One Simply Complex God

Genesis 1:1-10
Mark 10:32-34


Rockville United Church
Rev. Dr. Duncan Newcomer

March 9, 2008

As this religious season of Lent gravitates towards the passion story of Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection, we see that it all turns on Jesus’ seemingly simple decision to go up to Jerusalem—somewhere scripture says he sets his face like flint towards Jerusalem. Certainly he faces his death. Scripture also says, astonishingly, that for the joy that was set before him, Jesus endured this cross, despite the shame.

It’s actually a complex decision Jesus makes to go up to Jerusalem: a certain death; an uncertain joy; and the fate of God’s willed love for the universe hanging in the balance. A complex decision, a multiplicity of motivations (“how will my mother, Mary, feel about this?” being just one.) A multitude of factors converging in a simple outcome; God’s will is done; “not my will but thine be done,” says Jesus.

So, out of his human complexity comes a sacred simplicity: God’s will is done. About our own decisions, how do we know what to do and when to do it? Complex systems are altered by complicated decisions, yielding a world simply and utterly changed, and even more complex.

Note that as Jesus moves towards Jerusalem, he is literally ahead of, in front of, leading, his disciples and followers who are reported to be—as he walks ahead of them—both amazed and afraid. Amazed and afraid, as are we when we face complex problems, posing complicated dynamics, yielding, when we act, a world simply altered, clearly, changed. We too are amazed and afraid.

We all know what it is like to bring the universe to the altar of a decision with consequences both simply obvious but hardly endurable. Thus was Jesus’ walk up to Jerusalem.

It is interesting to note that we often think that decisions are simple and that consequences are complex. Presidents who go to war like to picture themselves as simply courageous deciders—let the chips of complications fall where they may. In fact, in fact, all our important decisions are made in the midst of chaos, in the midst of chaos. We really don’t live making simple decisions with complex consequences, so much as we make decisions out of massive complexity yielding one new thing after another.

Change is not a simple decision. Change is the flap of a butterfly’s wing in the midst of a storm that reverberates into a tornado a thousand miles away. That is the classic metaphor of how chaos theory, hand and glove with complexity theory, says that things happen. Despite appearances, there’s nothing simple about why a butterfly flaps its wings, or why Jesus decided to walk up to Jerusalem.

Things happen when an independent catalyst (a butterfly, a Jesus Christ), alters a system that is operating on the edge of chaos. Change is never simple. The only thing simple about change is that it’s always happening—whether we like it or not.

And we don’t like to think of our neat and clean lives, and our well-run and well-organized church, as operating on the edge of chaos.

But we are. We are because systems, like churches, operate through a network of many agents (think: the economy, the war, the weather) in simultaneous and parallel interactions with other agents evolving changes that are themselves constantly being altered through feedback loops producing not results, not so much results, but perpetual novelty, simply one new thing after another.

It just makes you wonder why we write annual reports, doesn’t it? -- I mean, if equilibrium is never produced, how are we ever going to report out the results of our actions and our decisions?

Not that we don’t need information channeled into hierarchies of control in order to avoid destruction, but really what was the final status report on Jesus’ decision to go up to Jerusalem? What would his annual report say, what were the results of his choice and how do we evaluate the outcome so that we might address, have something to say to, the amazed and afraid disciples as they walk behind their leader and their teacher?

Frankly we don’t want church change, or life changes, to come out of complexity towards simply clear but sometimes devastating consequences. We don’t want life to go from a mess to a messier mess. We want life to go from simple to simple with maybe a short detour called complications.

But, our desire for simplicity, and simple answers producing simply predictable results, is so basic to our life, so basic to our fear of amazement and our amazing fear of life, that we make simplicity a virtue and complexity an immoral obfuscation. Remember Mayor Giuliani telling the United Nations after 9/11, “evil is evil.” Well that satisfied all our needs for simplicity to be virtue, dismissing complexity.

But it just ain’t so. Jesus’ decision to go up to Jerusalem was an act of interactive complications, of many factors and agencies, from the beheading of his cousin John the Baptist, to the death of his friend Lazarus, to the plot of Judas, the reproach of Martha, and the mysterious motions of his own prayer, and his arguments with Peter about what to do next. Just to name a few of the complexities in Jesus’ life those Passover days.

So, in that frame, in that picture, what should we do next, RUC? Is there a simple action or will we act out of complexities, into more complexity, with nothing but complications to follow?

Well. I could suggest a simple five point program. But I’d rather encourage us to enter this whim of life as it is really lived and changes.

I’d rather suggest that what God is doing with the creation is God’s own complicating of the creation as it was once simply made.

Creation in Genesis is simple. Light and dark are separated. Land and water are separated. Man and woman are not the same. And on and on: a blue-print, power-point paradise!

But ever since that simple-sounding beginning when God made heaven and earth, things have just been getting more and more complicated. And I believe that that is God’s will. I want to suggest that the mounting complexity of life is the mind of God—the mind of God—making manifest God’s beautiful loving intelligence.

In our Genesis Bible story the creation is imagined as seven discrete days in which several unique tasks were completed and a rather small number of things were made and each was separated form and defined by its boundaried difference: night and day, land and water, man and woman. But that is only the beginning of the mind of God making the world, the cosmos.

And for centuries we have been idolizing this idea, the idea of boundaries, and separateness. As if God’s first week day-timer checklist of unique tasks done was supposed to be the blueprint for eternity. We have been stuck in our first impression of God: work a 6 day week, make 20 separate things and call it a day and start over!

We have an understandable instinct for wanting to keep life simple like that, even a nostalgia for “the gift to be simple,” for former, quieter, simpler times—as if life and God stopped at the end of week one. But this regressive instinct has led us to put boundaries around God’s creation, saying to ourselves sinful things such as: my tribe is God’s tribe, my nation is God’s nation, my race, my gender, my definition of marriage is God’s definition.

In fact, however, God’s never stopped creating. And ever since week one God has been calling us to cross over the boundaries of creation, interact with the other, and fulfill the mind of God with a million, million interacting loops of newly created life. The entirely of the mission and message of Jesus is that heaven is found in the breaking down of earthly boundaries: Jews need to recognize Samaritans as Jesus recognized the Samaritan woman at the well; good people need to recognize that the first shall be last; the temple rulers need to see the kingdom of God in children; and finally, as Paul came to say about the cosmic Christ: in Christ there is neither Jew nor Greek; Christ, not in the separate boundaried people, places and things, but in their meeting, in their mutual recognition, in the love of the other not the love of the self only.

That, my friends, is why we are a church in mission to the world as well as in mission to each other. That is why we reach out, as well as hold on. That is why partnerships local and global fulfill God’s will. Partnerships, partnerships, partnerships. That is my prophetic message to you. Partnerships with Indians in Arizona. Partnerships with Indians in South India. Partnerships with Indians for Christ who worship at Crusader Lutheran Church. Partnerships with Tamil people who worship at Pilgrim UCC in Wheaton. Partnerships with Sri Lankan people, here and there, who want to end that civil war. Partnerships with Palestinians, with Israelis, with Latinos in Guatemala and in Rockville. Partnerships
with more gay, lesbian, trans-sexual people, with more people of color, and more intergenerational partnerships so we can fulfill God’s dream of being a beloved community in systemic, complex, relationship with all of God’s beloved communities.

Here, my friends, is a short testimony to this vision of God’s interactive world. Here’s one way I have experienced the other and complexity not just the simple self. When I was a boy, my peaceful State College, Pa. neighborhood had two gangs. We called them gangs. They were just cohorts of boys who lived on different streets, the Theil boys on Hillcrest Avenue, and John Davidson and his friends down the hill. And we threw dirt clots at each other and made other war-like gestures. I found myself quietly going to both groups and being their friend, even telling them I belonged to their group. Some may see me as a Benedict Arnold.
But I just could not give my loyalty to one group, but rather to the possibility of the two groups being in relationship with each other, somehow, and I was to be the bridge, the go-between, the peace-maker, or whatever. It was a dangerous, risky calling, and I think we moved to New Jersey before both groups beat me up. But this has been a part of my life. I married an African-American woman from South Carolina. I married a wonderful Jew. I’d read about Jewesses in Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe. Maybe I need to stop trying to marry the world! But let us never stop trying to partner with the world.

There was a time when God’s true mind was best formed in separate colonies of the saved. The American Shakers were one such separated holy group. But now is the time for God’s will to be done in reaching out, reaching across, making complex interactive feed-back loops, simply beautiful, simply one.

The complex reason that Jesus set his face and walked up to Jerusalem, the complex story of the butterfly who flaps its wings, is that of God and the world as simply one.

Amen.