Biography
Bruce W. Thielemann, a native of Pennsylvania, is preacher, teacher, and counselor to the Grove City College community, Grove City, Pennsylvania. He is a former pastor of the Glendale (California) Presbyterian Church, which under his leadership became "One of the alivest churches in the Southland." (Los Angeles Times) [Biographical information is correct as of the broadcast date noted above.]

"A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Heaven"
I'd like to think with you tonight about some of those funny things that happen on the way to heaven. I don't mean funny “ha, ha.” I mean those strange and unusual circumstances which God weaves into the fabric of our lives as we move toward him. It seems to me that God makes his will known to us in three different ways.

First, he speaks to us in response to our prayers. Now most of us do not hear an audible voice from God when we pray. In fact I will confess to you that I'm a bit leery about people who claim to hear God speak to them. It seems to me that what God says to them always suits their own prejudices too perfectly.

We had a young lady on our campus this last semester who broke all of the college rules and her parents' hearts, and did it all she said because God had told her so to do. Now I don't think that God speaks to us in that way, but he does suggest his will to us, gently and subtly, and we confirm that will when we move to the second way in which he shows himself.

And that is through the study of scripture. Now the operative word in that sentence is the word "study." The Bible is not a magic book, though some people treat it that way. Did you hear about the fellow whose way of discovering God's will was to simply turn the pages of the Bible and stick in his finger and whatever verse came up he assumed to be God's will for him? One day he was doing that and he stuck in his finger, and the verse read, "And Judas went out and hanged himself." So he thought he better try again. He turned a few more pages, stuck in his finger, and the verse read, "Go, and do thou likewise." He didn't like that either so he tried one more time, pushing a few more pages and then sticking in his finger and the verse read,

"What you are about to do, do quickly."

The Bible is not to be treated like a magic book. It is to be studied. When we are concerned about knowing God's will in some particular regard, we should study passages which are germaine to such concern. And when we add to that our prayers, and then the third way of knowing God's will, I think his will becomes clear.

That third way, well, it's those funny things that happen on the way to heaven.

Now I know there are those who say that God cannot be so involved with each individual life that his will is made known in these little events. But I beg to differ with such ones. It seems they come from either one of two perspectives. They suggest on the one hand that God is too great to be concerned about little lives like ours. I think these people need to remember that great things are usually the result of the sum total of little things. Significant events in history don't happen most often out of the blue but rather they come as the result of many small things which preceded them.

We are very proud, as a people, of the successful flights of the Columbia space shuttle, and we have right to be. But do you remember how many times in the testing of that spaceship that we had to postpone the first shot. Why? Because of some small tiles on the outside of the spaceship which fell off when they were heated in the process of reentry. A little thing stopped the great thing from occurring. Great things are made up of little things. Therefore, the great God is concerned about our little lives, if you will, because it is the movement of those lives together that cause history to come to pass.

Now, other people say that God cannot be involved in our lives, because he's just not big enough to handle all of our problems. I can't imagine that either. You know as you sit and listen to me now, you have more cells in your brain than there are people living on the face of the earth. And you are able to control those cells in a very remarkable way. Just so the great God, the maker and the sustainer of everything that is, can move in the lives of every one of us for we are part of that which he has made.

So I believe God does involve himself in our experiences and gives us these funny little things that happen on the way to heaven. And I think there is Biblical evidence for this.

Abraham is concerned about finding a wife for his son, Isaac. He sends him on a journey, and funny thing: Isaac meets Rebecca at a well.

Saul is very concerned about the future of his little nation of Israel and he goes off hunting some lost donkeys one day, and funny thing: he meets Samuel, who anoints him the first king of Israel.

Matthew was sitting one day in his tax table. Now Matthew was an interesting man. He was always able to balance his accounts, but somehow he was never able to balance his life. And Jesus came by and stacked up all Matthew's coins and then with one finger knocked them over and said, "Follow me." And funny thing: at just that moment Matthew was ready to follow.

Well, here is Jesus' concern with the news that his cousin, John the Baptist, has been arrested, and he is walking by the Sea of Galilee, thinking of this, and funny thing: he meets two men, Peter and Andrew, who had first been introduced to him by John the Baptist sometime before. I suppose those two young fishermen were thinking about John also for he was their friend. And Jesus comes up to Peter and Andrew and he says to them, "Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men." And funny thing: at just that moment they were prepared to follow him.

See, I think that God is moving in the events of our lives. No event is too small to be outside of his concern, and we need to be alert to his movement. You see, it doesn't happen with a blare of trumpets, and a roll of drums, and surging violins, and spotlights. Not at all. It often comes silently, subtly, almost secretly, and we must be intent in order to see it when it comes.

Robert Hillyer has a little short story about a man who was paralyzed from his waist down. He spent his life in a wheelchair. And he filled his days with the keeping of journals. Little items were recorded in the journals. How far the forsythia was out today when compared with yesterday. What Mrs. Kranz gave to her son when he returned from the armed services. Things of that kind. And someone asked him once why it was that he kept these journals, and he replied, "It's just to let God know that I'm paying attention."

That's what we need to do, to pay attention to these things that God weaves into the course of our days. For example, have you learned to discover the sacramental in the incidental?

It was back in 1754 that Horace Walpole, the English scholar, coined the word "serendipity." There was an old Arabic legend about The Three Princes of Serendip. Serendip is the Arabic word for Ceylon. We call it Sri Lanka today. This story concerned three princes who set off on a journey. They never got where they were going. But on the way they discovered many remarkable things. So Walpole came up with the word "serendipity," which means finding valuable or remarkable things not sought for.

We should be looking for those kinds of things. I think, for example, of a man I know who was riding in an airplane, and leafing through the pages of a magazine, he came across an article on the world's hungry. At that moment he was ready to read that article, and on reading it, his whole life's perspective was changed. He gave himself to a ministry to the world's hungry. And I don't know of a single human being who is doing more for the world's hungry today than that man.

Or I think of a woman who was driving home in Pittsburgh one night. Her car radio was on, and she heard a sermon. It touched her so much that she pulled over to the side of the road in order to listen to it with total concentration. When the broadcast was over, and she was driving home, she thought to herself, radio ministry is terribly important. I don't know of a single person in America today who is doing more to support and encourage radio ministry than this woman.

These were individuals, you see, who had their wings spread, ready to catch the winds of God. That's the mark of a Christian: going through life with your wings spread.

There is a novel called Samson's Choice, about a man who died and goes to hell and it is so much like earth that he doesn't believe it is hell. And the devil was trying to convince him of this, and the devil said, "No one here wants to climb. No friend of mine has ever asked for wings."

God's people keep their wings spread, alert, intent, looking for the movement of the spirit in their experience.

Those of you who are fans of country music will recognize the name of Lonzo Green, a great country singer of a few years ago. Once Lonzo Green was visiting some of his family in Tennessee and his little nephew, Jimmy, was there and when he went to school the next day, he told all of his school friends that his famous Uncle Lonzo was in town. One of the boys in Jimmy's class came up and said, "Do you think your Uncle Lonzo would be willing to teach me how to tune my guitar?"

So Jimmy went home and asked his Uncle Lonzo if he would do it, and Uncle Lonzo said, "Certainly, bring him over to the house and I will teach him."

Jimmy said, "Well, Uncle Lonzo, my parents won't allow me to bring him into the house. You see, he's white trash." That phrase and attitude was quite common then.

So Uncle Lonzo said, "If you can't bring him into the house, at least bring him to the sidewalk in front of the house, and I will meet with the boy there."

During the day Lonzo Green tried to change the family's mind without success, and so at five o'clock that afternoon, he met the boy on the sidewalk. He was a nice looking young man, brown hair, very soft drawl to his voice. He had an old guitar fashioned with a string around his neck. Lonzo Green taught him how to adjust the frets and tune the instrument, and then the boy said, "Thank you, sir," and turned to go.

Lonzo said, "No, come sit, and let's sing together." And they made good music there on the curb. For a long time.

And then the boy, recognizing what time it was, jumped up and said, "Oh, thank you so very much, but I promised my mother I'd be home, and I always keep my promises to my mother." And he was gone.

The boy was never welcomed into the house. But since that time, more than thirty years now, he has been welcomed into many homes. He has made more than thirty-three films, and sold over 400,000,000 phonograph records.

His name, of course, was Elvis Presley. And in the course of his life, Elvis Presley said on many occasions that one of the places he learned generosity and grace was from Lonzo Green.

Green, you see, was open to the movement of God's spirit. A young man had a need. He responded to that need.

We don't always know those moments. But I believe there are times when the very stars skip in their courses because they understand the greatness of what we do not understand.

If I may be very personal for a moment, I think there may be a time my friend when you will be reading a paragraph in a book or you'll hear a word spoken from the pulpit of your church or from this very desk. Perhaps it will be the question of a child. Maybe a job opportunity will come to you which is different than any you ever expected. Maybe it will be a face you see in a crowded room. But it will change your life if you will be sensitive to it. Watch for it. This is what the Japanese call Shibui, the art of discovering beauty in the unexpected.

I wonder also if you have ever thought about discovering the sacramental in the accidental, in the bard things, the difficult moments, the pains and the frustrations, the storms that come in life. You know, when a storm breaks upon you, there are really only two things you can do. You can pretend you're a rooster. That is, pull your wings in about you and try to hold on for dear life. Or you can be an eagle. An eagle spreads his wings and lets the winds carry him to heights he had never known before.

Arnold Toynbee, the most distinguished historian of our century, has said that civilization progresses because of the stimulus of blows. In other words, it is as we are battered and knocked about in life that we ofttimes make our greatest gains.

I don't understand much of the suffering and hardship of life. As you can see, I have a weight problem. I don't understand, for example, how it is that God puts calories in ice cream when he could just as well have put them in spinach. And he could have put vitamins, not in spinach, but in ice cream. I don't pretend to understand that. And I don't understand much of the suffering, and the evil, and the hardship that is part of life. But I have discovered this: that many times it is these moments of pain and difficulty which challenge us to do better than we have ever done before.

I was in a camp in Michigan last July, and the director of the camp was taking us for a stroll around the camp one day, and he took us into every nook and cranny. At one point we were climbing up a very steep slope and the path was full of rocks and bumps, and one of the people in the group said, "Good heavens, man, why don't you take away these rocks and these bumps?"

And the guide, the director, said, "It's the rocks and the bumps that you climb on."

So it is. Many times the bumps in life are what we find help us in our climbing.

Thomas Edison set up his first laboratory when he was an attendant on a railroad. It was in a freight car. The car lurched one day, chemicals were thrown on the floor, the car caught fire, and Edison was fired from his job. But, it was after he lost that job that he went on to begin his career as an inventor, the greatest inventor in the history of our country.

Or, one thinks of Abraham Lincoln. He failed at just about everything he started out with. He failed as a postmaster. He failed as a storekeeper. Went into the military as a colonel and came out a lieutenant. He failed at just about everything. Even his first few political campaigns were not successes. But out of those bumps, those hardships, came a tenacity, a compassion and understanding that made him just the man necessary to hold this country together when it had to be held together.

Or one thinks of the great English surgeon whose work as a physician was world-renowned, A. J. Cronin. Then he developed heart disease, and as a result of that heart disease could not practice medicine any more. And in despair and frustration, he sat down and began to write. You perhaps have read some of the marvelous works that have come from his pen: The Keys of the Kingdom, The Citadel, and other masterpieces.

What about James Whistler? James Whistler wanted to be a military man; went to West Point. He often said that if silicone had been a gas, he would have been a major general. Silicone is not a gas and he flunked out of West Point and went on to take up a career in painting. And no one who has ever painted has matched his skill with blacks and grays. Do you remember his famous work entitled "Study in Black and Gray?" Perhaps you know it by its more common name, "Whistler's Mother." It came forth you see out of a time of storm and failure and despair.

I guess what I am saying can be summed like this. If some night an angel were to visit you and ask you what things in your life have taught you the most, if you were honest, and of course you would have to be honest with an angel, I think you'd have to admit that some of the moments of greatest trauma and difficulty bad been your best teachers. Those funny things that happen on the way to heaven.

Please bear in mind, I am not saying that all events are God's will. And I am not saying that every event has some kind of secret meaning. And I am not saying that we are to blindly accept all of the events of our lives and the circumstances of our days. What I am suggesting is that we need to be alert to, sensitive to, God's will in our experience, examining the events of our days, to discover what God is saying to us in them, This means that we must never resent life. There must never be rigidity or inflexibility in us.

If the Sears Tower did not move in the wind, if it were not flexible, it would fall. Just so we must have in us always a flexibility. And there must be in us as well nothing of the attitude commonly called stoicism. We are not just to endure life or to tolerate it, to go through life like a turtle.

James Conant, the president of Harvard, said, "Even a turtle wouldn't make any progress until he is ready to stick his neck out."

So we've got to be ready to involve ourselves and risk ourselves to creatively use the things that God brings into our lives.

I was in Cody, Wyoming, two summers ago, and on the front page of the newspaper were two stories. They both started the same, but they both ended quite differently. The first story concerned a man whose girl had jilted him, and he committed suicide. The second story concerned a man whose girl had jilted him and he wrote a song about it and sold it for $20,000. That's the difference that being sensitive to God's opportunity can make.

They called Jesus a drunkard, and he took the story of a young drunkard and made out of it the beauty of the parable of the prodigal son.

They nailed him to a cross, and he turned that terrible instrument of death into a beautiful thing that we hang around little children's necks.

Many Christians turn courthouses into churches and prisons into pulpits. This was not a matter of luck. It was a matter of being sensitive to the winds of God. There is uncertainty, there is hardship and difficulty, there is insecurity in life, but God is in life also. There is mystery, there is suffering, there is chance, and there is uncontrollable change, but there is God also. And we must be sensitive to his will to know the beauty of his power.

One day, three husky young guys by the side of Galilee were approached by Jesus. Their muscles bulged as they pulled in those wet nets full of their flippy, finny catch. And Jesus said, "Follow me."

And they followed him, and things were never the same for them or for the world. And I think there were times around the campfire in the coming years when they said one to another, "Do you remember that day the Master came and called us? Funny thing that just at that moment we were ready to go."

I believe those kinds of funny things are still happening to all of us on the way to heaven.

Pray with me: Oh, God, help us discover your will in our lives to the glory of your name. Amen.