(Note: This blog entry is based on the text for “How Do You Make God Laugh?”, originally shared on January 31, 2022. It was the 186th video for our YouTube Channel, Streams of Living Water (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCB7KnYS1bpHKaL2OseQWCnw), co-produced with my wife, Rev. Sally Welch.)
How do you make God laugh? Tell him your
plans. Does that mean it’s wrong for us to make plans? Today, we’re going to
find out.
There are lots of variations of the riddle “How do you make God laugh?”
and the answer, “Tell Him your plans”, but they all seem to come from a Yiddish
proverb, “We plan. God laughs.”
So, does that mean that our planning is useless or, worse, shows a lack
of faith or a lack of trust in God?
I don’t think so.
I think that it means that we are wise to make
our plans in accord with God’s will and not with our own personal desires.
Planning in accord with the direction of the Holy Spirit and not our own
is the difference between a life of faith and a life that is curved in on
oneself, the difference between the reign of God and conformity with this
world.
James writes, in James 4:13-17,
13 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.” 14 Yet you do not even
know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? For you are a mist that
appears for a little while and then vanishes. 15 Instead
you ought to say, “If the Lord wishes, we will live and do this or that.” 16 As
it is, you boast in your arrogance; all such boasting is evil. 17 Anyone,
then, who knows the right thing to do and fails to do it, commits sin.
There are some important
questions around this issue.
Do we have free will, or has
everything been pre-determined by God? Does God pre-destine everything, or does
God just know everything that will happen in advance?
How can God be both omnipotent
(all powerful) and omniscient (knowing all) unless God is limiting God’s power
and, if that’s the case, “Why?” And, if God is self-limiting, what do we mean
when we say that God is “in control”, that is, “sovereign”.
I don’t
know that human beings can completely resolve issues about God’s nature. As
Paul says, in the “love chapter”, in 1 Corinthians 13:12,
12 For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we
will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as
I have been fully known.
Planning, at least on a pragmatic level, is necessary
for significant outcomes. That includes accomplishing acts of justice, that is,
in the Bible, doing God’s will.
In fact, it’s said that, if you fail to plan you plan to fail. And
there’s a lot of truth in that.
One of my favorite quotes on planning (probably because I confess that it reflects a lot of my own behavior) comes from composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein, who said “To achieve
great things, two things are needed; a plan, and not quite enough time.”
And, anyone who has every
planned anything, from a picnic to a construction project knows that things do
not always go according to plan. Picnics can get rained out, and as is said of
planning for construction projects, “everything takes longer and costs more.”
As Scottish poet Robert Burns
wrote, “The best laid plans of mice and men
often go awry”.
The key to making plans or creating
expectations in life is that we are wise to make our plans in accord with God’s will and
not with our personal desires.
God is God and we’re not.
Job was
a good man who nevertheless suffered terribly in his life. His friends came to
explain things and to comfort him but wound up giving him the terrible counsel
that we often hear from well-meaning people who think that they can understand
the mind of God.
God
speaks for God’s self from the whirlwind starting at the 38th
chapter, and then at the end of the book of Job, the 42nd
chapter, verses 1-6, Job speaks (in the “ ” marks) in response to what God
has said (in the ‘ ‘ marks):
42 Then
Job answered the Lord:
2 “I know that you can do all things,
and that no purpose of yours can be thwarted.
3 ‘Who is this that hides counsel without knowledge?’
Therefore I have uttered what I did not understand,
things too wonderful for me, which I did not know.
4 ‘Hear, and I will speak;
I will question you, and you declare to me.’
5 I had heard of you by the hearing of the ear,
but now my eye sees you;
6 therefore I despise myself,
and repent in dust and ashes.”
In the
end, the message of Job might be said to be, “God is God and you’re not.”
Why do
bad things happen to good people like Job? We might explain the story of
Creation and Fall in Genesis, but we also might ask “Why do good things happen
at all?”
We
might also say that human beings cannot draw a connecting line between what
happens in our lives and what causes them to happen. God is God and we’re not.
But we
can build our lives on what endures, and that is the Word of God and the
Sacraments, on the fruits of the Holy Spirit and holy living.
Jesus said, in Matthew 7:24-27,
24 “Everyone then who hears these words
of mine and acts on them will be like a wise man who built his house on
rock. 25 The rain fell, the floods came, and the
winds blew and beat on that house, but it did not fall, because it had been
founded on rock. 26 And everyone who hears these
words of mine and does not act on them will be like a foolish man who built his
house on sand. 27 The rain fell, and the floods
came, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell—and great was
its fall!”
The floods that come in this world may destroy things, but it is the
Holy Spirit, the streams of living water gushing out from within us that guides
us to the rock.
Our work is
to seek to do God’s will in our lives. As the rock band U2’s front man, Bono,
has said, “Stop
asking God to bless what you're doing. Find out what God's doing. It's already
blessed.”
It is
our blessing to do the will of God because faith and trust teach us that God
knows what is best for us even better than we ourselves, even when it doesn’t
seem so at the time.
Ruth
Bell Graham who, though accomplished in her own right, was also Billy Graham’s
wife once said, “God has not always answered my
prayers. If He had, I would have married the wrong man – several times!”
Waiting for
God’s time and doing God’s will is why we have that bedrock
default of joy that nothing can take away from us. It comes from God. It is the
presence of God within us, the love of God in action for us, the indwelling
presence of the Holy Spirit, the streams of living water gushing up from within
us.
“Man (or “A Man or a Woman”) proposes. God
disposes.” the saying goes
Let that be your guide when making your plans. Experience what is best
for you by making your plans in the light of the Holy Spirit’s leading to do
God’s will and not in your own desires.
Seek always to do God’s will and let that be your plan.
Proverbs 16:9 says,
9 The human mind plans the way,
but the Lord directs the steps.
And six verses earlier, we see how to plan that way, in Proverbs 16:3
3 Commit your work to the Lord,
and your plans will be established.
