Isaiah 43.16-23                                                                                           25 March 2007

“MERE COINCIDENCE OR SHEER PROVIDENCE?”

I have wanted to share a story since I arrived here. Finally, today Isaiah provided me a text on God’s gracious intrusions among us that empowers me to share it.  
Back in the mid-90s, when I was a pastor in Colorado, our youth minister Demory was called to divinity school.  Demory also did daytime childcare for my two daughters, Greta and Lise, during the week. A west coast seminary wooed her with a full scholarship. But this school was not a favorite of the associate pastor and I.  We urged her to consider another seminary. Grudgingly, Demory agreed to visit Duke Divinity School. Our church covered her travel costs. I arranged for an interview with Stanley Hauerwas, the brilliant, provocative, irascible professor.

So Demory flew off to North Carolina and sat with the formidable Mr. Hauerwas.  He made no attempt to charm and affirm; rather he challenged and provoked her.  She came away from that interview saying to herself, “Why am I here?  I don’t need this abuse.  I don’t even want to go here.  And God knows I can’t afford it.”

Demory wanted to turn and walk, but she felt guilty. We had paid her expenses. Resisting the urge to flee, she decided to go through the motions out of respect.  Demory sat in the financial aid office learning how little scholarship money was available at Duke and how poor it would make her. Then the phone rang and the financial aid officer picked it up.  Demory couldn’t help but overhear.  “You’re at the Pacific School of Religion?  You want to transfer to Duke Divinity?”  Well, that got her attention, PSR was her other seminary choice.  “So what is your name?” the financial officer asked.  “Uh huh, yes. Greta Rosenberger.  I’ve got it, thanks.”

Demory froze in her chair.  Greta Rosenberger.  Not an everyday, average name, is it?  She didn’t know what it meant as she heard the name of the girl for whom she sat, whose daddy sent her there.  She felt God was trying to get her attention and yielded herself to God. Of course, the real Greta Rosenberger talking to that financial aid officer was the daughter of our own Peter and Connie Rosenberger.

From that moment, Demory perceived everything differently.  She lunched with Divinity students and felt a strong gravitational pull. Suddenly, she saw Duke as a special opportunity.  She did an about-face and attended Duke despite the tens of thousands of dollars of debt. Not only this, that same mean, insensitive Prof. Stanley Hauerwas preached at Demory’s wedding as she married one of his teaching assistants.  All on a chance name during a throwaway conversation. She is today an ordained Episcopal priest with her family in central Pennsylvania.

So what do you think?  Was the mention of a familiar name in that far-off place mere coincidence?   Did my daughter’s and Peter and Connie’s daughter’s name haphazardly and randomly rise up? That’s not how it felt to Demory. Weary and disaffected, the mention of my daughter’s name came to her like a lightning bolt. 
It felt like that name came to her from a consciousness beyond her own thinking.

I find it odd that we label moments like this coincidence. The dictionary defines coincidence as “an accidental sequence of events that appear to have a causal relationship.”  We casually toss away some of the most remarkable moments of life, saying, “Well, that was merely a coincidence.” Anyone else find that strange?

It is odd how the modern scientific world insists that we conceive of life as a series of random, pointless, accidents. I have no argument with the Big Boom theory or Darwin’s evolution.  But fact-based theories barely scratch the surface of deep mysteries beyond the statistics of cause and effect.  And to wave off that wondrous reality of God’s mysterious guiding, directing, and purposefulness that makes up the twists and turns of our lives only leaves one cold, empty universe. 

Last week I was reminded of this at our new member gathering.  A couple uniting with us on Palm Sunday, David Olsen and Beverly Younger, told their story in turn as we made our circle of introductions.  A few years ago Beverly was with the moose and bear in northern Minnesota grieving the loss of her husband.

Beverly’s daughter bid her to put her Minnesota home on the market. She had found a cottage rental on the Cape.  But things were uncertain.  Should Beverly accept the crummy offer on her north woods home?  What am I supposed to do?  She felt led not to accept the offer and a much better offer came that also bought all of her furniture and effects: just precisely the result that she was praying for.  “The Lord is looking out for me,” Beverly explained.  “God keeps bailing me out.”

But life is never simple and straightforward.  That Cape cottage and three other promising places fell through. Still, Beverly and her dog Max packed their U-Haul and moved here without housing or a job. She was on the waiting list for a cottage at the old Methodist campground off Willow Street. At 8:45 pm one night a cottage opened and Beverly bought it sight unseen.  It had no heat, almost no kitchen, and a Pleistocene fridge. She had no experience with tough fixer-uppers.  But she felt led to venture into this unknown project. She bought and renovated the place. “How did I trust God to do this?” she asked aloud of our new members.

Beverly’s son sent her to his preferred bank. She made a wrong turn and went to the wrong bank. She opened an account and they offered her a job on the spot where she worked happily for two years.  She planned to stay here but a year. A year ago last February a coworker twisted her arm into dinner at the Olde Yarmouth Inn.  She was tired, wanted to skip it, but went anyway. The place was full so they had to eat at the bar.  Only one seat was open in the entire place.  The last thing she wanted was a man.  The man who came and sat next to her was her David. “For once in my life,” she said, ”I listened and waited on the Lord.” 

In a sense, it is a plain story, much like our testing and travail through transition. But as divine agency infuses routine events with tender and fugitive impulses to come here and not stay there, to do this and not that, it all becomes remarkable.
 

So what do you think? Is it all mere coincidence? Science can explain anything with simple cause and effect and synapses firing in our brains and the release of hormones (that would cover the romance episode at the inn).  Frankly, science does well at this: I for one wouldn’t be here today but for science’s answer to my double pneumonia in first grade. But is there also room for God’s providence?

Frankly, few places exist where stories like Beverly’s can be shared, at least from her take on reality, how she sees forces at work for good with all who trust God.   I can’t tell you how often people come to me looking furtively over their shoulders like film actors in the days of McCarthyism.  “You are going to think this is crazy,” they invariably whisper.  Then they tell of the unlikely thought that came out of no where and changed their lives; the person who they hadn’t seen for years who made a transforming claim upon them; the course of action that came out of the blue and they can’t get rid of it no matter how hard they try; they cannot shake it.

Most people feel pressured to push no deeper than coincidence to explain life. Most who dare to speak of God interceding for them are made to feel foolish. And that is why they come to pastors like me to find sanctuary and safe space for talking about what God is up to in their lives. Really, it is as though we have been carefully propagandized to describe what comes into our minds as exclusively coincidental, accidental, and random. Perceive a course of events as intentional, purposeful, designed as a gift, and people will wink about you behind your back.  And to think that some bright people only consider religion narrow and dogmatic. 

Here’s one last go at this.  Last Monday Bob David did a program for SERVAC on celestial navigation.  Bob really knows his stuff.  Last Sunday at Coffee Hour he explained to me an impressive astronomical event in the years 3 BC to 2 BC.  Science knows all about this.  Back then, Venus, Saturn and Jupiter were all so close to one another as to appear as single bright star outshining all the others.  This climaxed in the summer of 2 BC when Jupiter and Saturn were so close as to be more than four times brighter than the next brightest star in the sky, Sirius.
So what do you think? Was this mere coincidence waiting to be noticed by magi? Or was it the sheer providence of proclaiming a ruler and king unlike any other?

As for me, I cast my lot with Isaiah, who looked at the sagging fortunes of the people of Israel and perceived God doing a new long overdue thing among them.

Isaiah wrote for a people with no way out if there isn’t a God who cares and acts. His prophecy is suffused with the notion that our hope in life, in death, in life beyond death, is that God lives and acts, creates and intervenes, intrudes and takes sides.  In taking sides, I mean more Jewish slaves over Pharoah than the Boston Red Sox over the Yankees. Then again, the Yankees are the evil empire.

So what does all this mean to us?  Notice and ponder the weird stuff in your life. Don’t just dismiss it out of hand when a familiar name is mentioned in a far-off place, when doors mysteriously open and close to bring you to a place you have always wanted to be, when stars appear in the sky signaling heavenly events.

For those of us convinced that the Word was made flesh to dwell among us, and the Son of God has intruded into our landscape, nothing can be mere anymore.
Revelation is a gift of God that’s constantly speaking to us, full of grace and truth. “Behold, I’m doing a new thing,” says our God.  Lord, give us the eyes to see it.  Amen.

Lord, there is so much wrong with us and our world.  We have so often failed to walk in your way laid out before us and to share your light.  Lord, we have sinned against you, refusing to hear your commands and obey expressions of your will.  Come to us, Lord, and do a new thing.  Keep creating us, forgiving us, transform-ing us, intruding upon us despite our lack of a welcome, interceding on our behalf even as we fail to render unto you thanks and praise.  Take the flattened world of our cults of cold hard fact and explode them with gracious and glorious possibility.