Sermon: Tuesday, December 25, 2012: Nativity of Our Lord, Christmas Day

Texts:  Isaiah 52:7-10  +  Psalm 98  +  Hebrews 1:1-12  +  John 1:1-14

The Church seems to have its clocks set perennially about four to six weeks ahead.  Even as we gather this morning, the world is already moving on from its celebration of Christmas and preparing for New Year’s Eve parties and the start of a new year.  In the Church, however, we celebrated our New Year almost a month ago with the beginning of the season of Advent.

For three weeks and two days we were students of hope.  Our scriptures and our songs directed our attention toward a moment when God’s future reign would break into our present reality and transform the world around us.  This year, like every year, we have witnessed horrible evidence that the world as it is cannot be the world as God made it.  Our hope has been stretched to its limits, our patience with business as usual has run out.

As the sun set last night and Christians began gathering in sanctuaries around the world to celebrate the eternal birth of Christ into the world, the Church once again set its clock ahead by about six or seven weeks.  Having already begun our New Year, we are now celebrating the festival of love.  Like the one that falls on the ides of February, this festival is also marked with candles, and presents, and sweets.  The love we celebrate this day, however, is more cosmic than the romances of Valentine’s Day.  Today the Church celebrates the reality of the love of God made real and present to us in Christ Jesus, the baby of Bethlehem.

The holy one has so many names.  As we waited for its arrival we heard its heralds calling to it by its aliases.  John the Baptist called it a purifying fire.  Mary’s song called it justice for the oppressed and food for the hungry.  Isaiah called it Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.  Perhaps those are your preferred names for the one who has come.  Perhaps the God you yearn for most is purity, justice, might, peace.  Be that as it may, this morning we are given a different name to know the presence of the divine, and that name is love.

On Christmas morning we read from the gospel of John that Jesus, the baby of Bethlehem, the pre-existing Word, was in the beginning with God and, in fact, was God.  John says,

He was in the world, and the world came into being through him; yet the world did not know him.  He came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him. (John 1:10-11)

We might wonder why God would choose to wrap the Word of light and life up in something so fragile as flesh, but John’s gospel doesn’t make us wait long for that answer.  Two chapters later Jesus states his reason for being,

For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.  Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him. (John 3:16-17)

The words are so familiar I barely notice them anymore.  “For God so loved the world…”  How do you feel about the world?  Because, I’ll admit, I’m pretty ambivalent.  It seems like a hard place to be.  It seems pretty callous toward the majority of its people, and pretty cruel toward those who try to do anything about it.  It’s an exhausting world, where there is always more work to be done.  And, it is a heart-breaking world, where wars and violence are always interrupting our lives, making it impossible to ever really settle in here.  We are sometimes drawn to fantasies about some other world, some next world, because this world, right here, is so painful.

But God, who has every option available, including apocalyptic judgement or complete abandonment, chooses not to leave this world but to enter it.  Because God made it, and God loves it.  And this includes you.

God loves you so much.  You are the most precious thing in God’s good creation, and the fact that this is also true of the person sitting in front of or behind you doesn’t take away from that reality one bit.  No matter what was happening at the moment of your conception, no matter how you were treated in the years that followed, the truest, deepest reality is that God was loving you fiercely even before you came into being.  In the incarnation we see that God, in fact, has been moving heaven and earth to get as close to you as possible.  Closer than light.  Closer than words.  As close as bread and wine and water and skin.

It’s important that you hear this.  It’s important that you know this.  Because, without love, all the other names for the holy of holies are hollow.  Purity, without love, is a brittle self-righteousness.  Justice, without love, becomes callous authority.  Might, without love, quickly turns to violence.  Peace, without love, tends toward either tyranny or isolation.  It is love that makes holiness accessible to flawed, ordinary, struggling people like you and me.  It is love that cares enough to stoop down in time, leaving perfection for eternity and making a home in this fragile, broken, wounded world.

This Christmas morning we can see so much more clearly than we could last night, in the dark, by the soft glow of our little candles, that the world is hurting.  We are hurting, perhaps even wondering if it’s time to move on from this world.  But the light of day is also evidence that all nights come to a end, that darkness always gives way to dawn.  By the light of this Christmas morning, as the days begin to lengthen again, our trust is renewed that “the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.” (John 1:4)

This light has a name.  It is purity.  It is justice.  It is might.  It is peace.  It is Jesus.  It is love.  It is God’s gift to you and to the world, because God loves it all.

Merry Christmas.

 

Sermon: Sunday, October 21, 2012: The Book of Job, Pt. 3

Texts: Job 38:1-7, (34-41) and Psalm 104:1-9, 24, 35c  •  Hebrews 5:1-10  •   Mark 10:35-45

If you’ve been watching the political debates like I have, you’ve seen some heated exchanges between the candidates recently as each attempts to describe the state of our nation, and to persuade voters that he has a plan to improve upon it.  As they respond to questions from the moderator and attacks from their opponent, each tries to gain the advantage by framing the terms of the argument. Such has been the case with Job as well.

This morning we come to the final Sunday in our three week study of the book of Job and the themes it raises — particularly the themes of justice and suffering, and how each relates to the other.  In the first week we learned the set up, and heard that Job was “blameless and upright, one who feared God and turned away from evil.” (1:1)  In heaven, God has been in a debate with a member of the heavenly court whose role was to find fault with humanity, who has accused humankind of devotion to God based only on gratitude for God’s blessing and fear of losing it.  To test the merit of the accusation, God has allowed the accuser to afflict Job with every kind of misery.  In a day, all that he had — his livestock, his servants, his children, his health — was taken from him in order to see if he would curse God.

In the second week we listened as Job refuted the wisdom offered by his friends, who attempted to console him by providing rationales for his suffering.  They told him that God, who is good and just, punishes the wicked and rewards the righteous, and suggested that Job look to his own life to understand what he had done to merit this punishment.  Job tears apart their arguments, challenging them to find fault with his conduct, to explain to him what he could possibly have done to deserve such suffering and loss.

Not content merely to justify himself to his friends, Job takes his debate directly to God, imagining a trial in which God would answer Job’s accusations of injustice and malicious neglect.  Job imagines a debate more dramatic than any we’ve seen so far in this season of campaigning.  He imagines a debate on a cosmic scale, in which God would be forced to answer Job’s questions about why bad things happen to good people, and where justice is to be found.

Finally, today, God speaks.

Before we consider the content of what God says when God finally enters the debate, let’s consider what is at stake.  Though the original test was designed by the accuser to prove the transience of human devotion, Job — through his profound wrestling with God in faith — has set up a test of his own, and it is we, the listeners, like the audiences that fill the halls or tune in on their televisions, who will decide who has won this debate.  Carol Newsom, my professor of Hebrew Bible at Emory University, describes the situation like this,

No longer is the question simply whether unconditional piety exists; one needs to know how such a stance could be meaningful.  From the perspective of Job, who makes justice the central value, the notion of radically unconditional piety is at best meaningless and at worst monstrous, for it would appear to sanction divine arbitrariness and cruelty.  The task God faces is to articulate a theological vision that will make such a stance not only meaningful, but also profound.”

What Dr. Newsom points out is that, while the book of Job begins with a story about a test for humanity, over the course of our engagement as readers and listeners a different test has also been established.  It is a test for God.  Having heard, along with Job, the feeble rationalizations offered by his friends, the limits of their proverbs, we want to know if God can offer a defense for the reality of so much unmerited suffering.  We, like Job, want to know if we can continue to offer our praise and worship to the God who allows things to be as they are, painful and unjust, without in essence endorsing this state of affairs, the state of creation.  As we, with Job, wait for God to speak we realize that God is now being tested every bit as much as Job.

I think this is a tremendous victory for Job.

God speaks, but when God speaks it is not to answer Job’s questions, but to pose an entirely different set of questions.  God begins,

“Who is this that darkens counsel by words without knowledge?  Gird up your loins like a man, I will question you, and you shall declare to me. Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth? Tell me, if you have understanding.” (38:2-4)

Though it sounds callous, God’s opening statement signals that God will not be delivering the same speech as Job’s friends.  God does not defend God’s honor by questioning Job’s.  Instead, God signals that the very terms of the debate are about to change, and that Job will need to pay attention and keep up.

It’s also just funny, and I think we have to acknowledge this, when God says “gird up your loins like a man.”  It sounds like the biblical equivalent of “pull up your diapers” or “put on your big boy pants.”  We might be tempted to hear this as a bit of divine mockery or condescendence.  Instead, Dr. Newsom suggests that to “gird up your loins” was to tuck the ends of your robes up into your belt so that you could move quickly without tripping over yourself.  In essence, God isn’t saying “grow up” as much as God is saying “keep up.”  God is about to cover a lot of ground, rhetorically, and Job will be challenged to follow where God is going with this.

Throughout the book so far, Job has been charging God with a failure of justice.  Here, God replies that Job suffers from a failure of knowledge, that Job’s arguments are based on his assumptions about how the world is ordered, how it has been created.  Job, in his anger and grief at the chaos and loss that go hand in hand with being alive, has questioned the very nature of being.  In response, God asks, “where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?”  And then, with a heavy dose of sarcasm, God continues, “who determined its measurements — surely you know!” (38:5)

We get only a few verses of what follows in the passage read in worship this morning.  We hear God ask, “Can you lift up your voice to the clouds, so that a flood of waters may cover you?” (38:34) and “Who has the wisdom to number the clouds?  Or who can tilt the waterskin of the heavens, when the dust turns into a mass and the clods cling together?” (38:37-38)  Of all the verses in God’s reply to Job, we couldn’t have picked better on a day when two of our sisters and brothers are being baptized into the body of Christ.  We are reminded that God is the creator, that God provides the rains we need for life, waters that transform the dust of the earth into clods of clay molded into the shape of humanity; and that, in baptism, God recreates us, providing new birth into a new life, taking the dust of our fragile natures and molding us into vessels for God’s holy spirit to be poured into and through for the sake of the world.

But it’s a shame that we don’t get to hear the fullness of God’s response to Job, which reads like poetry, because it is the way that God speaks just as much as the content of what God says, that finally moves Job.  God’s response to Job’s questions about the justice of creation washes over Job, wave after wave, as God asks:

Have you commanded the morning since your days began? (38:12)  Have you entered into the springs of the sea, or walked in the recesses of the deep? (38:16) Have you entered the storehouses of the snow, or have you seen the storehouses of the hail? (38:22) Do you know when the mountain goats give birth? (39:1) Is the wild ox willing to serve you? (39:9)  Do you give the horse its might? (39:19)  Is it by your wisdom that the hawk soars, and spreads it wings… (39:26)

For us, who live in cities and visit animals in their cages at the zoo, this might sound like a romantic call to consider the wild beauty of creation and to find our place in it.  But to people who lived in smaller settlements, close to the land and surrounded by the dangers of the wilderness, these images are less romantic and more menacing.  We might hear God as saying, “look around you at the world I have created, it is filled with powerful creatures that do not submit to your will.”

In our day and age, we might be less frightened and amazed by creation as it exists outside our bodies, and more frightened and amazed by creation as it exists inside our bodies.  I wonder if we might hear an extension of God’s reply to Job suited to our day and age that sounds something like,

Do you know when a cell becomes a life?

Can you tell when the division of cells will proceed along its course

to renew your inward parts as they slowly slough off their deadened layers day by day;

or, can you control when their multiplication will surge past their normal process, blossoming into masses that will burden your limbs, cloud your minds and stop your breath?

Job makes his case against God on the basis of justice.  God’s defense is given on the basis of creation.  The world as God has created it is filled with wonders.  The powers of creation are awesome.  The earth quakes.  The skies storm.  The seas rage.  The rivers overflow their beds.  The animals devour and are devoured in turn.

Perhaps it is even harder for us than it was for Job because we, with all our knowledge and technology, have shielded ourselves from so much of the chaos of creation.  We have come to imagine that someday we will engineer a way to shield ourselves from death.  To live forever.  We suppose that God’s creation will, finally, be supplanted by our own.  That someday we will write the rules, the terms that come with the precious gift of life.  That, in our hands, creation’s wilds would bend to our order.  That, under our management, there would finally be justice.

We need only hear ourselves speak these dreams out loud to know how false they are.  In our hands the creation groans.  In our hands death comes too quickly and too soon for too many people and places upon the earth.  Justice, in our hands, is life for those we know and love, and the devil take the rest.

As harsh as they may sound to our ears, and perhaps to Job as well, God’s response is not intended to put Job in his place in any kind of humiliating way, but to remind him of the lessons we were learning throughout the season of creation that preceded this series on Job — that we are a part of creation, not apart from it.  That we live and we die by the same laws that govern all of life.  That death is a part of living, and suffering too.

At its core, God’s speech refuses to answer Job’s question about the causes of unmerited suffering, because to do so would suggest that there is still some method or device that lies within our grasp, that we still might hope to evade the fate that comes for each of us.  God never says, “this is the ways things are so that some greater plan of mine can be fulfilled.”  We are never asked to accept that the sufferings of life play some part in a mystery that will someday be revealed.  God’s answer, such as it is, is simply “This is life.  Not centered around you, always responding to your actions, rewarding or punishing you.  Not responding to your wishes.  Not bowing to your will.  Creation is always being recreated, and you are a part of that, along with the rest of creation.  The process is chaotic and it is painful, of that you can be sure.”

Job, finally, accepts this.  Having pleaded that God would hear his case, Job finally acknowledges, “I had heard of you by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees you; therefore I despise myself, and repent in dust and ashes.” (42:5-6)  In the end, Job’s words become as enigmatic as God’s answer, suggesting as the book draws to a close, that any work left to be done will have to be done by each of us.  Does Job, in the end despise himself?  Is he signaling that he has withdrawn his case against God?  Has his mind been changed concerning his place in God’s creation?  It’s all, purposefully I think, left unclear.  Throughout, Job has not been comforted by the easy answers of his friends, and so — consistent with that theme — Job refuses to provide easy answers for its readers and listeners.  Whatever peace Job has found in the end has come through passionate engagement with his own life and adamant engagement with the God who created him, suggesting that the same may be required of each of us as well.

In praise of the God who created the world, who set the boundaries for the waters of earth and sky, whose floods have drowned us and whose hand has saved us and made us one with each other and with the whole creation.

Amen.

 

Sermon: Sunday, October 14, 2012: The Book of Job, Pt. 2

Texts:  Job 23:1-9, 16-17 and Psalm 22:1-15  •   Hebrews 4:12-16  •  Mark 10:17-31

It’s an odd mixture of moods in the room this morning, and a strange day to be preaching.  We began our worship by celebrating the baptism of our newborn baby brother, Evan David Abbo, into the body of Christ.  We’ll end by gathering around our dear friends, Heather and Ben Kulp to bless them as they take their leave of us and set off for new adventures in Boston.  And in-between these two events, we are midway through our three week study of the book of Job — a book of the Bible that explores the experience of suffering, the search for justice in a world filled with arbitrariness, and our relationship with God in the face of all that is most difficult about being human.

If you were here last week, or if you’re familiar with the book of Job, then you’ll remember that the story begins by introducing Job, a man described as “blameless and upright, one who feared God and turned away from evil.”  Shortly thereafter, the reader discovers that Job is at the center of a debate between God and a member of God’s court whose task is to find fault with humankind.  This accuser has alleged that humanity is only faithful to God for the sake of the blessings God grants, or out of fear of what would happen if God’s wrath were to fall upon them, but that this is no true love.  The accuser incites God to test the limits of human faithfulness, saying “but stretch out your hand now, and touch all that [Job] has, and he will curse you to your face.” (Job 1:11)

God accepts the challenge, and in one devastating day Job, a wealthy man, loses all that he owns — his servants, his livestock, and all ten of his children.  Calling to him as he sits in the ashes of his mourning, Job’s wife issues the accuser’s challenge “Do you still persist in your integrity?  Curse God, and die.” (Job 2:9)  But Job remains faithful in the midst of his suffering, replying, “Shall we receive the good at the hand of God, and not receive the bad?” (Job 2:10)

But grief is long, as we all know, and complex.  Left alone with our thoughts and feelings, convictions give way to questions, and certitude becomes doubt.  For a while, people seem able to tolerate our pain, but in time we begin to feel pressure, to perceive cues, that it’s time to move on with our lives whether we’re ready or not.  The same is true for Job, whose friends travel to be with him in his grief.  At first they are the model of true friendship.  Scripture says,

“They met together to go and console and comfort him.  When they saw him from a distance, they did not recognize him, and they raised their voices and wept aloud; they tore their robes and threw dust in the air upon their heads.  They sat with him on the ground seven days and seven nights, and no one spoke a word to him, for they saw that his suffering was very great.” (Job 2:11-13)

Once Job is finally ready to speak, he curses the day he was born.  He would rather trade in any experience of this life than have to face the suffering of all he has lost.  Finally, hoping, perhaps, to comfort Job by offering an explanation for what has happened, one of the friends suggests that Job is responsible for his own fate — that somehow he has sinned and brought this terrible fate on his own house.  Job’s friend says,

“Think now, who that was innocent ever perished?  Or where were the upright cut off?  As I have seen, those who plow iniquity and sow trouble reap the same. By the breath of God they perish, and by the blast of [God’s] anger they are consumed.” (Job 4:7-9)

At this point, Job’s suffering is complicated by the efforts of his friends to make sense of it for him.  Maybe you know something about these sorts of complications.

Among the varieties of genres found in scripture, the book of Job is categorized as wisdom literature.  Wisdom literature itself is varied and diverse and not limited to Christian scripture.  The Bible contains both Lamentations and Ecclesiastes, both Proverbs and Psalms — all of which seek to offer insight about the nature of reality, the character of God, and the human effort to live virtuously in light of what we have experienced and can know about each.

Proverbs are a form of wisdom literature, not just the ones we read in the Bible, but the ones we hear and use every day.  Tig Notaro, the comedian I referenced last week, skewered the modern day proverb we’ve all heard, “God never gives you more than you can handle,” but there are others, each more or less helpful.  Working as a chaplain in children’s hospitals you hear a lot of them.  At the death of a child I often heard, “God needed another beautiful angel,” and “time heals all wounds,” or “everything happens according to God’s plan.”

The difficulty with wisdom literature is that it isn’t always true, and it certainly isn’t true in all situations or circumstances.  Time doesn’t, in fact, heal all wounds.  Some wounds defy healing.  Other sayings offer to explain away our pain with proposals that, if true, only raise additional problems.  What kind of God takes children from their parents to create angels?  What kind of God allows suffering for the sake of some master plan?

This is the suffering Job endures as his friends try to explain away his pain.  Perhaps their sympathy has run out, or maybe his suffering reminds them of their own and they are simply grasping at the kinds of explanations offered them in their grief, but it’s doing no good.  Job complains about the effects of their best efforts:

“My companions are treacherous like a torrent-bed, like freshets that pass away, that run dark with ice, turbid with melting snow.  In time of heat they disappear; when it is hot, they vanish from their place… They are disappointed because they were confident; they come there and are confounded.  Such you have now become to me; you see my calamity, and are afraid… Teach me, and I will be silent; make me understand how I have gone wrong.” (Job 6:14-17, 20-21, 24)

Job hears the wisdom of his friends, but finds no wisdom it it — at least not for him.  And it’s at this point that I want to return to the question I left you with last week when I asked you to listen carefully to the prepared answers that come to your mind when you are caught up in suffering, or when you are attempting to comfort those around you in their griefs.  What have you been taught to think, to do, to believe in response to your own life’s suffering?  How have those actions and beliefs comforted you, shielded you, carried you or failed you as you negotiate life’s complex mixture of joy and pain?

I spent a little bit of time on the phone with my parents this past week trying to sift through what we’d been taught about suffering.  Certainly, on my dad’s side, there was an almost stereotypically stoic response to suffering that is typical among those who are farmers, as was my grandfather and his brothers.  My dad remembers that complaints were quickly shut down by my grandfather, who would clip short the whining of his six children with “If it were any worse, I’m sure you’d tell us.”  Farm life wasn’t fair.  Weather was good, or it was bad.  The land was dry or it was wet.  Farmer spirituality didn’t grow out of an expectation of justice, measured in inches of rain, it proceeded from the observation that “it is what it is” and moved on from there.

The expectation of justice, however, sits at the heart of Job’s dilemma.  Although he rejects his friend’s explanation, that this suffering was somehow God’s response to his sin, Job does seem to accept that God is a god of justice — and it is this belief that torments him.  If God is just, then why do good people suffer?

The divide between God’s justice and the random distribution of human suffering plants an idea in Job that grabs a hold of him, and won’t let go.  There must be a trial.  At first, Job seeks a trial in which he would be the defendant.  He wants to prove his innocence, but struggles to put his confidence in any court over which this God presides, saying

“Though I am innocent, my own mouth would condemn me; though I am blameless, [God] would prove me perverse… I become afraid of all my suffering, for I know you will not hold me innocent.” (Job 9:20,28)

Job still believes in justice, but he has lost faith in the cosmic justice system, and in this many of us can relate to Job as well.  As a congregation, we hold a strong conviction that the God we worship is the god of justice.  In our ministries to one another, in our advocacy on behalf of our neighbors, our nation, and even our environment, we invoke the message of the prophets and of Jesus that the God we serve is the God of liberation, of relief and release.  We root our passion for justice in the justice of God…

… but then we go to work and see those who cut corners or shift blame getting ahead.  We go to school and see those who keep quiet or flatter moving to the front of the class.  We go to the hospital and see good people suffering horribly, and negligent caretakers and guardians inflicting unconscionable harm.  We go to the court room and we see one set of rules applied to those with access and means, and another applied to those without access to adequate representation or advocacy.  We believe in justice, and we believe in God — but we wonder, does the absence of one suggest the absence of the other?

Here’s where it is helpful for you to have spent some time reflecting on what you’ve been taught about suffering, and how you were trained to make sense of it and endure it.  We may not all share Job’s vision of God as cosmic judge and arbiter of justice, but there are other images of God that shape our experience of God’s absence.

Perhaps you relate to God as the great physician, and long less for justice and more for an accurate diagnosis of the cause of your suffering, only to find that no one can tell you what is causing your pain.  Perhaps you relate to God through Christ Jesus as the friend who walks beside you, who hears and answers your prayers, and you are tormented by a sense of abandonment as you face new trials alone.  Maybe you’re among those who substitute talk of “the Universe” for the name of God, but now find that the universe is vast and ever expanding, and your personal agonies seem too small for the universe to pay much attention to with so many stars collapsing into black holes.  Or maybe you don’t think much about God or the universe, and you’ve always felt alone, but some new suffering has you ready to throw in the towel and you worry that there’s no one out there who will notice your passing.

This is the place that defies answers.  Every instinct in me as a preacher and as a friend, as a brother and a lover, wants to take this pain away from you.  Wants to toss off a proverb or a song lyric or some other bit of wisdom literature and make it all alright.  Except that when you’re truly suffering, you know that it’s not all alright.  You know that your world is not the way it was supposed to be, and you don’t need to be blamed for it, or explained out of it.  You need a person, or a people, or a baptized body to sit with you while you wait for your appetite to return.  You need your anger.  You need to rail at the injustice of life, or the inadequacy of science, or the failure of family and friends.  You need to be exactly as you are.

So, today — despite everything in me that wants to offer you the promise of God’s justice, the assurance of God’s healing, the steadfastness of God’s presence, the reliability of God’s good creation; despite the fact that I honestly, and unromantically, and unapologetically believe in all these things — today we will not end on a positive note, we will not wrap things up neatly, we will not answer the questions left open before us.

Because sometimes we know a thing best when it is missing, and sometimes it is a thing’s absence that finally makes it real.

Amen.