The Eastering of Job (Sermon)

“The Eastering of Job”

Job 42:1-10

Allen Huff

Jonesborough Presbyterian Church

10/25/15

         To begin to conclude our study of Job, let us return to the opening lines of the story.

         “There once was a man in the land of Uz whose name was Job. That man was blameless and upright, one who feared God and turned away from evil.” (Job1:1)

         And he has a lot of stuff.

         With the implication that Job enjoys excess because of God’s particular favor, we meet a very First World, Be Good-Get Rich kind of god. But this deity quickly proves all-too-human. He brags on Job, and Satan dares this god to test Job. What else can it be but pride the permits this god to do something so un-Godlike as to accept Satan’s dare?

The story vividly illustrates the way that humankind does, in fact, create all manner of gods in our own image. And for 37 chapters the characters continue to assume this human-imaged god. Then, in Chapter 38, something catastrophically glorious happens. As Forrest Gump says when a hurricane hits his little shrimp boat, “God showed up.”

Last week, Lee Clements explored God’s response to Job. “What may seem like a non-answer,” she said, “does affect Job. He is awed…speechless…humbled…He is reminded,” she said, “of the totality of creation, a world that is both beautiful and tragic.”¹

Do you see what the story is doing? It debunks the very existence of the impressionable, weak-spirited, small-g god of Chapter 1, and it introduces us to Yahweh, the Creator, the capital-G God.

Job answers this magnificent, terrifying God, saying,

²“I know that you can do all things, and that no purpose of yours can be thwarted.

³‘Who is this that hides counsel without knowledge?’

Therefore I have uttered what I did not understand, things too wonderful for me, which I did not know.

⁴‘Hear, and I will speak; I will question you, and you declare to me.’

⁵I had heard of you by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees you; ⁶therefore I despise myself, and repent in dust and ashes.”

⁷After the Lord had spoken these words to Job, the Lord said to Eliphaz the Temanite: “My wrath is kindled against you and against your two friends; for you have not spoken of me what is right, as my servant Job has. ⁸Now therefore take seven bulls and seven rams, and go to my servant Job, and offer up for yourselves a burnt offering; and my servant Job shall pray for you, for I will accept his prayer not to deal with you according to your folly; for you have not spoken of me what is right, as my servant Job has done.”

⁹So Eliphaz the Temanite and Bildad the Shuhite and Zophar the Naamathite went and did what the Lord had told them; and the Lord accepted Job’s prayer. ¹⁰And the Lord restored the fortunes of Job when he had prayed for his friends; and the Lord gave Job twice as much as he had before.” (Job 42:1-10)

         Now I know, Job says to God. You can be and do as you please. You will not be hindered.

Job also confesses to having overstepped his bounds as a human being. He realizes that all of his furious ranting against God rose from an image and understanding of God based solely on things he has heard – on mere rumors.

         “But now my eye sees you,” Job says to God. “Therefore I despise myself, and repent in dust and ashes.”

         Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Having desired death, Job has now experienced a death. While this death does not release him from life and its bitter memories, it does give him a new lease on life. And the urn for the ashes of Job’s old life is a whole new kind of faith. He dies the death that all human beings must die in the process of living into more mature understandings and authentic images of God.

         Now I know, says Job. You are so much more than even now I can imagine.

         Job’s new understanding of God is nothing short of an Easter experience, a resurrection. And once Job staggers out of his tomb, God puts that new faith to work. Just like Jesus forgiving the weak-spirited disciple Peter, Job finds he must forgive and intercede for the three friends who abandon him in his hour of suffering.

         To experience resurrection here-and-now, we forsake all of our small, rational, vengeful, Protestant-work-ethic gods. To live an Eastered life is to live sacramentally – forgiving the unforgivable, loving the unlovable, and recognizing the real presence of God in the created order. This is to have our “fortunes” restored.

         Now, the restoration of Job’s fortunes becomes a list of material gains, but a freshly Eastered Job handles his new wealth very differently. Verse 15 reads: “In all the land there were no women so beautiful as Job’s daughters; and their father gave them an inheritance along with their brothers.” Dismissing inviolate tradition, Job treats daughters like sons. This detail may seem trivial, but Job’s radically new generosity reflects the awareness of holiness and wholeness in the Creation that a Chapter 1 god simply cannot offer.

         In its straight and narrow confines, human reason almost always tries to distort any image of God into something logical and palatable. You do know, don’t you, that the phrase God helps those who help themselves is not biblical. In fact, it is antithetical to biblical witness. That god, like all other genie-in-a-bottle gods, dies a long, painful death in the pages of the Book of Job – and on the cross.

         The God revealed in Job’s story is incarnate in Jesus of Nazareth. Both Job and Jesus live and die in such a way as to help those who cannot help themselves. They both reveal that to experience and to know God, one must embrace suffering along with happiness. And they both reveal that blessings, whether material or spiritual, are only truly blessings when they are shared in humble and generous gratitude. That is especially true when they are shared, like Job’s prayers and Jesus’ life itself, with people who do not “deserve” them. And if that does not define grace, I do not know what does.

         Richard Rohr is fond of saying that Jesus comes not to change God’s mind about us, but to change our minds about God.² It seems to me that the Book of Job has that same mission. Job’s story has become for me a kind of cliff notes version of how individuals and faith communities progress from manipulative Santa Claus and childish fairy godmother images of God to images that inspire awe, humility, and hope – images that inspire us to participate in God’s transforming presence in an all-too-real and all-too-broken world.

         If Jonesborough Presbyterian Church is a vibrant, relevant faith community, it is not because of good staffing and programming. Those things can help, of course, but the difference is made when we choose, individually and corporately, to acknowledge and enter the suffering of the people sitting next to us in the pews, and when we choose to acknowledge and enter the suffering in our immediate community as well as places far and wide.

Job and Jesus both tell us that God is Eastering the Creation into the ways of Love and the means of grace. Through many deaths and resurrections, God is transforming us into a people of forgiveness, gratitude, and generosity in a world which sits among the ashes, scraping its sores, and crying out for deliverance. We cannot do the delivering. We can only be a sign of hope. And even now, whether through us or in spite of us, God is making all things new.

¹The Rev. Lee Clements in her sermon “Out of the Whirlwind,” preached at Jonesborough Presbyterian Church on 10/18/15.

²http://www.azquotes.com/quote/798492

A Bitter Intimacy (Sermon)

“A Bitter Intimacy”

Job 23:1-9, 16-17

Allen Huff

Jonesborough Presbyterian Church

10/11/15

         Two weeks ago we began looking at Job. Much happens between the first two chapters and the twenty-third chapter. So, let’s review a little first.

         Job is a man of wealth and renown. He lives by rules of generosity and hospitality. His ten children seem a little spoiled by privilege, but all in all, life is exceptionally good for Job.

         Then, twice, God brags on Job to Satan. And twice, Satan challenges God to make things difficult on Job. Push any human being far enough, says Satan, and they’ll turn on you. Here, let me show you.

         He’s all yours, says God. Just don’t kill him.

         In less than two chapters, Job has lost everything except one furious wife.

“Curse God, and die!” she screams. But even in unspeakable pain, Job does not “sin with his lips.” And the fierce conversation begins.

Job curses the day of his birth. He wishes himself dead. Then we meet Job’s three friends, Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar, all of whom say basically the same thing: You must be guilty of something. Confess it, and move on.

Throughout the saga, Job maintains his innocence. Things reach a kind of climax when Job speaks words that Handel completely misuses in the Easter portion of The Messiah. In 19:25-26 Job cries out, “For I know that my Redeemer lives, and that at the last he will stand upon the earth; and after my skin has been thus destroyed, then in my flesh I shall see God.”

Job is claiming a vindicator, someone who will help him get justice from God who has so uselessly and unjustly abused him.

In chapter 22, Eliphaz scolds Job yet again. “Is not your wickedness great? There is no end to your iniquities.”

Unyielding in the face of such battery-acid counsel, Job says:

²“Today also my complaint is bitter;

[God’s] hand is heavy despite my groaning.

         ³Oh, that I knew where I might find [God],

that I might come even to his dwelling!

⁴I would lay my case before him,

and fill my mouth with arguments.

⁵I would learn what [God] would answer me,

and understand what he would say to me.

⁶Would [God] contend with me in the greatness of his power?

No; but he would give heed to me.

⁷There an upright person could reason with him,

and I should be acquitted forever by my judge.

⁸“If I go forward, [God] is not there;

or backward, I cannot perceive him;

⁹on the left he hides,

and I cannot behold him;

I turn to the right,

but I cannot see him.

¹⁶God has made my heart faint;

the Almighty has terrified me;

¹⁷If only I could vanish in darkness,

and thick darkness would cover my face!”

                                             (Job 23:1-9, 16-17)

         Listen again to that last line, “If only I could vanish in darkness, and thick darkness would cover my face!” Job’s accusatory lament takes me to the poet’s affirmation in Psalm 139: “If I say, ‘Surely the darkness shall cover me, and the light around me become night,’ even the darkness is not dark to you…for darkness is as light to you.”

Job wishes he could “vanish in darkness,” but he cannot.

         Both Job and the psalmist acknowledge that the utter loneliness of human suffering still happens within the context of intimacy with God. It is a bitter intimacy, but intimacy, nonetheless. If we cannot share our deepest anger, fear, and hurt with those we love the most, do we truly love them or trust them? When we offer to God nothing but laundered, starched, and clean-fingernailed formality, we are trying to protect something.

         After my first year at Columbia seminary, I interned at a church in a small town south of Atlanta. During that summer a church member died a death he should not have died. Just a few months earlier, the man had been a heart patient at a hospital in Atlanta - a good hospital with a good staff. Yet a good person made a bad mistake and gave medication to thicken instead of thin the man’s blood. There were confessions, and tears all around. But the damage was done.

         A couple of weeks after the funeral, I went with my supervising pastor to visit the man’s widow. She greeted us with gracious melancholy. After pleasantries, the pastor read some scripture passages. He began with words of comfort, Psalm 23 and such. Then he read from Psalm 44 in which the poet dares to name God’s shortcomings in caring for Israel: “You have rejected us and abased us…You have made us like sheep for the slaughter…You have sold your people for a trifle…you have broken us in the haunt of jackals, and covered us with deep darkness.”

         The lady squirmed in her seat. “O my,” she said, “I don’t believe I could talk to God like that.”

         I think we need to feel free to offer the rawest, most bitter intimacies of our hearts with God. Sometimes they are the most profoundly honest prayers and most sincere affirmations of faith that we can utter. They take seriously our faith that God creates the world and declares it good. Bitter intimacy also takes seriously God’s steadfast presence in the midst of human suffering.

         Job’s tortured laments do all of these things. They also emphatically declare his innocence. Elie Wiesel says that Job’s “innocence troubled him, left him in the dark; his guilt might give the experience…meaning. [Job] demanded…an answer that would show him unequivocally that [humankind] is not a toy…Job turned against God to find and confront Him. He defied [God] to come closer to Him.”¹

         “Moreover,” says Wiesel, “Job needed God because he felt abandoned by…his wife [and] his friends,” none of whom had anything to offer but empty pity and judgment.­²

         Job’s angry words, his stinging laments declare his absolute faith that his suffering does not reflect the will of God. As pervasive and inescapable as it is, suffering is not God’s desire for anyone. And it is very often in our most vehement, unfiltered protests of God that we draw closest to the one who, to re-quote James Finley, “protects us from nothing [but] sustains us in all things.”³

         The problem is, of course, God’s sustaining faithfulness is most real in retrospect. The writer of Psalm 23 would have nothing to say whatsoever without having already known the speechless despair in the “valley of the shadow of death.” He can “fear no evil” only by having already felt fear, and having been all but overcome by it.

         These are indeed desperate and overcoming times. And it is easier to act like one of Job’s “friends,” to judge victims for comeliness or cowardice. As children of God, however, our calling is to enter the bitter intimacy of lament, to lend our voices to the cries of suffering in the creation, and in so doing, to help reveal the presence, the strength, the grace, and the Love of God.

         A word of caution: Healthy lament always begins with our own intimate struggles with God. When people of faith do not feel free to be bitterly honest with God, we will almost certainly, like Job’s wife and friends, project onto others our anger at and fear of some deity we really have not known and are too timid to confront. Misdirected intimacies and bitterness can cause any of us to lay the burden of blame on people who deserve compassion, not sanctimonious judgment.

If the story of Job does nothing else, it slings us into the deepest, darkest, most faith-threatening, contemporary pain in our lives and in the world. And it dares us, in the midst of that pain, to draw near to a God very unlike the caricatured deity of Job 1 and 2.

The story of Job invites us, instead to prepare for and to meet the God being revealed in Jesus of Nazareth – the God who comes to us as one of us. The God who suffers with us. The God who transforms our darkness into sustaining and redeeming light.

¹Elie Wiesel, Messengers of God: Biblical Portraits and Legends, Random House, NY, 1976, p. 198.

²Ibid., p. 199.

It's Five O'clock Somewhere (Sermon)

“It’s Five O’clock Somewhere”

Matthew 20:1-16

Allen Huff

Jonesborough Presbyterian Church

10/4/15

         The longer I wandered around in this story, the more it became a kind of rising river. And the deeper I waded into the river, the more urgently the flow tugged at my whole being. It began to pull me deeper and push me further than I wanted to go. Anything I might have chosen or expected, anything I might have fished for in that river began to dilute into the irrepressible cataract of holy purpose.

         As a pastor, I am committed to the intentional community called the church. I have a very personal stake in the well-being of the organization. If the church falls apart, my career ends. No more salary, or benefits, or self-actualization. It is clearly in my own best interests, as well as those of many others, to maintain the integrity of the institution as well as its message.

         While that is not a bad thing, I do recognize the danger of institutions devolving into beasts. Governments, corporations, universities, individual congregations, religions in general – the list goes on. At some point, almost all institutions face the temptation to exist simply to survive for their own sake. When this happens, an institution abandons its mission. It becomes a ravenous maw on the earth. It consumes far more in resources than it produces in benefits.

         Perhaps the recent, bold-faced fraud of Volkswagen represents a good example. So does Duke Energy’s self-preservationist denials of the now-proven hazards to all life near its many ash ponds. Pharaoh, Jezebel, Caesar, the Pharisees – all of these are biblical metaphors for both political and religious institutions run amok.

Moses, Elijah, Jesus – all of these reformers and transformers are, in some way, products of the institutions, yet even as agitators, they are gifts of God for the people of God, whether God’s people are ready to welcome them or not.

Through the prophetic words and actions of these human gifts, God reveals anew God’s scandalous presence in, with, and for the creation. The trouble with prophets is that they seem, at first, to represent far more in the way of threat than hope. We face an abundance of threat, but only hope that redeems. To help us discern God’s kingdom-revealing hope in the work of holy agitators, Jesus tells the parable of the laborers in the vineyard.

         The kingdom of heaven, he says, is like a landowner who chooses to give as generously to workers who labor for one hour as he does to those who labor all day.

         The defining characteristic of God’s true prophets is a gratuitous generosity that deeply offends our sense of all that is right and just. Their generosity challenges everything that we have been taught lies at the foundation of our familiar institutions.

‘This won’t do,’ we say. ‘If such a practices become standard procedure, all laborers will show up at 5:00pm expecting to receive a day’s wage for an hour’s work. Such wanton openhandedness threatens the very foundation of our culture!’

         I do not know exactly how institutions might adopt more gratuitously generous practices. Raise the minimum wage? Increase maternity leave? Offer more vacation days? Many economic arguments against such things clearly have merit. So do biblical arguments for them – as Jesus’ parable clearly illustrates.

I am not in a position to impact decisions in any institution beyond the small community of this particular congregation. But something seems apparent enough to me. It’s five o’clock somewhere. It is always time for you, for me, for us to express our utter faith in God by living more generously than we might think is warranted or even healthy.

Five o’clock urgency broke through again on Thursday when yet another angry young man killed or wounded some 20 people in Oregon.

Five o’clock urgency cries out from Syria as hostilities continue to escalate in that country.

Five o’clock urgency beats at the borders of many nations as refugees from violence, poverty, and natural disaster force people from homes they would rather not leave.

Five o’clock urgency is, right now, sending new people in search of help at Habitat for Humanity, the Salvation Army, soup kitchens, and shelters throughout the world.

It is five o’clock all over God’s creation. And institutions that exist for their own sake will simply dismiss the hour with anemic “thoughts and prayers.” Unless they discern some clear financial or political reward for taking decisive action, institutions that exist for their own sake will do nothing.

Even if we are in some way part of the institutions, as individual “landowners,” you and I cannot depend on them. It is time to be prophets, as inside agitators. It is time for us to enter the rising river and to offer gratuitous generosity to everyone, especially those who seem to be caught in the throes of 5:00 loneliness and despair. As we are reminded virtually every month on some campus, in some church, in some theater or shopping center, initiating undeserved kindness can be the difference between life and death for many people. It seems to me that in the long run, no firearm will ever make any person or community safer than the generous practice of faith, hope, Love, and gratitude.

Jesus’ parable says that the kingdom of heaven is not manifest in some new world order imposed by some victorious institution. We manifest the kingdom of heaven in our willingness to actively engage and witness to the alternative way of life of Jesus – a way of life marked by a generosity so profound that few institutions dare to participate.

Sadly, this seems to be true even for the institutional Church.

Friends, it is five o’clock – here and now. As we come to this table on World Communion Sunday, we proclaim yet again, even when our jealousy prevents us from fully enjoying it, the boundless, limitless, perfect, and perfecting Love of God in Christ.

Everyone, come to the table. Enter the rising river, and embrace the terrifyingly generous life of Jesus.