Fluke or Providence?

by Glen Wiberg

Now his brothers went to pasture their father’s flock near Shechem. And Israel said to Joseph, “Are not your brothers pasturing the flock at Shechem? Come, I will send you to them.” And he said to him, “Here I am.” So he said to him, “Go now, see if it is well with your brothers, and with the flock; and bring me word again.” So he sent him from the valley of Hebron, and he came to Shechem. And a man found him wandering in the fields; and the man asked him, “What are you seeking?” “I am seeking my brothers,” he said, “tell me, I pray you, where they are pasturing the flock.” And the man said, “They have gone away, for I heard them say, ‘Let us go to Dothan.’ ” So Joseph went after his brothers, and found them at Dothan. They saw him afar off, and before he came near to them they conspired against him to kill him.

Introduction

First, let’s do a little exercise in word study.

With help from my good friend Paul J. Larson, English Professor emeritus, I learned that a fluke is an accidentally successful stroke at billiards or pool; hence, any accidental advantage, an extraordinary stroke of luck, good or bad. What piqued my interest in the word was the comment of a colleague in the ministry who said that a person visited his church by a fluke, got converted, and joined. I said, “You mean by a fluke of the Holy Spirit?” Ted Johnson would call it “the Gospel of Fluke.”

By contrast, providence is a dense, weighty word speaking of a beneficent Deity. The word means, literally, “seeing beforehand,” referring to the power that sustains and guides human destiny. While full of mystery, God’s providence is the believer’s source of wonder and gratitude. And, believing in providence, we acknowledge a hand moving in the course of human affairs. Something known only to faith.

The text we have just read appears odd, if not trivial. I’ve never preached on it before, and I’ll wager you have never heard a sermon on it before — unless by some fluke for good or ill. But, ever since reading it some months before, it is a text that I have been unable to shake from my more sober moments of reflection. It has become almost confessional in my own journey.

I

The story begins with old Jacob, patriarch of the clan, sending his younger son Joseph on a mission to his brothers who were pasturing their flocks at Shechem. “Go and see if it is well with your brothers and their flock.” Literally, go and bring them shalom.

One wonders what is behind the old man’s request. Doesn’t he know the possible threat to Joseph, given the bragging dreams that have earned his brothers’ rage? Or could that be the very reason — that, as a father hoping for shalom within the family, he sends Joseph, bearing his father’s shalom, in the hope that it might touch them and bring about reconciliation? At any rate, Joseph does what his father asks, and goes looking for his brothers. When Joseph does not find them at Shechem, the text says that Joseph was found wandering in the fields by a man who asks him, “What are you seeking?”

Now that’s a bit of humanity in the male species that deserves at least a passing comment. The last thing I want to do when I’m lost or looking for a street or road in a strange place is to ask directions. Despite Jane’s gentle and sometimes not so gentle nudgings to stop and ask, I tend to want to trust my own instincts or finally, as a last resort, ask for help. So instead of asking for directions, Joseph is found wandering in the fields by this stranger who asks him, “What are you seeking?” The stranger seems to be avoiding any suggestion that he thinks Joseph might be lost.

And on this slender thread, the rest of the tale hangs. “Have you seen my brothers? Tell me, where are they pasturing their flocks?” And the man in the field says, “Oh yes, by the way, I did overhear them say something about going over to Dothan.” So, Joseph goes after his brothers and finds them. In the finding, the course of his life takes a dramatic turn, because of which, things will never be the same again.

You know the outcome. The brothers throw Joseph into a pit; and when some strangers who are traders happen by, they sell their brother, and take his technicolored coat stained with goat’s blood back to father Jacob — with the story that an animal had done him in, devoured him. So, another, larger drama begins.

What prompts the sermon, of course, is the man wandering in the fields. Who is he? What is he doing in the fields? On the surface, this man who lives in anonymity seems quite unnecessary to the plot of the story and its outcome. He is only an actor with a one-liner, who speaks his part and then drops out of the story. To have eliminated him from the story would not have changed the outcome. The story would have been the same.

Or would it have been the same? Was Joseph’s chance meeting with a man wandering in the fields fluke or providence?

II

Without settling too quickly for an answer, let’s take a look at something Sara Little says: “Everything is related to everything . . . and the specificities of life make a whole.” This is what ecology is all about; each part relates to the whole — which is why environmentalists worry about endangered species or the loss of rain forests or, in Minnesota, wetlands. This is why saving the spotted-owl in Oregon is necessary, because what happens to the smallest creature affects the whole.

This is also something I have discovered in reading Hebrew Bible — that no detail in a text is unimportant, nor is there such a thing as an isolated act. The rabbis have discussed in great detail this man wandering in the fields, just as New Testament scholars have pondered long and hard on the incident in Mark’s Gospel where a young man, who had nothing but a linen cloth about him and who was following Jesus, was seized by soldiers in Gethsemane. In managing to escape, he left his linen cloth behind and ran away naked into the night. Why these apparently inconsequential details in story-telling? How can they be said to be in any way driving a greater story?

It is just such little dramas that invite the question: fluke or providence?

Some of you who are older may remember a Saturday afternoon radio program, “Grand Central Station.” It began every week with a dramatic voice that named the trains sweeping out of the Hudson Valley into Grand Central and that described Grand Central Station as “a gigantic stage on which are played a thousand dramas daily.”

Our lives are like that. We play a thousand dramas daily, small pieces often unrecognized and unacknowledged. Life is full of contingencies leading us to ask, “What if . . . ?” What if Jacob had not sent Joseph on that fateful errand looking for his brothers? Or what if he had not met the man wandering in the fields and instead had given up looking and returned to the safety of home? What if traders had not come along when they did and paid a ransom for Joseph’s life and carried him away as a slave to Egypt?

Fluke or Providence?

Think of your own life — not just the big turning points but some of those so-called chance happenings — events trivial and incidental at the time but which turned out to have profound consequences. What if at a certain time and place you and your spouse had not met on a so-called blind date? Or what if you had gone to another school rather than North Park? [Or what if you had gone to North Park rather than another school?] What if I had not gone on internship to Oakland, California (which was out of sync with the seminary program) and had not enrolled at Berkeley Baptist Divinity School in a Greek course in which I was the only student — and, because I was the lone student, I was assigned to read Greek New Testament with a retired Danish Baptist pastor by the name of Nels Peterson in his home and in so doing my whole belief system was changed? I went to read Greek because I thought that it would be safe; instead my life was turned around. What if? So our lives are lived out in many small, disordered dramas full of contingencies.

A wild card in the deck or something in the plan?

III

Without jumping to conclusions (we need a certain humility and reverence that comes from not knowing — “for we walk by faith and not by sight”), I would like to suggest a couple of possibilities.

1) The role of the stranger in biblical narrative, those who remain anonymous, often drives the larger story. Some of the most important people in the Bible remain nameless. They may have only one function, one moment, one task. A messenger who does not know that she is a messenger. The Hebrew designation for the man in the field is simply ish — someone. And yet, as Rabbi Lawrence Kushner says, were it not for this unnamed someone in the program, this someone who has a single message, a word to deliver, the children of Israel would never have stayed in Egypt, never have been freed, never have crossed the sea, never have come into being as a people.

And then, Rabbi Kushner adds, we are only someone. Ordinary people who go about our tasks in holy anonymity, often unknown even to ourselves. With only a word spoken as this someone spoke it in the empty fields of Shechem: “Oh yes, by the way, I did overhear them saying, ‘Let us go over to Dothan.’ ” Just one line. That’s all. Yet, if the word had not been there, it would not be the way it is now, and we would not be the same as we are now. You have a word that only you can speak; a message only you can deliver; a song only you can sing; a task only you can do. God puts you where God needs you, and someday you will understand.

2) And that’s the other possibility. Where we happen to be right now, or what we happen to be doing right now is hard to fit into any larger, more visible drama. It takes a larger, wide-angle lens. Often we think we are doing one thing, but later discover it serves some other, larger purpose. This is what Joseph discovers toward the end of the story when he has become ruler of all Egypt. Meeting his brothers years later, Joseph reflects on the plot of his brothers who threw him into a pit and sold him into slavery, and he says to them: “See, now it was not you who sent me here, but God.” Looking through the larger lens, he realizes that this is the way things were meant to be from the beginning. The smaller, odd-fitting pieces of the drama, which were anything but neat or obvious or even, were flowing toward the central narrative, the drama of salvation.

I would like to share a few of the odd, uneven pieces in my life that raise the question of my sermon. Watching our son Carl die by inches at age 27 has been without doubt the most serious assault on our faith that we have encountered. If that death is God’s will, I do not understand it. But accepting it, we have gone on with our lives and I have done God’s work as best I know how. Looking through a larger lens, however, Jane and I have been given a peek behind the curtain now and again, hints of providence however fleeting.

When Carl went into a coma, he was taken to the hospital where he had been previously hospitalized and where his doctor practiced. But because the nurses were on strike, he was taken on to the Hennepin County Hospital where most of the city’s charity cases are taken. Like the man in the fields, the doctor assigned to Carl’s case was a young doctor doing his residency, a stranger to us, but not for long. Dr. John Rieke was a Christian who, during those ten awful days, became Christ to us. Was meeting this stranger a fluke, a quirk, a coincidence, or providence?

When Carl died, Dr. Rieke attended his funeral and, shortly after, we entertained him and his wife in our home and became good friends. Meeting Dr. Rieke’s wife further heightened the question. Because she has maintained her maiden name, Jean Robertson, she was as stunned as we were to discover that she and Carl’s wife Krista had been working side by side at the same place. Though she knew all about Carl’s illness, she had no idea that this was her husband’s patient.

Fluke or providence?

When Dr. Rieke continued his education in California, specializing in oncology, and later moved to Seattle and the famous cancer hospital there, we learned from him that one of his patients was Phil Larson, a young man about Carl’s age, who was married to Debbie Metcalf (of the missionary family), who during several years of our North Park days was our daughter Sarah’s close friend. When Phil died of cancer, Dr. Rieke, not a Covenanter, was asked to deliver a tribute to Phil at First Covenant Church of Seattle. He called to tell me that Phil had died, and he said again that being Carl’s doctor had been a turning point in his life as a physician, especially in dealing with death and dying.

A fluke or providence?

I think it was Frederick Buechner who said that “a coincidence is God’s way of remaining anonymous, or it can remain a coincidence.” What do you think?

THE GRASS WITHERS AND THE FLOWER FADES, BUT THE WORD OF GOD ABIDES FOREVER.