound to the circumstances of this present hour but is an overarching kind of care and guiding of God that keeps you focused on more than just the present circumstances.

Talbot: Because most of us hear the phrase “God’s hand is in…” and you fill in the blank, but it’s usually a positive outcome. God’s hand was in the joy or God’s hand was in that gift of love that you received. But you’re using it in those moments, in those narrow places, where we suffer and where pain comes when plans change in a painful way.

Shoemaker: That’s right. I think it’s very interesting that God’s hand here is a different kind of hand than just appearing in good times, but it’s there to guide us, to reshape us, to drive us deeper, to help us be more compassionate, to help our lives be more meaningful to the world around us in the midst of our darkest and altered lives.

Daniel: Let’s talk a little bit about this idea of America being an “almost chosen nation.” Do you think part of what Lincoln was getting at in that phrase was the idea that there could be more than one chosen nation, that we wouldn’t be the only one?

Shoemaker: I think certainly he was giving the impression that “chosenness” could be something more than one nation could claim. And I think Lincoln was saying that chosenness has both its responsibilities…it has responsibilities inherent with that chosenness.

Daniel: Could there be any nation that’s not chosen?

Shoemaker: You’re asking me rather than Abraham Lincoln?

Daniel: Yes, I’m asking you. This is for you, Steve.

Shoemaker: I think nations need to live by a sense of their purpose, their living a purpose for the welfare and wellbeing of their own citizens and the wellbeing of the world. In that sense, every nation should aspire to have a kind of chosenness. Not a chosenness as a kind of set apartness or superiority, but a chosenness of purpose to a greater good. I think what Lincoln emphasized was that there is purpose guiding us but we cannot presume upon that purpose. I think it’s easy sometimes to take our chosenness and presume upon it. Lincoln warned us against that. I think it’s also possible to give up any notion that we could be used by the transcendent for a higher purpose. So in both of those dimensions I think we have a lot to learn from President Lincoln.

Talbot: I must jump in here with the kind of gratitude that I suspect many of our viewers may feel having heard your usage of inclusive language in your earlier message, referring to God with the pronoun “she” and “her.” How did that evolve for you personally? Where did you absorb that and how do folks feel at the Myers Park Baptist Church in Charlotte, North Carolina?

Shoemaker: I think growing up with a lot of intelligent, highly spirited, as well as spiritual, women had a lot to do with that, both in the family and in my theological education. I think our church has a sense of God’s transcendence that does transcend our own human kind of words for God. So I think there is, as Tillich would say, that God beyond God that we’re all striving to meet. But they also recognize we’ve got to have a more generous set of names for God and descriptions for God in order to preserve the mystery of God. I think we’re getting more and more used to imagining God in feminine as well as masculine ways.

Daniel: I love the fact that in your remarks today you made God a waitress with a Southern accent who brought you your coffee with extra cream and sugar! I think part of it is the mystery of God, and then we want something to cling on to. How do you prevent that image from becoming the one that people always have for God?

Shoemaker: I think you talk very deliberately so that mystery is preserved in multiplicity in terms of our descriptions of God and names for God, and that you consciously and conscientiously work on many descriptions of God so that one image does not become a graven image for God.

Talbot: And so that all embracing male/female, father/mother image has great meaning personally for you?

Shoemaker: Yes, very much so.

Talbot: We’re so happy you’ve shared that with us. Thank you, Stephen Shoemaker.