The problem with "This is all part of God's plan"

Text: Exodus 3:1-12

"O God, you have called your servants to ventures of which we cannot see the ending, by paths as yet untrodden, through perils unknown. Give us faith to go out with good courage, not knowing where we go, but only that your hand is leading us and your love supporting us; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen."

I changed it up this week—the prayer, that is. This prayer, taken from the Evening Vespers service in the ELW, may as well have been Moses’ prayer. It’s also one of my favorites. The path before us is always only dimly lit. At my ordination last October, a professor mine preached on Psalm 119, which famously says “Thy word is a lamp unto my feet and a light unto my path,” and he posited that the lamps that were around in the time of the Psalmist were really pretty weak things. We’re not talking 100 watt halogen bulbs; more like a candle wick only capable of penetrating a foot or two into the darkness.

That is the irony of the burning bush. Light imagery in the Bible so often has to do with knowledge of the future, and yet the burning bush offers only an end destination with no map to get there. It does not light Moses’ path; it just tells him the end result. God does not outline how Moses is going to deliver Israel from Egypt; he just tells Moses he needs him to do it.

If you’re a planner this would be a problem. Kate, my wife, would have a serious problem with these kinds of instructions. She’s a planner. She wants to know how things are going to go down to the finest detail. She needs to know dates, times, contact info; she makes packing lists, shopping lists, to-do lists, cleaning lists, cooking lists. I’m thinking Kate would not like to be summoned to a burning bush that tells her the end result without a map of how to get there. Come to think of it, I don’t think many of us would. Even I would have an issue with this call--and I am anything but a planner. But this is exactly how God calls us most of the time. We are not given all the information. We are not told how we should act or what we should do. All we are told is the end of the story. Whatever you believe is the simplest synthesis of the Christian faith—you are saved by grace through faith, or Christ has died for your sins, or love wins, or whatever answer you would give to that question—that promise gives direction to your life.  

And yet, none of those summations of our faith tell us exactly how to get there; they are at best partial blueprints of how to live right here, right now.

 Moses had no clue what to do. He wanted more information. So he asks for God’s name. It seems like an innocent request—the kind of thing we would like to know—on whose authority does this radical vision come? But the appeal for a name is hardly innocent. To know a name means to have a measure of control. Adam and Eve gain dominion over creation by giving names to all the creatures; now Moses is asking for God’s name not as a matter of clarification but in order to change the playing field. His request is sneaky, which makes God’s response all the more fantastic. My name? says God, “I AM WHO I AM.” In Hebrew: Yahweh, or even better (since the verb tense is not clear): “I will be who I will be."

God is going to be exactly who God will be, and we can do little to change that. God was going to make certain the people of Israel were led out of Egypt no matter Moses’ resistance. For us, God is bringing about salvation regardless of our petty wants and desires. It sounds strange to say it, but God isn’t so interested in the details. At the very least, the details aren’t the point of the story.

We don’t get this. I know, because just about every time something tragic happens I hear the same hollow words. I’m sure you have heard it too. I heard it again this week when a friend of a friend was tragically and senselessly killed. It seems like every time something like this happens somebody—well-meaning and good-hearted as they may be—says the magic words: “This is all part of God’s plan.” I understand the sentiment. We want to be able to say something helpful in a time of helplessness. We want to believe that nothing bad ever happens without a “good” to follow. We long for justice in cases that simply seem unjust, and since we believe in a just God it only follows that this must be part of some divine architecture for the universe. It's just that neither scripture nor experience show us a God who works like that.

Sometimes awful things just happen.

That’s not to say there is not justice for the hurt, joy for the sorrowed, and peace that surpasses the loss we experience in this life. There is. But it’s at the end of the story and not in the middle. God does have a plan but, as with Israel captive in Egypt, it is not the kind of plan that seeks to justify tragic loss as if it being part of God's will makes it better. That should be good news. It frees us from justifying every evil in the world as part of God’s plan; it frees us from defending God whenever anybody experiences loss; it frees us to get about the business of life in a complicated world and to stand alongside those who hurt without feeling the need to give a half-hearted reason for it all. God doesn’t give anybody cancer, but God is redeeming the cancer-sufferer. God does not take the lives of children because heaven needs another angel, but God does give to children the kingdom of God. God does not cause hurt, but God is with us in our suffering.

You see, the burning bush tells us that God does have a plan for us, but it is always bigger than we can figure. Sometimes it doesn’t involve us at all. Moses, for all the work he does in leading the people out of Egypt, never sees the Promised Land. Many of us will never see the fruits of our labor. To the world our lives will look like abject failures. For most of us, nobody is going to write a history of our lives; nobody is going to carve our faces on a mountain.

But, you know, that’s OK.

Our lives are not meant to be remembered. Our lives are meant to discover God, and to know God is not to ask God’s name; to know God is not to have your life planned out ahead of you like a carefully delineated trail map. To know God is to live every day of your life as if you might learn something about God. To know God is to ask yourself how God desires you to work, or how God might wish you to treat your family and friends; and to wonder how God impacts every decision of your lives not because God planned out all those instances and knows what you are going to do but because our lives are more sacred--and just better--with God in them.

Too often we dwell on who God is, what God is, and what we can say about God with certainty. When we find ourselves in that rut we stand like Moses before the burning bush asking, cleverly and all too ignorantly, “God, what is your name?”

I will be what I will be.

Take that, Moses. Take that, preachers and teachers who tell you who and what God is. Take that, books, magazine articles and TV shows debunking the divine. Take that, Confirmation and Sunday School classes. As a teacher of mine once said, “How do you like them apples, Moses?”

I do not know how God is impacting your life. I can’t tell you. All I can hope is that you’re open to seeing it. We believe in one God, and that God is much bigger than our declarations. We believe in one true faith, but that faith is lived by individuals through eyes that see the world in vastly different ways.

The important matter is not who God is but whether we are going to allow God to make any difference in our lives. What is God calling you to be? What is God calling you to do? I don’t care if it’s the voice of a bush lit with fire or quiet deliberations that you feel in your heart. The only way to discover what God would have you be is to live as if the God of the universe is with you now.

Thankfully, God is who God is. He will be what he will be. And he is here with you now and every moment of your lives.

Thanks be to God.