Preached at Silverton Friends Church
Jan. 11, 2026
I’ve been saddened and dismayed by current events, and the chaos unleashed on the world, disruptions to long-held friendships between individuals and nations, violations of norms, and disregard for human dignity. Given the disorder of our external social and political world, the disruptions to family and friend relationships, the sense of powerlessness for the individual, it is no wonder that we have often internalized the mess, adding it to whatever there is of disorder in our inner selves. Our emotions rise up and can manifest as fear, anger, or sorrow, even as we continue to live in this beautiful world. Our systems and order are crumbling out of our control, and we fear the unknown. This chaos makes our worlds completely unpredictable.
Often we attempt to control chaos by finding someone or something to blame for it. We like to know cause and effect, so that we can, we believe, erase negative effects by removing known causes. And for religious people, disorder is more than distasteful; it undermines the structures by which we understand the world.
Power that works beyond our control and violates our expectations introduces chaos. Even our inner worlds are “like the ocean, mysterious and dark,” to quote a song by Bob Dylan. And the inner worlds of other people are not available to us to know directly; we mostly observe their actions and feel our feelings. Though we can inch toward some kind of understanding of another person, what they will do next is not entirely predictable, even if we’ve been married 50 years.
The “Chaos Theory” article in Wikipedia had this surprisingly profound comment: “What is clear is that the world is chaotic and outside of our control, beyond a certain threshold, and that our place in the world hinges in some ways upon our readiness to accept this.” God give us the serenity to accept the things we cannot change, the courage to change the things we can, and the wisdom to know the difference.
You’ve probably heard of the butterfly effect, a popular way to refer to the ideas in chaos theory. To oversimplify to what I can understand and express, many natural systems show sensitive dependence on initial conditions. So, for instance, the weather is notoriously unpredictable over any length of time longer than a week because weather events are sensitive to initial conditions, and we can’t keep track of those. So we use statistics and almanacs and watch how thick the squirrels’ fur is.
My daughter gave me Mavis Staples’s new album, Sad and Beautiful World. This whole album has been speaking to my heart, beginning with the title. Both sadness and joy, as well as the perception of beauty, are rooted in the individual’s perception, rather than being essential attributes of some thing or event outside us.
I want to encourage us to approach chaos with curiosity and interest, rather than fear and anger. God is not afraid of chaos, having shown that it has a place from the beginning of creation.
In human mythologies, darkness, the ocean, and the eternal feminine are often associated with chaos, and this is certainly the case with the creation narrative of Genesis 1. In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. And the earth was without form and void, And darkness was on the face of the deep. All of these are ways of saying, the beginning of God’s creating was chaos.
And then, the spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters, like a hen brooding over an egg. ( A feminine image, to be sure.) And God said, Let there be light, and there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good, and God divided the light from the darkness, calling the light Day and the darkness Night.
It is crucial to notice that God doesn’t call the night evil, even though the darkness (from a human perspective) is prone to chaos.
Next, God separates the air from the watery expanse, calling it the sky or heaven. Then, God gathers the waters together and allows the dry land to emerge, calling the waters Seas and the land Earth, and God saw both as good.
It is crucial to notice that God doesn’t consider the mysterious dark ocean evil, though its power and unpredictability make humans consider it chaotic.
Indeed, the Voice from the Whirlwind in Job asserts, “I shut in the sea, clothed it in clouds, and swaddled it in darkness….Tell me if you know where light dwells, and where darkness has a place…everything under heaven is mine.” Job responds: “I’ve been speaking about things I don’t understand. I have heard of you, but now I see you and I melt away and find comfort in being only dust and ashes.” (For reference see Genesis 18:27, where Abraham says, “I have taken upon me to speak with the Lord, I which am but dust and ashes.”)
As Christopher Linkiewicz writes in The Philosophy of Chaos: From Chaos Theory to Existentialism (medium.com), “It is in the nature of thinking that we never have all the information…we rarely even approach a complete picture of anything…Errors can, will be, and must be made in our calculations.” The lovely Wikipedia article on chaos theory continues, “Small changes in initial conditions can lead to unpredictable outcomes challenging traditional views of causality and order.”
We know so little and actually control even less. How then shall we go about our daily lives?
I think that recognizing the limits of our knowledge, our understanding, and our ability to control anything can be paralyzing or it can be freeing. I want to speak in favor of freedom. Indeed, every positive action we take is energized by hope and faith, and can be grounded in love.
Surprisingly, this chaotic mystery makes openings we did not expect for our small daily actions to have an effect we could not have expected. Each positive action may be the initial condition for untold and unforeseeable positive events.
Forty years ago, I heard Bill Vaswig preach, and I actually remember something he said. Bill was the founder of a ministry dedicated to emotional and physical healing, a Lutheran evangelist, and a founding member of Renovaré. What he said was this: when you pray and ask the Holy Spirit for guidance, take some time to listen, and then do what comes to you, simple as it may be. Essentially, why ask if we’re not going to listen for an answer and do what comes to us?
I’ve tried this, and, to be honest, it introduces an unpredictability into my life that isn’t very comfortable and can be embarrassing. I’ve prayed out loud for a stranger on the street, prayed out loud for healing among strangers and for lost causes. Since no one rose from a sick bed or from the dead, these prayers were humbling to me, though I don’t regret them. I do not know, in a universe where chaos theory pertains, what these tiny acts of attempted obedience may have set in motion somewhere in time. But I can see that these little efforts to listen and obey have changed me in ways I can hardly know and cannot describe.
I also know that my inner self is not by itself a reliable guide, since I barely know my inner ocean and can often act out of self-interest or herd mentality. Thus it is useful to have external advice as well. Jesus and the Jewish law said, “Love your neighbor as yourself.” This requires some imagination to live by. What am I doing to my neighbor? Would I do this to myself? And what am I doing to myself? Would I do this to my neighbor? In Romans 12, St. Paul beseeches us to give our bodies to God as a living sacrifice, embracing transformation rather than conformity. This is what transformation looks like.
Think realistically of ourselves
Recognize our connection to others, what Paul calls being members of each other, as part of Christ’s Body
Use the gifts we have, make space for the gifts others have
Love others without hypocrisy
Be kindly affectionate to each other
Give to those in need and be hospitable
Rejoice with those who rejoice
Weep with those who weep
Give preference and honor to each other
Associate with the humble
Don’t puff ourselves up
Be diligent, fervent, hopeful, patient
Continue steadfastly in prayer
As much as is up to us, live peaceably with all
Give our hungry enemies food
Give our thirsty enemies water
Bless those who persecute us
Don’t repay evil for evil
Don’t avenge ourselves
Abhor what is evil
Show our respect for good things
Cling to what is good
These are externals by which we can measure our internal promptings. As retired psychotherapist James Finley (Center for Action and Contemplation contributor) says, “What is the most loving thing for me to do in this moment?” Or as George MacDonald says, “It is a happy thing for us that this is really all we have to concern ourselves about—what to do next. No one can do the second thing, one can do only the first thing.” (David Elginbrod) And as he encourages us, “God sits in that chamber of our being in which the candle of our consciousness goes out in darkness, and sends forth from thence wonderful gifts into the light of that understanding which is His candle. Our hope lies …in the wisdom wherein we live and move and have our being.” (“The Imagination: Its Function and Its Culture,” A Dish of Orts, 1867).
Thanks be to God who is not afraid of the dark and has provided for both order and disorder. May our prayers and small daily actions move the world’s systems toward love.
Let’s end by celebrating our finiteness and our freedom to choose love. Listen to this excerpt from Psalm 104 (NKJV):
O Lord, how manifold are your works!
In wisdom you have made them all.
The earth is full of Your possessions—
This great and wide sea,
In which are innumerable teeming things,
Living things both small and great.
There the ships sail about;
There is that Leviathan
Which you have made to play there.
These all wait for You,
That You may give them their food in due season.
What You give them they gather in;
You open Your hand and they are filled with good.
You hide Your face, they are troubled;
You take away their breath, they die and return to their dust.
You send forth Your Spirit, they are created;
And You renew the face of the earth.
May the glory of the Lord endure forever;
May the Lord rejoice in His works.
He looks on the earth, and it trembles;
He touches the hills, and they smoke.
I will sing to the Lord as long as I live;
I will sing praise to my God while I have my being.
May my meditation be sweet to Him;
I will be glad in the Lord.
