The Best-laid Plans

1 Chronicles 28:1-7; 1 Cor. 3:6, 10a NRSV

A sermon delivered by Rev. Dr. Randy K. Hammer, January 12, 2020

What plans did you make for 2019?  How did all of those plans pan out?  Did all of your plans, goals, hopes, and dreams come to fruition?  Maybe they did.  Or maybe they did not.

One of the first pieces of literature that I was exposed to in college English classes was the poem “To a Mouse” by Scottish poet Robert Burns.  In case you have never read it, or in case you might need a refresher, “To a Mouse” is an eight-stanza poem that relates an apology of a farmer to a mouse in the field after the farmer unwittingly plows up the mouse’s nest the mouse has prepared for itself for the winter.  The farmer assures the mouse that he had meant no harm in destroying the tiny creature’s home.  Indeed, the farmer puts himself in the place of the mouse and reflects upon the situation from the mouse’s perspective.  The farmer even assures the mouse that it is okay that she occasionally takes an ear of corn from his bin, since the mouse struggles for survival as well.  The house that the mouse had prepared for itself is now gone, and winter is coming on, leaving the mouse in a dire situation.  The mouse’s plans had been destroyed by circumstances beyond its control.

But the poet then expands the thought by drawing a comparison between the mouse’s plight with life in general.  And the farmer, addressing the mouse, observes that in having her home destroyed and plans for the future swept away, she is not alone.  So it is with all of Nature.  The truth is, the best-laid plans of mice and men often go awry.  And all the good we had planned may be swept away or come to naught. 

It is from this poem, obviously, that we get the phrase, “the best-laid plans of mice and men.”  And it is that quotation that John Steinbeck drew from for his short novel, Of Mice and Men, a sad story about two itinerant farm workers and how their plans for the future go awry and meet a fateful end as well.

But who of us hasn’t seen some of our plans go awry, come to naught, fall by the wayside, or be destroyed as well?

We have read in 1 Chronicles of King David and a plan he had devised for himself.  “I had planned,” David said, to build a house for God; a majestic Temple in Jerusalem where the presence of God could be celebrated and a central place of worship erected to bring Israel together.  Such a Temple would not only be a unifying force for the Jewish people, but it would be considered a lasting monument to King David himself as well.  Such was the one big achievement that he dreamed of, the thing David most wanted to see happen, perhaps.

But as the chronicler relates it, David’s plan to build a Temple for God was not to be.  His plans didn’t pan out.  The chronicler gives theological reasons for David not being able to build the Temple as he had planned: as a man of war, David’s hands were covered in blood and it was not fitting that a man of war would build such a holy edifice.  The plans for such an ambitious task would have to be passed down to his son Solomon.

And so again, I raise the questions, “What plans did you make for the year just passed?  How did all of those plans pan out?  Did all of your plans, hopes and dreams come to fruition?”

Such questions regarding our plans presuppose, of course, that we did make plans for the year last January.  That we did set some goals and dream some dreams and draw up some plans of what we hoped to accomplish in 2019. 

Now, there are some relevant points from this topic that we might ponder this morning on this second Sunday of the new year.  One of the points we should take home with us is that making plans, setting goals, and dreaming dreams for the year ahead is a good thing.  Such is what our church board did yesterday.

Some years ago, I heard about and wrote and published a story about a 96-year-old woman who had just died.  While going through her papers and other personal items on her desk, her family found her list of goals and plans for the future – for the next eight years!  Think about that!

All of us need goals and plans for the future.  As Ben Franklin reminds us, to fail to plan is to plan to fail.  So what are your goals and plans for 2020?

I ran across another story this past week that I had clipped and saved years ago about a man who earnestly prayed, “God, I want your power!”  But the prayer never seemed to be answered.  Some time later, feeling even more desperate, the man prayed again: “God, why haven’t you answered that prayer about giving me power to help me with my plan?”  And the man seemed to hear the reply, “With plans no bigger than yours, you don’t need my power.”¹

Robert Schuller said a similar thing in one of his books: We need to make our plans big enough for God to fit into them.

But there is a second point we should consider and take home with us today: Of those plans that we made for 2019 that didn’t pan out, what should we, and what are we, going to do with them?  Perhaps we can pick back up some of those unrealized plans for 2019, dust them off, and determine if they are worthy for reconsideration and actions.

But then we might also ask if some of those unrealized plans need to be let go of; if they are not worthy of our time and devotion; if, perhaps, they are not as important now as they once appeared to be.  And if unrealized plans are such that we don’t need to pursue them, are we able to let them go so that we don’t allow them to become unwanted baggage to be drug behind us into the future?

Or, as in King David’s case, we may come to the realization that we cannot complete a worthy plan we had set into motion, but we may need to pass on the plans of something good we have begun to someone else to be completed. 

The Apostle Paul realized this great truth as well when he wrote that he planted the seeds, someone else watered them, but the real growth came later.  He laid the foundation, someone else after him built upon it, but the final building came later.  In other words, the plans Paul had for the work of God had to be passed onto others for completion.

A prayer by Archbishop Oscar Romero of El Salvador, that he wrote shortly before his assassination in 1980, is in such a spirit when it says, “We cannot do everything, and there is a sense of liberation in realizing that.  This enables us to do something, and to do it very well.  It may be incomplete, but it is a beginning.”  In other words, we have a plan, we do the good that we can do, but sometimes we don’t see our good plans come to fruition and we have to pass on those plans to someone else who can bring them to completion.

As Robert Burns and John Steinbeck both remind us, sometimes the best-laid plans of mice and men are swept away and come to naught.  And sometimes we just need to cut loose some plans and let them go.  And sometimes we may put a worthy plan into action, then pass it on to others for completion.  But we do need to plan.  And we do need to work as we can to make worthy plans become reality. 

So, as individuals, families, and a congregation, may we have the wisdom, discernment, and the grace to devise and see through positive, honorable, and worthy plans that are life-enhancing and that make a positive difference in our world.  May it be so.  Amen.

Work Referenced: ¹Carl Bates, copied.