Suppose between two nodes there are multiple passive elements in series - does the order of these elements ever matter?
No, in the ideal case, there is no difference at all. The same current goes through each lumped element and it makes no difference what order in which they are connected. 

In real life, it may make a difference because of parasitic effects. For example, a large film capacitor connected with a 10M resistor in series to ground. You'd probably want to connect the capacitor to ground (and the outside of the winding at that) and have the physically small resistor not grounded. That's because the big cap will have lots of stray (parasitic) capacitance to the chassis and other stuff nearby, and with the 10M the only thing grounding it, it could be affected. Compare the two below cases- the difference in voltages seen at the labeled nodes is enormous. 







simulate this circuit &ndash; Schematic created using CircuitLab