Gospel reading: Matthew 4.1-11
(Click HERE for last Sunday's readings)
Yesterday I had a meeting in a downtown office building I had never been in before. My meeting was on the sixth floor so I stepped into the first elevator I found and pushed the 6. Unfortunately the elevator I was on serviced only the parking garage, so when the doors opened I realized that I had to go back down to floor one, and I might even have to ask for directions.
But the elevator stopped on floor two, and a friend stepped in. Actually she gasped, then laughed, then clasped a hand to her mouth, then stepped back out, then back in, and then teared up. "I was just taking a short walk during my break, and thinking that I needed to call you." She had had a difficult weekend and thought talking through things a bit might help. What are the odds?
She wondered whether this encounter was a "God thing."
My own theological hunches lean more toward serendipity than providence in such matters. At least since the time I realized that God apparently wasn't going to step in and stop my mother's multiple sclerosis, I have had a hard time believing that God nudges people onto elevators for our edification, but never quite gets around to doing away with real suffering. It's an old and noble question, definitive answers for which we're no closer to than Job.
Needing to know how and why and when God acts in our lives has been a preoccupation of mine for a long time. And it has been something of a red herring at times. I felt like God's action in the world needed to be comprehensible before I could trust it.
But whether I decided that God places me in elevators or leaves me entirely alone, my wonderings were all about me. I was the center of the universe, the point on which God did or did not focus. And what this perspective kept (and keeps) me from was enjoying the grace that I do stumble into. The answer to "What are the odds?" was always "Not very good."
Kathleen Norris wandered reluctantly into a church one All Saints' day. And there she heard the Beatitudes read, only moments after she had found them in the Gideon's Bible in her room at the Super-8. "I had found the right place after all," she said.
And that seems like a more life-giving way to imagine "God things" for me: finding the right place. Maybe our world is strewn with grace. We're stepping into it all the time. And when we have a moment in which we're certain that we've found one of those right places maybe such moments can be signs for us of all the times and places our lives will intersect with grace.
Lent is a time of paring down. And as we read of Jesus' temptations, grace seemed sparse there in the wilderness. But I wonder if Lent, and perhaps even times like those of Jesus in the wilderness are a clearing away of the clutter of our experiences so that we can watch those instances of grace reappear, one by one, here and there, over and over again. We watch grace reappear in the midst of life's pain and confusion to be sure. But it comes. Or we stumble onto it.
Soon enough we may find ourselves answering, "What are the odds?" with "Pretty good. I wonder what we'll stumble into next?"
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I guess being a lay person without a formal theological education, it is presumptuous of me to speak of “theological hunches”, but my “theological hunches” have always been in the direction of divine providence rather that serendipity.
The Monday before Thanksgiving, 1998, my mother was taken the emergency room with an unexplained pain. Twenty-four hours later she was taken to surgery for an aortic aneurysm. She lived for 23 days in the SICU, before dying of a hemorrhage. My sister and I learned how to pray together during those days. I don't suppose we had ever really done that, at least not like our mother's life depended on it.
I was raised on the Apostles Creed. In the church I grew up in the Apostle's Creed is said every Sunday. It opens with “I believe in God the Father almighty...” I always understood that to mean that God could do anything; create the world, save my mother, or nudge someone onto an elevator. To me that always meant that God was the center of the universe, and I am a speck in the vastness of creation.
There are many things I have never understood about what this says about God. Surely God did not mean for my mother to die a slow and painful death!
The month before my mother had her fatal incident, she and I had a talk that we had been needing to have for a long time. I guess you could call it “making amends.” One Sunday afternoon after lunch together, I felt moved to tell her some things I had never told her, to say I was sorry for some things that I had never said I was sorry for, and to get her forgiveness and to feel her love. We had a good cry together. I had no idea that in two months, she would be dead.
I like the word synchronicity for those seeming coincidences that take on special meaning in hindsight. The woman who stumbled into Scott in the elevator, my mother and I having an important talk just in time, Ann Young sitting behind me in the pew at Christ Church, are all examples for me of the way God works in my life. What are the chances?
I once heard Judy Dench recite Psalm 139 in a movie. I was moved more than I can really put into words right here. Those words of the Psalmist sum it all up for me. The story is not all about me. It's about God and me. My mother died a horrible death. God did not prevent it. But God did help me do something before she died for which I will always be very grateful. What are the chances? Pretty good, indeed.
I like the notion that divine providence is a reality that our freedom exists within. It takes away some of that old debate between freedom and predestination - a debate that has hardened as our understandings of each of those concepts has narrowed.
Trey's lovely story reminds me that grace keeps coming in the form of resurrection. Ultimately what we need is not a clear explanation of just how and why God 'acts.' We need new life to come out of life lost. And, as Trey reminded us, it does.
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