14th January 2007. Epiphany 1. `Odyssey' service at St Edward's Church, Cambridge

`What did I do to deserve this'? Living faithfully in a random world.

Readings: Job 10: 1-7 John 9: 1-3

Picture an old lady in a sheltered flat in the North of England. The picture of health and vigour until her 90^th birthday, she has gone into a rapid decline in the two years which have followed. Giving up her house with genuine relief, she moves - with the help, financial as well as practical, of a devoted tribe of seven children, most of them now retired - into an extremely comfortable and attractive small apartment - ground floor, of course - with a view of the communal front door, which gives her unique previews into who's visiting whom. She likes to know what's going on - always has. She;s a great storyteller. Staff check on her four times a day, make sure she takes her medication and eats her meals, deal with her housework. At least one of her children visits most days. It's a comfortable life. She seems to have little or no sense of diminution, effortlessly adapting her expectations to this new, much smaller horizon. She doesn't seem to miss the house she lived in for forty years, the gossips and feuds of the street, her friendships with neighbours. Certainly she doesn't hanker after the past's genuinely heroic battles to bring up her seven children in poverty to a decent life with reasonable expectations. That's all done and achieved. They've all done well. On the whole they've grown up both kind and successful. No, these days the patterns of the universe are those of her daily life - the weekly trips to the day centre, evenings in the lounge with other residents, the balancing act to make between watching the TV (a tiring and bewildering activity now that she is so deaf) and doing endless word and number games in puzzle books, the visits from her daughters to do her hair, help her with the bath, the odd shopping trip in the wheelchair.

But it's a dangerous world, too. Different sorts of dangers. The cups of tea which punctuate each day - they're a danger. Walking from her chair to the kitchen, she might fall. Her hand shakes with the weight of the kettle of boiling water. Sitting from standing, and standing from sitting, are both difficult and risky activities. There's plenty of risk in this life - at least as much as there was in the old one; and death stands closer to her mistakes now than he ever did in her fifties. All the same, those risks are sort of OK. You can make calculations about them - move slowly, cautiously, make sure the kettle's not too full, that sort of thing. But then there are the other dangers - the incalculable, unexpected kind - the kind which landed her here in the first place. The blackouts, from which she wakes dizzy and sick, with no idea how much time has passed or how she got where she is. The intermittent vertigo. The periods of confusion which seem to follow these episodes. So, well, she's a logical person, - she's always been good at calculating odds, always been outstandingly fast at mental calculation, always been quick to detect patterns and make connections. Heaven knows she's needed all those skills in her life until now - to make the week's money go round, to make sure all the children get some sort of equitable treatment, to make too little be adequate, week after week and year after year. So she uses those skills again, of course: she watches and she calculates. She'll learn the rules of the new world if she can. After a few weeks of careful observation she concludes that the blackouts aren't random at all. On the contrary, there are clear triggers for them. If the tea trolley is at a right angle to the armchair rather than flush against it, then she's prone to blackout. Leaving the kitchen window open has the same effect. Certain kinds of biscuit are contra-indicated, and cake gives her indigestion, which also seems under certain circumstances to prompt episodes. Those are the things to tackle. Her daughter suggests, gently, that her chronically weak heart might have something to do with it, but she can't hear her. After all, these days she can't hear much. Where she is, it's much, much better to have found the real causes: the causes she can do something about. She'll refuse the biscuits, reject the cake, close the window, get the trolley moved. Then she'll never have a blackout again.

One day, if we're lucky (or unlucky) enough to live so long, we'll be doing just the same sorts of thing. It's only from our perspective of inhabitants of a larger universe than the one in which that old lady by then lived that we can see the irrationality of her decision. In one way it was rather a sensible thing she did. There was a genuinely random cause for the thing she feared most in the world, and she ignored it - because she couldn't make it make sense, and she couldn't control it herself. Then there were a series of correlations she happened to see, and they were things she could control, so she called them causes and consequently felt safer. It wasn't true, but it marked the boundaries of danger in a way she really needed. It may have prolonged her life.

We humans are all pattern makers - and in making patterns, we don't just make sense of the world we find ourselves in. We use those patterns to gain control of our world, too. Some of the ways we do it are subtle, and some are blatant; some don't assign rational causes, and some do, or partly do. In my teens I would bet on the probabilities of my love life working out this way, or that way, depending on whether I could, or could not, play particular difficult passages during my piano practice perfectly four times without a break. It became a habit so ingrained I still, when tired, find myself falling into the same sorts of habits. If this set of red lights turn green before I reach them in the car then...I won't get `flu before the end of term. If the next car to pass me on the other side of the road is red then...no one will ring us up before we've finished eating supper. And so on. That sort of thing is not exactly harmless - because, believe me, it can get really obsessive and it's quite hard not to believe that it works - but it is very straightforwardly irrational. But the real horror of that kind of thinking is when it considers a connection which could be genuine. My adult child can't see things through because when she was younger I....finished off her Year 9 textiles project for her. I have cancer because I...don't think positively enough. My best friend committed suicide because I...didn't listen in the right way, didn't give him enough of my time, didn't make that decisive move which would have made all the difference - if only I'd known what it was. These are the nightmare thoughts, and they are neither far-fetched nor uncommon. A good friend, many years ago, made her last months dying of pancreatic cancer distinctly worse than they already were by deciding that it was her fault for being subject to frequent depressions. This was a woman who had coped gallantly with losing her whole family to the Nazi concentration camps: she had been saved by being on the Kindertransport - but had experienced being sent away, at the time, as rejection. She made a fine and honourable career for herself as a social scientist, but of course it took her many years to make peace with her past. She had read literature which gave inconclusive but also suggestive evidence that positive thinking could aid remission in cancer patients, and when it did not happen in her case she made the obvious inference: she was not able to think positively enough. Death would be her punishment. And I have met no parent with an unhappy or dysfunctional adult child who does not spend much of their time fruitlessly reviewing the past for the thing which, had they done it differently, would have meant their baby grew up happy and confident. And it might be true or it might not, or there might be an element of truth mixed in a complex mass of causation; but the day that you say `I did the best I could at the time, and what my child has decided to do, or not do, since, is out of my control and must be accepted' is the day you acknowledge that you are much less powerful and important a person than you thought you were. It is an act of humility, not of defeat. Not until you make it do you discover what things there might be also to be penitent about.

The thing that all these habits of mind have in common is that they take the data available, which is absolutely bound to be partial because we are such finite creatures, and make it all add up to something which makes sense. We are addicted to making sense. Even chaos has to make sense. In that way it is our great gift, but it is also our great limitation. `What did I do to deserve this?' - said about some misfortune - is just one of a range of cognate responses to the circumstances of life; and every single one of them, from the totally nutty to the super-rational, is flawed. To take sole responsibility, that is to say causative responsibility, for events, is to claim arbitrary power. Whether you're receiving supernatural messages from car numberplates or analysing the flaws in your past parenting techniques the case is in principle the same: you are claiming a bigger place in the workings of the world than is rightfully yours. To do it might bring you comfort, make a beguiling pattern, or trap you in a nightmare of impotent guilt: but all these positions will be more or less delusory.

God - an imagined God - plays a major role in the drama of `what did I do to deserve this?' And it's not just formal believers who give Him that role. During the time I spent as a trainee chaplain on a transplant ward, I came across a lot of people for whom the question `What did I do to deserve this?' was directly addressed to the God in whom they did not believe. For one particular woman waiting for a double transplant the question formed part of a horrible cycle in which she tried to gain control over an uncontrollable situation by finding a delusory cause in her own behaviour - not for the failure of her organs, but for the persistent low fever and lassitude which plagued her, which kept her off the operation list, and which nurses hinted from time to time were something she could throw off if she were prepared to make a bit more effort. Almost as a distraction from this horrible cycle of depression and self-blame she fastened on the expedient of blaming God instead; which, if it achieved nothing else, did at least lend her the energy of indignation during the time she was doing it. Perhaps it helped her to hang on long enough for the fever to go, because she got her operation in the end.

For God's place in the habit of reproach is, for us humans, a tricky one. He is often characterised as the invisible link whicb will provide a chain of causation, otherwise entirely untenable, between human behaviour and circumstances - as, for example, in vast majority of local reactions to the tsunami, as reported in a respectable theological journal recently, where it appears that religious reactions in all the religions of the region proceed upon the same lines: that the tsumani was divine punishment for particular sins committed by that local community, the favourite being homosexuality. Since this can't make sense any other way, God is pressed into service to provide human acccusers with an authority not rightfully theirs. In seizing upon and enslaving the name of God to human purposes, this is, of course presumptuous (to put it mildly) - but that is not an unusual position for we humans to take in relation to divine purposes. As a clear-headed friend pointed out to me recently: if we take the phrase `God knows' seriously, it can only mean `the thing which no human being can definitely know'. Is such and such a person saved? God knows. Is history going in such and such a direction? God knows. What is the specific relation between our personal histories and the sins we commit? God knows. It is a necessary space, and it is not our business to fill it. When Job cries out to God, affirming his innocence and asking why God nevertheless seems bent on destroying him, he is NOT asking `What did I do to deserve this?' He knows, and we his readers also know, that he did nothing at all to deserve it. Much extra suffering is caused him by his friends' inability to take in this central fact. While this does not answer any questions about God's actual intentions, it does save Job, his creature, from a fruitless and self-aggrandising readiness to attribute to God a humanly constructed character and set of intentions invented to suit his own myopic and partial view.

The truth is that whatever we do, misfortunes will come. In one sense the indignation of `what did I do to deserve this?' is rather modern - though the sentiment is not. I can expect a long life, probably, with a longish plateau of middle age during which I will be active and relatively powerful. That is true for many here; but it's not guaranteed for anyone. Just expected. All the same, sooner or later, like the old lady I began with, the plateau will dip into a long downhill run; sooner or later, however happy and easy my life, however strong my body, however carefully I look after it, it will fail me; I will fall ill and die. And no amount of affluence and care saves me from the heartbreaks of love and loss. Sadness will come. It is only a question of how and when. No one will deserve all that happens to them. The question to ask is not why we suffer, but how we will meet it. Some kinds of reaction will diminish me and hurt those I love; others will allow spaces for love and generosity to continue to flower. My aunt died a few months ago, a truly dreadful death from cancer, which no technique of modern medicine could make kinder. She had no brief for death; raged against the dying of the light as loudly as any; but when she thought over her life and its vicissitudes her response was `weren't we lucky?' And that is what stays with those of us who mourn her - in its generosity, its celebration of what was joyful in her life. It was, in every sense, a response which had grace.

When the disciples asked Jesus `was it because of this man's sin or his parents' that he was born blind?' Jesus replied `neither; but so that the glory of God might be made manifest.' For those of us who are Christians, the answer to `what did I do to deserve this?" lies in the life and death of Jesus Himself. In Him, God became sub ject to the vulnerabilities and dangers of human, finite, physical bodies; in Him, he suffered betrayal and pain and death, all utterly undeserved. We cannot innocently suffer anything which Jesus did not; only the pains of guilt are truly ours, and those too Jesus bore on our behalf for no more rational reason than than unsought love: - love we certainly have done nothing to deserve. And therefore I believe that when Jesus talks about making manifest the glory of God he does mean the healing he will perform on the blind man, but he also and more more fundamentally, means Himself: an innocent man, who suffers unjustly, who breathes and struggles and suffers and is vulnerable and dies in despair. Only such a man could truly be the Son of God. Only such a man could transform every loss into gain, every death into abundant life. In following him we hope to learn something of the infinite generosity of God. And, with his Divine assistance, when we meet the sorrows we do not deserve, we too might make manifest God's glory - not in miracles of healing, but in the openness and grace with which we face our suffering. Love is as strong as death; hold fast to that which is good. God is always with us in the valley of the shadow of death; fear no evil.

Amen.