The Best Laid Plans…
“The best laid plans of mice and men often go awry”
While the proverb that I have stolen borrowed for the title of this post is familiar to many of you, what you might not know is where the proverb comes from. The original line is from the poem “To a Mouse” by Robert Burns, and it goes like this: “The best laid schemes o’ Mice an’ Men Gang aft agley.” The poem’s language reflects the dialect of southern Scotland around 1888. The poem deals with a mouse who has found a cozy home in a field for the winter, but whose dwelling is destroyed by the wind.
As a pastor, your average week is crammed full of many tasks. Phone calls, facility issues, administrative duties, and lesson preparations are just a few of the issues that crowd around, demanding attention. Heap on top of this second jobs, family, and various normal life issues and it is easy to run out of week before you run out of tasks. Looming over all of this is the “shocking regularity” with which Sundays come. For many pastors, regardless of their preparation and delivery styles, sermon preparation will demand an outsized portion of the week. This is not to say that there is anything wrong with this. Preaching is both a burden and an honor. It is a calling to speak the word of God to the people of God and it demands persistent, prayerful preparation (and a bit of alliteration…).
That said, anything that makes the sermon preparation task easier, especially if it is a biblically faithful approach to text selection, is a welcome boon. This is one of the reasons, though not the only reason, that I generally preach through a book of the Bible rather than selecting a topic each week and searching for a text. That’s not a really a dig at topical sermons, but rather a personal observation that producing unconnected, topical sermons each week is a monumental task. Perhaps the greatest benefit to this approach, in my opinion, is that you work systematically through God’s word, hitting a variety of topics, even ones you are less inclined to preach on.
The greatest drawback to a lectio continua (continuous reading) approach to sermon text selection is that it can quickly become a comfortable mouse house. It is a cozy home from which the pastor must occasionally be unhappily drawn by the Holy Spirit. Knowing where you are going weeks in advance facilitates robust preparation, but sometimes God has other intentions for the sermon for that week.
If you heard the sermon from this past week you know we did not finish Hosea as I had planned. Rather, the events of the past week: war, refugees, inflation, etc. necessitated a new text and new focus. I would be lying if I said that I felt the Spirit’s leading after hours of sweat-inducing prayer. While I certainly pray as I prepare my sermons, this was a much easier decision. As I was working on Hosea, I simply knew that this was not the text God would have me preach. With only a slightly shameful amount of kicking and screaming, I was plucked from my comfortable text and dropped into Isaiah 61.
Initially, I was very uncertain why God kept leading me to, and back to, this text. I knew I needed to address the moment we find ourselves in, but it seemed to me that there were a host of better texts to use. As I dug (quickly, because it was Thursday) into the text, though, God was faithful to show me where he wanted me to go. Ironically, I was plucked from my cozy plan so God could make the point that there is only one real plan that never goes awry. The world is in a strange place right now. We are afraid for the future of America because of political divides, social divides, and economic upheaval. On top of this, the world finds itself unsettled by a war of naked aggression and a looming humanitarian crisis. The demons that so many secular thinkers have declared extinct have reared their ugly heads as humanity demonstrates the dark, fallen heart that lurks within us apart from God’s saving grace.
Despite all this upheaval, the safest, most secure place we can be is following in the footsteps of the one who called us and saved us. While every other cozy home will be overturned by the winds of change, our calling to preach the Gospel, speak out against evil, and minister to the needy will never change. The wind that so unsettles us exposes fertile ground for the seeds of the Gospel to be planted. People across the globe are being inescapably confronted by the truth that the world is broken. “Be better, do better” philosophies and vague spiritualism have no answer for the challenges facing the world. But the Gospel speaks words of life for both the one broken by the hate of others, and the one broken by the hate in their own heart.
The Gospel is also the only message that calls for evil to be named and confronted, not out of a spirit of retribution, but out of an abundance of love. God’s love demands justice for the one who is crushed and abused by those who abuse their power. Just as certainly though, God’s love for those who oppress demands a bold proclamation of their sin and a call to repentance. The church has always been called to speak truth to power, even in those instances where speaking the truth is unpopular, or even dangerous. Perhaps to our discredit, we sometimes relish this task, especially if we are able to call out the evil of those we see as “the opposition.” However, the better metric is our willingness to call out evil when it puts us at odds with those that we generally side with. It is in these moments that we tend to find ourselves tongue-tied, or we even resort to “what about”-ism. Finding refuge in the hollow cry of “yes, but what about…” is usually an indication we are less interested in being a prophetic voice and more interested in having political talking points. To bring this home, we can, and must, decry the evil we see being committed in Ukraine, and this in no way interferes with calling out other injustices.
As the church, we do not wield the weapons of this world. As the church, our words, whether private and prayerful or public and prophetic, form the bulk of our arsenal. But, we would only be partially armed if we took the field without mercy. For many in the American church, this is often seen as a weapon of last resort. While words can be dangerous, they are often cheap. To bring costly mercy to the broken and needy strikes us at a weak point in our armor. We do not want to endanger our lifestyle or comfort. On this topic, I am deeply grateful to minister to a body of believers that regularly demonstrates their willingness to give sacrificially, of time and resources, to meet the needs of others. Though we are not a wealthy or large church, there is a spirit of generosity that I wish I could replicate across the entire breadth of the Christian church.
This past week I was plucked from my comfortable home in Hosea by the winds of change. Right now I believe the church is being plucked from our comfortable slumber by the winds of God’s change. The question is, will the church demonstrate the relevance of the Gospel in times of crisis, in both words and actions? Or will we seek a comfortable place of slumber while the relevance of the Gospel is demonstrated in spite of us?
Until next time…
In Christ,
Mike
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