Job 38:1-7, 34-41
It is an amazing gift and maybe a little bit of a curse that we homo sapiens are creatures who desire meaning. I learned a long time ago, long before I was an elected official, that if people don’t know what is going on, don’t understand what is going on, they’ll simply make stuff up. This is one of the primary drivers of religion and politics.
In our postmodern age of social media, this can be terrifying, but in premodern times this myth-making was not inherently bad. Rather than live in constant anxiety about the many things that are unknowable and uncontrollable, people lived in comfortable fictions. It kept us sane. Well, sort of…
One of those fictions was that deities, or a single deity, micromanaged the mundane, decided which fields got rain, which diseases got cured, which army won the war.
Of course, we are more sophisticated now, right? We wouldn’t ask God to lead our favorite football team to victory, then thank Him, always a “Him,” for that victory.
We wouldn’t expect that an arbitrary and capricious god would heal some who are sick while choosing not to heal others, possibly tallying up the number of prayers or “get well” cards as a quantitative measure of worthiness, and then insisting the outcome was God’s plan.
We wouldn’t tell anxious children that the latest school shooting happened because God needed new angels, bad theology and bad policy, except that many do tell exactly this kind of repulsive lie, ask for divine intervention, thoughts and prayers, projecting onto God human will and agency, and thereby reducing God to human-size while avoiding human responsibility.
The Book of Job, the source of today’s reading, is a pious fiction from a myth-making age. It intends to make meaning, to answer the question at the heart of Rabbi Harold Kushner’s 1981 book “When Bad Things Happen to Good People.” Kushner was reeling from the death of his 14 year-old son, who suffered from the genetic disease progeria, when he took on this question, known in theological circles as theodicy.
The Book of Job may be a pious fiction, and if I am honest, I no longer believe it has value to our faith. God and the Adversary are basically super-sized omnipotent humans, sociopaths toying with human lives. Sure, Job comes out on the other side of this divine terror okay, but his family does not.
My answer to the questions God asks Job would be “No. I didn’t create all things and have all power. That’s you, not me. So why are you being a jerk?”
The fictional Job doesn’t really comprehend the ordering of the world, and neither do the ancient authors of the Book of Job. In order to address one intolerable thing, meaningless suffering, they imagined a worse intolerable thing, a cruel god.
Now, I believe in God. I just don’t believe in that god. And while I, like everyone else, desire an existence that is orderly, predictable, and meaningful, I have come to realize that moving from chaos to complexity is a question of scale, of perspective.
God is not the monster pre-modern humans imagined, nor is God the clockmaker of modernity and the scientific age. The strange behaviors of the sub-atomic world opened up new ways of thinking, and one of those, complexity science, has remarkable explanatory power, while leaving room for those of us who choose to believe in holy mystery.
Complexity in this case does not mean complicated in the negative sense, like trying to reach someone at your health insurance company. Complexity here means inter-connected systems that produce something greater than the sum of the individual parts. Wheels are great, very useful. Engines are great too. Together they make a car. Add a sunroof and a great stereo system and that car becomes a ride, baby!
The car is complex. But it is missing one final trait of the sort of complexity I’m describing. Think of the flocks of birds we see in the sky this time of year, how they seem to fly as one creature, though they might be made up of a hundred individual birds.
Now apply this idea to cells, made up of other organelles that together create life. To humans that come together and create cultures and civilizations. In fact, almost everything we observe in creation seems to self-organize, move toward complexity, and give rise to novel behaviors, from subatomic particles to stars, to you.
You are both a complex system composed of complex systems, and a sub-system of bigger complex systems.
There are two crucial factors in the development of complex systems. First is that there must be sufficient numbers, of objects, of actors, but not too many. There is a sweet spot in every complex system. We even have a term for this, critical mass.
In the same way, there is a sweet spot between order and chaos.
This is where we come back to Job. Bad things happen to good people because randomness, chaos, is built into the system. It is a feature, not a bug.
A genetic mutation killed Rabbi Kushner’s son. A different genetic mutation might have made him a Hall of Fame baseball player, with remarkable hand-eye coordination and a sinker even Ichiro couldn’t hit.
Too little chaos, and the system freezes. Too much, and it cannot organize. Just as there is a sweet spot when it comes to numbers, there is a sweet spot when it comes to dynamism, to randomness. In complex systems, there is always a force that keeps the chaos under control.
We’ve spent a long time in the scientific age dissecting what was living and splitting what wasn’t, always thinking if we keep zooming in to smaller and smaller units we’d find the answers. And it turns out we were wrong.
It is fine to try to understand how a heart works, the structure and behavior, but that won’t tell you why John W. Jones had the courage to escape slavery, then risk it all leading other enslaved humans to freedom.
Breaking things apart with careful documentation won’t tell you what moved Martha Graham to add the spiral to her pioneering contraction and release technique in modern dance.
It isn’t that humans are illogical, thank you Mr. Spock. It is that what we understand as logic is only part of the story.
It turns out, magic happens.
Every system in creation seems designed to hit that sweet spot of complexity and creativity. Every system we can observe in creation is given to these emergent properties.
The whole of creation is striving to create eruptions of beauty again and again, an ever upward spiral that produces orchids and chocolate mousse and you.
You are the result of something mysterious and holy. You are part of something mysterious and holy.
Earlier I mentioned the question of scale, and when it comes to theodicy and our own lives, when it comes to Rabbi Kushner’s question about bad things happening, scale is everything, for his son’s disease was a horrific thing on the personal time-space scale of that one family and religious community. But genetic mutation and natural selection are not bad things on the species scale.
Neil Theise, a diagnostic pathologist, ethnically Jewish and Zen Buddhist, puts it like this:
Everything only looks like a thing from its own particular vantage point, the level of scale at which it can be seen as “itself,” as a whole. Above that level of scale, it is hidden from view by the higher-level emergent properties it gives rise to. Below that level, it disappears from view into the active phenomena from which it emerged.
If takeaway one from complexity is that you should not take the randomness in the system personally, and takeaway two is that you are an eruption of holy mystery, and pretty random if I’m being honest, takeaway three offers us something practical, something actionable.
If we want life, if we want creativeness and beauty, then we must always be looking for the sweet spot, for enough but not too many, and we have to always be willing to accept that the result probably won’t be exactly what we expected, because that simply is not how creation works, is not how complex systems behave.
Too few people, and you are one catastrophe away from system collapse.
And when there are many people, too many to know everyone’s name and story, that isn’t bad. In the church world, a large church is made up of smaller churches, maybe organized around different worship times or formats, around different ministries and missions, small complex systems of people who are part of another larger complex system of systems.
On our personal scale, not knowing everyone’s name might be a limiting factor. On our institutional scale, continued growth is where the magic happens, where lives are changed, as we adapt to stay in the sweet spot of creativity, as we embrace the unexpected, as we walk with a God who delights in the platypus and a piano concerto.
Amen.