Chaos, Hope, and Meaningful Action

 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.

Trust and Doubt in James 1:1-18

Preached at Wayside Friends Church

Sept. 17, 2025

The author of Hebrews wrote, “In order to know God, you need to believe that he exists and that he rewards those who seek him.” I think it is possible that there are people who are unable to believe God exists. More likely, I think, people don’t want to believe God exists for some reason, often rooted in tragedy.

I have been unable to quit believing God exists. I have personal experiences for which God is the explanation and I look at the creative genius of our universe and can also find no other persuasive explanation. 

If you are unable to believe God exists, but you’d like to, that desire itself is the beginning of belief, of faith. Go ahead and ask, seek, and knock.

I’m glad to have a chance to talk about this opening passage in the book by James, or Jacob, or Yakob, the brother of Jesus, or Joshua, or Yeshua.  (I notice his humility in not claiming his famous brother.) In this passage, James has something to say not so much about this basic belief, but instead about what we believe about God, about who we think God is, about trusting God.

Our focus today will be on trust and doubt, and I’ll reorganize the verses in order to highlight that. As well, I’m going to drag in the book of Job, with its famous opening scene between the Accuser and God, in which God says, “Go ahead and test Job, but don’t kill him.” This is not an eyewitness report, perhaps I need to say, yet I’m not going to let God off the hook for what follows, any more than Job does.

So first, back to James.  The First Nations version (and others) substitute trust for faith, and I think that makes everything clearer.  I have had such a puzzle regarding the word faith, because it has seemed to be something with actual weight and volume, something one tries to have enough of, rather than something one chooses to do, which the word trust indicates. When we trust, we trust in something or someone.  We trust a chair will hold us. Why? We understand the nature of wood and chairs.

When James talks of trust, he means trust in God. What does it mean to trust in God?  It means that we understand the character of God as God relates to us.  James says that God is light, that God doesn’t change, that God gives all good and perfect gifts. that God can neither be tempted to be evil, nor can God tempt others to be evil, and that God “chose to birth us into being by God’s word of truth [Jesus?] so that we would be truly what God made us to be.” God is the epitome of single-minded. As Jesus told us, “Fear not, little flock, it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom” (Luke 12:32). So we have this basis for trusting God. 

Let’s look at Job now. Here’s a man who lost everything except his grief-stricken and angry wife, everything including his health.  He sits on a manure pile and laments.  Who wouldn’t? So the first thing we learn is that it is ok to weep over losses.  

Second, he seems to have bought in to the idea that doing good and being good will result in prosperity and good health. So he is disappointed in God for not carrying out God’s side of the deal. We learn from this that it is not a fatal error to be disappointed in God.

Third, he tells God what he thinks. Here are some examples: “God has wronged me” (Job 19:6).  “Why do the wicked still live, and …become very powerful?” (Job 21:7). “God has made my heart faint, and the Almighty has dismayed me” (Job 23:16). “Oh, that I knew where I might find Him…I would present my case before Him…I would learn the words He would answer…surely He would pay attention to me…and I would be delivered” (Job 23, passim).

We can see that Job has made a common mistake in understanding his relationship with God.  It is not a “this for that” or “quid pro quo” deal. But we can also see that Job trusts God with honest complaint and lament and prayer.

So it is not a sign of doubt to be sad and disappointed when God does not act as we expected.  It is not a sign of double-mindedness to wonder where God has hidden when God seems to be absent.  

What is a sign of double-mindedness or doubt?  Believing God is capable of evil. I know Christians who think magically about God—that if they pray a certain way, or if they follow a certain ritual, or if they observe the Sabbath carefully, God will not punish them. They blame any misfortune on not having enough faith or on breaking rules. They think God is rigid and self-centered, exacting the pound of flesh when it is owed.

This completely ignores what Jesus said about suffering and sadness.  “In the world you will have trouble”… “if they treat the teacher with cruelty, you can expect the followers to be treated just the same” … “Run for the hills when you see trouble coming” (paraphrased).

Or as Job says, in his calmer moments:

“Shall we accept good from God and not accept adversity?” (Job 2:10)

And Job goes on to express his continued trust in God. “Though God slay me, yet will I trust in Him; but I will still argue my case to Him.” (Job 13:15)

“Naked I came from my mother’s womb, and naked I will return to the womb of the earth. The Lord gave and the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord” (Job 1:21). 

“I know that my redeemer lives and that he will stand at last upon the earth, and that though my skin is destroyed, yet I will in my body see God” (Job 19:25-26).

Now James has something to say about suffering and troubles. James says to count it all joy because we know the God in whom we trust.  We know that testing will make us single-minded, just fire removes impurities from gold ore; we know that in our stubborn hanging on to the God we know, we will pass the test.  Those who are poor can rejoice because this is a test they can pass, an honorable test and a test of their honor.  Those who are rich can humbly recall that the same death comes to them as to everyone else and that their wealth can wither up like wildflowers. So if we’re undergoing a test, rejoice and trust; if we are comfy and “blessed,” take no credit and also trust. 

James knows humans well enough to recognize and state that we are not yet whole. He’ll go on to say that we are fools if we forget that fact, like people who look in a mirror and see flaws, but walk away smug about their beauty.  James warns that we have desires that will entice us to do wrong. James isn’t talking primarily about sexual desire, but about all desires that give an opening to temptation.  I think about the desire for admiration, the desire for power, the desire for control, the desire for security, the desire for immortality, the desire for love—all these can motivate actions that are not in line with what James will call “the perfect law of love that sets people free.”  

So let’s trust in the character of God as revealed by Jesus, as attested to by St. Paul and St. James, and Job, and let’s talk to God about our troubles with honesty and heartfelt sorrow, when we need to. I have personal experience of complaining bitterly to God about events that caused me suffering, and having God send me a vision of God’s eyes of love looking right into mine. I know this isn’t special treatment.

When we choose again and again to trust in the character of God, we will find that our true selves shine more brightly, and now and again, God will blow our socks off with presence.

Righteousness and Peace Have Kissed Each Other, and the Pure in Heart See God

Preached at Silverton Friends Church

Nov. 23, 2025

Four more Beatitudes:

Matthew 5:8-12

Blessed are the pure in heart for they shall see God.

Blessed are the peacemakers for they shall be called children of God,

Blessed are the persecuted for righteousness’s sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

Blessed are you when they revile you and persecute you and say all kinds of evil against you falsely on account of me, for so they persecuted the prophets before you; rejoice and be glad, for great is your reward in heaven.

Like some of you, I grew up during the hot era of the Cold War, learning in high school how to crouch under my paddle desk in case of nuclear attack.  My teacher, who had a dark sense of humor, said, “It will be as much use to hold this civil defense book over your head.” I also read a book around that time called I Found God in Soviet Russia by John Noble, and I was pretty sure that the main enemies of Christians were communists. So when I read where Jesus says, “Blessed are you when they revile you and persecute you and say all manner of evil against you falsely, on account of Me,” I was pretty sure that the “they” in this sentence were the communists or at least atheists, and that my crime would be identifying as a Christian.

I don’t feel sure of that today, here in the U.S.A., and if I look at Jesus’s life and death, I am even less sure that my opposition is likely to be systems outside of Christianity. The people who hounded Jesus to death were of his own religion, and they were both the intellectuals and the Torah literalists, the Sadducees and the Pharisees. And these four other beatitudes we’re looking at today may help us see how to live in precarious times, when a person’s enemies may be members of their families (see Mt. 10:36). 

First, blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.  As we’ve seen before, Jesus brings into his gospel many insights from the poets and prophets of the First Testament, our Old Testament, helping us see that God has not changed somehow between testaments.  Jesus nearly quotes Psalm 24:

“Who may ascend into the hill of the Lord? And who may stand in his holy place? The one who has clean hands and a pure heart…” 

In other words. the pure in heart are the ones who will see God.  And the identifying marks of the pure in heart are these: truthfulness, honesty, integrity—and actions that line up with a pure heart, symbolized by clean hands.

Hidden in the word for pure are the metaphors of pruning or being purified by fire, like gold.  So it isn’t a static word, it’s an ongoing process word. We can remember John 15, with its extended metaphor of pruning and abiding; parables about sifting out chaff which is thrown on the fire; and an acted parable about washing the feet. Staying open to God’s actions to bring us into our best selves, our truest selves is being pure in heart. You are clean, Jesus says, through the word I have spoken to you (John 15:3).  And Jesus is still speaking through the Holy Spirit.

This brings to mind what Jesus said about being clean, about being pure. Jesus advised his critics to clean the inside of the cup first, to admit the death hidden in whitewashed tombs, to allow God to make their inside pure so their outside could be truly pure. He told those most committed to purity, the Pharisees, to start from within, to be honest, and then to act out of that pure heart, actions of generosity and mercy.

Every committed movement has its purity laws. You must boycott this, you must praise this, you must make followers who are as zealous as you are, which Jesus referred to as making them twice as fit for hell as you are yourself. Those purity laws are focused on external behaviors but do nothing to remedy the hot mess within.

I advise you to sift through St. Paul’s pastoral advice to see how he tries to help people disallow harmful activities at the same time as he encourages them to embrace the liberty of the children of God. There is no way except to rely on the guidance of the Holy Spirit and the example of Jesus. And that means that one additional characteristic of the pure in heart is humility.  

The second:  Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God. It may not surprise you that there isn’t a lot in the history of Israel praising peacemaking. But peacemaking does show up in the poets and prophets. Psalm 34:14 “Depart from evil and do good; seek peace and pursue it.” Psalm 85:1: “Righteousness and peace have kissed each other.” Isaiah foretells the coming of  the Prince of Peace (9:6) and says,  “the work of righteousness will be peace, and the service of righteousness, quietness and confidence forever” (32:17).  “How beautiful on the mountains are the feet of him who brings good news, who announces peace, and brings good news of happiness, who announces salvation, and says to Zion, ‘Your God reigns!’” (Is. 52:7). 

The peace we are talking about refers both to tranquillity and quietness and also to reconciliation and to fearlessness. So we can see that it is evident both in stillness and in action.

This Hebrew word, shalom, has so much embedded in it. Not only is it used to describe our relationship with God, where our reverence is not tainted with fear, but also our relationship with others. The messengers of God greet frightened humans with “Fear not!” Jesus said, “Don’t be afraid of those who can kill the body.” It includes contentment, which derives from having enough to meet our daily physical needs (our daily bread) as well as our need for love. It includes friendship. It includes wholeness, wellbeing, and safety. 

Jesus says, “Peace I leave with you, my peace I give you” (John 14), the peace of an untroubled heart.  “You will have tribulation, but in me you can have peace."  This speaks to centeredness, and clearly connects to the idea of being pure in heart. 

St. Paul consistently opens his letters with “Grace and peace.” All of Romans 12 can be read as a manual for peacemaking, ending with “as much as is possible, live peaceably with everyone.” Ephesians 2:14 identifies Jesus as our peace, who has reconciled opponents with each other and has broken down the walls between us.  Hebrews 12:14 says, “Follow peace with all and holiness, without which no one shall see the Lord.”  

Following Jesus means to do what we can to help create a world where people can live tranquil, fearless lives, where we work to bring down walls and to bring opponents together in harmony.  This work, surprisingly, is counter-cultural in every culture, since each culture or subculture identifies “us vs. them” groups, people who belong inside vs. people who belong outside.  And we ourselves need to live without walls, without fearing our opponents, without our hearts being troubled. Believe in God, Jesus says, and believe also in me.

Third, blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. As the Psalmist says, Righteousness and peace have kissed each other. So it will be helpful to delve a bit into what qualifies as righteousness. 

Though it came to me from the church much laden with baggage, this word righteousness means simply the state of being who we are meant to be, our true selves, our right selves. In a narrower sense, it also means justice, or giving each other what is due to another human being. What do we feel we are owed as a human? Give that to others.  

But surprisingly, giving other people their natural rights as human beings, acknowledging their inclusion as children of God, carriers of the image of God, can make some people mad.  So if we’re part of a culture, which we are, that identifies insiders and outsiders, some in our culture may well want to protect that by suggesting that outsiders are not due their rights as human beings, or maybe aren’t entirely human at all. 

Insisting on the human dignity of outsiders can turn us into outsiders, and then we will be persecuted. Persecution means driving people away, forcing them to flee, harassing them, molesting them, troubling them, mistreating them. We have seen this on viral videos in recent times.  And it is soooo hard to remain peacemakers, so hard to center on God and to keep our hearts open to God’s purifying work, so hard to be just to our opponents. 

I turned to my World War II thinkers and survivors for help on how to remain fully human and humane, how to be righteous, in hard times.  A French Orthodox Christian who was for awhile in the French Resistance to the Nazi occupation, Olivier Clement wrote this:  “The war threw me into political action…I joined the French Resistance. But total war makes for total politics as well, and … total politics justifies anything and everything.  It justifies lies and violence, with no longer the recognition of any limits—whether …honor or…cannibalism.” (43)“The worst is when the shedding of blood is premeditated…During the last months of the war, this was something I could not subscribe to. So I became involved in other forms of resistance. We still risked our lives, but in order to save lives.” (44)  Clement had to leave the Resistance as a movement to remain his true self, but still he participated in actions that made others safe. (The Other Sun: A Spiritual Autobiography, tr. Michael Donley, Chester, UK: 2021)

Tzvetan Todorov looks at a Dutchwoman, Etty Hillesum, who was 27 when Nazis occupied Holland.  She felt called to minister to her fellow Jews who were in transit to concentration camps by showing them “the way to their own interior in a time of great adversity.” She constantly spoke to God, not as a potential savior, but as a power inside herself that had to be nurtured. (see Wikipedia article). Todorov writes, “Though she never stops fighting the injustices of the camp, hatred remains her chief enemy” (200).  (Facing the Extreme: Moral Life in the Concentration Camps, [New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1996)). She was eventually deported to Auschwitz, where she was murdered.

Todorov is not sure that such nonviolence is the only or the most effective response to totalitarianism, and he acknowledges that even “those whose cause is just” may exchange being the hunted for being hunters, in which case “the new kingdom…will not be so new after all.” (216) He quotes Victor Frankl, survivor, “No one has the right to do wrong, not even if wrong has been done to him.” (217) He admits that “moral action [as opposed to political or military action] can perhaps be more effective than we think” (201).

I want to acknowledge that I also would like to persecute a person or two, but I’m not going to, and that is the difference between the capacity to act and the action itself. At the present time, I’m praying for those I want to persecute to meet Jesus like Saul did on the road to Damascus, as he was traveling in order to persecute followers of Jesus.

Here’s a prayer I heard on the Canterbury Cathedral choral evensong for Wednesday, Nov. 19:

“Loving God, we give thanks for the precious gift of life.  Give us strength and courage to speak out against all forms of abuse. …Lord, we pray for your world. In times of hostility to immigrants, we pray for a more generous understanding of the needs of others throughout our world. For an openness to the value that people different from ourselves can bring to our life. And for a recognition that it is only by working together that we can serve the good and the prosperity of all.  Generous God, to you all people are equal and from your love nobody can be shut out.  Inspire all peoples with this vision of your equal love that we may learn to expand our hearts in reaching out to others and find by looking on their faces with gentleness the true image of your son Jesus Christ our Lord.” (YouTube, Canterbury Cathedral Choral Evensong, Nov. 19, 2025)

Let’s move forward in our times and places with the commitment to be fully human and humane, to be true inside and out, to work for the dignity and peace of others, and to center ourselves in our experience of God’s presence and the example of Jesus. And then let’s commit to listening to the Spirit of God and doing what we are told to do.