[Description of the movie]

It sounds like a wonderful concept. I could just hold this remote, point it over there at Chuck and at the end of the day make him say, “Honey how was your day? Tell me all about it while I rub your feet.”

But then if he had his own, he’d point back at me with the fast forward on to be sure.

I could point at the Session and get quickly to a decision about how we’re going to fix our ailing heating and cooling systems without endless debate, or I could arrange my buttons so I could increase the volume so that everyone could hear when someone had a complimentary thing to say and hit the mute button during any criticism.

But then life doesn’t come at us quite that way. As much as I get to be in the center of my own little universe inside my own head, when I encounter other people, it doesn’t take long to realize that not everyone is going to want things Kerra’s way. Having not seen the movie, I don’t know how it will turn out for Adam Sandler’s character, but I hope that in the end there is some realization that things can go quite wrong when human beings start thinking they can play God. Hollywood pays lip service to this principle through comic ends – but they also know our fantasies where they hit most at home.

Who among us wouldn’t want to hold the remote to the world for just a couple minutes? Given the chance, we’d let the genie out of the bottle every time. It never seems to take very long either for the human character to digress into prankish wishes. We want nothing more than to be able to push the “smite” button on the very people we love to hate, and every time we keep all the rewards for ourselves.

Our society has become all about control, but human beings have been in this business for centuries, so it’s really nothing new. We want to make our own rules, devise our own plans, execute them with grand efficiency, and take only the credit for the good stuff while blaming others for the bad. However, before the dawn of the scientific revolution, the randomness of illness, disease, and natural disaster I think left people a bit more skeptical about our abilities to make things happen. Now, with genetic modifications, modern medicine, and the ability to detect some patterns in harmful weather conditions, we are beginning to fool ourselves into thinking that control of our world is somewhere in our grasp.

When we read biblical metaphors about scattering seed and trusting that God will provide the rest, we laugh. We can make irrigation ditches, choose the best seed for the soil conditions, and the latest news is that we can genetically engineer pigs so that the fat in pork as healthy for human consumption as the Omega -3 fatty compounds in salmon. There seems to be no stopping us now. Agricultural metaphors are well off our radar.

The miracle of the tiny mustard seed growing into “the greatest of all shrubs” or the harvest being about God’s work, not our own seems ridiculous. The kingdom of God is being outsourced to the capabilities of the human mind. But then again, Jesus says that the parables will be confusing to the masses. He may need to explain them to his disciples in private. We don’t really want to believe that our fate is up to God, not us. We don’t want to believe that God’s rule which seems insignificant in many ways is actually the guiding force of our universe. We want our free will and we want it now. Will Willamon says that this is particularly a problem for pastors. He says, “From time to time we get the erroneous impression that God wants us to be builders of the church rather than custodians of what God builds. So we work long hours – visit, plan, preach – because, if we don’t make the church, who will? In our better moments,” he adds, “we know better. The church exists because God wills it to be.” (What’s Right with the Church, p. 49)

Not only pastors, but everyone who desires to be faithful to God can do well by Willimon’s words and relax a little bit. Working long hours, doing everything “right,” getting good grades, making the promotion, all of those things are the extraneous things – not the most important things like we make them out to be. We aren’t the builders of this world; we are the custodians, the trash collectors, the nursery workers, the attendants and care givers. We can only see to what God is already doing.

I don’t know if it is God’s will that bacon should be as healthy as salmon. I get a bit jittery when we tinker with certain things. Since none of us made a pig or called a fish to swim – I don’t know how well we truly understand all the parts that go into those creatures. We may more than I realize. God certainly has given us the intellectual understanding and the drive we need to continue to propagate our species and make our living conditions ever more comfortable. What’s playing God and what’s using what God has given us is becoming a much blurrier line in our time and place. Perhaps that’s why we turn to the fantasy world of movies to speculate on how it might turn out.

In my limited experience with limited human beings, my inclination is toward the understanding that we are not in control, never have been. Predestination works for me because I think that God has plans for my life that I don’t yet know and couldn’t articulate if I did. I don’t really think that God is simply pulling the puppet strings on puppet people; however, thinking that we have free will to do anything at anytime doesn’t make much sense to me either. There are too many other mitigating factors, the least of which being the other people I bump into along my journey. In fact, that’s my grand scheme for doing ministry – to allow those bumps to be the determining factors for where and how I spend the bulk of my time. Sure there are sermons to write and church newsletters to print, and all those routine kinds of things, but the ministry that is truly ministry is what happens in our interactions with one another, be that at worship, in a Session meeting, or at someone’s side in the hospital. That work of ministry is not in any way, shape or form limited to ordained clergy either. You too are to pay attention to the bumps. Learn to forgive, to reach out, or to hear God’s call to invite a choir from the Congo to sing here or to visit so-and-so in the hospital.

God put us together for a purpose – maybe for more than one purpose – but so we would in effect see that we are not in control. We learn that first in our families, and grow more into that knowledge in communities, this in particular being the community of the church, the Body of Christ in the world. The more we realize that God is in control of our common future, the more we can relax and be ourselves in the bigger picture. We won’t, we can’t make it happen. Only God builds. We are the crew in the wings.

That should really bring us greater comfort, not greater anxiety. God being in control makes my mistakes feel smaller and amplifies all the good we can do together. God will work it out – God’s job, not mine – my job is to enjoy this life and see it as the gift it is. Not a bad deal in my opinion. So who’s holding the remote? Not me, and I’m glad for that.

Amen.