The goodwill between Pharaoh and the Israelites in Egypt disappears when Joseph dies and a new Pharaoh arrives who doesn’t know what a good guy Joseph has been. The growing population of Israelites threatens Pharaoh, who schemes to keep them down by forcing them to do harsher and harsher tasks. That plan doesn’t work, the Israelites keep growing strong, so Pharaoh decides to get serious and tells Hebrew midwives to kill baby boys but to let baby girls live. The midwives refuse, playing to Pharaoh’s Egyptian pride. Pharaoh then tells his Egyptian people to throw Hebrew boys into the Nile, and it’s under this circumstance that Moses is born. Moses’ mother hides him until she can’t any longer, puts him in a basket in the reeds along the Nile. At that exact moment, an Egyptian woman, Pharaoh’s daughter, no less, a princess, comes along, takes pity on the baby, sends him back to his mother to nurse, and then when Moses is a little older, Moses becomes the princess’s son.

Now the convergence of events in this story really is just too perfect, isn’t it? Moses’ mother does the very odd, outside-the-box thing of setting her baby adrift, and before any harm can come to him, the daughter of Pharaoh happens to be wanting to bathe, and happens to come across the baby, and happens to not obey her father, and happens to end up becoming Moses’ adoptive mother. This is the kind of scenario that only happens in stories, right? Wrong! This is going on all the time, but we have to change our vantage point to see.

I got the urge to call my parents this week on Thursday morning. I usually call at night, but I figured I’d try anyway. My mother answered and said, when she recognized my voice, “I was just thinking about you.” Merely a coincidence you say. A coincidence is two events that happen at the same time. Nothing cosmic about it: parents do think about their children and sons do call parents, so it’s not inconceivable that such an accident could happen. And this is the way we tend to think: that miraculous and unexpected convergences of events happen only in fiction, in stories and in movies.

But what if we were to erase that line between fiction and real life? What if, for a moment, we stopped being the authors of our life stories, and allowed ourselves to consider the possibility that we are characters in a story we’re not writing or directing? Characters in stories don’t have control over events in the stories in which they appear, and, not only that, things can happen to characters that you and I, in the “real-world,” would normally think just too unlikely.

Sound strange? Well, there is a psychological theory that I can’t help but take seriously, not only because it seems to make sense, but because I have experienced it, and I think you have too—though we all may not be taking it as seriously as we might. It is the idea of synchronicity, first named by the Swiss psychologist Carl Jung. Jung said that while coincidences are two events that happen at the same time—Dick Webster and I are both working around the church and we bump accidently into each other, which does happen now and again—synchronicities are coincidences which have personal, subjective meaning or power for the person experiencing it. I’ll give you two examples of synchronicities.

For those of you who don’t own or know what an iPod is, let me explain. An iPod is basically a device that plays music. You turn it on, and you can select the song or songs you want, or you can use an option called “shuffle.” Shuffle randomly selects songs from your collection and plays them. I have an iPod with about 400 songs on it, and I often use the shuffle function. Most of the time the songs that come up are truly random, but not always. There have been a few times when I have a song stuck in my head, I turn on my iPod and use the shuffle, and it plays that song first. Amazing, right? I could say it was merely a coincidence, but Jung would say that there’s something else going on, that there is connection that goes beyond the science of iPod and has to do with me encountering something greater than what I can control, and that I need to pay attention to that anomaly, be open to considering what its meaning for me might be.

Here’s a different example, one about relationships. Robert Hopcke is a minister and psychologist who has studied synchronicity, and he relates this story: “Ellen had moved to California to start college, only to find herself in rather severe conflict with her father, who had agreed to pay for her education but who also held certain ideas about how his daughter should live. He wanted her on campus; she wanted to live off campus with friends. She wanted a car; he didn’t feel that a car was a good idea. She felt her social activities were an important part of her education; her father felt she should not be spending money and time on anything but her studies. As the feelings grew more and more heated between them, through a series of transcontinental phone calls, her father finally said that unless she behaved as he wished, he would discontinue his financial support. In anger, she responded, ‘Fine. Go ahead,’ and hung up the phone.”

“Stewing furiously about a situation which had finally grown untenable, she walked around campus the following day in a funk, not knowing what she was going to do. She had no skills, and her father’s controlling attitude had virtually assured her dependence upon him, so making good on her threat seemed a bit beyond her. She continued to walk through camppus until she bumped into a friend and, sitting under a eucalyptus tree, she told her friend the story. Not feeling that her quandary was all that amusing, she almost got offended when he laughed—that is, until he told her why he was laughing. He had just come from his job as a word processor in a nearby engineering firm and that day his supervisor had asked him if he knew of anyone who wanted a job. They were paying well enough to enable Ellen to support herself, the schedule was completely flexible, and they were willing to pay her while she was being trained. In this way, synchronistically, Ellen found a job that allowed her to resolve the uncomfortable reliance on her father and strike out, quite appropriately, on her own.” Sometimes—especially when it seems we need to change—events work together like magic, or, as we Christians would say, like grace—but maybe only if we’re willing to anticipate and take notice.

Friends, I am more and more persuaded that you and I are living in the illusion that we’re totally in charge of our lives, what we do and what we don’t do. But as people of faith, we say that God is the author of our lives, and that really means that we may just not be in as much control of events and occurrences as we think, that we actually are more like actors, characters—beloved characters—in a story God is continuing to compose. And, rather than be afraid of such a possibility, or resent it because “I’m not a puppet, thank you,” I think the more we can embrace that perspective, the more we are opened to experiencing exactly that miraculous, life-changing, sounds-too-good-to-be-true grace we want so badly, but which could probably never penetrate the well-defined, rational boxes we tend to live in and the limits we set. In other words, a little openness to meaning behind the convergence of events we might otherwise dismiss might well expose us to the grace and guidance and sense of genuine connectedness with God we want so much.

So, how do we become more open to meaning? How do we give synchronicity a chance? How do we begin to view ourselves less the directors of our lives and more the dear, directed characters in God’s story? Let’s go back to the Exodus reading. Apparently how not to do this is to exactly what Pharaoh did: scheme in order to gain and retain power. The more Pharaoh schemed, the further from this goal he moved, to the point that exactly what he didn’t want to have happen—the Israelites growing powerful—was exactly what happened, with one of the Hebrews even ending up in his own family.

Like Pharaoh, authors and film directors are schemers, they plan, they lay out plotlines and have their characters do what they want. And, to an extent, that’s what you and I try to do, too. We try to control events, and cajole and convince people of what we want, or of our perspective and convictions. But look at the other characters in the story: the Hebrew midwives realize they can’t do what Pharaoh wants, they have to do what they know in their hearts is the right thing, and so they think outside the box and come up with a way to let the babies live and to keep Pharaoh at bay. And Pharaoh’s daughter, she also lets her heart be her guide, she takes pity on Moses in the basket, and she too thinks outside the box and finds a way to save the baby and to evade her father’s wrath. Imaginative faithfulness makes room for grace—even unbelievable grace: the midwives have children, Moses’ mother saves her child, the princess becomes a mother, and Moses is perfectly positioned to be the savior of the Israelites later on.

As Christian disciples, we know what to do: follow our hearts and follow the example of Jesus. And when we commit to making choices from that foundation, God promises life-giving grace. The promise is kept, and kept constantly. Our challenge, as people actring faithfully, is to remain open to meaning in events large and small that we might be tempted to overlook or dismiss, and to resist the idea that God’s grace always comes in ways that will make sense to us, that conform to the rules of the world we’ve become convinced are there. As faithful people, we must never dismiss the seemingly coincidental, the accidental, the unexpected, the stranger-than-fiction, for it may be precisely those moments when God is choosing to break through into our awareness. So will we make power plays, like Pharaoh? Or will we be faithful actors in the powerful play God has written for us and is directing? Our choices, every day, will make all the difference.