DR. JAMES C. HOWELL
Jeremiah 29:11
October 9, 2016
So almost any polling of people's favorite Bible verses will wind up including Jeremiah 29:11, which you just heard from the verses people love. For I know the plans that I have for you, says the Lord. And we hear that and we do different things with it. I mean I am fine with what Anne Lamott once said if you want God to laugh, tell God your plans; that's always a good line. But what usually happens when we hear that God has plans for us is we do a kind of skewed reading of it. I remember this years ago; Lisa went to one of these events, it was like a community thing where there were people from different churches, women from different churches and so Lisa went and she was reporting it to me later. I said how was the speaker and she said oh OK. The speaker seemed to take as her theme Rick Warren's book, the Purpose Driven Life, which is a very fine book; has a lot of good things in it, except at the beginning of that book, what Rick Warren does is he does this plan for your life thing. And what he says is the life you have is the life that God has arranged for you. The person you are married to, that is who God has arranged for you. The house where you live, that is where God intended you to live. And Lisa said that as this is being said, she was looking toward the speaker and within eyeshot, there was a woman and as Lisa put it, she was wearing a fabulous dress and had these amazing shoes and she had this oversized diamond in a platinum setting and as the speaker was saying this is the life that God has planned for you, the woman was nodding enthusiastically. And it is easy I guess for someone like that to say this is the life that God has planned for me but try and tell that to people that I know who gosh, a lot of people who have had children die; I heard about a guy this week I have known all his life, 32 years old diagnosed with stage IV colon cancer. You hear about someone who has cheated on them. You go to Haiti right now right and once in my lifetime we have had a hurricane here in Charlotte, Haiti gets every hurricane. But God planned it for you. I am not sure that is how that works at all, is it? It kind of leaves God as the kind of God who would so favor on some people and harm other people.
When we think about God having a plan, we should think instead about let’s say that moment you just graduated from college and you take that mortarboard off your head and you fling it in the air and at that point, you have got plans. You have no idea what is going to happen but you have plans, right? You are going to have a great life and you are going to keep your good friends and it is going to be terrific. Or I think about March 1, 1986, when Lisa and I came right up to this altar and we exchanged vows, we exchanged rings, we kissed and we turned to go out; we had plans. We had no idea what we were doing, but we had big plans. We were going to love each other. We were going to have a great life. We were going to stay together.
Here's a better example. When parents are in the labor and delivery room and they hear their child's first cry; they have big plans for their child, but that can be a problem, right? Because what parents do is they have big plans for their child but they over-script the child. They say you shall do this, you shall go to this school, you shall become a dentist like I am a dentist as all good people are and you will go here and when children are over-scripted they chafe under the weight of that. God does not over-script our lives. God has plans like the grads, like the couple getting married, God has dreams for us, God has yearnings for us and what God plans for each one of us is what God plans for every other person and that is God wants us to know that there is a God and that that God loves us; we are never alone, like ever. God made you and God wants you to know that and to take solace in that. God's plan for you is stuff like John 3:16; for God so loved the world that he gave his only Begotten son and that whoever believes in him should not perish but have Eternal Life. That is God's plan for every one of us is to hear that, to believe that. To look at the law of Jesus and his healing and his touching people and his crucifixion and taking the sins of the world on himself so that we could be forgiven and then him rising from the grave so that we could have the hope of new life; God wants us to know that. God's plan, God's yearning, is that we will know how great God is.
I recently finished reading a really quirky novel called The Gargoyle and in it in this sentence that I think is well worth pondering. God is a circle, whose center is everyone and whose circumference is nowhere. Let me read that again. God is a circle, whose center is everyone and whose circumference is nowhere. God wants us to know how great God is. God wants us to know that as great as God is, God has tender love and compassion for you, God is with you at every moment, even the moments that you feel like you are abandoned. God wants you to know that. Part of God's plan is that you go to church and you did it today, well done. You came to church today and that honors God, just getting up and walking into this place; that is part of what God's plan for us is. Part of God's plan for us is that we will be holy. It is really hard isn't it to be holy in a world like this where we are just peppered constantly with unholiness. You see it everywhere. There is so much unholiness that you are tempted to be disgusted; all you have to do is just then look in the mirror and what you realize is that unholiness is not just out there in somebody else, there is so much unholiness in me. I need God's mercy. I need God's healing power.
It is God's plan for us that we are part of the church and that we help each other to cope with our sorrows. It's God's plan for us that no matter how dark things get, we believe that God will bring us to some good end, that this life is not all there is, that there is redemption, there is Eternal Life. There is always hope with Jesus. God's plan for us.
If you think about the context of this reading from Jeremiah 29 it is really interesting. The first thing in this, when you read the original Hebrew, when God says I have plans for you, that you is not singular, you is plural, they should really translate it; it is like a southern God right, God says I have plans for y'all. And the y'all is the people of Israel, it is the community of faith. As we read the passage today, God has got plans for y'all, God has got plans for us, God has got plans for the church. What is God's plan for the church, for us together? This letter by Jeremiah is written at a fascinating time in Israel's history. Nebuchadnezzar and the Babylonians, they came to Jerusalem and they have reduced the holy beautiful city to smoking rubble. There is nothing left and only a few people are left to live around the ruins, to try to poke around and just survive; most of the Israelites intelligentsia, the wealthy, the leaders, they have all been shipped off to live in exile far away in Babylon and what happened you see is they got shipped away but they thought, we are coming home soon; God is going to fix everything soon, let’s not even bother because God is going to fix everything soon and what Jeremiah's letter to them says is settle down, build a house, get married, plant crops, plant trees as you are going to be there a while. God actually says you are going to be there 70 years. This is so interesting.
When we want God to fix something, we want Him to fix it pretty soon, right? Like if you pray for something today, God should fix it by the end of lunch today or at the latest, by sundown tomorrow. And this whole idea that God might take some time is hard for us, we are kind of instant people.
A lot of people know I am involved in stuff in the city of Charlotte and what we are trying to do and a lot of people ask me what are we doing? What are we doing to fix Charlotte? There are a lot of things we need to do to fix Charlotte, let’s just be very clear, it is going to take some time. We are not going to have some meeting and by next Tuesday, Charlotte is fine. It took us probably 70 years to get us into the fix that we are in so it is going to take a little while to kind of work our way out. It takes you time to become more holy.
Jeremiah says build houses, marry wives, settle down, stay here and then here is his big thing too y'all, he says seek the welfare of the city where you are. To the Israelites in Babylon, he says seek the welfare of the city where you are. This is God's word to us today, seek the welfare of the city where you are.
One of my doctoral students is a guy named Jason Butler, one of my students at Duke and he has written a book already and he gave me a copy of the book and what he says at the beginning I think is absolutely right. The subtitle of the book is Following Jesus Into The City and he writes it is my deep belief that God is calling the church to the broken urban centers of our nation and world. I am writing this book to inspire you to follow Jesus into the under-resourced neighborhoods in our nation and your own backyard. To follow Jesus to do one distinct thing, and that is to love. Our church is a wonderful church. We love this church. We love each other. In fact, there is so much love in this church, what God believes is entirely possible and it is certainly God's plan for us, which is all the love that we have in here will just pour out, it will just seep out of here and just like floodwaters, it will just cover this entire city, it will cover this entire city.
Jonathan Sacks wrote this book about leadership that I like a lot. We tend to think leaders are just certain people. He says everybody is a leader. He said you may lead where you work, you may lead when you are out playing tennis with somebody. You may lead when you are at home. You may lead when you are out with friends. All of us lead somewhere and the question they ask is how do you lead? He says there are always those who light the darkness and then there are those who curse the darkness. And the question is where you are, where your spirit influence is, are you lighting a light in the darkness or are you cursing the darkness? What is God asking our church to do? To seek the welfare of the city in which we find ourselves.
I think the thing that Martin Luther King said that I think is absolutely right; Martin Luther King once said I can never be all I can be until you are all that you can be. We forget that, right? What we think is ,well I will live over here in my little place and I will be all I can be; I will throw the mortarboard in the air and I will get married to somebody fabulous and I will be all I can be, but then there is always some nagging hollowness isn't there? There is always something missing no matter how much you are and what it is is that God wired the world in such a way that I can never be all that I can be until everyone gets to be all that they can be and the joy that comes from when we become a part of enabling that to happen. It is just a splendid. Paul in Corinthians says if one suffers we all suffer.
It takes time. It takes time to become holy. It takes time for us to figure out how to seek the welfare of the city in which we find ourselves. Little baby steps are required. Speaking of baby steps, I read this in the same novel of The Gargoyle, the main character, he started to look as a very unsavory character and he was making some progress and about two-thirds of the way through the book he says this…while I am not claiming I now feel great love for all people, I can state with some confidence that I hate fewer people than I used to. This may seem like a weak claim to personal growth but sometimes these things should be judged by distance traveled rather than current position. I like that. So let’s say today you say God you have a plan for me, I am ready to go with it, I am ready to be part of your plan. So the first thing that may happen is you hate fewer people than you do today and that is a good start. Then pretty soon, you like more people than you do today and after a while you actually love more people than you do today and then you do something like, it is way out for you, but you go and pack a meal for Stop Hunger Now or something like that or you text them some money for Haiti and you are like whoa man, I am just out on the edge here, but then it gets even better because instead of just leaving food somewhere you actually take it to somebody, you actually meet somebody and it is different and you begin to know their names and then you begin to befriend someone and you are not looking down on them, you are just friends but they are different, you did not know them a year ago and that is really the key for us in Charlotte isn't it? If we had friendships all across this city, everything would just be so very different and then maybe one day, you never know where it comes from, you become the heroic one who does something that is really memorable, like in the Bible, Saint Francis of Assisi, this guy was over-scripted by his father, right? Pietro has this son and he says all right, you are going to be the maven here and you are going to go into the cloth business like I have and you are going to be one of the leaders of the city here is Assisi and Francis was just weird because he changed under that; he heard about God's plan for his life and God's plan for his life was that he would be holy. God's plan for his life was that he would seek the welfare of the city in which he found himself. He sort of touched all the wrong people and he sparked a revolution in the world where everything changed and the church became what it was supposed to be for so long. God's plan.
You have to know the love of God and trust that and live under that and be forgiven by that, be transformed by that, be full of joy because of that and then you try to be holy and you try to seek the welfare of the place where you are, whenever it is, your center of influence and we do it together, as God's people of the church. That is why you are here. That is what saved people do. God has plans for y'all. Thanks be to God.