After spending the month of June struggling with the difficult book of Job, Psalm 139 is a welcome breath of fresh air! Where Job was dark and challenging, Psalm 139 is much more hopeful and much more readable.
We probably should have had read Job at the end of the summer rather than the beginning. We did Job first because Job shows up first in the Bible where all the poetry books are clustered. I say we maybe should have looked at it last because Job may be intended to be a critique of the other traditional wisdom literature. Perhaps it is sarcastic, perhaps a satire. Think of what Mark Twain was to American culture of his day. He wrote important truths, but they were a bit warped. They were sarcastic. Perhaps Job is like that. We don’t know.
By contrast Psalm 139 is easily at the core of theology and wisdom literature of its day. The psalm breaks into four parts. We read it in those four parts. Let’s look at each.
Part 1 is verses 1-6. The very first word of the psalm is Yahweh – the name of God never or rarely spoken allowed by Jews. “Yahweh, you have searched me and known me.” This part is clearly about God.
The second word is “you”. The second verse starts with you. The third verse starts with you, as does the fifth verse. This is all about God, and about how God knows a person completely and totally.
The word know (or known) show up seven times in the psalm. Maybe that’s deliberate. Maybe that’s a coincidence. Whatever the case, the number seven is a number that symbolizes completeness. God’s knowledge is complete.
As the psalmist says, “Such knowledge is too wonderful for me…” This can be intimidating. It is impossible to hide any thought or feeling from God. God even knows your thoughts of trying to hide your thoughts from God! So it’s best to just be honest.
At the same time such knowledge is wonderful. Why bother hiding anything from God? Just be honest at all times and in all situations. If you find yourself enraged at something that perhaps you don’t think you should be enraged at. Or perhaps you’re disgusted by something you don’t think you should be disgusted at, go ahead and share those feelings and questions with God too. God knows.
We want to be good people, but we live in an immensely complex world. We do not know as much as we want to know. Much of the news and information we receive, from whatever source we get it, is not reliable. If you want to be a conscientious, sincere, honest person in our world today… someone who works hard, truly deserves the lifestyle that you have, is not excessively environmentally damaging, and wants to just be a truly good citizen in your community, good luck! Sure, you can fool yourself by finding sources of information that tell you what you want to hear, and tell you that you’re a great person. But are you actually? Or on the other hand you can depress yourself by finding sources of information that will undercut every virtue you’ve ever valued. But are you actually bad?
Where is the authentic, conscientious guidance that we want to depend upon? You’re not going to find it in popular culture or news.
The creeds tell us that we will be judged by Jesus. The scripture tells us in several places that we are accountable to God for what we do. God alone knows and God alone judges rightly. But how do we know what is right?
All I’ll say is it requires critical thinking. Question everything that agrees with you and question everything that disagrees with you. Life takes work. There are no cookie cutter approaches to life and there are no shortcuts. And do all things with honesty and humility, for God alone knows the full truth.
The second part of the psalm is verses 7 to 12. There we are reminded that it is impossible to hide from God’s presence. No matter where you go, God is there. This psalm takes the idea of God being omnipresent even a step further than most other Jewish thought. Verse 8 says, “…if I make my bed in Sheol, you are there.” Sheol is the place of the dead. So, God is present even in death and among the dead.
Psalm 139 is one of those places in scripture which remind us that to exist is to be in God’s presence. And existence apart from God is impossible. The ancient Hebrews didn’t do much with the idea of hell as eternal punishment. That’s more of a Greek idea that wanders its way into Hebrew thought. Jesus does use it and so do the New Testament writers. But however you understand hell, and even though it is mind-bending to say it, hell itself cannot exist apart from God’s presence. Again, you cannot exist if God does not make existence possible. An atheist can deny God’s existence all he or she wants. Or a person could hate God and rebel against God all he or she wants. But there is just no getting away. There is no getting away from God’s presence just like there is no getting away from God’s knowledge.
The third part of the psalm is verse 13 to 18. There we read that it was God who knit us together when we were still in our mother’s womb. And there is where we read that we are fearfully and wonderfully made. The images are warm and rich and wonderful.
The all powerful, all knowing, all present God who is too big to comprehend, crafted each of us uniquely and individually among the billions of people on the earth. God makes good things. God does not make mistakes. And God does not make junk. Never ever let anyone tell you that you are less than the wonderful thing God made you to be. You are valuable, capable, and wonderful.
At the same time, recognize the same value and potential in others.
Two things need to be noted about this section. One is great. The other is hard. First the great thing.
You’re probably familiar with the idea of God creating people the way a potter creates something out of clay. The prophet Jeremiah uses that imagery. So does Isaiah. St. Paul uses it in his letter to the Romans. It’s a great image. But this psalm does not use potter and clay imagery. Clay pots were the disposable vessels of that day. Things that were woven were not. A potter can turn out something quickly. Weaving takes time. In contrast to the usual potter and clay image this psalm talks about God as weaver and ourselves as woven. We are indeed carefully crafted by God, not a production line of disposable crockery.
That takes us to the hard thing. This psalm often finds its way into arguments about abortion. I should probably do an entire sermon on abortion based upon this text. But that is not what this psalm has in mind. I’m just going to be general and brief. God has given to many people the creative power to conceive new life – the ability to have God set to work weaving a new being that will bear God’s image. It is a wonderful and amazing power. Those who use that power carelessly and then decide to abort the results out of convenience or shame stand convicted by this psalm. It is the destruction of God’s handiwork for the sake of convenience.
I have worked with some people who have had abortions. And if they are conscientious at all, and they have decided to have an abortion for convenience sake then they bear those emotional scars for the rest of their lives.
And then there are abortions done for medical needs: mother’s life, fetal abnormalities. These are especially difficult because if we claim that God weaves together wonderful things, then what went wrong? There’s no short or easy answer to that. The only thing we can do is insist that God has indeed done a wonderful thing; but there is no way, with the limits of our knowledge, for us to understand it. People who have had abortions by medical need bear scars too. But here we find God’s presence and care coming alongside them fully acknowledging the grief and pain they feel. We live in a broken world. We do not understand it. But we know God is with us.
The final part of the psalm is usually left out when it is used in worship. Verses 19-24 ask God to kill the wicked. It talks about hating people with a perfect hatred.
If the writer of the psalm has been known by God since conception and woven together by God, then has God also not done the same with the wicked people?
That is a good question! But that is not the point of this psalm. Several of the psalms use hate language. We’ll look at one of them later this month. There is an important theme that runs through all of them, and all of the hatred language. The psalm writers are not seeking personal revenge for wrongs done to them. The psalm writers are turning to God and asking that God set things right. It is a “thy kingdom come, thy will be done” type of request.
Ultimately the hate is not so much a personal feeling as it is the writer’s way of saying that he or she opposes those who oppose God.
No one knows the situation that caused the writing of Psalm 139. But it appears that the writer is in serious trouble because of being wrongly accused of doing something. It is a cry for help to God. It is also a statement of faith and confidence in God’s protection.
Psalm 139 is a fun piece of literature. It is a favorite psalm among many people. God actively pursues us and will not let us get away. It invites both fierce loyalty to God and a safe and complete surrender of our whole selves to God. I suggest turning to it often as part of your own devotional life.
Monday, July 8, 2024
Wednesday, June 26, 2024
June 23, 2024 Job 38-40
(Introduction to the Texts)
I want to say a few words to set us up to understand the chapters from Job that we’re about to read. I find it helpful to remind myself of just how powerless I am before reading these texts. There are two things that I remember every time I start to think I’m strong or highly capable.
One is that I used to be the Scout Master for Boy Scout Troop 32 in Canandaigua. Every Memorial Day and 4th of July they put a float in the Canandaigua parade. They use our church’s farm wagon and they assemble it behind my house. Our wagon is not large or heavy and I can push it around by hand on a flat surface. But there is a slight incline from the back of my house and into the driveway. It doesn’t look like much. You can tell it is uphill, but if you were asked casually is the ground level, you’ll probably say yes. Yet even that slight grade is too much for me to push our wagon up. I tell myself that the wagon isn’t all that heavy, and that it has wheels and rolls easily. Surely I can push it up a slight short incline. But no luck. I stand there with my feet slipping and my muscles aching as I try with all my might to move it. It only takes the strength of one more person to get it up over there, but it is still more than I can do. I am not strong or powerful at all.
The second thing has to do with digging with a backhoe. I’ve used backhoes a few times in my life. I don’t do too bad in soft dirt. But when it comes to hard shaley soil, forget it. I can scrape and scrape and scrape and feel like I’m doing nothing. Advice from an old and skilled backhoe operator I’ve been given is that when you don’t feel like you’re accomplishing anything, shut off the machine, climb out, grab a shovel, and start digging by hand. You’ll be back in the operator’s seat soon enough! Indeed that is true. While I can dig okay enough in soft soil, when it comes to hard packed soil or rocky stuff I struggle. I’ll spend a whole day with a pick and shovel working myself into a lather of sweat and muscles aching with fatigue, and if I’m lucky I’ll have a couple tons of dirt to show for it; which isn’t much at all.
We’re about to hear God’s response to Job and his friends after they’ve been arguing about why there is suffering. They haven’t come to any conclusions. Several times Job takes God to task calling God unfair, and saying he wants to argue his case before God. Job has convinced himself that he understands things and God isn’t being just.
God’s words are not things we want to hear. But they are true. They remind us of just how small and limited we are. Think for a couple moments about God’s power and majesty. The universe is enormous, but God is bigger. Every atom in this infinite universe and every bit of energy and all of time only can exist because God makes them exist.
We think we understand things through science and we can come to predictions about how long the earth will last and the sun will shine, and all that sort of stuff. But it is entirely within God’s power to end it all before I end this sentence. God can change time, create or annihilate anything and everything at every moment. Existence itself can only be within God. Heaven and hell can only exist because God makes them exist. Everything about us could be changed by God faster than I can snap my fingers.
God is simply bigger. God is more. God cannot be understood.
Those of you who grew up Lutheran and studied the Small Catechism in confirmation class know that Martin Luther wrote many times that we are to “fear and love God.” To fear God is to acknowledge God’s power, and to acknowledge our complete and total eternal dependence upon God.
We are weak. God is strong. No matter how much we think we know, we cannot truly know anything. God alone knows. We are about to hear God remind Job of those realities.
(Read Job 38-40)
When you think about all the innocent pain and suffering Job has endured this response from God comes across as unduly harsh. God rips into Job. God is challenging and sarcastic. Can’t God come across as firm but pleasant instead? Couldn’t God say, “You know, Job, being me is complex. It’s beyond what you can handle. And you just aren’t sophisticated enough to do my job. You really can’t understand what it is to administer justice in this universe. I’m sorry for the suffering you have experienced.”
But if that’s the response we think Job should get, then we are mistaken as to God’s nature. We would be trying to domesticate God into a big soft cuddly teddy bear. That is not God.
God is God. God acts as God chooses to act. Sometimes things may make sense to us. We should not be surprised when things do not.
If God’s words to Job in what we read today were the be all and end all of our understanding of God, we’d be in a real mess. We’d live in constant fear and uncertainty. How could we depend upon God like that? But there is more to the story.
Yes, God is God. God acts as God chooses to act. But God also respects us and makes promises to us that God will not break. God does love us.
Our gospel reading may not seem to connect to the passage from Job at all, but it does. It connects because it points to something very ironic about Jesus’ arrest, trial, and crucifixion.
We’ve talked about this before. In John’s gospel it looks like Jesus is on trial before Pontus Pilate, and Jesus is condemned, and Jesus is executed. That is humanity’s judgment upon Jesus. But what is actually going on is the reverse. Jesus is not on trial before Pilate. The world is on trial before God. Pilate is not the judge. Jesus is the judge. Except Jesus is not actually condemning the world. Verse 19 of our gospel reading says, “this is the judgment, that the light has come into the world. And people loved darkness rather than light.”
So, God is God. God acts as God chooses to act. And in God’s judgment God decides not to condemn the world, despite it rejecting him. God decides to save the world by suffering for it, so as to prove to the world how much God loves it.
I think the crucifixion of Jesus speaks to us more powerfully when we consider it in light of what we read from Job today. God can do anything. God can change the rules any time God wants. God can make justice be whatever God wants it to be. God can do anything to us and we have no power to the contrary. But God puts limits upon himself. God makes promises to us and keeps those promises.
Where were we when God created the universe? Nowhere to be found. We are weak and helpless creatures. But God is loving. This is not a cuddly cosmic teddy bear love. It is a powerful and ferocious love, that is willing to suffer wrongly too; and at the hands of humans. Even as that happens, God does not judge humanity for its failings. God only bids us to live in the light.
Next week we’ll conclude our look at Job and we’ll see what ultimately happens to him. For this week, when we look at it through the love of Christ, we realize that God’s justice is not at all like our ideas of justice. And that is a good thing for us! For we do not stand up before God as good enough by our understanding of justice!
We remember that when we are suffering, and when we are crying out to God for help or guidance and it does not come, that God truly is beyond us. We know that we may never understand. And yet we know that we are always securely in God’s love and that God will ultimately do good things with us.
I want to say a few words to set us up to understand the chapters from Job that we’re about to read. I find it helpful to remind myself of just how powerless I am before reading these texts. There are two things that I remember every time I start to think I’m strong or highly capable.
One is that I used to be the Scout Master for Boy Scout Troop 32 in Canandaigua. Every Memorial Day and 4th of July they put a float in the Canandaigua parade. They use our church’s farm wagon and they assemble it behind my house. Our wagon is not large or heavy and I can push it around by hand on a flat surface. But there is a slight incline from the back of my house and into the driveway. It doesn’t look like much. You can tell it is uphill, but if you were asked casually is the ground level, you’ll probably say yes. Yet even that slight grade is too much for me to push our wagon up. I tell myself that the wagon isn’t all that heavy, and that it has wheels and rolls easily. Surely I can push it up a slight short incline. But no luck. I stand there with my feet slipping and my muscles aching as I try with all my might to move it. It only takes the strength of one more person to get it up over there, but it is still more than I can do. I am not strong or powerful at all.
The second thing has to do with digging with a backhoe. I’ve used backhoes a few times in my life. I don’t do too bad in soft dirt. But when it comes to hard shaley soil, forget it. I can scrape and scrape and scrape and feel like I’m doing nothing. Advice from an old and skilled backhoe operator I’ve been given is that when you don’t feel like you’re accomplishing anything, shut off the machine, climb out, grab a shovel, and start digging by hand. You’ll be back in the operator’s seat soon enough! Indeed that is true. While I can dig okay enough in soft soil, when it comes to hard packed soil or rocky stuff I struggle. I’ll spend a whole day with a pick and shovel working myself into a lather of sweat and muscles aching with fatigue, and if I’m lucky I’ll have a couple tons of dirt to show for it; which isn’t much at all.
We’re about to hear God’s response to Job and his friends after they’ve been arguing about why there is suffering. They haven’t come to any conclusions. Several times Job takes God to task calling God unfair, and saying he wants to argue his case before God. Job has convinced himself that he understands things and God isn’t being just.
God’s words are not things we want to hear. But they are true. They remind us of just how small and limited we are. Think for a couple moments about God’s power and majesty. The universe is enormous, but God is bigger. Every atom in this infinite universe and every bit of energy and all of time only can exist because God makes them exist.
We think we understand things through science and we can come to predictions about how long the earth will last and the sun will shine, and all that sort of stuff. But it is entirely within God’s power to end it all before I end this sentence. God can change time, create or annihilate anything and everything at every moment. Existence itself can only be within God. Heaven and hell can only exist because God makes them exist. Everything about us could be changed by God faster than I can snap my fingers.
God is simply bigger. God is more. God cannot be understood.
Those of you who grew up Lutheran and studied the Small Catechism in confirmation class know that Martin Luther wrote many times that we are to “fear and love God.” To fear God is to acknowledge God’s power, and to acknowledge our complete and total eternal dependence upon God.
We are weak. God is strong. No matter how much we think we know, we cannot truly know anything. God alone knows. We are about to hear God remind Job of those realities.
(Read Job 38-40)
When you think about all the innocent pain and suffering Job has endured this response from God comes across as unduly harsh. God rips into Job. God is challenging and sarcastic. Can’t God come across as firm but pleasant instead? Couldn’t God say, “You know, Job, being me is complex. It’s beyond what you can handle. And you just aren’t sophisticated enough to do my job. You really can’t understand what it is to administer justice in this universe. I’m sorry for the suffering you have experienced.”
But if that’s the response we think Job should get, then we are mistaken as to God’s nature. We would be trying to domesticate God into a big soft cuddly teddy bear. That is not God.
God is God. God acts as God chooses to act. Sometimes things may make sense to us. We should not be surprised when things do not.
If God’s words to Job in what we read today were the be all and end all of our understanding of God, we’d be in a real mess. We’d live in constant fear and uncertainty. How could we depend upon God like that? But there is more to the story.
Yes, God is God. God acts as God chooses to act. But God also respects us and makes promises to us that God will not break. God does love us.
Our gospel reading may not seem to connect to the passage from Job at all, but it does. It connects because it points to something very ironic about Jesus’ arrest, trial, and crucifixion.
We’ve talked about this before. In John’s gospel it looks like Jesus is on trial before Pontus Pilate, and Jesus is condemned, and Jesus is executed. That is humanity’s judgment upon Jesus. But what is actually going on is the reverse. Jesus is not on trial before Pilate. The world is on trial before God. Pilate is not the judge. Jesus is the judge. Except Jesus is not actually condemning the world. Verse 19 of our gospel reading says, “this is the judgment, that the light has come into the world. And people loved darkness rather than light.”
So, God is God. God acts as God chooses to act. And in God’s judgment God decides not to condemn the world, despite it rejecting him. God decides to save the world by suffering for it, so as to prove to the world how much God loves it.
I think the crucifixion of Jesus speaks to us more powerfully when we consider it in light of what we read from Job today. God can do anything. God can change the rules any time God wants. God can make justice be whatever God wants it to be. God can do anything to us and we have no power to the contrary. But God puts limits upon himself. God makes promises to us and keeps those promises.
Where were we when God created the universe? Nowhere to be found. We are weak and helpless creatures. But God is loving. This is not a cuddly cosmic teddy bear love. It is a powerful and ferocious love, that is willing to suffer wrongly too; and at the hands of humans. Even as that happens, God does not judge humanity for its failings. God only bids us to live in the light.
Next week we’ll conclude our look at Job and we’ll see what ultimately happens to him. For this week, when we look at it through the love of Christ, we realize that God’s justice is not at all like our ideas of justice. And that is a good thing for us! For we do not stand up before God as good enough by our understanding of justice!
We remember that when we are suffering, and when we are crying out to God for help or guidance and it does not come, that God truly is beyond us. We know that we may never understand. And yet we know that we are always securely in God’s love and that God will ultimately do good things with us.
Monday, June 17, 2024
June 16, 2024 Job 33
Job is a very difficult book to understand. It is also a difficult book to preach on. I’ve been relying on three scholars to help me understand it. One is James Crenshaw, whose scholarship is in the Harper Collins Study Bible. One is Carol Newsom, whose work is in the New Interpreter’s Bible Commentary that we have in the church’s library. She’s a great help to understand Elihu, whose perspective we got in what we read today. And the third is Edwin Good in the Harper’s Bible Commentary. None of these three scholars have all that much positive to say about Elihu.
Edwin Good says this about Elihu, “The effect of Elihu’s intervention is an odd one. He proposes a new meaning for human suffering, as a teaching device from God, and he shows a high appreciation for God’s natural power. But he surrounds the nuggets of semiprecious metal with so many clods of ordinary dirt as to weary the miner beyond reason. They style is wordy, convoluted, often hardly intelligible. Translating excellent poetry is hard but exhilarating; translating Elihu is just hard.” (Harper’s Bible Commentary, 1988, Pg. 429)
Elihu is indeed tedious. But like Good and the other scholars point out, he does add an important point to the discussion about suffering. That is the idea that God causes suffering for the purpose of teaching us. Though Elihu’s words are convoluted, we find a pretty decent summary of them in what we read today. In Job 33:29-30 we read, “God indeed does all these things, twice, three times, with mortals, to bring their souls back from the Pit, so that they may see the light of life.”
The idea that God causes suffering to teach us has been extremely influential in both Judaism and Christianity. It is also a tempting answer. 20th Century Christian scholar and novelist, C.S. Lewis wrote this in his book The Problem of Pain:
Edwin Good says this about Elihu, “The effect of Elihu’s intervention is an odd one. He proposes a new meaning for human suffering, as a teaching device from God, and he shows a high appreciation for God’s natural power. But he surrounds the nuggets of semiprecious metal with so many clods of ordinary dirt as to weary the miner beyond reason. They style is wordy, convoluted, often hardly intelligible. Translating excellent poetry is hard but exhilarating; translating Elihu is just hard.” (Harper’s Bible Commentary, 1988, Pg. 429)
Elihu is indeed tedious. But like Good and the other scholars point out, he does add an important point to the discussion about suffering. That is the idea that God causes suffering for the purpose of teaching us. Though Elihu’s words are convoluted, we find a pretty decent summary of them in what we read today. In Job 33:29-30 we read, “God indeed does all these things, twice, three times, with mortals, to bring their souls back from the Pit, so that they may see the light of life.”
The idea that God causes suffering to teach us has been extremely influential in both Judaism and Christianity. It is also a tempting answer. 20th Century Christian scholar and novelist, C.S. Lewis wrote this in his book The Problem of Pain:
Now God, who has made us, knows what we are and that our happiness lies in Him. Yet we will not seek it in Him as long as He leaves us any other resort where it can plausibly be looked for. While what we call “our own life” remains agreeable we will not surrender it to Him. What then can God do in our interests but make “our own life” less agreeable to us, and take away the plausible sources of false happiness? …We are perplexed to see misfortune falling upon decent, inoffensive, worthy people – on capable, hard-working mothers of families or diligent, thrifty, little trades-people, on those who have worked so hard, and so honestly, for their modest stock of happiness and now seem to be entering on the enjoyment of it with the fullest right…. Let me implore the reader to try to believe, if only for a moment, that God, who made these deserving people, may really be right when He thinks that their modest prosperity and the happiness of their children are not enough to make them blessed: that all must fall from them in the end, and that if they have not learned to know Him they will be wretched. And therefore He troubles them, warning them in advance of an insufficiency that one day they will have to discover. (Lewis, Problem of Pain, New York: Macmillan, 1940, 84-85)
That is the essence of Elihu’s argument, that God will cause suffering as a last resort to turn our souls properly to God and God alone. If we consider that the ultimate end is either salvation or damnation, we may consider it to be a fair price to pay. Lewis himself saw plenty of hardship. His mother died when he was a child. He experienced trench warfare in World War 1, and he suffered multiple serious injuries from an artillery shell that fell short of its target. Lewis knew suffering in his early life.
There is an appeal to the idea that God causes suffering to teach us. Just like the idea that we looked at last week – that suffering is punishment for sin – this idea helps us put the sometimes craziness of suffering into something that makes sense.
Perhaps even more than suffering, I think we fear the idea of meaninglessness of suffering. We want life to have meaning, and we want what happens in life to be meaningful!
But there are two flaws. These are flaws in Lewis’ argument and flaws in Elihu’s argument. And remember, as we read Job, we are given a number of wrong answers about the reason for suffering. (We will get the answer, or perhaps I should say we get a response, when God speaks in the text in what we will read next week.) The two biggest flaws are these.
They leave out the idea of evil. The idea of evil has become passe in our culture today. People want to say things are caused by ignorance or fear rather than evil. But any person who has lived in a war zone knows that there are forces at work within some human minds that are grotesque beyond all explanation. Suffering makes no sense sometimes and is beyond all human control. Evil is beyond all sense and while undefinable, is a force beyond the bounds of human control as well.
The other flaw in saying that God causes suffering in order to teach us is that it makes God into a monster. If God created us, and God gave us the incredible ability to feel great pleasure and to feel intense pain, they why would God so quickly resort to pain to teach us? Surely God has other means. Why would God create a creature in love and then punish it in order to make it turn back to Him? The logic is warped.
I earlier quoted from C.S. Lewis in his book The Problem of Pain where he said basically that God caused suffering to teach us. That book was published in 1940. In 1961 Lewis published A Grief Observed. There his words sound like Job himself. Lewis writes:
Meanwhile, where is God?... When you are happy, so happy that you have no sense of needing Him, so happy that you are tempted to feel His claims upon you as an interruption, if you remember yourself and turn to Him with gratitude and praise, you will be – or so it feels – welcomed with open arms. But go to Him when your need is desperate, when all other help is vain, and what do you find? A door slammed in your face… After that, silence… Not that I am (I think) in much danger of ceasing to believe in God. The real danger is of coming to believe such dreadful things about Him. The conclusion I dread is not “So there’s no God after all,” but “So this is what God’s really like. Deceive yourself no longer.” (San Fransisco, Harper, 1989, Pg. 17-19)
There’s no denying Lewis is being honest about his pain and bewilderment here. He writes this after the death of his wife at the age of 45. And yet, in the midst of it, he is still turning to God. That is the mark of faith. That is the same faith we find in Job himself. He rails against God. He calls God unjust and unfair. He complains that he is powerless and feels lost, yet he still turns back to God.
I like these words from Carol Newsome in The New Interpreter’s Bible:
Part of the problem with attempts to grapple with the meaning of suffering is that suffering does not have a single cause or a single shape, and so it cannot have a single meaning. It may arise out of human cruelty, out of self-inflicted folly, out of the inescapable reality of finitude, or any number of things. The notion that God wills particular suffering in order to teach something, however, can lead only to the conclusion that God is a monster of cruelty. (Volume 4, Pg. 572)
In what we read next week we will find that God is totally supreme and beyond the ability to comprehend. So, can God teach through suffering? Yes, God can do that. God can do anything. But does God necessarily do that, or is suffering somehow part of God’s plan for your life to punish your or to teach you? Don’t go there. You’re not going to find any answers that satisfy. That is indeed where the next section of Job takes us.
However, Elihu’s point has some value, despite its imperfections. If you can break away from the idea that teaching you something is the purpose of suffering, it keeps open the door that says you can learn a lot through suffering.
Last week I said that if I lay my hand on a hot stove it will get burned and I will not do it again. That is certainly a lesson learned! But there is much much more.
Through suffering you can become truly empathetic to those who are suffering. Through suffering you can understand the feelings of those who feel powerless. Through suffering you can recognize the true power of evil. Through suffering you can understand the frustration and fear of, as Lewis describes, God’s silence. Through suffering you can understand the feelings of meaninglessness and pointlessness that life can be for many people.
In other words, when you are suffering you do well if you can put its pain to good use in your life. God will be your companion in suffering. You may even discover the immense strength and depth of God’s power there.
Suffering is not fun, but it may also equip you well journey with others who are suffering as well.
That is the essence of Elihu’s argument, that God will cause suffering as a last resort to turn our souls properly to God and God alone. If we consider that the ultimate end is either salvation or damnation, we may consider it to be a fair price to pay. Lewis himself saw plenty of hardship. His mother died when he was a child. He experienced trench warfare in World War 1, and he suffered multiple serious injuries from an artillery shell that fell short of its target. Lewis knew suffering in his early life.
There is an appeal to the idea that God causes suffering to teach us. Just like the idea that we looked at last week – that suffering is punishment for sin – this idea helps us put the sometimes craziness of suffering into something that makes sense.
Perhaps even more than suffering, I think we fear the idea of meaninglessness of suffering. We want life to have meaning, and we want what happens in life to be meaningful!
But there are two flaws. These are flaws in Lewis’ argument and flaws in Elihu’s argument. And remember, as we read Job, we are given a number of wrong answers about the reason for suffering. (We will get the answer, or perhaps I should say we get a response, when God speaks in the text in what we will read next week.) The two biggest flaws are these.
They leave out the idea of evil. The idea of evil has become passe in our culture today. People want to say things are caused by ignorance or fear rather than evil. But any person who has lived in a war zone knows that there are forces at work within some human minds that are grotesque beyond all explanation. Suffering makes no sense sometimes and is beyond all human control. Evil is beyond all sense and while undefinable, is a force beyond the bounds of human control as well.
The other flaw in saying that God causes suffering in order to teach us is that it makes God into a monster. If God created us, and God gave us the incredible ability to feel great pleasure and to feel intense pain, they why would God so quickly resort to pain to teach us? Surely God has other means. Why would God create a creature in love and then punish it in order to make it turn back to Him? The logic is warped.
I earlier quoted from C.S. Lewis in his book The Problem of Pain where he said basically that God caused suffering to teach us. That book was published in 1940. In 1961 Lewis published A Grief Observed. There his words sound like Job himself. Lewis writes:
Meanwhile, where is God?... When you are happy, so happy that you have no sense of needing Him, so happy that you are tempted to feel His claims upon you as an interruption, if you remember yourself and turn to Him with gratitude and praise, you will be – or so it feels – welcomed with open arms. But go to Him when your need is desperate, when all other help is vain, and what do you find? A door slammed in your face… After that, silence… Not that I am (I think) in much danger of ceasing to believe in God. The real danger is of coming to believe such dreadful things about Him. The conclusion I dread is not “So there’s no God after all,” but “So this is what God’s really like. Deceive yourself no longer.” (San Fransisco, Harper, 1989, Pg. 17-19)
There’s no denying Lewis is being honest about his pain and bewilderment here. He writes this after the death of his wife at the age of 45. And yet, in the midst of it, he is still turning to God. That is the mark of faith. That is the same faith we find in Job himself. He rails against God. He calls God unjust and unfair. He complains that he is powerless and feels lost, yet he still turns back to God.
I like these words from Carol Newsome in The New Interpreter’s Bible:
Part of the problem with attempts to grapple with the meaning of suffering is that suffering does not have a single cause or a single shape, and so it cannot have a single meaning. It may arise out of human cruelty, out of self-inflicted folly, out of the inescapable reality of finitude, or any number of things. The notion that God wills particular suffering in order to teach something, however, can lead only to the conclusion that God is a monster of cruelty. (Volume 4, Pg. 572)
In what we read next week we will find that God is totally supreme and beyond the ability to comprehend. So, can God teach through suffering? Yes, God can do that. God can do anything. But does God necessarily do that, or is suffering somehow part of God’s plan for your life to punish your or to teach you? Don’t go there. You’re not going to find any answers that satisfy. That is indeed where the next section of Job takes us.
However, Elihu’s point has some value, despite its imperfections. If you can break away from the idea that teaching you something is the purpose of suffering, it keeps open the door that says you can learn a lot through suffering.
Last week I said that if I lay my hand on a hot stove it will get burned and I will not do it again. That is certainly a lesson learned! But there is much much more.
Through suffering you can become truly empathetic to those who are suffering. Through suffering you can understand the feelings of those who feel powerless. Through suffering you can recognize the true power of evil. Through suffering you can understand the frustration and fear of, as Lewis describes, God’s silence. Through suffering you can understand the feelings of meaninglessness and pointlessness that life can be for many people.
In other words, when you are suffering you do well if you can put its pain to good use in your life. God will be your companion in suffering. You may even discover the immense strength and depth of God’s power there.
Suffering is not fun, but it may also equip you well journey with others who are suffering as well.
Monday, June 10, 2024
June 9, 2024 Job 3-27
I’ve tried to capture the main themes of Job but that is difficult. The book’s logic twists around and around and is highly repetitive. A major point might be made and if you miss it you are lost. There are also a lot of cultural references and stylistic devices that confuse us. I’ve selected the passages that we read so that we could get a little feel for the dialog between Job and his friends.
For our sermon I want to pull out two of the biggest themes. We’ll spend some time with each.
The first is our sense of powerlessness. I touched on this briefly last week. None of us chose to be born. None of us had any say as to who are parents would be, what race or culture we’d be born into, what our intelligence level would be, or what our skills and talents would be. We were just born. At some point in our development we became aware of our existence. We became aware that we are humans. We came to sense our consciousness. We also became aware of God.
We discovered that we have some amount of control over our living conditions and environment, but not a whole lot. We have some control over our houses, our clothes, our food and the like. But we have no control over the weather, volcanoes, earthquakes, sunspots, etc. And we discovered that vast as the earth may seem, it is actually a small planet orbiting an average star somewhere relatively near the edge of a galaxy and it is among billions of galaxies and trillions of stars in a universe that is, as far as we can tell, infinite.
Who are we in the vastness of it all? What control do we actually have? Who, or what, is this God that we sense? And what is the nature of that God? We are told that we are given the promise of eternal life, and that it can be excellent. That’s good, but we still live largely in the face of mystery; and we know that at some point we will die. Even after death, we will forever be dependent upon the goodness of the God to exist.
It doesn’t seem fair. If everything of significance is not actually under our control, then what are we to do? Why am I given no say in a reality I that I did not ask to be a part of and which I cannot escape?
I know that’s a quick and deep philosophical dive into our existence, but it is true. The character Job does not ask questions like that outright, but he explores that sort of thinking. He points out the fundamental unfairness of it. How is he to escape pain when he is so powerless? In segments of Job that we did not read Job asks to go to court with God. There he can argue for fairness. But he knows that no such thing is possible for God has him hemmed in in every way and place.
So that takes us to the second major theme – the idea of justice and fairness.
I think we all have a sense of justice that is action and consequence related. If I put my hand on a hot stove I will get burned. And I will not do it again. Depending on how hot the stove was and how long my hand was there I might get burned very badly, even doing permanent damage to my body.
This is action and consequence. They are directly linked and the amount of pain I feel is directly connected to what I did.
But what if someone accidentally spills something slippery on my floor in front of the stove? Then I slip when walking by and in an automatic reaction I reach out to steady myself, with my hand landing on the hot stove. There’s still action and consequence. That make sense. Yet somehow I’ve suffered an injury and it is not my fault.
Or what if someone deliberately pours something slippery in front of my stove? I slip when I walk by and I reach out my hand and touch the hot stove. Should there not be some sort of consequence to that person for what they did? Surely they cannot continue to do things that injure other people with nothing happening to them in return!
This would be a crude form of justice, but it would be justice, if that person’s hand were also forced on a hot stove. They would then experience the consequences of what they made happen to someone else.
These are not nice thoughts, but we are ultimately okay with them. They make sense. It is a sense of justice where actions lead to consequences.
It gets messy very fast. When you have billions of people interacting, some deliberately, some accidentally, some carelessly, some carefully, consequences happen to people far from the source. The consequences may not come about for quite some time afterwards. Perhaps the people who set something in motion have died before the consequences present themselves. Or perhaps it is something on a global scale.
This time last summer there were serious wildfires in Cananda. Our skies were smokey and air quality was bad. We’re told that all of that accelerated by the dynamics of human caused climate change. If true, then what are we to do with it? And what about justice that happens at a national or global scale and not an individual one?
Even so, this sort of justice has a chain of action and consequences links. We may not like it. It may not seem fair, but it is something we fell we can do something about. We are ultimately okay with it. We know that things aren’t fair.
But what about natural disasters? I referenced some things earlier in the sermon. What about volcanoes, earthquakes, sunspots, asteroids, etc. We humans are puny compared to those things! We have no way of controlling them or even managing them.
In the midst of forces over which we have no control we have a dilemma of justice. Actions and consequences do not connect at all. Our desire for some sort of control in this reality into which we have been born is broken and unmendable.
In our Bible readings Job insists that he has done nothing wrong. He has three friends who visit him to comfort him. They also criticize him. They tell him that the natural and man-made things that have happened to he and his family must be God’s punishment for something that he has done. We read about them last week. Enemies attack and take and kill his livestock and possessions. Natural disasters kill all ten of his children. He is left with nothing. But then things get worse. His health is inexplicably ruined. He is suffering. He is in pain that he cannot escape. Job’s friends insist that this is divine justice. They insist that Job must have be doing wicked things – either unknowingly or that he’s been doing them secretly. Job vehemently insists that he is innocent. And we the readers know that he is indeed innocent.
In one of the passages we read Job points out the way wicked people get away with it without any consequences. And if the consequences of their actions are divinely brought upon their children, how is that justice? Shouldn’t the one who did the bad thing suffer the consequences and not someone else? Job says that all die the same – some being wicked and living good lives and some being righteous and never experiencing anything good.
Job is not a nice book of the Bible to read. It is not fun to read at all. But Job dares to dive into these questions and fears that exist in our lives.
We have more of Job to read, so I’m not going to say too much this week. But lets conclude by quickly noting two related things.
First, Job is not the only book from the ancient near east that brings up the idea of innocent people suffering wrongly. Other cultures have similar writings. Job even seems to be somewhat dependent upon them. What is distinct about Job, and Hebrew scripture in general, is the understanding of God. In other cultures they explained bad things happening by saying that the gods had created humans as basically playthings and servants. The gods would do things to humans for their own entertainment. Ancient Hebrew writings don’t go that way. Ancient Hebrew writings insist that God does not play games with people. And while some things are not possible for humans to understand, God holds humans in high regard and is ultimately fair and merciful.
And two, from a Christian perspective, we always view justice through the lens of the cross. In the life of Jesus God made Godself vulnerable to the forces of the world, and even vulnerable to the forces of human beings. Jesus did not die an accidental death from a force of nature. Jesus did not die as part of a riot that got out of control. Jesus dies because he leaves himself powerless to an unjust sentence of death at the hands of humans to whom he had done nothing wrong.
It is perfectly fine to cry out to God when you feel you are suffering unfairly. It is perfectly fine to cry out to God when you feel justice is not being done. It is perfectly fine to cry out to God when you feel the forces of this world are just too big and you can’t do anything to change them. In other words, it is fine to cry out to God with your feelings of powerlessness. Those are all faith-filled things to do.
And know that God knows exactly what it feels like.
Ultimately God’s justice is not our own. We do not understand. But God does love us. God respects our integrity. God desires our good intentions. And God treats us with mercy. Because of those things we can continue to live in confidence.
For our sermon I want to pull out two of the biggest themes. We’ll spend some time with each.
The first is our sense of powerlessness. I touched on this briefly last week. None of us chose to be born. None of us had any say as to who are parents would be, what race or culture we’d be born into, what our intelligence level would be, or what our skills and talents would be. We were just born. At some point in our development we became aware of our existence. We became aware that we are humans. We came to sense our consciousness. We also became aware of God.
We discovered that we have some amount of control over our living conditions and environment, but not a whole lot. We have some control over our houses, our clothes, our food and the like. But we have no control over the weather, volcanoes, earthquakes, sunspots, etc. And we discovered that vast as the earth may seem, it is actually a small planet orbiting an average star somewhere relatively near the edge of a galaxy and it is among billions of galaxies and trillions of stars in a universe that is, as far as we can tell, infinite.
Who are we in the vastness of it all? What control do we actually have? Who, or what, is this God that we sense? And what is the nature of that God? We are told that we are given the promise of eternal life, and that it can be excellent. That’s good, but we still live largely in the face of mystery; and we know that at some point we will die. Even after death, we will forever be dependent upon the goodness of the God to exist.
It doesn’t seem fair. If everything of significance is not actually under our control, then what are we to do? Why am I given no say in a reality I that I did not ask to be a part of and which I cannot escape?
I know that’s a quick and deep philosophical dive into our existence, but it is true. The character Job does not ask questions like that outright, but he explores that sort of thinking. He points out the fundamental unfairness of it. How is he to escape pain when he is so powerless? In segments of Job that we did not read Job asks to go to court with God. There he can argue for fairness. But he knows that no such thing is possible for God has him hemmed in in every way and place.
So that takes us to the second major theme – the idea of justice and fairness.
I think we all have a sense of justice that is action and consequence related. If I put my hand on a hot stove I will get burned. And I will not do it again. Depending on how hot the stove was and how long my hand was there I might get burned very badly, even doing permanent damage to my body.
This is action and consequence. They are directly linked and the amount of pain I feel is directly connected to what I did.
But what if someone accidentally spills something slippery on my floor in front of the stove? Then I slip when walking by and in an automatic reaction I reach out to steady myself, with my hand landing on the hot stove. There’s still action and consequence. That make sense. Yet somehow I’ve suffered an injury and it is not my fault.
Or what if someone deliberately pours something slippery in front of my stove? I slip when I walk by and I reach out my hand and touch the hot stove. Should there not be some sort of consequence to that person for what they did? Surely they cannot continue to do things that injure other people with nothing happening to them in return!
This would be a crude form of justice, but it would be justice, if that person’s hand were also forced on a hot stove. They would then experience the consequences of what they made happen to someone else.
These are not nice thoughts, but we are ultimately okay with them. They make sense. It is a sense of justice where actions lead to consequences.
It gets messy very fast. When you have billions of people interacting, some deliberately, some accidentally, some carelessly, some carefully, consequences happen to people far from the source. The consequences may not come about for quite some time afterwards. Perhaps the people who set something in motion have died before the consequences present themselves. Or perhaps it is something on a global scale.
This time last summer there were serious wildfires in Cananda. Our skies were smokey and air quality was bad. We’re told that all of that accelerated by the dynamics of human caused climate change. If true, then what are we to do with it? And what about justice that happens at a national or global scale and not an individual one?
Even so, this sort of justice has a chain of action and consequences links. We may not like it. It may not seem fair, but it is something we fell we can do something about. We are ultimately okay with it. We know that things aren’t fair.
But what about natural disasters? I referenced some things earlier in the sermon. What about volcanoes, earthquakes, sunspots, asteroids, etc. We humans are puny compared to those things! We have no way of controlling them or even managing them.
In the midst of forces over which we have no control we have a dilemma of justice. Actions and consequences do not connect at all. Our desire for some sort of control in this reality into which we have been born is broken and unmendable.
In our Bible readings Job insists that he has done nothing wrong. He has three friends who visit him to comfort him. They also criticize him. They tell him that the natural and man-made things that have happened to he and his family must be God’s punishment for something that he has done. We read about them last week. Enemies attack and take and kill his livestock and possessions. Natural disasters kill all ten of his children. He is left with nothing. But then things get worse. His health is inexplicably ruined. He is suffering. He is in pain that he cannot escape. Job’s friends insist that this is divine justice. They insist that Job must have be doing wicked things – either unknowingly or that he’s been doing them secretly. Job vehemently insists that he is innocent. And we the readers know that he is indeed innocent.
In one of the passages we read Job points out the way wicked people get away with it without any consequences. And if the consequences of their actions are divinely brought upon their children, how is that justice? Shouldn’t the one who did the bad thing suffer the consequences and not someone else? Job says that all die the same – some being wicked and living good lives and some being righteous and never experiencing anything good.
Job is not a nice book of the Bible to read. It is not fun to read at all. But Job dares to dive into these questions and fears that exist in our lives.
We have more of Job to read, so I’m not going to say too much this week. But lets conclude by quickly noting two related things.
First, Job is not the only book from the ancient near east that brings up the idea of innocent people suffering wrongly. Other cultures have similar writings. Job even seems to be somewhat dependent upon them. What is distinct about Job, and Hebrew scripture in general, is the understanding of God. In other cultures they explained bad things happening by saying that the gods had created humans as basically playthings and servants. The gods would do things to humans for their own entertainment. Ancient Hebrew writings don’t go that way. Ancient Hebrew writings insist that God does not play games with people. And while some things are not possible for humans to understand, God holds humans in high regard and is ultimately fair and merciful.
And two, from a Christian perspective, we always view justice through the lens of the cross. In the life of Jesus God made Godself vulnerable to the forces of the world, and even vulnerable to the forces of human beings. Jesus did not die an accidental death from a force of nature. Jesus did not die as part of a riot that got out of control. Jesus dies because he leaves himself powerless to an unjust sentence of death at the hands of humans to whom he had done nothing wrong.
It is perfectly fine to cry out to God when you feel you are suffering unfairly. It is perfectly fine to cry out to God when you feel justice is not being done. It is perfectly fine to cry out to God when you feel the forces of this world are just too big and you can’t do anything to change them. In other words, it is fine to cry out to God with your feelings of powerlessness. Those are all faith-filled things to do.
And know that God knows exactly what it feels like.
Ultimately God’s justice is not our own. We do not understand. But God does love us. God respects our integrity. God desires our good intentions. And God treats us with mercy. Because of those things we can continue to live in confidence.
Wednesday, June 5, 2024
June 2, 2024 Job 1-2
Introduction to Job
I want to take a few minutes to talk about the book of Job before we begin reading it. I think that will help us understand what is going on in it and have it make more sense.
No one knows who wrote Job, or when it was written, or where it was written. Biblical scholars are all over the place when it comes to answering those questions. They do agree on a few things. First, as we have it today, Job is written by at least two different people and at two different time periods. And second, it is written in a style older than its actual date. Perhaps think of it this way. Imagine a play-write of today writing a new play using the style and language of Shakespeare. It would use archaic words and sentence structure even though it was written now. That seems to be case of Job. My best guess is that it is written in the 6th Century B.C.E. using language and styles from several centuries earlier.
Job is an epic poem. The beginning and end are prose and read like a fairy tale. No scholar that I read even dreams that Job is an historical account. It is not, and you run into big problems fast if you try to interpret it as a real story. It does not begin with the words, “Once upon a time…” but it does begin with, “There once was a man…”
The book is complex. It is deliberately crafted to be inconsistent and even self-contradictory. Sometimes people talk about the patience of Job. In the New Testament the book of James references Job saying, “You have heard of the endurance of Job, and you have seen the purpose of the Lord, how the Lord is compassionate and merciful.” But we will find that in part of Job, he is quite patient and enduring. And in other places he is angry, impatient, and basically throws a temper tantrum that would be fitting for a two-year-old.
Overall, Job wrestles with the idea of suffering; and why bad things happen. Or more specifically, why do bad things happen to good people? The answer to that question is very complicated. Using all of those inconsistencies and self-contradictions Job engages that question with equal complication.
Let’s be clear from the beginning, Job does not give the right answer; although it gives a lot of wrong answers. Job will, however, be a faithful companion to you when you find yourself wrestling with those issues.
Before we begin there is one character we should discuss. Satan. In the Old Testament Satan is not synonymous with bad or evil. Satan is not the devil. Those connections come later, especially in the New Testament. Satan only shows up three times in the entire Old Testament. In the Old Testament Satan is part of God’s court whose basic duty is to “accuse” humans before God. The name means, “The Accuser.” But again, do not think this is a being looking to make people guilty. Satan is more of being whose purpose is to ensure people’s authenticity. Perhaps think of Satan as being the head of God’s CIA. He gathers information on enemies and also gathers information to make sure allies are reliable. With that, we begin the text.
Read Job 1-2
I suppose you could say that Job has had a couple of bad days! I hope you have never experienced anything like that! All in one day Job loses pretty much everything he has. His herds are killed. His possessions are destroyed. His servants all die. And his ten children are all killed. But Job does not complain. He simply says, “The Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord.”
I like the old joke where someone says, “Everything was falling apart and I was feeling depressed. Then someone said to me, ‘Cheer up, things could be worse!’ So I cheered up, and things got worse!”
Next Job loses his health. He is covered in sores. Every moment of existence is pain and agony. Job’s wife says that he should curse God and die. But Job replies, “Shall we receive the good at the and of God and not the bad?”
Thus far Job is indeed the model of patience and endurance. If the book of Job ended here we’d be left with the idea that whatever happens, it is God’s will. We should not only endure it, we should accept it with silence. But this is not the end of Job. In the next few weeks we’ll see that Job does not sit in silence and just accept it all. But that is for the weeks to come.
The text we read today gets at the underlying question that needs to be addressed before you can ask the question, “Why do bad things happen?” That underlying question is, what is the purpose of faith? And what is the nature of faith? That is what Satan is testing Job over.
It starts out with God pointing out to Satan how perfectly faithful Job is. Satan points out that of course Job is perfectly faithful. God is providing for Job’s every whim and need. God protects Job from anything bad ever happening.
Is our faith transactional? Is our faith based on keeping God happy with us so that God will then bless us and make our lives easy? Indeed, many people believe basically that. They think that God likes the model of godliness they embody and rewards them for it. This is heresy, but many people believe it.
A variation on the same theme is the person who asks why does God let bad things happen to faithful people? I encounter many people today, especially those of younger generations, who refuse to believe in a God who would let bad thing happen. They ask how can God be supposedly good and loving and allow there to be so much suffering in this world?
Those are all fair questions. They are valid questions. And yet, they expect there to be some quid-pro-quo in a life of faith. Or, and we’ll get into this more in the next two weeks, they expect God to operate by their idea of justice. But we’ll explore that more then.
What is the root of our faith? Are we faithful in hopes of blessings and protections from God? Are we faithful now because we think a life of faith will get us to eternal life with God? Is that the deal we make with God? “God, I’ll live according to the way you want so that I get to go to heaven when I die?”
That’s another fair perspective.
The way I put it may seem too business-transactional, but let’s push it further; even to the absurd.
If there was no promise of eternal life, or threat of some sort of punishment, would you live by faith now?
If everyone goes to heaven regardless of how they live, would that affect your faith now?
Let’s make it really messy. Would you have faith if a life of faith meant you go to hell, and if you lived like a faithless hedonist, you’d get to have eternal life in heaven with endless indulgence?
Okay, that one goes too far. I’m getting ridiculous. But it does make us consider why we have the faith we do. Are we expecting something from God? How does it impact our faith if we don’t get it? Where do our ideas of fairness and justice, as limited human beings, intersect with God’s idea of fairness and justice, from an infinite divine perspective?
We just finished reading Mark’s gospel last week. Perhaps the way Mark depicts Jesus is the purest expression of faith that there is. Biblical scholars point out that the way Mark depicts Jesus, Jesus did not die on Friday knowing that he’d be resurrected on Sunday. He does not say to his disciples, “Don’t worry. I’ll see you Sunday.” No, as Mark depicts Jesus, Jesus is hanging there on the cross and all is lost. His disciples have failed and fled. He’s been rejected by the religious leaders. The Romans have given him a sham of a trial and are executing him for expediency sake. Everything Jesus did and taught will die with him. Was it all worth it? Will he stay faithful to God in the midst of total loss and unfairness?
Thanks be to God that the answer is yes!
I don’t believe any of us have perfect faith. We all want or expect something from God for believing in him and living according to his expectations. We all know that life isn’t fair. We know that bad things happen to good people. We know that good things happen to bad people. We do not impose our idea of justice upon God. We are okay with some measure of unfairness. But ultimately we want our right relationship with God to have some benefit for us.
We were all born into this world without our consent. We have simply come to exist and have consciousness. We have decided that we need to have God’s help and accompaniment for life to make sense, and have meaning, and have hope. Those are all good reasons for faith. But they are not perfect reasons for faith. And so even as we have good reasons we recognize the imperfections. We realize that we ultimately need God’s grace, God’s unmerited favor; and through that we can live in confidence.
I want to take a few minutes to talk about the book of Job before we begin reading it. I think that will help us understand what is going on in it and have it make more sense.
No one knows who wrote Job, or when it was written, or where it was written. Biblical scholars are all over the place when it comes to answering those questions. They do agree on a few things. First, as we have it today, Job is written by at least two different people and at two different time periods. And second, it is written in a style older than its actual date. Perhaps think of it this way. Imagine a play-write of today writing a new play using the style and language of Shakespeare. It would use archaic words and sentence structure even though it was written now. That seems to be case of Job. My best guess is that it is written in the 6th Century B.C.E. using language and styles from several centuries earlier.
Job is an epic poem. The beginning and end are prose and read like a fairy tale. No scholar that I read even dreams that Job is an historical account. It is not, and you run into big problems fast if you try to interpret it as a real story. It does not begin with the words, “Once upon a time…” but it does begin with, “There once was a man…”
The book is complex. It is deliberately crafted to be inconsistent and even self-contradictory. Sometimes people talk about the patience of Job. In the New Testament the book of James references Job saying, “You have heard of the endurance of Job, and you have seen the purpose of the Lord, how the Lord is compassionate and merciful.” But we will find that in part of Job, he is quite patient and enduring. And in other places he is angry, impatient, and basically throws a temper tantrum that would be fitting for a two-year-old.
Overall, Job wrestles with the idea of suffering; and why bad things happen. Or more specifically, why do bad things happen to good people? The answer to that question is very complicated. Using all of those inconsistencies and self-contradictions Job engages that question with equal complication.
Let’s be clear from the beginning, Job does not give the right answer; although it gives a lot of wrong answers. Job will, however, be a faithful companion to you when you find yourself wrestling with those issues.
Before we begin there is one character we should discuss. Satan. In the Old Testament Satan is not synonymous with bad or evil. Satan is not the devil. Those connections come later, especially in the New Testament. Satan only shows up three times in the entire Old Testament. In the Old Testament Satan is part of God’s court whose basic duty is to “accuse” humans before God. The name means, “The Accuser.” But again, do not think this is a being looking to make people guilty. Satan is more of being whose purpose is to ensure people’s authenticity. Perhaps think of Satan as being the head of God’s CIA. He gathers information on enemies and also gathers information to make sure allies are reliable. With that, we begin the text.
Read Job 1-2
I suppose you could say that Job has had a couple of bad days! I hope you have never experienced anything like that! All in one day Job loses pretty much everything he has. His herds are killed. His possessions are destroyed. His servants all die. And his ten children are all killed. But Job does not complain. He simply says, “The Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord.”
I like the old joke where someone says, “Everything was falling apart and I was feeling depressed. Then someone said to me, ‘Cheer up, things could be worse!’ So I cheered up, and things got worse!”
Next Job loses his health. He is covered in sores. Every moment of existence is pain and agony. Job’s wife says that he should curse God and die. But Job replies, “Shall we receive the good at the and of God and not the bad?”
Thus far Job is indeed the model of patience and endurance. If the book of Job ended here we’d be left with the idea that whatever happens, it is God’s will. We should not only endure it, we should accept it with silence. But this is not the end of Job. In the next few weeks we’ll see that Job does not sit in silence and just accept it all. But that is for the weeks to come.
The text we read today gets at the underlying question that needs to be addressed before you can ask the question, “Why do bad things happen?” That underlying question is, what is the purpose of faith? And what is the nature of faith? That is what Satan is testing Job over.
It starts out with God pointing out to Satan how perfectly faithful Job is. Satan points out that of course Job is perfectly faithful. God is providing for Job’s every whim and need. God protects Job from anything bad ever happening.
Is our faith transactional? Is our faith based on keeping God happy with us so that God will then bless us and make our lives easy? Indeed, many people believe basically that. They think that God likes the model of godliness they embody and rewards them for it. This is heresy, but many people believe it.
A variation on the same theme is the person who asks why does God let bad things happen to faithful people? I encounter many people today, especially those of younger generations, who refuse to believe in a God who would let bad thing happen. They ask how can God be supposedly good and loving and allow there to be so much suffering in this world?
Those are all fair questions. They are valid questions. And yet, they expect there to be some quid-pro-quo in a life of faith. Or, and we’ll get into this more in the next two weeks, they expect God to operate by their idea of justice. But we’ll explore that more then.
What is the root of our faith? Are we faithful in hopes of blessings and protections from God? Are we faithful now because we think a life of faith will get us to eternal life with God? Is that the deal we make with God? “God, I’ll live according to the way you want so that I get to go to heaven when I die?”
That’s another fair perspective.
The way I put it may seem too business-transactional, but let’s push it further; even to the absurd.
If there was no promise of eternal life, or threat of some sort of punishment, would you live by faith now?
If everyone goes to heaven regardless of how they live, would that affect your faith now?
Let’s make it really messy. Would you have faith if a life of faith meant you go to hell, and if you lived like a faithless hedonist, you’d get to have eternal life in heaven with endless indulgence?
Okay, that one goes too far. I’m getting ridiculous. But it does make us consider why we have the faith we do. Are we expecting something from God? How does it impact our faith if we don’t get it? Where do our ideas of fairness and justice, as limited human beings, intersect with God’s idea of fairness and justice, from an infinite divine perspective?
We just finished reading Mark’s gospel last week. Perhaps the way Mark depicts Jesus is the purest expression of faith that there is. Biblical scholars point out that the way Mark depicts Jesus, Jesus did not die on Friday knowing that he’d be resurrected on Sunday. He does not say to his disciples, “Don’t worry. I’ll see you Sunday.” No, as Mark depicts Jesus, Jesus is hanging there on the cross and all is lost. His disciples have failed and fled. He’s been rejected by the religious leaders. The Romans have given him a sham of a trial and are executing him for expediency sake. Everything Jesus did and taught will die with him. Was it all worth it? Will he stay faithful to God in the midst of total loss and unfairness?
Thanks be to God that the answer is yes!
I don’t believe any of us have perfect faith. We all want or expect something from God for believing in him and living according to his expectations. We all know that life isn’t fair. We know that bad things happen to good people. We know that good things happen to bad people. We do not impose our idea of justice upon God. We are okay with some measure of unfairness. But ultimately we want our right relationship with God to have some benefit for us.
We were all born into this world without our consent. We have simply come to exist and have consciousness. We have decided that we need to have God’s help and accompaniment for life to make sense, and have meaning, and have hope. Those are all good reasons for faith. But they are not perfect reasons for faith. And so even as we have good reasons we recognize the imperfections. We realize that we ultimately need God’s grace, God’s unmerited favor; and through that we can live in confidence.
Tuesday, May 28, 2024
May 26, 2024 Mark 8:14-26
Last week when I was talking about liking to have a plan for how I want to get things done in a week, I mentioned that the tractor that we use for the church garden had some unexpected problems. However, since the week was well scheduled I was able to find time to make the needed repairs. What I did not mention is how extensive the work on the tractor was. Those of you who went up into the church shed over the winter know that the tractor was split in two. The back half was one place. The front half, with the engine and front wheels, was disconnected and pulled a few feet forward. There were big things wrong. I think anyone who has done any major repair work on a piece of equipment knows the anxiety of getting it all back together again. No, I don’t mean forgetting how it goes back together. And I don’t mean having a pile of parts leftover that you don’t know where they go. For any good mechanic takes lots of photos and has ways of keeping track of parts. I mean that even when you’ve documented everything and done everything carefully, there is still so much that has been done that you just hope you’ve done it all right. I held my breath when I test started the tractor. If I’d done anything wrong it wouldn’t work. And had all the work I had done actually solved the problem.
As it turned out, the main problem was fixed. A couple other issues came up though. That’s what made things messy. But even so… even with everything working and tested, there is still anxiety of it all being done well. For a while you operate a machine with tentativeness just to be sure.
I often wonder about surgeons who do much more delicate work than me fixing a tractor. If I mess up I’m frustrated and have to take things apart again. If a surgical team messes up the stakes are a lot higher! I don’t think I could handle the pressure.
There are many things in life where repairs and solutions are complicated. In fact, most things are that way. You rarely get to snap your fingers and have a problem go away permanently.
The gospel reading where it seems to take Jesus two tries to heal the blind man may take us by surprise. We’re used to Jesus just fixing everything completely and immediately. Jesus just shows up. He says a few words or makes a few gestures, and the problem is gone. In some cases he doesn’t even show up. There is the centurion’s servant and the Syrophoenician woman’s daughter where he heals at a distance. Jesus’ supernatural power is immediate and overwhelming. But we are blessed that Mark includes this story in his gospel. I suspect it made the other gospel writers nervous. In their gospels Jesus does indeed immediately fix everything perfectly. Mark alone gives us a few of these, let’s call them “messy” miracle stories. You may remember the scene Mark includes where Jesus is not able to perform miracles. When Jesus goes to his hometown of Nazareth the people do not accept him. In Mark 6:5 we’re told, “And he could do no deed of power there…” We’re not used to that. Why couldn’t Jesus do a deed of power there? Were his abilities limited by the attitude of the audience? We’re not told. To be truly fair, I only read half the sentence. The full sentence is, “And he could do no deed of power there, except that he laid his hands on a few sick people and cured them.” But it does tell us that Jesus’ powers are not automatic and overwhelming.
I said we are blessed that Mark has included this story. Here is why. Scholars who focus on Mark’s gospel point out where this story is placed in the gospel. It is always important to remember that the gospels in the Bible are not so much history texts as they are theological treatises set in a historical story. When reading the gospels, theology, or a word about God, always comes first. History is its servant. And so the gospels are crafted to teach us about God and ourselves.
We read the scene just prior to Jesus taking two steps to cure the blind man. It sets it up. Just prior to that Jesus had had his second great healing miracle. The Pharisees had come to him and demanded a sign from him. But he said no sign would be given to this generation. So then Jesus when Jesus talks about the yeast of the Pharisees and of Herod in what we read today we realize he is critiquing something about them. There is something they are missing. It is as if they are blind to what Jesus is doing, even as it is happening right before them.
So they are blind.
Then we have the healing of the blind man. It is detailed and fairly graphic. We’re told Jesus takes the blind man by the hand and leads him out of the village of Bethsaida. Then he puts saliva on his eyes and lays his hands on him.
This is far more touch and detail than we usually get. So when Jesus asks, “Can you see anything?” It seems like an odd question. We’re so used to Jesus just immediately curing everything that we expect the man to say, “Wow, everything is suddenly crystal clear!” But that is not what happens. The man says, “I can see people, but they look like trees walking.” Presumably this man had been able to see at some point earlier in his life if he knew what trees looked like! But obviously he is not cured. Of what value is such a healing? Not much!
Jesus lays his eyes on the man a second time. Then, and don’t overlook this detail, he looked intently. (The man looked intently, not Jesus.) Then he could see everything clearly. It was both Jesus repeated attention, plus the man’s intent looking that produced the clarity of the sight.
So, we have a story suggesting the figurative blindness of the Pharisees. Then we have the story of the blind man being cured with two steps. Then immediately following what we read in our gospel is the scene where Jesus asks the disciples who do people say that he is. You may remember that well. The disciples reply, “John the Baptist; and others Elijah; and still others, one of the prophets.” He then asks them, “But who do you say that I am?” Peter replies, “You are the Messiah.”
Good going Peter! He’s showing some sight; or perhaps some insight.
Then Jesus tells them that he will undergo great suffering and be rejected by the religious experts, and be killed. But Peter takes Jesus aside and begins to rebuke him. This is almost as if Peter thinks Jesus is demon possessed and Peter is going to do an exorcism. But it is Jesus who replies with the language of exorcism, “Get behind me Satan! For you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.”
So, Peter’s sight into who Jesus is, is only partial. It’s going to take seeing the crucifixion for Peter to have full sight into who Jesus is.
What does all this mean for our lives of faith? It means that when we pray we can’t expect problems to be immediately and permanently solved. It means that when we read the Bible we don’t read it only once, come to a full understanding, and never have to read that part again. Faith is an ongoing journey. It takes the work of Jesus (or the Holy Spirit) to inspire the faith, and then our intentness for it to be ongoing.
Later in this service we’ll be baptizing Emma. It would be great if after we pour water on her head and anoint her with oil that she would feel a major shift in her life of faith. It would be great if every moment afterward were a time of perfect clarity. It would be great if every physical ailment she has, or ever will have, would be magically and permanently solved. But that is not the case. If baptism is a touch from God it is only the beginning of a lifetime, and intent, journey to sight. Emma does not head off on her own for faith. Just like the blind man in the gospel, he could see clearly when there was both his intent looking and Jesus’ touch. It took both.
The next scene where Peter appears to be insightful and then is all too quickly falling short is where Peter is trying to see all by himself.
For Emma to live the fullness of life of her Christian faith it will be both Jesus’ ongoing touch plus her intentness. Faith may be a miracle. But it does not happen by accident.
In order for us to live the fullness of life promised by Jesus we need his touch, his ongoing touch. His presence. And we have it. With our intentions in alignment miraculous things do happen!
As it turned out, the main problem was fixed. A couple other issues came up though. That’s what made things messy. But even so… even with everything working and tested, there is still anxiety of it all being done well. For a while you operate a machine with tentativeness just to be sure.
I often wonder about surgeons who do much more delicate work than me fixing a tractor. If I mess up I’m frustrated and have to take things apart again. If a surgical team messes up the stakes are a lot higher! I don’t think I could handle the pressure.
There are many things in life where repairs and solutions are complicated. In fact, most things are that way. You rarely get to snap your fingers and have a problem go away permanently.
The gospel reading where it seems to take Jesus two tries to heal the blind man may take us by surprise. We’re used to Jesus just fixing everything completely and immediately. Jesus just shows up. He says a few words or makes a few gestures, and the problem is gone. In some cases he doesn’t even show up. There is the centurion’s servant and the Syrophoenician woman’s daughter where he heals at a distance. Jesus’ supernatural power is immediate and overwhelming. But we are blessed that Mark includes this story in his gospel. I suspect it made the other gospel writers nervous. In their gospels Jesus does indeed immediately fix everything perfectly. Mark alone gives us a few of these, let’s call them “messy” miracle stories. You may remember the scene Mark includes where Jesus is not able to perform miracles. When Jesus goes to his hometown of Nazareth the people do not accept him. In Mark 6:5 we’re told, “And he could do no deed of power there…” We’re not used to that. Why couldn’t Jesus do a deed of power there? Were his abilities limited by the attitude of the audience? We’re not told. To be truly fair, I only read half the sentence. The full sentence is, “And he could do no deed of power there, except that he laid his hands on a few sick people and cured them.” But it does tell us that Jesus’ powers are not automatic and overwhelming.
I said we are blessed that Mark has included this story. Here is why. Scholars who focus on Mark’s gospel point out where this story is placed in the gospel. It is always important to remember that the gospels in the Bible are not so much history texts as they are theological treatises set in a historical story. When reading the gospels, theology, or a word about God, always comes first. History is its servant. And so the gospels are crafted to teach us about God and ourselves.
We read the scene just prior to Jesus taking two steps to cure the blind man. It sets it up. Just prior to that Jesus had had his second great healing miracle. The Pharisees had come to him and demanded a sign from him. But he said no sign would be given to this generation. So then Jesus when Jesus talks about the yeast of the Pharisees and of Herod in what we read today we realize he is critiquing something about them. There is something they are missing. It is as if they are blind to what Jesus is doing, even as it is happening right before them.
So they are blind.
Then we have the healing of the blind man. It is detailed and fairly graphic. We’re told Jesus takes the blind man by the hand and leads him out of the village of Bethsaida. Then he puts saliva on his eyes and lays his hands on him.
This is far more touch and detail than we usually get. So when Jesus asks, “Can you see anything?” It seems like an odd question. We’re so used to Jesus just immediately curing everything that we expect the man to say, “Wow, everything is suddenly crystal clear!” But that is not what happens. The man says, “I can see people, but they look like trees walking.” Presumably this man had been able to see at some point earlier in his life if he knew what trees looked like! But obviously he is not cured. Of what value is such a healing? Not much!
Jesus lays his eyes on the man a second time. Then, and don’t overlook this detail, he looked intently. (The man looked intently, not Jesus.) Then he could see everything clearly. It was both Jesus repeated attention, plus the man’s intent looking that produced the clarity of the sight.
So, we have a story suggesting the figurative blindness of the Pharisees. Then we have the story of the blind man being cured with two steps. Then immediately following what we read in our gospel is the scene where Jesus asks the disciples who do people say that he is. You may remember that well. The disciples reply, “John the Baptist; and others Elijah; and still others, one of the prophets.” He then asks them, “But who do you say that I am?” Peter replies, “You are the Messiah.”
Good going Peter! He’s showing some sight; or perhaps some insight.
Then Jesus tells them that he will undergo great suffering and be rejected by the religious experts, and be killed. But Peter takes Jesus aside and begins to rebuke him. This is almost as if Peter thinks Jesus is demon possessed and Peter is going to do an exorcism. But it is Jesus who replies with the language of exorcism, “Get behind me Satan! For you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.”
So, Peter’s sight into who Jesus is, is only partial. It’s going to take seeing the crucifixion for Peter to have full sight into who Jesus is.
What does all this mean for our lives of faith? It means that when we pray we can’t expect problems to be immediately and permanently solved. It means that when we read the Bible we don’t read it only once, come to a full understanding, and never have to read that part again. Faith is an ongoing journey. It takes the work of Jesus (or the Holy Spirit) to inspire the faith, and then our intentness for it to be ongoing.
Later in this service we’ll be baptizing Emma. It would be great if after we pour water on her head and anoint her with oil that she would feel a major shift in her life of faith. It would be great if every moment afterward were a time of perfect clarity. It would be great if every physical ailment she has, or ever will have, would be magically and permanently solved. But that is not the case. If baptism is a touch from God it is only the beginning of a lifetime, and intent, journey to sight. Emma does not head off on her own for faith. Just like the blind man in the gospel, he could see clearly when there was both his intent looking and Jesus’ touch. It took both.
The next scene where Peter appears to be insightful and then is all too quickly falling short is where Peter is trying to see all by himself.
For Emma to live the fullness of life of her Christian faith it will be both Jesus’ ongoing touch plus her intentness. Faith may be a miracle. But it does not happen by accident.
In order for us to live the fullness of life promised by Jesus we need his touch, his ongoing touch. His presence. And we have it. With our intentions in alignment miraculous things do happen!
Wednesday, May 22, 2024
May 19, 2024 Pentecost Acts 2:1-21
I assume you’re like me in that you like to have control over your life, and you want a good deal of orderliness to your life. I don’t mean being a neat freak or a control freak. I mean that things are predictable and you feel like you can manage things. You’re responsible, conscientious. You want to live within your means. You want to honor your time commitments.
I know I’m behind the times with this, but I like to write everything down in an old-fashioned pocket calendar. The church denomination used to give every pastor one of these for free every year. Apparently they wanted pastors to stay organized too! But times change and these calendars aren’t free anymore. In fact they’re going to stop making them next year. I’ll have to find something else.
I also begin every week by sitting down at my desk on a Monday morning and making a to-do list. It helps me get a feel for what all is ahead and how I have to manage my time. Last week was crazy. There was all the usual weekly stuff, plus the funeral I have to do this afternoon, plus all the work needed to prepare the church garden for planting tomorrow. By making a list at the beginning of the week I could manage time and get everything done that I had to do.
Of course things happen that ruin our plans. Life is not entirely predictable. Last week something failed on the tractor that I could not have anticipated. That had me rethinking things. But with the to-do list leading a time management plan, I could work around the unexpected too.
Yes, I like to have a sense of control over my life. So when we read things like the Pentecost story from Acts 2 that we had as our first Bible reading it makes us uneasy. God’s Spirit is not predictable. It cannot be contained, controlled, or predicted. If tongues of fire, the sounds of wind, and understanding different languages just happens without warning, you have no idea what to do! That doesn’t have a place on a weekly to-do list!
I suspect we have mixed feelings about that story. Part of us is anxious. What will God do next? What if God calls me to do something totally crazy, or something that upends the well-organized life that I have created for myself? What if God calls me to do something that hurts or is risky? God can do anything after all. So part of us is anxious.
But I think another part of us deeply wants something like that to happen to us. We would use it as proof of God’s existence, and it would give us a clear direction for what we are to do. It would show us that faith is God’s work and not up to us. It would be an energy boost for our lives, especially our lives of faith, which can so often seem draining rather than inspiring.
So, I think we both want something dramatic and fear something dramatic!
Regardless of how we feel, it is worth noting that events like the one described in Acts are rare; if they ever happen at all. Sometime we should read through Acts in Sunday worship. Perhaps we’ll do that next summer. (This summer we’re focusing on Old Testament poetry readings like Psalms, Proverbs, Job, and others.) When you read through Acts you discover that much of what the apostles are described as doing is quite ordinary. They are also not immune from hardship. St. Paul describes miraculous things. But he mostly describes ordinary struggles with no miraculous help whatsoever. Overall, Christianity has not grown through miracles and great events. Christianity has grown through very ordinary means. It’s just ordinary people doing ordinary things, but doing them with their minds on God.
For that we should turn to our gospel reading. There we have Jesus talking to his disciples during the Last Supper. What he says is hard to follow. Jesus says, “…if I go, I will send the [Holy Spirit] to you.” So far so good. We understand what he’s saying and we understand how that fits into the theme of Pentecost. But then Jesus continues, “And when [the Spirit] comes, he will prove the world wrong about sin and righteousness and judgment: about sin, because they do not believe in me; about righteousness, because I am going to the Father and you will see me no longer; about judgment, because the ruler of this world has been condemned.”
Those words leave us puzzled. Hopefully I can explain them briefly.
There are three concepts there: sin, righteousness, and judgment. Each of those words is used in multiple ways in the Bible. Sin is used to mean one thing one place, and it may mean something different another place. The same goes for righteousness and judgment.
Whenever I hear the word sin I think of it as if it were a moral category. Like, killing is a sin. Stealing is a sin. Lying is a sin. These are bad acts we shouldn’t do. Indeed, most places the Bible’s authors use sin that way. But John’s gospel does something different. For John, sin is more of a theological category. For John, sin is to not believe in Jesus. Or, it is to not believe that in Jesus God has revealed God’s true nature to us. For John, if you believe that Jesus is God’s true nature then it will automatically lead you away from doing destructive things.
Righteousness in John’s gospel is also used in way different from what we are used to. Righteousness does not refer to the righteousness of people. Righteousness refers to God. It means that God can absolutely always be counted on to do the right thing. God does not make mistakes. God does not do careless things. And God’s actions, difficult as they can be do understand somethings, do not result in unavoidable collateral damage. Righteousness means God total reliability.
Finally judgment. The word is again used differently from what we’re used to. I invite you sometime to sit down with your Bible and read the account of Jesus’ trial in John’s gospel. It is in chapters 18 and 19. As you’re reading it keep asking yourself who’s on trial? On one hand it appears that it is Jesus who is on trial. After all, he’s been handed over by one of his disciples, and arrested. He’s questioned and he’ll ultimately be executed. So it seems like Jesus is being judged. On the other hand, there’s an ironic twist to every scene where Jesus is the one who is the judge, and the whole world is on trial. Even though the world (filled with greed and fear, and acting in ignorance and darkness) seems to win, it is actually God who wins. The ways of the world are condemned.
So when Jesus says in verse 11 that the Holy Spirit will prove the world wrong… “about judgment, because the ruler of this world has been condemned,” he’s actually talking about his judgment of the world in his crucifixion.
John’s gospel reverses and upends many of the ways we usually think. That’s a big part of what makes it so hard to understand. But it’s also worth getting a grasp of it. John’s gospel is playful and ironic all the way through.
John’s gospel is also serious. It sees the world in a way that is helpful for us here on Pentecost, and helpful for us as we like to have life be orderly in the midst of the chaos that can be life.
John’s view of the world fits well for today. It talks about sin, righteousness and judgment. As for sin, John’s gospel recognizes that people would rather hear so-called truths that are convenient for them, rather than real truths that are healthy for them.
As for righteousness, people would rather live with their own self-made morals because they can make themselves righteous by their own power, rather than recognizing God’s righteousness, which is not in their power but tells them their true value rests in who God made them to be.
As for judgment, people would rather think they can keep everything under control, rather than realizing real control comes through connecting with God.
I started by saying we want control in our lives. And I talked about the way the dramatic coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost may seem to be out of control. But we do realize that true control of life comes through faith in God.
Indeed, whether it is dramatic or subtle, the Holy Spirit is working in us to remind us that God is solid and dependable. We are therefore too, regardless if the world is in control or not.
And our faith sends us into the world which has lost its way, in its own darkness and chaos. We witness the solidness that comes from God to it. If history is any indication, many will reject the goodness God has to offer. But also many will recognize the truth. And that truth also sets them free.
I know I’m behind the times with this, but I like to write everything down in an old-fashioned pocket calendar. The church denomination used to give every pastor one of these for free every year. Apparently they wanted pastors to stay organized too! But times change and these calendars aren’t free anymore. In fact they’re going to stop making them next year. I’ll have to find something else.
I also begin every week by sitting down at my desk on a Monday morning and making a to-do list. It helps me get a feel for what all is ahead and how I have to manage my time. Last week was crazy. There was all the usual weekly stuff, plus the funeral I have to do this afternoon, plus all the work needed to prepare the church garden for planting tomorrow. By making a list at the beginning of the week I could manage time and get everything done that I had to do.
Of course things happen that ruin our plans. Life is not entirely predictable. Last week something failed on the tractor that I could not have anticipated. That had me rethinking things. But with the to-do list leading a time management plan, I could work around the unexpected too.
Yes, I like to have a sense of control over my life. So when we read things like the Pentecost story from Acts 2 that we had as our first Bible reading it makes us uneasy. God’s Spirit is not predictable. It cannot be contained, controlled, or predicted. If tongues of fire, the sounds of wind, and understanding different languages just happens without warning, you have no idea what to do! That doesn’t have a place on a weekly to-do list!
I suspect we have mixed feelings about that story. Part of us is anxious. What will God do next? What if God calls me to do something totally crazy, or something that upends the well-organized life that I have created for myself? What if God calls me to do something that hurts or is risky? God can do anything after all. So part of us is anxious.
But I think another part of us deeply wants something like that to happen to us. We would use it as proof of God’s existence, and it would give us a clear direction for what we are to do. It would show us that faith is God’s work and not up to us. It would be an energy boost for our lives, especially our lives of faith, which can so often seem draining rather than inspiring.
So, I think we both want something dramatic and fear something dramatic!
Regardless of how we feel, it is worth noting that events like the one described in Acts are rare; if they ever happen at all. Sometime we should read through Acts in Sunday worship. Perhaps we’ll do that next summer. (This summer we’re focusing on Old Testament poetry readings like Psalms, Proverbs, Job, and others.) When you read through Acts you discover that much of what the apostles are described as doing is quite ordinary. They are also not immune from hardship. St. Paul describes miraculous things. But he mostly describes ordinary struggles with no miraculous help whatsoever. Overall, Christianity has not grown through miracles and great events. Christianity has grown through very ordinary means. It’s just ordinary people doing ordinary things, but doing them with their minds on God.
For that we should turn to our gospel reading. There we have Jesus talking to his disciples during the Last Supper. What he says is hard to follow. Jesus says, “…if I go, I will send the [Holy Spirit] to you.” So far so good. We understand what he’s saying and we understand how that fits into the theme of Pentecost. But then Jesus continues, “And when [the Spirit] comes, he will prove the world wrong about sin and righteousness and judgment: about sin, because they do not believe in me; about righteousness, because I am going to the Father and you will see me no longer; about judgment, because the ruler of this world has been condemned.”
Those words leave us puzzled. Hopefully I can explain them briefly.
There are three concepts there: sin, righteousness, and judgment. Each of those words is used in multiple ways in the Bible. Sin is used to mean one thing one place, and it may mean something different another place. The same goes for righteousness and judgment.
Whenever I hear the word sin I think of it as if it were a moral category. Like, killing is a sin. Stealing is a sin. Lying is a sin. These are bad acts we shouldn’t do. Indeed, most places the Bible’s authors use sin that way. But John’s gospel does something different. For John, sin is more of a theological category. For John, sin is to not believe in Jesus. Or, it is to not believe that in Jesus God has revealed God’s true nature to us. For John, if you believe that Jesus is God’s true nature then it will automatically lead you away from doing destructive things.
Righteousness in John’s gospel is also used in way different from what we are used to. Righteousness does not refer to the righteousness of people. Righteousness refers to God. It means that God can absolutely always be counted on to do the right thing. God does not make mistakes. God does not do careless things. And God’s actions, difficult as they can be do understand somethings, do not result in unavoidable collateral damage. Righteousness means God total reliability.
Finally judgment. The word is again used differently from what we’re used to. I invite you sometime to sit down with your Bible and read the account of Jesus’ trial in John’s gospel. It is in chapters 18 and 19. As you’re reading it keep asking yourself who’s on trial? On one hand it appears that it is Jesus who is on trial. After all, he’s been handed over by one of his disciples, and arrested. He’s questioned and he’ll ultimately be executed. So it seems like Jesus is being judged. On the other hand, there’s an ironic twist to every scene where Jesus is the one who is the judge, and the whole world is on trial. Even though the world (filled with greed and fear, and acting in ignorance and darkness) seems to win, it is actually God who wins. The ways of the world are condemned.
So when Jesus says in verse 11 that the Holy Spirit will prove the world wrong… “about judgment, because the ruler of this world has been condemned,” he’s actually talking about his judgment of the world in his crucifixion.
John’s gospel reverses and upends many of the ways we usually think. That’s a big part of what makes it so hard to understand. But it’s also worth getting a grasp of it. John’s gospel is playful and ironic all the way through.
John’s gospel is also serious. It sees the world in a way that is helpful for us here on Pentecost, and helpful for us as we like to have life be orderly in the midst of the chaos that can be life.
John’s view of the world fits well for today. It talks about sin, righteousness and judgment. As for sin, John’s gospel recognizes that people would rather hear so-called truths that are convenient for them, rather than real truths that are healthy for them.
As for righteousness, people would rather live with their own self-made morals because they can make themselves righteous by their own power, rather than recognizing God’s righteousness, which is not in their power but tells them their true value rests in who God made them to be.
As for judgment, people would rather think they can keep everything under control, rather than realizing real control comes through connecting with God.
I started by saying we want control in our lives. And I talked about the way the dramatic coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost may seem to be out of control. But we do realize that true control of life comes through faith in God.
Indeed, whether it is dramatic or subtle, the Holy Spirit is working in us to remind us that God is solid and dependable. We are therefore too, regardless if the world is in control or not.
And our faith sends us into the world which has lost its way, in its own darkness and chaos. We witness the solidness that comes from God to it. If history is any indication, many will reject the goodness God has to offer. But also many will recognize the truth. And that truth also sets them free.
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