The Uncertainty Principle

Scripture: Hebrews 4:12-13

In February of 1927, a German physicist by the name of Werner Heisenberg made a discovery that had profound and far-reaching implications for scientists. Heisenberg was interested in the measurement of subatomic particles, like electrons. But Heisenberg realized that when he tried to measure the position and the momentum of a particle at the same time the results were always imprecise.

It was this imprecision that prompted Heisenberg’s startling and revolutionary conclusion. You see, Heisenberg came to believe that this imprecision wasn’t the result of some human limitation or mistake. Rather, it was simply in the nature of things. Or, to put it differently, Werner Heisenberg theorized that one of the characteristics of the universe—at its most basic and elemental level—is uncertainty.

This idea—known as “Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle”—shocked the scientific world and gave rise to furious debate among the leading theoretical physicists of the day. From our perspective, this may seem like a great deal of unnecessary fuss. After all, if you want to know whether there is a fundamental uncertainty to things you do not need to ask Werner Heisenberg or Albert Einstein. You can ask a philosopher. You can ask a theologian.

Or you can go to an even better source. You can ask a retired assembly line worker who is worried about losing his pension and his medical insurance. You can ask a fifty-year-old automotive engineer who finds himself unemployed for the first time in his life. You can ask a doctor who has to give hard news to one of her patients. You can ask anyone who has a friend or family member serving in Iraq. You can ask someone who has fallen out of love or who does not seem to be able to fall into love. You can ask someone who’s trying to decide whether to begin chemotherapy, take a failing parent off life support, or lend financial aid to a struggling son or daughter who may spend the money on drugs or alcohol.

You could have asked my father. He grew up in poverty during the Great Depression, dropped out of high school to help support his family, watched both of his parents die while he was still a young man, served in the Second World War and was shot at on two different continents, built a successful business that crashed, spent some time in prison, moved to Detroit the year of the riots, and suffered from ill health his entire life. I don’t think my father ever knew anything but uncertainty.

Yes, if you want to know whether there is a fundamental uncertainty to things, all you need to do is ask an expert. That probably includes just about everyone you know. It probably includes you, too.

And the uncertainty principle I’m describing has a deeply troubling dimension to it. For it is when we most need certainty that we may have the most trouble finding it. It is when we face life’s toughest questions that we may come to wonder whether we can find any answers, or, for that matter, whether any answers exist. And yet we have to live with this uncertainty and conflict and contradiction, because that is where life happens. The writer and naturalist Barry Lopez, in his book Arctic Dreams, puts it this way: “One must live in the middle of contradiction, because if all contradiction were eliminated at once life would collapse. There are simply no answers to some of the great pressing questions. [So] you continue to live them out, making your life a worthy expression of leaning into the light.”

The biblical text before us is a letter written to a group that must have been plagued by conflict and contradiction and uncertainty, perhaps as no group has been before or since: the Hebrews of the mid- to late first century of the common era. Imagine their circumstances. They were members of the Jewish faith and followers of Jewish traditions. In all likelihood, their family, their community, their occupation, their very day-to-day existence was intertwined with that identity. But they had come to believe in the divinity of one of their own, a Jew, a man they had never met, a revolutionary who had divided the religious and political authorities of his time, an itinerant miracle worker about whom they had heard fantastical stories and who was said to have risen from the dead.

And who was guiding them in this new faith? Well, it was a motley crew: a ragtag collection of disciples; a former persecutor of Christians who wrote lots of nagging letters and who now called himself Paul; and countless others who claimed to speak with authority—and how was one to know whether they did or did not? How could you tell who to follow or what to do? Indeed, those early Jewish Christians might have sympathized with an observation made by the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, who once said—probably only half in jest—that “Everything has been figured out, except how to live.”

What the writer of this letter offers to those uncertain people living in those uncertain times is this: God watches you and knows who you are. God sees the thoughts of your mind and the intentions of your heart. God understands you as if you were naked and laid bare before Him and stripped of all pretense and deception. God comprehends your very soul.
Of course, this is not the only time we encounter this message in the scriptures. We run across it periodically and it often comes to us as a kind of warning. God sees everything and judges what He sees. God watches what you do and so you better watch what you do as well.

Now, let us be honest with each other. This message makes us nervous. It intimidates us, maybe even frightens us, perhaps more than a little. And if you have any question about that, try living just one day in a state of constant minute-by-minute awareness of the fact that God is monitoring your past and present and future, observing your every action, and listening to your every thought. It is not an exercise for the faint of heart.

Therefore, most of us, maybe all of us, do not live this way. And we can understand why: this is strong medicine, and so we take it sparingly, and after a while we stop taking it at all. So we conveniently forget that God knows everything we think and do. And, in its own way, this seductive forgetfulness makes life easier and less demanding. But when we cease remembering this basic truth about God’s relationship with us we deprive ourselves of a source of certainty that may help us in some of our uncertain times.

Let me offer an example. In the early nineteen seventies, a study was conducted using Princeton Theological Seminary students as guinea pigs. The seminary students were gathered into a classroom for a discussion period and then dismissed. As the students left the classroom they came across an individual slumped in a doorway and clearly suffering some form of distress. You will not be surprised to learn that the vast majority of those seminary students stopped to see if the individual needed help.

You may, however, be surprised to learn that the students were much less likely to stop if they were told at the end of the discussion period that they were late for an appointment. Under those circumstances, most students bustled past the suffering stranger as if he or she wasn’t there. And, ironically, the seminary students chose to keep their appointment, rather than help the individual, even when their classroom discussion had focused on the story of the Good Samaritan.

Now, we should be fair to those seminary students. Many of them probably just responded to the pressure of the moment without giving the matter any thought. And those who did consider stopping—but didn’t—might have believed that they were making an appropriate choice in morally uncertain circumstances. “Well,” they might have said to themselves, “I have a responsibility to help others but I also have a responsibility to follow the instructions that were just given to me. Lots of people can take care of this stranger. But I’m the only person who can keep my appointment.” We should be fair to those seminary students, if for no other reason than that most of us can see our own decision-making in theirs. Again, let us be honest with each other and admit that we, too, have made thoughtless or self-interested decisions like this and have tried to justify our choices by claiming that we were presented with a complicated and uncertain situation and did the best we could.

On some occasions, such justifications will be true and fair. We will have confronted a situation of genuine moral uncertainty. And we will have made the best judgments we knew how to make, trying our hardest to “lean into the light” as we went along.

But I wonder whether that is the case with the seminary students. I wonder whether the situation they faced really involved any moral uncertainty at all. I wonder whether those students would have walked past the stranger in distress if they had simply remembered that they were making that choice in the sight and in the presence of the living God. I wonder if there are times in our lives when remembering that simple article of faith might help us find some certainty where the temptations of uncertainty have clouded our vision.

Still, there is another—and, in my view, vastly more important—dimension to the idea that God is with us and watching us. It has nothing to do with judgment or correction. It has everything to do with peace and consolation. And it is this: watchfulness is an essential characteristic of love. We know this to be true. We know that this explains why every year millions of parents gather to watch their children play baseball, play soccer, play football, play in the band, play in the orchestra, or even play in the backyard. How will you know if I love you? Check to see if I’m watching.

We are made in God’s image, and so it is with God. God is not the ultimate surveillance program. God does not watch us because He hopes to catch us breaking the rules. God watches us because that is how God finds opportunities to offer us forgiveness and redemption and hope and grace. It is in the knowledge that this is so, and in those opportunities—which arise mysteriously and unexpectedly and in the most improbable ways—that we may find something like certainty even in the midst of the radical uncertainty that surrounds us.

And it is in the nature of forgiveness and redemption and hope and grace that those opportunities will come to all of us, no matter who we are or where we’ve been. My favorite contemporary bluegrass musician, a guy named Bill Bynum (who hails from—of all places—Trenton, Michigan) has a song with a wonderful refrain: “Every sinner has a future; and every saint has a past.” God knows this, because, as the Letter to the Hebrews says, “all are naked and laid bare to the eyes” of God. So God watches us; and knows us; and loves us; and comes to us. And that certainty can carry us through times when no other certainty can be found, because it is certainty enough to keep us going.

In an August evening of 1997, musician Neil Peart learned that his nineteen-year-old daughter, who had left that morning for college, had been killed in an automobile accident. Within ten months, his wife of twenty-two years had been diagnosed with cancer and had died of it. These tragedies, one hard upon the other, left Peart empty and desolate, a ghost of his former self. A year later, restless in his despair, Peart set off on a fourteen-month 55,000 mile journey on his motorcycle, searching for a reason to live.

The uncertainty principle, in its most callous and brutal form, had taken control of Neil Peart’s life. Indeed, just before he set out, Peart wrote to one of his friends, “I don’t know who I am, what I’m doing, or what I’m supposed to do.” Shortly after setting off, someone recognized him and asked if he used to be a musician. Peart responded, “I used to be a lot of things.”
Still, Peart pushed on. He “leaned into the light.” And after a while he could say “I did not really believe in a destination called ‘healing,’ but at least I had begun to believe in the road.”
Sometimes that’s all the certainty we can find: the certainty of the road and the search. And then, along the way, we discover the certainty that someone is watching us; that someone is with us; that someone loves us; that someone has come along for the ride; that someone is trying to help us see the signs and the hazards; that we are not going it alone.

And so, sitting in a Nazi military prison in April of 1943, alone but not alone, in the midst of the most uncertain circumstances imaginable, Dietrich Bonhoeffer could write these words: “It is certain that we may always live close to God and in the light of God’s presence, and that such living is an entirely new life for us; [it is certain] that nothing is then impossible for us, because all things are possible with God; [it is certain] that danger and distress can only drive us closer to God. It is certain that we can claim nothing for ourselves, and may yet pray for everything; it is certain that our joy is hidden in suffering, and our life in death; [and] it is certain that in all this we are in a [relationship with God] that sustains us.”

So what of our old friend Werner Heisenberg? Well, in my view he got it partly right. Sure, the uncertainty principle is fundamental. But it is not foundational. And it is not final. Because it turns out that the universe has another characteristic as well: it is under the watchful eye of the One who made it. And so, praise the Lord, are you.

Amen.