The Eastering of Job (Sermon)

 “The Eastering of Job”

Job 42:2-10

Allen Huff

Jonesborough Presbyterian Church

10/24/21

 

         To begin our third and final look at Job, let’s remember that Job is a man of means. He has lots of livestock, lots of money.

         The storyteller also implies that Job’s excess is a sign of God’s favor. So, as ancient as this story is, chapter 1 of the Book of Job presents a god similar to that of today’s prosperity gospel. And such deities prove all-too-human. What else but pride would permit even a god to do something so un-Godly as to accept Satan’s dare to test Job?

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

 

“Then the Lord answered Job out of the whirlwind: ‘Who is this that darkens counsel by words without knowledge?

‘Gird up your loins…I will question you, and you shall declare to me.

‘Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth? Who determined its measurements—surely you know!

‘Have you commanded the morning since your days began, and caused the dawn to know its place…Have you entered into the springs of the sea, or walked in the recesses of the deep?

‘Have the gates of death been revealed to you…? What is the way to the place where the light is distributed, or where the east wind is scattered upon the earth? Can you bind the chains of the Pleiades, or loose the cords of Orion?

‘Who provides for the raven its prey, when its young ones cry to God, and wander about for lack of food?’” (Selected verses from Job 38)

 

Do you see what the story does? It exposes that impressionable, weak-spirited, small-g god of chapter 1 as an absurdity, and it introduces Yahweh, the Creator, the eternal and capital-G God.

Now, Job is still suffering, still feeling broken and defeated, but he’s also enlightened and newly hopeful. He realizes that the god whom he has blamed and to whom he’s been complaining is decidedly not the God who will redeem him. Both humbled and emboldened, Job opens himself up to Yahweh.

Listen for God’s Word:

 

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.’
⁵ I had heard of you by the hearing of the ear,

but now my eye sees you;
⁶ therefore I despise myself,

and repent in dust and ashes.”

⁷ After 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. ⁸ Now 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.”

⁹ So 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.

¹⁰ And 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 NRSV)

 

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

Job realizes that all of his furious ranting against God rose from an understanding of God based solely on rumors.

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

Having desired death, Job has now experienced a death. And while this death does not release him from life and its bitterness, it does give him a new lease on life through a whole new kind of faith. He dies the death that all human beings must die in the process of living into more authentic images and mature understandings of God.

         Job’s new theological understanding is a kind of resurrection experience. And once Job staggers out of his tomb, God puts that new faith to work. Just like Jesus forgiving his disciples for their betrayals and denials, Job finds he must forgive andintercede for the friends who abandoned him in his suffering.

         To experience resurrection here-and-now, we forsake all of our small, vengeful, Protestant-work-ethic gods. To live an Eastered life is to live sacramentally—forgiving the unforgivable, loving the unlovable, working for justice, and recognizing God’s holy presence in the midst of the mundane. This is to have our “fortunes” restored.

         Job may have some material fortune restored, as well, and a freshly-Eastered Job handles his new wealth very differently. Job 42:15 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.” This detail may seem trivial, but Job’s radically new generosity reveals the effects of his awareness of a holiness and a wholeness in the Creation that a chapter 1 god cannot offer. Surrounded by and saturated with Yahweh—the God who acts within yet exists beyond human comprehension—Job subverts sacrosanct tradition and makes his daughters equal to his sons. This scandal foreshadows Jesus healing on the sabbath, talking alone with a Samaritan woman, and “eating with tax collectors and sinners.”

         In its straight and narrow confines, self-serving theologies always try to distort God into something friendly to any status quo that supports privilege and ignores injustice and suffering. For instance, we do know, don’t we, that the phrase God helps those who help themselves is not biblical? Indeed, it’s antithetical to biblical witness. That god dies a slow but memorable and transformational death in the pages of Job—and on the cross.

         Both Job and Jesus live and die in ways that proclaim a God who helps those who cannot help themselves. Their stories reveal that true knowledge of God includes the embrace of suffering as well as happiness. And both stories reveal that blessings—material and spiritual—are only truly blessings when they are shared in humble and generous gratitude and when they become acts of justice and peacemaking.

That’s especially true when they are shared with people who do not “deserve” them—like Job’s prayers for his friends and like Jesus’ life itself. And don’t such things define grace?

         Richard Rohr is fond of saying that Jesus comes not to change God’s mind about us, but to change our minds about God. It seems to me that Job’s story has that same mission. It has become, for me, a kind of CliffsNotes version of how individuals and faith communities progress from Santa Claus and fairy godmother images of God to images that inspire awe, humility, hope, and action—images that inspire us to participate in God’s resurrecting presence in this beautiful if all-too-broken world.

         I usually cringe when I see pithy little sayings that churches post on yard signs. In my opinion, too many of them express theological positions worthy only of the god of the first chapter of Job. Recently, though, I saw one that said very simply, “The struggle is real. So is God.”

         If Jonesborough Presbyterian is a vibrant, relevant faith community, it’s not because of good staffing and programming. Those things can help, of course, but the real difference occurs when we choose, individually and corporately, to acknowledge and enter the suffering of the people next to us in the pew, at the grocery store, the post office, the ball game, the coffee shop…

Job and Jesus both tell us that God is Eastering the Creation toward justice through the ways of love and the means of grace. Through many deaths and resurrections, God is transforming us into a people of gratitude and generosity in and for a world which sits among ashes, crying out for deliverance.

Now, while we can’t do the delivering, we can offer our hands, our feet, our voices, and our prayers to God who speaks, acts, and loves through us.

So even now, whether through us or in spite of us, God is Eastering the Creation and making all things new.

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/

 

The Labyrinth of Job (Sermon)

“The Labyrinth of Job”

Job 1:1, 2:1-10

Allen Huff

Jonesborough Presbyterian Church

10/10/21

 

¹There was once 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.

One day the heavenly beings came to present themselves before the Lord, and Satan also came among them to present himself before the Lord. ² The Lord said to Satan, “Where have you come from?” Satan answered the Lord, “From going to and fro on the earth, and from walking up and down on it.”

³ The Lord said to Satan, “Have you considered my servant Job? There is no one like him on the earth, a blameless and upright man who fears God and turns away from evil. He still persists in his integrity, although you incited me against him, to destroy him for no reason.”

⁴ Then Satan answered the Lord, “Skin for skin! All that people have they will give to save their lives. ⁵ But stretch out your hand now and touch his bone and his flesh, and he will curse you to your face.”

⁶ The Lord said to Satan, “Very well, he is in your power; only spare his life.”

⁷ So Satan went out from the presence of the Lord, and inflicted loathsome sores on Job from the sole of his foot to the crown of his head. ⁸ Job took a potsherd with which to scrape himself, and sat among the ashes.

⁹ Then his wife said to him, “Do you still persist in your integrity? Curse God, and die.”

¹⁰ But he said to her, “You speak as any foolish woman would speak. Shall we receive the good at the hand of God, and not receive the bad?”

In all this Job did not sin with his lips. (NRSV)

 

 

         Job: History or legend? A flesh-and-blood human being? Or an amalgamation of human experience in general and of Jewish experience in particular? Is the question WAS Job real? or IS Job real?

In his book Messengers of God: Biblical Portraits and Legends, Jewish scholar and holocaust survivor, Elie Wiesel, writes an essay entitled “Job: Our Contemporary.” In that essay Wiesel wrestles with the stories around the story.

“Once upon a time,” he says of Job. “When? Nobody knows. [Job’s] name is mentioned by Ezekiel in passing, along with those of Noah, and Daniel—was he a contemporary of one or the other? Possibly. Other legends link him alternately to Abraham, Jacob, Moses, Samson, Solomon…and…the Babylonian exile. [Job] would thus have lived…more than eight hundred [years].”¹

Later in the same essay, Wiesel describes Job as one who “was everywhere and everything at the same time…[a man characterized by] peregrinations through provinces and centuries.”²

To ask, “WAS Job real?” forces us to deal with nearly a millennium of conflicting stories. So, we enter a kind of maze, and a maze is just a complicated playground for which there is, typically, only one right answer. You enter in one place and, eventually, by trial and error, find the exit at another. The point of a maze is simply the entertainment of getting lost. The experience leaves you essentially unchanged.

Now, to ask, IS Job real? is to ask an entirely different question. It brings us into the moment. It acknowledges unmerited suffering, and dares to ask, “If God allows human suffering, does that mean that God, in some way, causes it?”

To ask if Job is real is to enter not a maze, but a labyrinth. A labyrinth is an ancient spiritual practice in which a person walks a set path with twists and turns similar to a maze, but its purpose is engaging Mystery, not becoming mystified. A labyrinth can be trusted. When walking a labyrinth, one follows the pathway, shedding distractions, pretensions, and fear. The center of the labyrinth offers a place of stillness, reflection, and divine encounter. It also becomes a place of metanoia, of turning around, a place to begin anew. To leave the elaborate coil of a labyrinth, you simply retrace your steps, and, assuming due discipline, you become a refreshed pilgrim reentering the world.

To ask if Job is real is to enter his story as one would enter a labyrinth. At the center of this story-labyrinth, we encounter God in, of all places, a gut-wrenching experience of human suffering. When traveling with Job as a path of divine encounter, we discover that regardless of whether or not he existed as a particular individual, Job most certainly is real.

In discovering the immediate is-ness of Job, we walk shoulder-to-shoulder with all of the characters in the story. Entering the labyrinth, we deal first with God bragging on a righteous Job. Irked by God’s boasting, Satan dares God to test Job’s spiritual mettle.

Make any human being miserable enough, says Satan, and they’ll turn on you in less time than it takes to ask ‘Why?’.

And what are we to make of God accepting Satan’s dare? Do your worst, says God, just don’t kill him.

Seriously? Who wants to walk justly, kindly, and humbly with that God?

Then we meet Job’s wife. She reminds us that it wasn’t just Job who lost everything. Her family and fortune are gone, too. And she’s furious! So, she dares her husband to test God’s faithfulness the way Satan dares God to test Job’s faithfulness.

Now we can start dealing with Job. Instead of eating the seductive apple of vengeance as tempted by his wife, Job lies down in an ash heap, scrapes his oozing sores with a potsherd, and wishes himself dead.

“Let the day perish in which I was born, and the night that said, ‘A man-child is conceived,’” he cries. “Why did I not die at birth?” (Job 3:3, 11)

Utter despair is not exactly where one expects to find God, is it? Indeed, many people dismiss the very notion of God when caught in the grip of suffering that seems to have neither purpose nor end. And I can’t blame anyone for that, especially those who have been taught that a lack of suffering and a surplus of comfort prove God’s presence and favor. For generations, the Church has infected the world with such dis-grace. We have funneled people into a kind of doctrinal maze, saying, There’s only one way out of your suffering, only one way out this world. You must enter here. Turn there. Memorize this. Believe that. Say it, and don’t doubt. Just accept and believe everything this way.

Perhaps there’s comfort in such certainty. In a maze, however, we have more in common with lab rats than disciples on a journey. When we confront suffering, the labyrinth of faith leads us through that suffering, not away from it. And there we encounter God.

Now—I do not think God causes illness, addiction, abuse, poverty, war, accidents, natural disasters, or anything else. Not to come close to us, not to punish us, or even to strengthen us. I don’t think God causes suffering because I don’t think God revels in the Creation’s pain. I do trust that God never abandons us in our suffering. I think God, as the Ultimate Opportunist, uses those experiences to reveal God’s faithfulness and the reality and the nature of Resurrection. And perhaps it’s true that the suffering which is often most revelatory for us is the suffering into which we enter on purpose—particularly the suffering of others. And Jesus leads us into that pain. Jesus—who asks us to follow him more than to believe in him—guides us into the labyrinth of human experience where we encounter God’s relentless grace at the heart of both “great love and great suffering.”³

“Then the righteous will answer him, ‘Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry and gave you food, or thirsty and gave you something to drink…[or] a stranger and welcomed you, or naked and gave you clothing…[or] sick or in prison and visited you?’ And the king will answer them, ‘Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me.’” (Matthew 25:37-40)

Why is it that Jesus is often far more real in the projects than the palaces?

We’re going to walk with Job for the next two weeks, and as we do, I encourage you to spend time with this remarkable story. Enter it on purpose, as you would a labyrinth. Read it. Pray it. Most of all, trust it. Let a very real Job point you toward suffering—your own, someone else’s, or the raging, cultural pain around us. Be honest about any feelings of bewilderment, anger, betrayal, or despair. And when you feel that you just can’t go any further, stop. Be still. Open your heart to the grace of the living and loving God.

Then turn, and begin your journey outward—retracing your steps, back through the labyrinth of faith, where you may claim and share God’s healing, transformation, and hope.

 

¹Elie Wiesel, Messengers of God: Biblical Portraits and Legends, Random House, NY, 1976, p. 188.

²Ibid., p. 190.

³Richard Rohr, The Universal Christ: How a Forgotten Reality Can Change Everything We See, Hope for, and Believe. Convergent Books, NY, 2019. p. 50-53. 

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.