The Illusion that Our World is Under Our Control

First Sunday in Advent – Nov. 29, 2009

Luke 21: 25-36 – Pastor Deborah Birkeland

Alice was proud of the life she had worked so hard to build. At age 50, she had tenure as a cognitive psychology professor at Harvard and was a world renowned expert in linguistics who traveled far and wide to share her latest research and insights with eager audiences of serious science. Her husband, John was also a successful Harvard professor, and their three grown children were following paths that made their parents proud. Life had rhythm and predictability. Alice settled into her 50th year confident and in control, and then one day, she literally lost herself.

The book, ìStill Alice,î is a moving and vivid story of a journey terribly interrupted by the early on-set of Alzheimer’s disease. It is a book that is both compelling and disturbing to read, for it takes the reader into Alice’s degenerating mind and her terrifying experience of losing control over her world day after day. Yet the beauty in this story lies in what she and her family discover, that love is a greater gift than control and functionality. Love is the stuff of life that cannot be controlled, it must come within the jarring interruption.

When I saw the texts for this First Sunday in Advent, with all their apocalyptic, the earth is about to come apart language, I sighed. This year, 2009, has not been particularly easy given the challenges of economic stress, endless war, H1N1 hovering over our children and ponsi schemes ad nauseum. Collectively, 2009 has felt out of control. And for some of us, there have been an additional jarring interruption of a diagnosis, a heart attack, a surgery or hospitalization that alters our life and changes everything, just like it did for Alice. Some of us are in the midst of it and mourning the loss of a job, the death of a loved one, or the pain of a relationship or marriage dismantled before our eyes. Wouldn’t it be nice to settle into the advent season with less bad news and disruption? Couldn’t we focus on the Christ Child under warm lights of Christmas joy and avoid the frenzy of surviving the countdown of 25 more shopping days before us?

The illusion that our world is under our control is a hard illusion to break. It hurts and the light is harsh as it shines in to expose our naivete. The Church is not exempt from disruption, we have certainly learned that this year! Yet, the Church specializes in continuity. People come to worship seeking refuge from the trials and turbulance of human life and so literally have an ìOrder of Worship,’ of liturgy, prayers, the Word and the means of God’s Grace to sustain and encourage one another in this journey. That’s an important function of our fellowship together as God’s people, yet the truth is, my friends, Advent is not about any of those things. Advent speaks of a God who steps up to the plate of human despair, steps in to the dark and dreary cold, and interrupts the flow of human history. The apocalyptic, revealing end times that Jesus describes in today’s Gospel contain some fearsome, cataclysmic events, and yet Jesus speaks of this experience as a time of redemption. How can it be that the ending of the world, the destruction of the status quo, is also a time of hopeful redemption? Yet such is the world we live in. God interrupts our illusion of control in order to intervene.

When I was a young girl, living on a farm in northern Minnesota, I often found myself caught up in the midst of the very stuff of life that was way beyond what a child probably was capable of handling. Yet, because I was the oldest, and my father needed to rely upon me to help him when there was no one else to help, I had to step up to the plate and do things I did not dream possible. One cold, spring night, my dad jarred me awake and beckoned me out of my warm bed to join him in the barn. He had been up all night with a cow that was in labor and it had turned into a nightmare. The calf was too big for the mother cow to deliver and all night the poor thing had bellowed and struggled. My dad had tried everything he could think of to help her in the delivery, but she was quickly losing strength and it was only a matter of time before both mother and calf would be dead. A vet could not get there in time, and short of putting her down, my dad had only one last intervention strategy. He needed someone with small hands and arms to reach inside and put a rope around the calves hooves and nose so he could use a rope and tackle to pull the calf out himself. So, in the middle of that dark night, I was gathered into my father’s arms and jarred awake so that I could join him in the barn. It is hard to describe the fear of a child put into a situation that they have no understanding. I didn’t understand much about the ìbirds and the bees,î as my parent’s called it. I didn’t understand the process of birth or the anguish if an animal overcome with agonizing pain. All I knew was this was scary and yucky, and I didn’t belong in such a terrifying place! Yet my father reassured me that our intervention was the very last chance this cow and her calf had for life, and that if I didn’t put my arm deep into her body and secure the rope to those bony legs and slippery nose so that he could pull out the baby calf, all would be lost.

There are moments one never forgets, and this was one of them for me. I can still hear the terrible bellowing; I can almost feel the slimy, bloody tissue; I can still experience the wonder of realizing that what I was touching was a life about to be born and dependent upon my intervention as a deliverer of the rope of mercy. Somehow, my little hands found the legs and the calf’s little head and under my dad’s guidance, I secured the rope in the right places. Then together, my father and I pulled and pulled, and that poor mother cow bellowed and bellowed, and slowly, that baby calf finally slipped through the birth canal and came out into the light and flopped on the straw. I was absolutely mesmerized by that experience. Here was the very stuff of life, a new baby calf covered in mucus and blood, yet breathing it’s first breath and struggling to move onto unsteady legs. Here was a mother, weak beyond exhaustion who found the strength to reach down and lick her calf clean. Here was a moment to savor with my father when together, we entered into the turmoil and chaos of life and death, and pulled a helpless, dying creature into a new beginning.

Isn’t it amazing how we think of God? We think of God as the divine source of order and stability. In the first two chapters of the Book of Genesis, the world begins out of a formless void. There is chaos, confusion and disorder. And then God speaks and there is order: night and day; sky and earth; land and sea. There is a progression of seasons, seedtime and harvest. Yet a closer reading of that text reveals another reality. God speaks and there is LIGHT! Not orderÖbut light that bursts into the darkness. Presumably, darkness can be orderly until light bursts on the scene. It is the light that reveals just how disorderly the darkness really is. So maybe the real meaning of creation is that God interrupts and intervenes. The One who sees our struggles, our chaos, our dying condition hidden in the darkness of sin and sorrow, intervenes so that life can come out of the death throes of human despair. This is the very stuff of Advent. In the cold, dark, terrifying world that bubbles and boils with turmoil, a Savior comes. Redemption is near.

Emmanual, God with Us, is God’s grand, gracious interruption. For our world to fundamentally change, something has to fall from the sky. God has to come and His will has to be done. Love has to break in and make new life visible. Aren’t there times, my friends, when it is as if God interrupts our orderly, controlled lives in order to make room for him to come in and make new? Advent points to such moments.

Someone said that the main difference between a living, true God and a dead, false God is that a dead, false God will NEVER surprise you! So maybe, the best news we can share this morning is that we worship the Living God who came, and comes, and will come again, and again and again. We worship the Living God of Love that will not leave us in our darkness and turmoil, but who will reach in and bring salvation to pull us through this life. Amen.

GUIDED BY THE GOSPEL: GATHERING • GROWING • GIVING