RANDOM COMES IN BUNCHES

a sermon preached by the Rev. Dr. Tim W. Jensen
at the First Religious Society in Carlisle, Massachusetts
Sunday March 4th, 2007

One of my all-time very favorite New Yorker cartoons doesn’t have a caption, and doesn’t need one. Two very serious-looking scientists, dressed in long white lab coats, are conducting an experiment. One scientist is standing next to a blackboard, and the other is standing on top of a tall stepladder. The blackboard is divided by a line down the middle into two sections, labeled “Head” and “Feet;” while the scientist on top of the ladder is holding a cat. That’s the basic concept. And on the blackboard, under the section marked “Feet,” there are several dozen little tally-marks. And under the section marked “Head” there is one. But what really makes the cartoon funny is the expression on the face of the cat....

I want you to know that both the title and the topic of my message this morning were inspired by something Ernie Huber said almost a year ago now, during one of last year’s Lenten potlucks. I guess the knowledge that “Random Comes in Bunches” is something that Scientists and Engineers take for granted, but as a historian and a theologian I’d never heard that phrase before, and so I was immediately fascinated by the concept, and eager (or perhaps I should say “anxious”) to explore it more completely.

I was, of course, already familiar with Murphy’s Law: that anything which can go wrong will go wrong (and at the worst possible moment); and I also had some familiarity with the notion of Serendipity, or coincidental good fortune, which is of course a theological concept of the highest order. I understood the phenomenon (if not the actual mechanics) of “feast or famine,” and how “it never rains but it pours” -- how, for example, a person can go for months without a date and then suddenly have to choose between two on the same night; and I also understood about the spiritual and ethical importance of practicing Senseless Beauty and Random Acts of Kindness, of simply doing good deeds for no apparent reason.

But this notion of “clustered randomness” -- the idea that unpredictability itself is predictably unpredictable in ways we can’t really anticipate -- although it obviously had something to do with all these other concepts, was surprisingly new to me.

The truth is, although I think random thoughts myself all the time, I’d never really taken the time to think systematically about Randomness at all. It was just one of those random things that had never really occurred to me. Random thoughts, as least as I understand them, are ideas which in my father’s day would have come out of left field; and throughout my life, ever since I was a little boy really, I’ve certainly enjoyed bunches and bunches of those. But randomness itself, and all the things that go with it: statistical probability and chaos theory, fractals, strange attractors, and the like -- simply didn’t make up a very large part of my mental landscape. In all honesty, I’m not even sure I actually knew what the word really meant.

Random, haphazard, without aim or purpose, (or for that matter, apparent direction), bizarre, unexpected, off-topic, off-the-wall, a non-sequitur, nonsense. Random. And not just Random. Sometimes Totally Random. I’d overhear my own kids, and then later my students at the University of Oregon, talk about random people doing these random things in random places, but I could never quite make heads or tails of it, and frankly it didn’t really seem that important that I did. It was just sort of random information anyway: more noise out there in the background, distracting me from focusing in on what was truly important.

And yet as I grew older it also grew increasingly difficult to ignore that random things seemed to be happening to me all the time. Things that I couldn’t predict and which were beyond my effective control, some of them big and some of them small, some of them actually quite pleasant, but others not so much. Our historical forebearers would have doubtlessly referred to these last as “afflictive dispensations of Divine Providence,” since it was an article of faith for them that God did not play dice with the Universe, and that every little thing that happened under heaven was subject to God’s Will and part of a divine, predetermined plan. There is no room for random in a Universe ruled by an absolutely sovereign, omnipotent and omniscient Deity; even free will and the power of human choice are on some level illusory, since God knows what we will decide even before we know ourselves.

And yet as logical as this may seem from a metaphysical perspective, it also raises a rather thorny existential question: Why do bad things happen to good people? How can someone go through life doing everything right, being responsible, caring for others, even performing Random Acts of Kindness, and then be struck down in their prime by some sort of accident or disease, or have to suffer through any of the countless other random ordeals and misfortunes which so routinely afflict even the best of us?

Are we somehow being punished for things we don’t even know we’ve done wrong? Or is God NOT Just, or somehow not in control; or perhaps merely cruel, mean-spirited, and vindictive? Or what if there is no God at all: suppose the Universe really is just Random to the Core, and thus at best ambivalent to any sense of right or wrong, fair or unfair? And if there is no universal Standard of Justice; if instead it really is “just us,” what possible reason could any of us have to be concerned about anyone other than ourselves, or those in a position to do us favors or cause us harm?

It’s kind of depressing, isn’t it? It kind of helps you understand why so many people WANT to believe in God, even if there isn’t any actual proof. For Jews, Christians, and Moslems, the absolute sovereignty of a just, compassionate and merciful, all-knowing and all-powerful Creator God is the ultimate article of faith, from which all other subsequent beliefs and practices derive. God’s ways may well be mysterious and incomprehensible to us, so much so that they seem completely random and arbitrary, or at times even malicious and malevolent, but that certainly doesn’t mean that God isn’t in charge.

In the Buddhist and Hindu traditions, however, God’s Will has little to do with anything. Rather, our human destinies are the product of Karma, an intricate web of interwoven cause and effect, decision and consequence, action and reaction, which plays out unceasingly through a never-ending succession of lifetime after lifetime. Who we are is the direct result of who we were, and the choices we make now will determine who (or what) we will become. We are therefore all ultimately accountable in a very tangible way both for what happens to us and what becomes of us, even though it may be impossible to do all the math in any given moment.

But now suppose, just suppose, that life truly is just Random, or perhaps more accurately that a certain degree of chaos and unpredictablity is simply essential to making everything else possible in the first place. Suppose that what little order we do perceive in the Universe is simply a product of our own imagination: our ability to make connections and create patterns of meaning in our minds, and even in certain controlled situations to replicate certain results time and time again, so that we can feel confident to the point of certainty that every time we do “A,” “B” will be the outcome.

But suppose as well there are a certain number of things, far more things than we might ever imagine, which are both beyond our control (or even our effective influence) and also in a very real sense essentially out of control, and yet which not only potentially influence our lives in unpredictable ways, but also (ironically) make the whole idea of free will meaningful in the first place? These are big, philosophical questions, and one can speculate about them almost endlessly -- and yet they are not exactly the sort of thoughts which give one comfort while laying awake in bed at night wondering what God and the Universe are going to throw at you next. When our lives FEEL like they are out of control, we often look desperately for something solid to cling to, even when we understand that we can’t always trust our own eyes, and that appearances can be deceiving.

And yet there is another school of thought which counsels us to embrace the randomness, and to let go of our need for control, and certainty, and predictablity, and simply learn to trust for the sake of trusting. It’s the wisdom of the Serenity prayer, which allows us to discern between the things we can and cannot change, and encourages us to change the one and accept the other.

We may not always be able to avoid being dropped on our heads. But we can try to learn how to land on our feet as often as possible, and how to pick ourselves up again when we don’t. Life isn’t fair. We can’t always get everything we want, or have things our own way. But the sooner we let go of the illusion that we SHOULD, the easier it becomes to move forward with our lives.

Gamblers often speak of Luck or Fortune as if it were a person, a fickle lady who some days loves you and other days lets you down. You do what you can to get the odds in your favor, but eventually you either have to roll the dice or walk away from the table, hopefully while you’re still ahead. Sometimes you’re up and sometimes you’re down, but the one thing every gambler knows (or ought to know) is that in the long run the house always wins.

The temptation to try to beat the odds, to try to “fix” the game, for example, by cheating, is always in the cards. But cheaters also pay a price for making their own luck; by their own actions, they create a world where no one can be trusted, because everyone around them is either a hustler or a mark. I suppose that knowing when the odds are in your favor, and knowing when it’s time to walk away, is an important skill to cultivate. But I personally feel uncomfortable playing in a game where the only way I can benefit from my own good luck is by taking advantage of those less fortunate than myself.

The alternative to gambling is to attempt to minimize risk by spreading it equitably among a large number of individuals. Thousands of years ago, Chinese merchants navigating the treacherous rapids of the Yangzee river, began to distribute their goods evenly among one another’s boats, so that if any one boat should capsize during the journey, no individual merchant would be completely wiped out. This was the start of what we now know today as social insurance: where society itself helps mitigate both the risks and the consequences of bad luck, by distributing them more widely among the fortunate and the unfortunate alike.

Of course, there are some who would say that this is simply a more sophisticated form of gambling, one which penalizes the people who are skillful boat-handlers while rewarding those who routinely run themselves upon the rocks. And I suppose from a certain perspective, this may well be true. But given a choice between living in a society where I know I can count on the people around me (and that the people around me are also counting on me), or one in which everyone I meet is potentially out to take advantage of me (that is, if I don’t take advantage of them first), I would much rather live in the former. And I suspect the same is true for you as well.

A healthy church is not merely a bunch of random souls thrown together haphazardly without aim or purpose. Rather, it is a true Religious Society -- a congregation of individuals who have chosen to invest themselves in one another’s lives, and to share with one another both the risks and the benefits of life itself. And so we chose “to dwell together in peace, to seek knowledge in freedom, [and] to serve humanity in friendship, to the end that all souls shall grow into harmony with the Divine,” and enter into a covenant with each another and with God around our shared values of Love, Truth, and Service. And even though it may not always seem like we’re all in the same boat (or even, quite frankly, always on the same page), we should at least take comfort in the knowledge that our neighbors have an interest in what happens to us, and that our concerns are their concerns as well....

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