Plan B

Learning to embrace God’s plan of happiness

07/18/2019

Exodus 3:13-20 Moses, hearing the voice of the LORD from the burning bush, said to him, "When I go to the children of Israel and say to them, 'The God of your fathers has sent me to you,' if they ask me, 'What is his name?' what am I to tell them?" God replied, "I am who am." Then he added, "This is what you shall tell the children of Israel: I AM sent me to you." "Thus they will heed your message. Then you and the elders of Israel shall go to the king of Egypt and say to him: "The LORD, the God of the Hebrews, has sent us word. Permit us, then, to go a three-days' journey in the desert, that we may offer sacrifice to the LORD, our God. "Yet I know that the king of Egypt will not allow you to go unless he is forced. I will stretch out my hand, therefore, and smite Egypt by doing all kinds of wondrous deeds there. After that he will send you away."

Human learning and education usually involved both a Plan A and a Plan B, an easy way and a hard way to learn the same life lessons that ultimately lead to happiness. And if your name happens to be “John Antony,” you need a Plan C, a Plan D and a Plan E. In other words, most of us – really all of us, except Jesus and Mary who never sinned – fail to learn what our parents try to teach us as small children (Plan A). We end up learning the same lessons through the school of hard knocks (Plan B). I’m reminded of that Tim McGraw song called “Next Thirty Years.” He sings: “My next thirty years I’m going to watch my weight / Eat a few more salads and not stay up so late / Drink a little lemonade and not so many beers / Maybe I’ll remember my next thirty years.” The singer’s first thirty years had been failed attempts to learn Plan A, where he squandered his life on loose living and too many beers. But he intends to make the next thirty years Plan B, and live according to a more rigorous regimen.

Perhaps the classical example of Plan B learning is Dante’s timeless poem called The Divine Comedy. The first lines set the stage where we read: “In the middle of the journey of our life, I came to myself in a dark wood, where the direct way was lost.” Tim McGraw was about thirty when he decided to learn Plan B, and Dante was about thirty-five when he enrolled in the school of Plan B. In other words, instead of trying to figure things out on his own, Dante would let God guide him to happiness. And where does God lead him? First, Dante dives into the darkness of hell, then climbs slowly up the slopes of the mountain of purgatory, and finally soars like an eagle through the light and love of heaven. In the wild world of human learning and education, there’s always a Plan A and a Plan B and usually more for us slow students.

We read about the two-fold approach to education in happiness in the first reading from Exodus. Did you know God’s original plan was not necessarily to free the people from bondage and slavery in Egypt? That was not Plan A. We read what God originally intended in the words of Moses to Pharaoh: “Permit us, then, to go a three-day journey in the dessert, that we may offer sacrifice to the Lord, our God.” And what would the people presumably do after that three day spiritual sojourn? They would jaunt back to Egypt and happily submit to the yoke of slavery. Why? God’s real preoccupation was not the people’s physical bondage but their spiritual slavery.

After four hundred years in Egypt, the people had started to worship the pagan gods of the Egyptians, like Apis, symbolized by a bull, who represented wealth and virility. Plan A, therefore, was to go into the desert and sacrifice a bull to show that you do not serve the bull-god, Apis. But like Tim McGraw, and Dante, and you and me, the people failed to learn Plan A; they couldn’t do it, and Pharaoh wouldn’t let them. Therefore, it is commonly said: “You can take the people out of Egypt, but you cannot take Egypt out of the people.” Their bodies were free but their hearts were still enslaved. The rest of the Old Testament recounts how the people of Israel – the children of God – would need Plan B, and then Plan C, and then Plan D to learn the lessons of happiness, until God finally taught them in Jesus.

My friends, where are you in the lesson plans of happiness? Are you trying to live your next thirty or forty or fifty years a little differently than your last thirty, forty or fifty years? Who are the teachers and tutors who are coaching you to learn the lessons of human happiness? I would say our primordial parents, Adam and Eve, failed to live according to Plan A in the Garden of Eden, and the rest of human history is the slow and sad unfolding of learning Plan B. An astute psychologist once said: “We are our parents unfinished homework.” What lessons of human happiness they failed to learn they passed on to us. In a sense, we must finish their homework, and learn those lessons without their help. Of course, we have plenty of life lessons we fail to learn and pass along to the next generation. We are probably on Plan X, or Plan Y or Plan Z.

I believe we will continue to learn the lessons of human happiness even after we die and leave this earth, like Dante did, because we still haven’t figured out Plan A, like the people of God in Egypt. After death we may be physically free but we are still spiritually slaves to earthly desires. You can take the people of out earth, but it’s not so easy to take earth out of the people.

Praised be Jesus Christ!