I was never a fan of “That 70’s Show,” though I suspect that was more about timing than anything, for it aired during years when almost every day was a sixteen work hour day for me. I just didn’t watch much television, leaving a lacuna in my personal cultural memory. I did know that Ashton Kutcher was near the top of the celebrity heap, and recognized him when I saw the 2004 film “The Butterfly Effect.” Classified by some as science fiction, it was really more supernatural fiction, and named after a notion from chaos theory and complexity science. We’ll circle back to that in a bit.
Kutcher’s character, Evan, is part of a trio of friends who experience a series of traumas during childhood. In each instance, Evan blacks out. As an adult, he realizes that he can travel back in time to those blacked out moments and change his actions. The film deals with the consequences of these seemingly small changes, each resulting in a completely different life. A decision made in a critical moment at the age of twelve forever changes the future.
It is actually a pretty good film, as the genre goes, though it isn’t for everybody. Critics hated it, but the public seemed to love it, and it made $96 million on a $13 million budget. It is, at least, a lot less weird than a similar film, “Donnie Darko,” which came out three years earlier. Trust me, Donnie Darko probably is not your thing…
We spend a lot of time, maybe too much time, talking about modeling these days, and I don’t mean on the fashion runway. Instead, we listen to experts discuss how various changes in our behavior and healthcare systems will impact the spread of Covid-19, while some politicians pick and choose the model that fits their agenda. The models vary based on underlying assumptions, and get tweaked as we learn more about the disease and the virus that causes it and as we change our behavior. It is educated guesswork in a complex and dynamic system, but necessary, for where there is good leadership, we are able to allocate resources and prepare for likely scenarios.
The Butterfly Effect comes from weather modeling. In the early 1960’s, Edward Lorenz noticed that the tiniest changes in a weather model’s input could produce huge changes in the output. When he was unable to decide on a title for a 1972 talk before the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a colleague came up with “Does the flap of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil set off a tornado in Texas?” It actually echoes an idea that first surfaced in a Ray Bradbury short story about time travel twenty years earlier. You saw a short and practical demonstration of the concept earlier in the service, where pendulums that started at nearly identical positions diverged in dramatic ways.
You may have heard the concept in different formulations over the years, a butterfly in China, a hurricane in the Atlantic, but the idea is essentially the same, and the intersection of science and science fiction in the film title is spot on. Tiny changes can make a huge difference when played out over time. Which is terrifying and hopeful, terrifying because we can choose to understand ourselves as trapped in a model that was influenced by one seemingly small decision or circumstance in the distant past, hopeful because it means decisions we make today can have a tremendous impact on the future.
But we sort of knew that. We’ve sort of always known that.
Paul’s letter to the churches in Rome offers a more direct line of causality, without the wildness and weirdness of the Butterfly Effect. Paul’s mission to the Gentiles was incredibly successful. He re-packaged the life story and teachings of a charismatic and eccentric rabbi in a way that not only had meaning to a non-Jewish audience but that also drove them to radically change their worldviews and their lives. But it was not without cost. His mission was met with hostility from other Jews, and with ridicule from many Gentiles, most famously in Athens, renowned for its philosophy. People made wild and untrue accusations against Paul and his co-workers in mission, sort-of the conspiracy theory tweets for that age if you will. We know he was arrested more than once, the crowds chanting “lock him up,” and legend tells us he would meet the executioner in Rome. We can guess that the constant agitation of those who opposed him and the aggression and violence of the authorities is the suffering he references here in his letter to the Romans, though he is also pretty hard on himself, seeking to always be better, more faithful, more effective.
Paul sees suffering as the precursor to endurance, endurance as a precursor to character, and character as a precursor to hope.
Now, I’m not completely on board with the idea that suffering is necessary or even inevitable. I’m not inclined to the sort of dualist thinking that requires a hell if there is to be a heaven, evil for there to be good. Not that I don’t see plenty of evil out there, I just tend to see entropy as part of the system. The flower blooms, a brilliant and beautiful moment, then fades. Evil does not cause the flower to fade. It was creative love that called it and held it in being, creative love that scatters the seeds and sets it all in motion again, a divine fireworks show that never ends and that has a near infinite number of permutations all going off at once.
Suffering and evil happen when the human, in the face of mystery, chooses the path of fear, refuses the transcendence that is us at our best, which leads to every sort of evil – greed, scapegoating, then builds systems to validate and sustain those vices. The opposite of that is what Paul refers to as character, a rejection of that fear. Hope is not, then, so much the successor of character as it is the fruit of character, for character is selflessness, it is love, and love is the opposite of fear, and without fear the eyes of our heart are open to see that non-stop show of dazzling divinity that is happening just outside the window, that is the person sitting next to you this morning or puttering in the kitchen and the music bop-bopping out of the speakers.
Character matters. Luke and the unknown authors of Matthew both use an early lost gospel we call “Q,” the source of this saying of Jesus: “A good tree cannot bear bad fruit, nor can a bad tree bear good fruit.”
Now, I will concede that bad things do happen to good people, and that the brain is a mystery box where things happen we will never understand, but in the end, we have to stake some claim. Either we are nothing but the end product of invisible forces, in which case we have no claim to anything, or we are people who dare to make a claim to being, dare to make the declaration that is the name of our God, “I am becoming,” in which case, with our daring claim, so comes responsibility.
“I am” means I choose, and the choice that is before us is the way of fear or the way of love, which is the way of life, which is character and hope.
That doesn’t mean be stupid. Life is a gift, so don’t blow it by going to a disco in the middle of a pandemic. But you can’t sit there trembling in fear, for you will become an ugly and distorted creature, as blind as a Gollum living under a mountain.
If the Butterfly Effect, the idea that small changes can have a dramatic impact is true, so to is the Tipping Point, the idea that there is a moment of critical mass when small things together cause a change in system state.
Which in the end comes down to this. What you do matters. You are going to get it wrong sometimes, because we are human, fickle and finite, primates with opposable thumbs and ridiculously large brains, but we can get it right too. And today you will have a chance to choose daring over fear. And tomorrow you will have a chance to choose love over despair. And the day after that you will have a chance to choose humility over hubris. And every decision matters. And every one builds or erodes your character, the spiritual muscle memory that appears as hope when we need it most.
Choose people of character to be in your life. Be gentle, for they won’t be perfect. But they’ll believe, and in their words you will hear hope.
God is love and God is the source of you. Be you. Be love. The rest will take care of itself.
Amen.