When plans go awry
My grandfather was born in Glasgow. And so maybe it’s inevitable that the great Scots poet Robert Burns is my family’s favorite. I actually inherited a wool rug with Burns’s face on it.
A lot of his poetry isn’t suitable for church. But one poem I grew up hearing is. Its full title is “To a Mouse, on Turning Her Up in Her Nest with the Plough, November 1785.”
Burns was a farmer as well as a poet, and one November day, as he’s plowing ahead of the winter freeze, he accidentally destroys a field mouse’s nest. The mouse is terrified.
“Wee, sleekit, cow’rin, tim’rous beastie, O, what a panic’s in thy breastie!”
The mouse had prepared well for the winter. She had gathered grass and leaves and built herself a cozy shelter against the cold. And now all that is lost.
The farmer meant no harm. He apologizes. But he can’t rebuild what’s been destroyed. And he says philosophically, “The best-laid schemes o’ Mice an’ Men gang aft agley, an’ lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain, for promis’d joy.” The best-laid plans of mice and men often go awry, and leave us nothing but grief and pain where joy was once promised.
And this isn’t a mild inconvenience. The mouse has lost her home. Winter is coming. And all her careful preparation has come to nothing.
Burns is right, of course. Plans do go awry. For mice and for men.
The story we heard this morning about Joseph is a story about plans going awry. In fact, almost everyone in the story has a plan that doesn’t work out as intended.
Joseph is seventeen years old, and his father’s favorite. And Joseph has a dream, the beginnings of a plan, a dream that he will one day rule over the rest of his family.
Joseph’s father Jacob also has a plan, a vision of a life supported by his beloved son Joseph. He gives Joseph a special robe to show his love. But that doesn’t go as he intended. It makes Joseph’s brothers jealous.
And so Joseph’s brothers make a plan of their own. “Here comes this dreamer,” they say. “Let us kill him.” They will tell their father that a wild animal killed him. And that will be the end of Joseph and his arrogant dreams.
In the end, the brothers don’t kill Joseph. They strip off his robe and throw him into a waterless pit. When a caravan passes, they pull him out and sell him into slavery. They tell his father that he’s dead. And Joseph is carried away into Egypt.
The best-laid schemes of mice and men gang aft agley.
Joseph has gone from beloved son to slave in a foreign land. Jacob has lost his child. Jacob’s other sons think they’ve gotten their way.
Of course, we know this isn’t the end of Joseph’s story. He will eventually interpret Pharaoh’s dreams and rise to power in Egypt. When famine comes, he’ll save many lives, including the lives of his brothers and his father.
But Joseph doesn’t know any of that as the caravan carries him away. As today’s reading ends, there’s no rescue and no explanation. Joseph has been betrayed by his brothers, sold into slavery, and taken to a country he doesn’t know.
Maybe you know the feeling. Something has happened that you didn’t plan and would never have chosen. You can see what’s been lost, but you can’t see what comes next. If anyone told you it will all work out for the best, you’d probably laugh in their face.
When the story returns to Joseph in Egypt, scripture tells us, “The Lord was with Joseph.” But that doesn’t mean that everything goes well. Joseph is falsely accused and put in prison. But even then we’re told, “The Lord was with Joseph.”
Joseph is a slave, a prisoner. But still God is with him. It seems that God’s presence isn’t a shield against terrible things. It’s a promise that even in the midst of terrible things, God won’t abandon us.
Many years later, Joseph will say to his brothers, “Even though you intended to do harm to me, God intended it for good.” Joseph doesn’t pretend that what they did was secretly good. God just made sure that evil didn’t get the last word.
This is very different from saying that God caused Joseph’s suffering because God wanted it to happen. And it’s very different from some things we say when we try to comfort one another. “Everything happens for a reason,” or “It’s all part of God’s plan.” Or, maybe worst of all, “God needed another angel.”
These sorts of words come from a place of love. We want pain to make sense. But pain rarely makes any sense at all.
The best-laid plans of mice and men gang aft agley.
The promise of scripture isn’t that God sends suffering to accomplish something good. The promise is that God can bring good out of suffering.
I don’t believe that God pulls every string, arranges every betrayal and every loss. I do believe that God never abandons us.
Burns doesn’t tell the frightened mouse that her ruined nest is a part of some greater plan. He says he’s sorry. He acknowledges what she’s lost.
And he says that he’s jealous of only one thing: that the mouse, unlike a human being, lives in the present. That she won’t waste her time lamenting the past or fearing the future.
But people do. We mourn what’s lost and we fear what might come. We don’t know how our own stories will turn out. We don’t know what God might still make possible. We know only what Joseph knew in the pit, and on the road to Egypt, and in prison: that God is with us.
Our best-laid plans may go agley. Other people’s plans may do us terrible harm. But none of it, not a ruined nest, or a waterless pit, nor a road into an unknown country, can make God abandon us.