A Bitter Intimacy (Sermon)

“A Bitter Intimacy”

Job 23:1-9, 16-17

Allen Huff

Jonesborough Presbyterian Church

10/17/21

 

         Last week we began looking at Job. And because much happens between the first and the twenty-third chapters, let’s review a little. 

         Job is a man of wealth and renown. He’s also hospitable and generous. His ten children seem a little spoiled by privilege, but all in all, life is exceptionally good for Job.

         Then God brags on Job to Satan—twice. And twice, Satan challenges God to make things difficult on Job so God can see what happens when humans face suffering.

         You do it, says God. Just don’t kill him.

         In less than two chapters, Job has lost everything except one irate wife. “Curse God, and die!” she says. But Job, while wishing himself dead, curses only the night of his conception and the day of his birth.

Then we meet Job’s three “friends,” Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar, all of whom say basically the same thing: Job, you have to be guilty of something. Confess it, and move on.

Throughout these conversations, Job maintains his innocence. And in chapter 19, he explodes in defiance saying, “I know that my Redeemer lives.”

Handel uses those words in the Easter portion of The Messiah, but while he uses them to proclaim the risen Christ, Job is declaring that he has a vindicator, someone who will help him get justice against God who has so uselessly and unjustly abused him. “[My Redeemer] will stand upon the earth; and after my skin has been…destroyed,” says Job, “then in my flesh I shall see God.”

Hearing that, Eliphaz scolds Job saying, “Is not your wickedness great? There is no end to your iniquities.”

In today’s text, an indignant 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  NRSV)

 

Job wishes he could “vanish in darkness.” He also knows that he can’t. One thing that Job is acknowledging is that human suffering happens within the context of intimacy with God. Sometimes it’s a rather bitter intimacy, but intimacy, nonetheless. And if we can’t share our deepest anger, fear, and hurt with those with whom we are most intimate, do we really love them? Do we really trust them? What or whom are we trying to protect if we offer to God nothing but laundered and starched formality?

When people seem to be angry with God, and uncomfortable with feeling that way, I always refer them to three particular psalms of lament. In these psalms, the poets do more than give voice to their pain or their community’s pain. They call God out and demand action. “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” cries Psalm 22. In Psalm 44, the psalmist accuses God of abandonment saying, “You have rejected us and abased us…You have sold your people for a trifle…[and] made us…a laughingstock…” Psalm 88 ends in utter despair: “You have caused friend and neighbor to shun me; my companions are in complete darkness.”

         I think we need to feel free to express to God our hearts’ rawest and most bitter intimacies. Sometimes lament is the most honest prayer we can pray and our most sincere affirmation of faith. Lament takes seriously our faith that God creates the world and declares it good, even when good is not what we’re experiencing. The bitter intimacy of lament calls on God to show up and to redeem our suffering.

         Job’s tortured laments do all of these things. They also declare his innocence. Elie Wiesel says that Job’s “innocence troubled him, left him in the dark.” Had Job felt guilty, “his guilt might [have given] 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 [God]. 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,” all of whom projected their own resentment toward and fear of God onto Job, even as he suffered.­²

         Wiesel is saying that Job’s angry laments declare his faith that his suffering, and that human suffering in general, is not God’s will. And it’s very often through our most passionate, unfiltered protests that we draw closest to God who, as James Finley says, “protects us from nothing [and] sustains us in all things.”³

         One challenge for us is that we tend to recognize God’s sustaining faithfulness most fully in retrospect. The writer of Psalm 23, for example, would have nothing hopeful to say without having already traversed the “valley of the shadow of death.” He can “fear no evil” only by having already faced some kind of fearsome malice. And perhaps only someone who survived something like the Nazi Holocaust—someone like Elie Weisel—can write an honest commentary on the Book of Job.

         We live in our own worrisome times. And it’s often easier to act like Job’s wife or one of his “friends” and lash out in judgment at each other. As followers of Jesus, though, our calling is to claim the gifts of our suffering and to enter the bitter intimacy of the world’s lament. When we lend our voices, hands, and feet to the Creation’s suffering, we help reveal the reconciling and resurrecting love of God.

         And remember: 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 bitterness toward God. And misdirected bitterness can cause any of us to judge and even condemn people who need and deserve compassion.

If the story of Job does nothing else, it invites us into the deepest, darkest, most faith-threatening pain in our lives and in the world. And it dares us, in the midst of that pain, to draw near to God—who, quite frankly, has nothing in common with that irresponsible, anthropomorphic deity who turns Job over to Satan.

          It’s interesting. Job wishes he could “vanish in darkness.” His lament has a counterpoint in the poet’s grateful affirmation when he says, 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.”

I think Job’s story helps to create space for us to prepare for and to meet the God being revealed in Jesus—the Christ.

The One who comes to us as one of us.

The One who suffers with us.

The God who, ultimately, transforms all suffering, all “darkness,” into redeeming and life-sustaining light.

 

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

²Ibid., p. 199.

³https://cac.org/suffering-week-2-summary-2018-10-27/

 

It's Five O"Clock Somewhere (Sermon)

 “It’s Five O’Clock Somewhere”
Matthew 20:1-16 

Allen Huff

Jonesborough Presbyterian Church

10/3/21

 

“For the kingdom of heaven is like a landowner who went out early in the morning to hire laborers for his vineyard. ² After agreeing with the laborers for the usual daily wage, he sent them into his vineyard.

³ When he went out about nine o’clock, he saw others standing idle in the marketplace; ⁴ and he said to them, ‘You also go into the vineyard, and I will pay you whatever is right.’ So they went.

⁵ When he went out again about noon and about three o’clock, he did the same.

⁶ And about five o’clock he went out and found others standing around; and he said to them, ‘Why are you standing here idle all day?’

⁷ They said to him, ‘Because no one has hired us.’

He said to them, ‘You also go into the vineyard.’

⁸ When evening came, the owner of the vineyard said to his manager, ‘Call the laborers and give them their pay, beginning with the last and then going to the first.’

⁹ When those hired about five o’clock came, each of them received the usual daily wage. ¹⁰ Now when the first came, they thought they would receive more; but each of them also received the usual daily wage. ¹¹ And when they received it, they grumbled against the landowner, ¹² saying, ‘These last worked only one hour, and you have made them equal to us who have borne the burden of the day and the scorching heat.’

¹³ But he replied to one of them, ‘Friend, I am doing you no wrong; did you not agree with me for the usual daily wage? ¹⁴ Take what belongs to you and go; I choose to give to this last the same as I give to you. ¹⁵ Am I not allowed to do what I choose with what belongs to me? Or are you envious because I am generous?’ ¹⁶ So the last will be first, and the first will be last.” (NRSV)

 

         The longer I sloshed around in this story, the more it became a kind of chattering brook. Then the brook became a river, and the deeper I waded into the river, the more urgently the flow tugged at my whole being. Then it became almost a flood, a force pulling me deeper and pushing me further. Anything I might have expected, anything I might have fished for in that river began to rise and converge into an insistent cataract of holy purpose. And at least for me, it became a call to ever-deepening transformation—personally, spiritually, vocationally.

         As a Christian, I’m committed to the intentional community called the church. And as a pastor, I have a very personal stake in the well-being of the organization. It’s in my own best interests to maintain the integrity of the institution as well as its message.

Problems arise, though, when church leaders, both professionals and lay people, allow that personal stake to become the guiding influence. It leads us to work to maintain the church rather than to serve God. Now, pastors know that if the church falls apart, so do our careers. No more salary, or benefits, or self-actualization. Pastors and lay leaders alike also know that if the church falls apart, certain very comfortable arrangements of authority could disintegrate and leave us feeling powerless.

         At some point, almost all institutions—governments, corporations, universities, congregations, denominations, and religions in general—face the temptation to exist simply to survive. When infected by selfishness, institutions focus on maintaining the arrangements that benefit those who hold authority. And when that happens, the institution exits for its own sake. As such, it becomes little more than a ravenous beast who aligns itself with worldly power and consumes far more in resources than it produces in benefit for others.

Think of the tobacco and the fossil fuel industries that knowingly market products which, in the big picture, diminish the lives of its customers and which, in the process, stress local communities and the global environment. Such institutions make healthcare much more expensive, but since it’s all about money, and since money is all about power, the status quo continues unhindered.

And since I’ve never asked if my investments or the investments of any church I’ve ever served are benefitting financially from such institutions, I’m talking out of both sides of my mouth here. That makes me part of the problem. 

         Pharaoh, Jezebel, Caesar, the Pharisees—all of these are biblical metaphors for political, economic, and religious institutions infected with individualistic greed, fear, and denial.

Moses, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Jesus—all of these reformers and transformers are, in some way, products of their institutions, yet as enlightened, inside agitators, they become gifts of God for the people of God, whether God’s people understand and welcome them or not.

Through the prophetic words and actions of these human gifts, God reveals God’s presence in, with, and for the creation. The trouble with the most faithful prophets is that they seem, at first, to represent far more in the way of threat than hope. They call institutions into question and call people to live lives transformed by new depths of perception of and trust in things like loving and being loved, offering and receiving compassion, and sharing—for the well-being of all—the God-given, material and spiritual abundance of the Creation.

As prophet and agitator, Jesus tells the parable of the laborers in the vineyard to challenge the greed and individualism of his own day and to reveal the deeply communal nature of the realm of God

         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.

         This scandalizing parable challenges everything that we’ve been taught lies at the foundation of our institutions. It dares to reveal that God’s true prophets are known by their connection to an autonomous and gratuitous Generosity that gauges individual worth on the basis that every person is a God-imaged human being, and not on his or her relative productivity.

‘That’s irresponsible!’ we say. ‘If such reckless open-handedness were to become standard, it would ruin everything. Everyone would show up at 5:00pm expecting a day’s wage for an hour’s work!’

         There may be truth in that. So, how else might institutions adopt more gratuitously generous practices? Offer a minimum wage that is at least a living wage? Offer longer maternity leave? Offer paternity leave? Offer more vacation time? While some economic arguments against these kinds of measures may have institution-maintaining merit, Jesus’ parable clearly lays the foundation for biblical advocacy of such generosity.

I can’t impact many decisions in institutions beyond the small community of this congregation; but, as the saying goes, “It’s always five o’clock somewhere.” It’s always time for you, for me, for us to express our faith in God by living more generously than we might think is warranted or healthy.

Five o’clock urgency has been on us for the last two years of pandemic. In my opinion, wearing the mask when you’re inside and around others, getting the vaccine, continuing to be careful about physical distancing are not threats to “individual liberty.” They’re simple acts of generosity.

Five o’clock urgency cries out in the form of Afghan refugees seeking safety and new beginnings.

Five o’clock urgency is, every day, sending people in search of help at food pantries, soup kitchens, and homeless shelters throughout the world.

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

We are all of us, in some way, part of those institutions. As followers of Jesus in a season of five o’clock struggle, it’s always time to act as enlightened prophets, as inside agitators. It’s always time for us to enter the rising river and to offer gratuitous generosity on behalf of a suffering Creation. As the physical violence and the violent rhetoric continually remind us, participating God’s realm of undeserved kindness can be perceived as weakness. Then again, it can also be the difference between life and death for many people. And I firmly believe that, in the long run, no weapon will ever make any person or community safer than gratuitously generous practices of faith, hope, love.

Jesus’ parable says that the kingdom of heaven is not manifest in some new world order imposed by some powerful institution. His followers manifest the kingdom of heaven in their daily willingness to actively engage and witness to Jesus’ alternative way of life—a life marked by a generosity so profound that few institutions (including, sadly enough, the church) dare to participate in it.

As we come to this table on World Communion Sunday, we proclaim yet again (Even if we don’t know how to enjoy it fully!) the boundless, and the perfect and perfecting love of God.

So, all of you, come to the table. Enter the rising river, and embrace the overwhelming generosity of God’s Christ.