I have been struck by the currency of a particular expression of piety that I don't remember hearing so much earlier in my life. I don't wish to criticize the faith behind this sentiment, though I worry that the expression is becoming something of a thoughtless, even misleading cliché. It pops up most frequently when people are dealing with unexpected adversity. It is a way of coping with the puzzling reality of bad things happening to good people. "God has a plan."
There is scriptural truth to this affirmation of faith, as we see today from first chapter of Ephesians. But I worry that people do not have in mind Ephesians’ understanding of "God’s plan." For biblically, it's a plan, as we see from the gospel reading, that can allow the whimsical murder of righteous John the Baptist by a vainglorious political sovereign, connived by powers behind the throne, to blunt the prophetic cut of John's preaching. It's a plan, as we learn from the Old Testament prophet Amos today, which involves confronting religious as a well as political authorities with their unrighteousness, including blasphemous attempts to harness religion to the cause of their unrighteousness. In short, yes, God has an eternal purpose and so a “plan” unfolding in time –his name is Jesus Christ, crucified and risen. It is a plan to reconcile the sinful world by conforming us worldlings to the death and resurrection of his beloved Son.
With all wisdom and insight God has made known to us the mystery of his will, according to his good pleasure that he set forth in Christ, as a plan for the fullness of time, to gather up all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth. This is how Scripture speaks the “plan” of God. The term in Greek is oikonomia, translated “plan,” which comes into English as the word "economy." The meaning of this Greek word is a management plan for the household, a sense of which we still hear traces in older terms like "household” or “domestic” economy – telling how the pre-modern “Lady of the House” managed the kitchen and the laundry and her staff of helpers, be they workers or children or, in the bad old days, the enslaved. So the passage from Ephesians depicts God arranging and directing events over the entire human world as if one household economy.
There was a school of ancient philosophers among the Greeks called the Stoics who had a similar idea; to put it in modern language, they thought of the world as a big eco-system in which every creature had its own niche and definite role to play for the benefit of the whole. But there the similarity with Ephesians ends. The Stoics were quite happy with the way things are and perceived no injustice at all, but rather a natural and rational “natural” order in the established hierarchies of power dominating a rigidly stratified human social world. But from the Exodus onward the biblical God is in the business – in the economy-- of putting things right in his world that have gone wrong, “casting down the mighty from their thrones and exalting them of low degree,” as Mary, mother of our Lord, sang in the Magnificat, when she welcomed into our suffering world of injustice the child in her womb who is and enacts the unfolding plan of God to rectify and reconcile.
You see, God's household, our human world, is not some pristine and harmonious natural ecology as the Stoics thought, but rather in and through us human beings the whole creation suffers corruption. For we have defected from God's purpose and filled the earth with injury and deep frustration as a result. This dysfunctional household of ours is full of harm and, therefore, needs to be reconciled, that means, straightened out, rectified, if finally it is to receive the good things which God intends.
That is why at the mysterious center of God's revealed plan in Jesus Christ and him crucified, as our Ephesians text states: we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses, according to the riches of his grace that he lavished on us. Our God executes his plan to put things right in that unjust people may now die spiritually in Christ to their injustices, and so forgiven, rise up in his power to newness of joyful life in righteousness, freedom and peace. Moreover, this Jesus Christ, at the center of God's plan in whom God is putting things right, is not God second thought – as if, “Gee, Adam sinned, now what do I do?” But Jesus is and has always been God's first thought: He chose us in Christ before the foundation of the world to be holy and blameless before him in love. He destined us for adoption as his children through Jesus Christ, according to the good pleasure of his will, to the praise of his glorious grace that he freely bestowed on us in the Beloved. For all of us so chosen with the gift and burden of faith in Jesus Christ, God's plan is not something that just happens around or over us without us, but we now, endowed by the same Holy Spirit, actively live to the praise of his glory in new works of goodness for others in need – truly good works which flow naturally and spontaneously from recipients of the amazing grace given in Jesus Christ. What newness of life! Not passive pawns of a “plan” running on automatic but we get to be instruments in God's unfolding economy of reconciliation by the event of gospel word and Spirit.
We see by way of contrast the usual way of this unjust world in the story of the political murder of John the Baptist, by characters drunk on their own power, ignorant of God and his rectifying plan, intent instead to live only for the gain and glory of this life here and now. What vainglory, what conceit, what spiritual pride, what office politics, political intrigue and trickery! And all of this wickedness-as-usual falls upon the neck of John the Baptist because he dared to hold up covenantal fidelity in marriage as a mirror before the adulterous royalty.
We do not know the fate of the prophet Amos, who lived 700 years before John the Baptist, but we can infer from the survival in writing of his prophecies, that he lived to deliver his message to the northern kingdom of ancient Israel. The message was that the kingdom had deviated from the straight plumb line of God's covenant justice and was being built up crookedly on the necks of the working poor. But the special accent of our little story today is how Amos showed up in the national cathedral of ancient Israel at Bethel and disrupted it solemn ceremonies with his message of judgment. What is telling is the rebuke issued by the presiding priest of this temple, Amaziah, who said to Amos, “O seer, go, flee away to the land of Judah, earn your bread there, and prophesy there; but never again prophesy at Bethel, for it is the king’s sanctuary, and it is a temple of the kingdom.”
Notice two things here: first, that Amaziah regards the temple at Bethel as the property of the king in service of his kingdom; second, that Amaziah regards prophecy as a for-profit enterprise and so tells Amos to go find religious work for hire elsewhere. We know from Amos's retort that he was not a professional prophet –one who makes a living off of flattering predictions on behalf of the status quo-- but a working man who was making a humble living tending sheep and orchards when he was plucked out of his normal existence to deliver the message of God's judgment upon the king and his unjust kingdom.
So the question for us from this text is simply this: whose church is it anyway, this community predestined in Christ before the foundation of the world to be holy and blameless before him in love to the praise of his glory? It's not my church and it's not your church; if it is truely church, it is the church of Jesus Christ, as we sing, “with his own blood he bought her and for her life he died.” Just the same, the pastor is not our hired hand to do our bidding but bound and authorized to serve us the word of God in season and out, like John and Amos, in judgment as in grace – so that we actually are a sacred community of Christians, not a religious club doing our own thing but living out of and enacting the economy of God.
Yes, God has a plan and his name is Jesus Christ. It is an eternal plan to reconcile and fulfill the lost and sinful creation and it comes into effect wherever and whenever the prophetic message of judgment and grace prevails by uniting us in faith to Jesus crucified and risen. According to this biblical plan of God, bad things can happen to good people just as surely as they did to John the Baptist foreshadowing the cross of Christ, the Lord himself and beloved Son. Bad things do not happen outside of God's sovereign plan. Perhaps we can say that that is God's cold comfort when we suffer adversity: even when we have fallen into the hands of persecutors we have not fallen out of the hands of our God.
Far better, however, pearl of great price, is God's warm comfort, the Holy Spirit's bearing witness to our spirits that we are indeed children of God, come what may, so that whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord's. It is the work of faith, when adversity befalls, to interpret the bad things that happen as tools God uses to humble the exalted and to exalt the humbled. So comforted truly we rise up as active agents and living instruments of God's plan, challenging unrighteousness, manifesting our righteousness in Christ abounding in works of merciful goodness through the union of faith with Jesus Christ, to whom be the glory now and forever.