Have Thine Own Way, Lord. - West Parish Church

9/5/10

DOES GOD HAVE A PLAN?
(Jeremiah 18:1-11; Luke 14:25-33)

There’s an old gospel hymn based on today’s reading from Jeremiah that I
learned growing up. It was written by Adelaide Pollard in 1902 and it’s called
Have Thine Own Way, Lord. Do any of you know it? The first verse goes like
this:

Have thine own way, Lord! Have thine own way;
Thou art the potter; I am the clay.
Mould me and make me, after thy will,
While I am waiting, yielded and still.
As with a lot of hymns, there’s a story behind this one. Adelaide Pollard
was convinced that God had a plan for her – that God intended her to go to
Africa as a missionary. Unfortunately, just when she was ready to sail away, the
money dried up and she had to cancel everything. Adelaide was crushed. But at
a prayer meeting one night, she remembered the words of a prayer she had
heard uttered by an old lady she knew: “It’s all right, Lord! It doesn’t matter what
you bring into our lives; just have your own way with us!” It was like a weight was
lifted from her shoulders. And when she got home after the prayer meeting, she
meditated on Jeremiah’s story of the potter, which seemed to fit her experience
so well So she wrote the words that became the hymn Have Thine Own Way,
Lord!
You won’t find that hymn in the New Century Hymnal. Otherwise we
might be singing it this morning. I don’t know if it’s because of the archaic
language or because the hymnal committee didn’t like the theology.
I have to admit that I never much liked the theology. I never liked the idea
that I was a lump of clay that God could knead and punch and mold into any
shape that fit God’s fancy. – and that if I didn’t turn out right God could just
smash me and mash me and start over.
And there’s another line in the fourth verse of the hymn that I don’t like:
Hold o’er my being absolute sway.
I don’t think that’s good theology.
Like Adelaide Pollard, a lot of people believe God has a plan for their lives.
In its most extreme form, that belief looks like determinism or predestination:
God has already decided what’s going to happen and we’re pretty much just
robots carrying out God’s plan. That’s the hard version.
There’s a softer version, though, which believes that God has a plan and
it’s up to us to figure it out.
I know that there’s something comforting and reassuring in the belief that
God has a plan for us. Our world is chaotic and confusing, and it would be nice
to know that under all the chaos and confusion there’s something that makes
sense, that everything is working out the way God intends it. There’s something
comforting and reassuring in that belief, even if there’s precious little evidence to
support it. Most of the time we can’t see anything that looks like a plan or a

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purpose. As some wag put it, “If you want to see God laugh, just make a plan.”
God seems more like the one who disrupts our plans, not the one who makes
and follows a plan.

I’m sure you all remember the story of Joseph and his brothers – how they
sold him into slavery but he wound up as Pharaoh’s right-hand man and saved
the family when famine struck. At the end of the story Joseph tells them, “You
meant this for evil, but God meant it for good.” Joseph saw the hidden hand of
God working behind the scenes to make it all turn out right. But then, Joseph
had a gift for interpreting dreams, too. He could see things others couldn’t.

The playwright Thornton Wilder once imagined that our life is like a
beautiful tapestry. If you view the tapestry from the right side, the pattern side,
you can see the intricate design. But if you view it from the back side, all you see
are broken threads and knots; there’s no pattern at all. We live our lives on the
back side of the tapestry where we can’t see the grand design.

It seems to me that one way to read the Bible is to see it as the story not
simply of God’s plan, but of how humans have messed up and frustrated God’s
plan – and how God copes with all of our screw-ups.

Take the story of Jonah. God told Jonah that the wicked city of Nineveh is
going to be destroyed. That’s just fine with Jonah because Jonah doesn’t have
any use for Nineveh, either. Good riddance! But Jonah and goes and preaches
one of the feeblest sermons ever, just one sentence: “In forty days, Nineveh is
history.” And wonder of wonders, Nineveh repents, the whole city. And now God
has to change the announced plan. Nineveh has a change of heart. God can’t
just go ahead and destroy the city anyway. God has to respond to Nineveh’s
change by changing the plan.

If God has to adhere rigidly to the plan, then what becomes of God’s
freedom and God’s sovereignty? In the story of Jonah, the people of Nineveh
were free to change. And God had to be free to change, too.

In fact, God changes God’s mind quite a few times in the Bible. The story
of Abraham arguing with God over the fate of Sodom and Gomorrah is probably
the best example. God tells Abraham the plan and right away Abraham starts
arguing, trying to change God’s mind.

Instead of saying that God has a rigid plan, it’s probably better to say that
God has a desire – that’s the word used in 1 Timothy – or that God has a
purpose – that’s the word used in Hebrews – or that God has a dream – that’s
the word Verna Dozier uses. A desire or a purpose or a dream is different from a
plan. A desire or a purpose or a dream focuses on the goal. A plan lays out how
to get there. The plan changes but the goal remains the same.

God has a goal in mind, and the goal never changes. But along comes
human freedom messes things up. There are lots of bumps and detours along
the way. And every time we take the wrong road, God scrambles to get us
headed back in the right direction. God never loses sight of the goal, no matter
how many twists and turns the path may take. Reaching the goal counts more
than how we get there.

Roger was in his sixties. He had spent his entire career as an accountant
and reflecting back on his life, he said that he was convinced that God wanted

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him to go to seminary and become a minister. Here was a man who felt that his
decisions had been contrary to God’s plan for his life. You could feel the
sadness in his voice. “Still,” he said, “as I look back over my life, I’m amazed at
how well God has used what I have been. If I had gone to seminary and become
a preacher, as I think God might have liked me to do, I would never have been
able to be a lay leader in the church and make a difference that way.”

That’s a beautiful statement of faith. It’s not so important for us to love
any “plan” God has, if God has one. What’s important is that we love God – a
God who is alive and active and resourceful when it comes to ultimately getting
what God .desires. And what God desires – the goal toward which any plan is
moving – is for us to be with God, now and for all eternity.