Fifth Sunday in Lent

5th Sunday in Lent
Jeremiah 31:31-34
Hebrews 5:5-10
John 12:20-33

Today’s gospel lesson includes that familiar text: “unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit. Those who love their life lose it, and those who hate their life in this world will keep it for eternal life.” There’s a book we use for confirmation class now entitled “Those Episkopols.” It’s been highly praised within the church as a brilliant, elementary exposition of the Episcopal Church and what it means to be a part of it. People really seem to enjoy reading it and get a lot from it. In this book the author devotes many words to the Episcopal Church’s interconnectedness with the world and our sense of its value and goodness and of God’s presence there. I don’t disagree with him, but it may be what most clearly sets us apart from other Christians whose faith is characterizes or even overshadowed by the sense that humanity and the world we live in are inherently corrupt. A faith with that area of focus is very different from one that embraces the world with all its wonders and risks. This text from John is one that is frequently claimed as proof that they are right and we are wrong.
It is a text that may have meant something very straightforward to the one who composed it. Many of his recent ancestors and contemporaries were probably called upon to give their lives for their faith. A sacrifice of that magnitude has to mean something. Those who offer it and those who witness it feel compelled to communicate that meaning to future generations. Twenty centuries later, we may be growing increasingly skilled at imagining threats but the demand that we give our lives for our faith still seems a remote possibility. If that is true, how can we honor the meaning of this text in our own time and place?
I’ve been reading a book entitled The Age of the Unthinkable. Its subtitle is “why the new world disorder constantly surprises us and what we can do about it.” The author is Joshua Cooper Ramo. One of the things he describes in the book is a physics experiment initially imagined by a Danish physicist named Per Bak. Think first about Galileo’s experiment of dropping two balls from the tower of Pisa, one light and one heavy, and noting that they hit the ground at the same time. As Ramo notes, in physics it is not uncommon that multiple layers of complexity underlie a relatively simple observation.
The question posed by Per Bak was this: If you piled sand, one grain at a time into a heap about the size of your fist, how would you know when the first little avalanche would occur? It was a certainty that as the sandpile got higher and the sides steeper, some would slide off. How would you predict when that would happen? Bak’s conjecture was that the sandpile would initially organize itself into instability. He described that condition as one in which adding one grain of sand would trigger an avalanche OR have no effect at all. What made this conjecture depart from the conventional thinking and observation of his discipline is that he was saying that these cones of sand – that looked fairly stable were deeply unpredictable. There was no way of telling what was going to happen next and the relationship between input and output was a mystery. It was organized instability. Bak went on to say that he thought that the energy of systems constantly poised on the edge of unpredictable change was a fundamental force of nature, giving as examples the assembly of clouds and the hard-to-predict onset of rainstorms or the evolution of mammals whose progress frequently jumps past the next logical step. Ramo observes that this sandpile view of the universe does not deny that stability exists in the world, but sees it as a pause in a system of incredible and unchartable dynamism. It is what science calls a “nonlinear” system in which internal dynamics disrupt the idea that you can expect a given action to produce the same reaction every time.
If you could make a model of such a system, you might begin to make sense of how and why they evolved over long periods of time. Another physicist set out to model Bak’s sand pile conjecture. He took sand from the beach and put it through a sieve to get grains of about the same size. He dried them thoroughly and put them in a device that looked like an automatic pepper mill. The mill could measure and control how many grains it dispensed over a period of time. Below the mill he put a plate the size of the palm of your hand, put the plate on a scale and the entire apparatus inside a plexiglass box. Then he hooked it up to a personal computer and started making sand piles. As predicted they initially shaped themselves into cones. Nobody told the grains of sand where to go, but the intrinsic physics of a falling grain of sand meant that they would organize themselves into a pile. But once the pile reached a certain size it went into a strange “critical” state predicted by Bak’s conjecture. With one pile, the addition of a single grain of sand at this point would trigger an avalanche. With another pile, a thousand additional grains could be added before any sand started sliding. You could predict the general chances of getting an avalanche at any given point, but whether or not that next grain of sand would set one off was fundamentally unpredictable. What happened within the pile – the shifting and sliding of grains of sand against each other was as important as any outside force acting upon the pile. There was no clear link between what you did to it and how it responded, nor was there any proportionality between cause and effect. And measuring all of those tiny, instantaneous changes in relationship between the grains inside the pile was impossible. No computer could manage it.
Ramo, the author of The Age of the Unthinkable suggests that the world we live in is much more like one of those piles of sand than we have been willing or able to understand up to this point. It certainly seems true that the world grows more chaotic and the effects of the chaos are hitting closer and closer to home, eroding our sense of security and causing us to question whether the way we have become accustomed to live is sustainable.
What if we do have to figure out how to live in this chaotic and unpredictable environment? In particular, what if we have to do so as Christians continuing to shape our own lives around the baptismal covenant and to encounter the world with a sense of love for God and neighbor? We might begin by re-imagining our understanding of loss. John does it when he describes the grain falling into the ground and dying. How do we make our losses redemptive? Just as an example, how do we experience empathy with the many comfortable and privileged persons who after watching the events of September 11 on television complained “I don’t feel safe any more” But then how do we go on to find a way to help them feel empathy with the child growing up impoverished, with an addicted parent, hearing gunshots outside his windows all night – someone who hasn’t felt safe a day in his life.
Or how might we empathize with the victims of someone like Bernard Madoff but then find a way to help them understand their losses in relation to the life of a single parent trying to raise a family with a minimum wage job in a tough economy?
The analogy of the sand pile, in which the fate of each grain is utterly and completely dependent upon its relationship with all the others offers a different perspective on John’s words about loving one’s own life and the grain of wheat falling into the ground and ultimately bearing fruit. What we imagine to be our individuality and autonomy may be little more than illusion. At the very least, it has less relative importance that we typically give to our life in community. Losing our lives may mean our realization and acceptance of the knowledge that they are linked with those of others in ways that we will never understand, control or predict. What Jesus teaches us is that in living out the baptismal covenant the links between our lives and those of others will be signs of God’s presence. In the experiment of creating the sand piles, the ultimate effect of piling grains of sand was an avalanche. We think of an avalanche as negative – they injure and kill people and destroy things. But that negative connotation is an artifact of the words used to describe it. In the reality that is modeled by this sand pile experiment, the avalanche produced by mysterious shifts in relationship between the grains of sand can be beneficial as well as destructive. What Jesus’ life offers us is the knowledge is that the fruits of our gains and the redemptive nature of our losses are always to be shared and made meaningful.
We may not always have control over what happens to us, but we always have the opportunity to give meaning to it. What we cannot control can bring us an awareness of the love expressed for us by God in shaping a world in which all is interdependent an in which that which is lost is ultimately made meaningful.