The Limits of Control

The scriptures referred to are Isaiah 64:1-9, Psalm 80:1-7, 17-19, 1 Corinthians 1:3-9 and Mark 13:24-37.

Remember Y2K? Electronic computers were a creation of the 20^th century and so the programs that were written were made for the years that began with 19. In most cases, the programmers omitted the 19 and the year was designated by its last 2 digits. As the millennium approached, people in the computing industry realized that many programs were not equipped to recognize what to do with the year 2000 and beyond. They feared the programs would read the year as 1900 and may stop working. There were articles and even books written about how, in a world largely run by computers, the electrical grid, our utilities and many of the basic technologies we rely on would cease to be functional, plunging the civilized world into a literal Dark Ages.

When January 1, 2000 came and went and we were not living in a post-apocalyptic hellscape, many people thought the furor was over nothing at all. But the people in the industry did not. They knew that the warnings were true and that they had caused them to work to fix the problem in all the software programs and avert the predicted catastrophe. And I knew it, too.

It was either 1996 or 97, when, as the production director for our local radio station, I noticed something disturbing. It was the evening before Thanksgiving and I was checking that the commercials which restaurants were running for the holiday would automatically stop after that day and their new ads begin playing. Few of them would. For some weird reason what we in radio called the “kill date,” the day to stop playing a commercial, for all of the new ads had reverted to the same day in 1983! This was not something that the computer would let you do manually. You had to enter a date in the future. Ads that would go through Christmas would play but generic ads scheduled to go for a year into the future wouldn't. Playing around I found that I could get them to play for a few more months before they hit some kind of invisible brick wall and would bounce back to '83, the date I presume the software was first created. Worse than that most of our music would not play either! So I spent hours changing the kill dates to the furthest date I could so that we wouldn't go silent the day after Thanksgiving. I did that for every single element playing through the morning show and left a note for our morning man and engineer to do the same and to call the software company for a patch to fix the system. And he did. The patch arrived in a few days and he installed it and no one outside the radio station was ever the wiser. So when the panic arose over Y2K, I knew the threat was real.

We've known about global warming for decades but we didn't do much to avert it because there were no immediate dire effects, and it would cost fossil fuel businesses and our economy lots of money. And quite frankly it would necessitate changing the way we used energy and the sources we would have to develop to replace gas and oil. Now climate change is undeniable with each year getting hotter than the year before, our winters getting shorter and our hurricane seasons getting longer. Some experts think it may be too late to avert the worst, while others say we are not quite at the point of no return. But time is running out for us to change. Whether we do so remains to be seen.

I don't mean to sound gloomy but the truth is that people don't respond to slow moving or incremental dangers, even when warned, the way they do to rapid or instantly terrible or fatal ones. If smoking or abusing drugs killed everyone who tried them immediately and 100% of the time, people would treat them like live grenades. The most insidious dangers are the gradual ones with consequences due somewhere in the seemingly distant future. But the “kill date” might be upon us earlier than we reckoned.

That's what today's Old Testament readings are about. The prophet and the psalmist are dealing with days of reckoning that God's people find themselves in the midst of. What I find interesting is that God is not depicted as actively punishing his people but just hiding or turning his face from them. When people don't want any part of God, the worst thing he can do is grant them their desire. Isaiah says, “...for you have hidden your face from us, and have delivered us into the hand of our iniquity.” Not into the hands of an angry God but into the hand of our own wrongdoing. In other words you have let us do what we wished, left us to our own devices and the resulting sin has become its own punishment. For instance, the person who puts the pursuit of money or power or passing pleasures ahead of God, family and friendships often finds his life empty of the love that would give it real meaning and lasting pleasure. A society that puts the prosperity of a few ahead of the well-being of all its citizens suffers instability, insurrections and eventual collapse, as we've seen over and over in history. And civilizations that exhaust their resources go into decline and disappear. Easter Island was a thriving culture until deforestation and civil war led to famine, homelessness and lawlessness. That's what happen when those with the biggest heads are made of rock.

If God is the source of justice and peace, life without him is chaos. Sure, you can try to impose law and order, but that is just trying to deal with the problems of people who can't govern themselves and aren't following God's law by outsourcing them to the other big G: government. The Nazis were big on law and order, just not morality or love for one's neighbor, key elements of God's law. Jesus had a big problem with those who substituted a rigid adherence to the rules over holiness and compassion.

So what are we to do? First we need to distinguish between what we can control and what we can't.

As infants we are totally helpless. About the only thing we can do is cry and hope that it motivates our parents to do for us what we cannot: change our diapers, feed us, show us affection, help us calm down and sleep, or get us out of this crib and stimulate us by talking or singing or just holding us. As we grow we gradually learn to control our bodies and reach for a toy or turn ourselves over or crawl. We gain some mastery over our environment. We learn to rearrange a room, though Mom may see this as making a mess. We learn to feed ourselves. Our communication gets better, more articulate and precise. We learn we can pretty much bring things to a halt by saying “No!” Which, like our crying, gives us a measure of control over others. And most of us learn the limits of what we can control.

Smart people maximize their skills over what they can control: their bodies, their knowledge, their thinking, their emotions. They recognize what they are good at and what they aren't. They learn how to navigate the parts of life over which they have limited control, such as in dealing with other people. Then there are the things we can't control. Foolish people think they can use their brains or brawn or words or wealth to control anything. Wise people learn how to deal with the things in life over which we have no control. We can, as I've said before, improve our odds. It's like the way a sailor learns how to travel on the sea. He has control of his boat, provided it's properly maintained; he doesn't have control of the tides or winds or weather. He uses his knowledge, training and skills to sail in such a way to take advantage of the wind and tides and minimize the risks. Of course, a really big storm can sink the best sailor. In those cases, he needs to do what Jesus tells us in our gospel for today: keep awake and keep alert.

A wise sailor watches for patterns that signal a change in the elements over which he has no control. Today a sailor has access to sources of knowledge, like weather reports, and technology, like GPS, that Peter, James and John didn't have 2000 years ago. They had to rely on training and experience alone. But they knew that, as Jesus said, “When evening comes, you say, 'It will be fair weather, for the sky is red,' and in the morning, 'Today it will be stormy, for the sky is red and overcast.'” (Matthew 16:2-3) Even so, we need to be able to interpret the signs of the times, as Jesus laments his contemporaries failed to do.

In the part of Mark that comes before our lectionary reading, Jesus gives us signs of the end times to watch for, like false messiahs and saviors, figures demanding the loyalty and worship reserved for God alone. We are not to fall for them. But Jesus tells us not to put much stock in the usual stuff people interpret as signs of the end: wars, earthquakes and famines. Such disasters are, he says, but the beginning of birth pangs. Labor usually takes hours and the contractions get stronger and stronger and closer together. Jesus doesn't want us getting alarmed too early and panicking, like Dick Van Dyke's Rob Petrie in the episode in which Laura gives birth.

But you should be ready. In Exodus, God tells the people to get ready to leave Egypt at a moment's notice. They know the plague is coming but the precise time they must leave is unknown. Jesus tells us his coming again will be sudden and no one knows the exact day or date.

It's kind of like hurricane season was before the technology that gives us useful estimates of when and where the hurricane will hit. In his book Isaac's Storm, Erik Larson looks at the devastating hurricane that hit Galveston, Texas in 1900. The meteorologists in Cuba were very skilled at reading hurricanes and predicted it would hit Texas. The US Weather Bureau arrogantly ignored them and said it would make landfall in Florida. Galveston's chief meteorologist Isaac Cline thought that it was crazy to believe a hurricane could do significant damage to the city and his views dissuaded Galveston from building a proposed seawall. When Cline did issue a hurricane warning it was too late for people to evacuate the island and thousands were killed by flying slate roof tiles and the flood, including Cline's pregnant wife Cora.

Even without the advance warning system we have today, there were things people could have done to prepare. Today we shutter our houses, take inside things like outdoor furniture that might become airborne, and fill up the car in case of evacuation. You can go online and find suggestions for hurricane kits to prepare beforehand. We do not know when a hurricane might pop up but we go through the season alert and prepared. And that's what Jesus is saying about his coming.

And in addition, he says here, when the master is away, the servants are to do the work assigned them. The Spirit of God gives each of us gifts and we are to use them for the good of all, to build up each other and the kingdom. (1 Corinthians 12:4-11) Our basic work is to trust in Jesus (John 6:29), spread the good news (Matthew 28:19-20) and to follow the 2 great commandments. (Mark 12:28-31) The rest of the commandments are basically examples of how to show our love for God and for our fellow human beings in various circumstances. (Matthew 22:40) And God gives us his Spirit to guide us in situations where there is no specific rule. (John 20:22-23)

Our jail has general orders and procedures for handing every kind of emergency, including hurricanes and even epidemics. In no case do they decide to abandon or not feed and care for the inmates. In fact, leave is canceled and every officer has a duty. But every year everyone who works there, including chaplains, has to read and refresh their knowledge of all the procedures and all the signs to look for that something is wrong. Awake and alert is the basic state in which we operate.

Y2K was man-made and reasonably easy to fix. Some of the messes we have made, like with the world God gave us, are more difficult to undo. Some things are beyond our control. Fortunately we have a loving and powerful God who will ultimately take control of things when they go completely off the rails and clean up our messes, especially those we have made of our lives. As Paul says, “He will also strengthen you to the end, so that you may be blameless on the day of our Lord Jesus Christ. God is faithful....” And when we face the thing we can never control, death, when all we can do is cry out for God, we can trust him to be there and to take us in his arms and wipe away our tears and bring us into his home to live with him forever.