Our text for the day comes from that immortal television series, The A-Team. At the conclusion of each show the leader would light up his cigar and say, "I love it when a plan comes together." He's right! It is great when a plan comes together.
In 1943 Great Britain was planning an invasion of Sicily. In order to carry out this invasion successfully British planners had to convince the Germans and Italians that the invasion would occur elsewhere. And so the British came up with a plan that would be worthy of James Bond. They secured a corpse of a recently deceased young man ” with the permission of the deceased's parents. Then they gave the corpse a fictitious life. Its name was to be Major William Martin, a man with a penchant for high living who had a fiancee named Pam and fictitious parents living in Wales. The bogus Major Martin was armed with love letters, English pounds, stamps, and a host of other personal effects, but most importantly, a cryptic letter detailing an impending invasion of either Greece or Sardinia. Supposedly these military documents were intended for the British commander- in-chief in North Africa. The British took the corpse by submarine off the coast of Spain and tossed it overboard. As expected, the corpse washed up on a beach, where the Spanish government believed it to be the remains of a secret courier. The communications were discovered and spies in the Spanish government turned the letter over to the Germans ” just long enough for it to be steamed open, studied, and resealed before being returned to British authorities with the corpse. Convinced of the letter's contents, the German high command no longer believed Sicily to be an invasion target, and instead sent reinforcements of men and armaments to both Greece and Sardinia. The British plan worked. A vital and successful parachute drop landed thousands of British troops in Sicily, helping to end the war in Europe and paving the way for the D-Day invasion. (1) It was a brilliant plan. Afterward Winston Churchill probably lit up a cigar and said, "I love it when a plan comes together" ” or whatever the British equivalent of that sentence might be. Very little is accomplished in life without a plan.
If you were going into business, the first thing you would do is sketch out a plan. Or, if you were building a house. It is amazing how much better things work out when you have a plan and when you stick to that plan. And when you see a great corporation or a beautiful home, you think to yourself, someone had a great plan!
That is why most of us believe that it would be very, very difficult to be an atheist. We look at this beautiful and complex world and we ask ourselves, Could something this wonderful have happened by accident? Surely not. Put a thousand monkeys in a room with a thousand typewriters and in a billion or so years they might quite by accident produce Webster's dictionary, but would a billion mindless microbes in all eternity produce this magnificent universe? I think not. It would take an enormous leap of faith to believe they would. You have to work at it to doubt the existence of God.
Even if you believe that evolution is an indisputable fact as many fine people do, where did the pattern for that evolution come from? Who put the design in the DNA?
Paul tells us in our text from Ephesians, everything started with a plan. As Paul puts it, God is working out "everything in conformity with the purpose of his will . . ." Nothing that is happened by chance. Behind all of creation there is a plan. Is that important? It is if you believe there is any meaning to life, any purpose, any reason for being. Where people have no meaning or purpose to life, there is moral and spiritual chaos.
A southern California mystery novelist and newspaper columnist, T. Jefferson Parker focused on the meaning of life in one of his columns recently. He recounted the true story of a local teenager who was convicted of killing his friend over a robbery dispute. The convicted murderer, Robert Chan, "wrote in letters to the court that he had read Albert Camus's The Stranger some nine months before the murder and claimed that the book encouraged him to kill his victim because 'everything (is) meaningless and nothing matters because we are all going to die.'" Parker notes that he read the same book some twenty years earlier when he was a teenager, but responded differently: "Rereading Chan's words," Parker writes, ". . . I was struck by how close he was to the mark, and at the same time how far away. Because we are all going to die, he reasons, everything is meaningless and nothing matters. But the truth is: Because we are all going to die nothing is meaningless and everything matters." (2)
The basic question in all of life is, Is there a plan? Is the world headed somewhere? Am I as an individual headed somewhere? Is there any ultimate purpose to it all? Once that matter is settled, everything else in life starts to fall in place.
I read a survey recently that an amazing 25% of men would consider trading five years of their life for a full head of hair. (3) Now, I don't want anyone to think I am making light of male baldness. It is a difficult issue for many men as they age. However, this report is more than amusing ” it is outright insane. These men would trade five years of their life for a few strands of hair? None of us have perfect bodies. All of us would make a few changes here and there. But is physical appearance what life is all about? I hope not ” or many of us are in trouble. In fact all of us are in trouble because one day this physical body will return to clay. No, there is more to life than what appears on the surface. There is a plan to life. And there is a Planner behind that plan.
But there is a second thing we need to see: Paul tells us that at the center of God's plan is humanity. Paul writes: "In him we were also chosen, having been predestined according to the plan of him who works out everything in conformity with the purpose of his will . . ." In other words, God's plan is centered in human beings. Is THAT important? Only if you believe in the concept of human dignity. I believe that the issue of human dignity is an important one in our time.
Now, I'm not going to make a case that human beings are without fault. Hardly. In Kudzu, the comic, the preacher is sitting along the river bank with a young parishioner. The young man says, "Preacher, why do so many people believe in extra-terrestrials?"
The preacher answers: "Lonely, I reckon . . . They want desperately to believe there's somebody else out there so they won't feel so alone . . . They are probably disappointed in their fellow human beings!"
The young man asks: "But what if there is somebody out there?"
The preacher answers: "They'll be disappointed in us, too!" The preacher is probably right. It's like a Ziggy cartoon in which Ziggy says, "If all the world's a stage . . . I must be on the GONG SHOW!! (4) We can't make a case that humanity is worth saving. Or worth caring about.
Except for one thing: "Jesus loves us, this we know." At the center of God's plan for the world is humanity. A noted rabbi once put it like this: A man should carry two stones in his pocket. On one should be inscribed, "I am but dust and ashes." On the other stone should be inscribed, "For my sake was the world created." And he should use each stone as he needs it.
There are many forces today that are tearing away at the notion of human dignity. Some people say it started when Darwin said we were part of the animal kingdom. Others say it was when Copernicus said that the earth was not the center of the universe. And still others claim it was when Freud revealed that our actions are the result of forces in our subconscious. Whatever its origin, the battle to maintain a sense of humanity's innate dignity still goes on. Ultimately, the sexual revolution is about human dignity, and to a certain extent, the battle over abortion. New questions raised by the specter of human cloning strike at the very heart of the question of the meaning of being human. We have always prided ourselves as a species by our unique intelligence. And then IBM's Deeper Blue computer challenges and ultimately defeats the best of human chess players.
What case can there be for the worth of an individual human being? Only this, that according to the Sacred Word, we are at the center of God's plan for creation. When we forget that central fact, then life does become meaningless and burdensome. According to Henry Alford Porter, The Greeks had a beautiful word for humanity--'anthropos,' meaning the being with the upturned face. "Men are queer things," Porter goes on to comment, "Man is so made that he cannot be content with forever looking down. He may look down a long time, so long that he almost forgets there's anything else, anything above, forgets that he was made for God ” until something happens, some crisis comes. And then he remembers and looks up.(5)
That is our only hope ” to look up ” to be reminded of who we are and why we are here. Behind this world is a plan and a Planner. At the center of that plan is humankind. And this brings us to Paul's final word to us: Linking God's Plan for the world and the humanity for which that world was created is Christ. Paul writes: "In him we were also chosen, having been predestined according to the plan of him who works out everything in conformity with the purpose of his will, in order that we, who were the first to hope in Christ, might be for the praise of his glory."
"The first to hope in Christ . . ." That's who we are. We are people trying desperately to make sense out of a chaotic world and placing all our hope in Christ who is the meeting place of humanity and God. We are not Pollyannas who turn their back on the world's problem's and blithely ignore earth's glowing contradictions. We are those who look reality in the eye and have come to believe that life is meaningful, it is worth living and that regardless of what the world may send or say, we have found a Savior who delivers us from darkness and despair.
Some of you may remember a television show in the mid-1970s called Medical Center. It was a highly popular show that made the career of one of its stars, Chad Everett. But after Medical Center's cancellation, the handsome young actor couldn't create another hit to save his life. Although he was able to find acting jobs, he couldn't get back the fame he once had. Chad began drowning his disappointment in alcohol, and he developed a severe drinking problem.
One day Chad saw a videotape of himself, and realized the toll that alcohol was taking on his health and personality. And so he turned where all of us who are anthropos must turn sooner or later. He looked up. In despair, he prayed, "Father, you take it. I can't handle it anymore." A sense of release covered Chad Everett. He knew now that it was time to take action for his problem. He called up a friend of his, a recovered alcoholic. When the friend's answering machine picked up, Chad left this brief message: "Hello, my name is Chad Everett, and I'm an alcoholic." Not long afterwards, Chad's friend gave him that answering machine tape with the admonition, "Keep this and don't ever forget what you were." With the help of his wife and daughters, and local AA meetings, Chad Everett overcame his drinking problem. He has starred in one short-lived series, done guest-spots on some others, and has a small part in an upcoming movie. But he's not as worried about his career anymore. In his view, what he couldn't handle, God is handling beautifully now. (6)
Chad Everett discovered what we all need to discover ” we live in a meaningful world. In fact, we are the center of that meaningful world. "God so loved the world that He gave His Son . . ." God gave His Son for you and me. It is absurd for us to live lives of meaninglessness and despair.
Behind this world is a Planner. And that Planner has provided a means for us to live victorious lives through faith in Christ. Isn't it great when a plan comes together?
1. Gerald and Patricia Del Re, THE ONLY BOOK (New York: Ballantine Books, 1994), pp. 70-71.
2. "Discovering God Through Stories," by Gretchen Passantino, CORNERSTONE, Vol. 24, issue 107, p. 20.
3. Bernice Kanner, ARE YOU NORMAL? (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1995), p. 43.
4. CLASSIC ZIGGYS by Tom Wilson. Contributed by Dr. John Bardsley.
5. Henry Alford Porter, TOWARD THE SUN RISING, (Nashville: Broadman Press, 1947), p. 49. Cited in J. B. Fowler, Jr., ILLUSTRATING GREAT WORDS OF THE NEW TESTAMENT, (Nashville, TN: Broadman Press, 1991).
6. "Leading Men," by Jeanne Wolf, ASPIRE, August/September 1996, pp. 40-42.