Job 42 returns us to prose, away from the poetry of the bulk of the book. It fills the frame of the first prose section.

1) Immediately, one needs to decide for this day, which of the many possible translations of Job's exclamation is close to the mark. See the NIB for a full listing. Basically, is Job apologizing, or is he repenting turning from his mourning and lament? See Donald Capps in Reframing as well.

2) Job gets a lot restored. Does restoration somehow make up for the loss of his first set of children? Do new riches make up for the loss of a fortune?

3) Does Job have 10 kids with Mrs. Job?

4) v. 5 now my eye sees thee. What does the creation speech do to Job's image of God? What does it do to yours?

5) Why comfort now from brothers and sisters? Why money?

6) Spell out why God is angry at the friends. How has Job spoken of God what is right? (v.7) Why is this repeated at 9?

7) See ch. 7 of G. Janzen's new book, At the Scent of Water.

 

Baptism Sermon Benjamin Enoch Parker Job 38, Heb. 5  October  18, 2009 Kingston Presbyterian Church, Greensburg, IN 

God gives Job a tour of the known universe. Our universe has vastly expanded. We can click on a computer and see pictures whose light has taken almost the entire history of the universe to reach us. We have seen into the structure of our heredity. In the immensity of this cosmos, God is looking at us, in deep focus, because Benjamin Enoch Parker is joined to the church of Jesus Christ. Lately, I picked up up a new book for the 40th anniversary of the lunar landing, Rocket Men. One of the striking thing is that taciturn engineers turned into poets when they looked at the earth from the lunar perspective. One said (274) that it looked like a Christmas tree ornament, so fragile and colorful in a black background. God see the globe as a whole, but God sees us as individual as well; so we are never merely statistics in a pattern, but always a unique creation. Out of the entire universe, God is paying special attention to the sacrament of baptism in Kingston Presbyterian Church.

 

Both of this boy's name are Old Testament names. Benjamin is a powerful name, the son of the right hand, the side of right and might. Benjamin would be the name of a tribe of Israel from whom sprang its first king, Saul. The name Enoch is more complicated. One instance of the name is the father of the ancient Methuselah who walked with God and was taken up by God. It has the sense of someone devoted or dedicated but it could also be a play on words as an enlightened one, a teacher perhaps.This is more than a dedication. Baptism brings him from the water into a new life, even at his young age. All of his life, he can face the east, the rising son that marks that God's mercies are new every morning. Maybe he will live into the 22nd Century and continue to live in the presence of God in heaven.

 

As Hebrews says, we need instruction in the faith to match our stage of development. just as Benjamin can handle milk right away, we can provide him spiritual sustenance in a way he can handle. As he grows, as he can handle sterner stuff, so too will his faith have a chance to mature and grow. Jesus can deal gently with us, even when we are the ignorant and the wayward. Baptism will not make him perfect, but it opens a door for him to find reconciliation time and time again. Baptism lasts a lifetime. Its beacon led his folks from Ohio to the place of Lola's baptism and their wedding. Its beacon can light the way of his life, and ours. It shines a light on this. God chooses. elects, selects us to be adopted into a new family, the household of God's very own. Benjamin did not choose to be born, to be named, to be a citizen of the United States. these are givens in his young life. God has reached out to grasp his little fingers, and as you know, a baby can hold on tight. As he grows, we know that he lives in the light of baptism, in a life claimed by God's path as shown in Jesus, the light of the world.

 

I always imagine that heaven takes a breath today. I imagine that that great cloud of witnesses, that gathering of the tribes, strains forward to look at the baptism of Benjamin this morning, ancestors near and far great grandparents and those distant in time beaming proud smiles as another citizen of the kingdom of heaven is added to the divine roll call. He is part of the communion of saints, as he is brother to all of this creation of God.

Sermon Sprinhill Job 38, heb. 5 October 18th, 2009
Job and his friends go back and forth for over thirty chapters. Finally God answers Job. It is in the form of a challenge. God is acting as a hostile witness. God may be on defense, but God is not going to let Job set the terms for the debate. God does not answer Job directly, but God does approach Job's complaints obliquely.

 

God takes Job on a long tour of creation. I think that this has the outcome of showing Job that he is not the center of the universe. God essentially challenges Job to make a better world than God created. It moves him past the "oceanic ego" of the suffering victim. It has the intent of moving Job out of depression by giving him a tour beyond his own suffering. Think of how we say that taking a trip does one good. We speak of not being able to see the forest for the trees. God wants Job to expand his horizon from his intense suffering to the bigger picture. If you will, it is a God's eye view of the world. The world is a living place of change. God gives creation the room to grow and change. Sometimes that change does harm some of the pieces of a puzzle. Can we seriously expect God to interrupt the flow of planets and suns to be at our beck and call, to subvert the careful balance of so many forces to prevent us from coming to harm?

 

I picked up a new book on the Apollo 11 flight, Rocket Men, as we marked its 40th anniversary in the summer.  It emphasizes the intense planning in creation, along with its immensity and complexity. Apollo 11 had some near misses, but it also had the astronauts marvelling at the sight of the earth from space. I sometimes think that the environmental movement gained steam when we saw the picture of earth rising from the moon view. In the midst of all that black emptiness is a jewel of a place for us. On a later flight (274) Bill Anders said "It reminded me of a Christmas tree ornament. Stu Roosa said, "it's the abject smallness of the earth that gets you, or "all I know, it's down there on that little thing, and it's so insignificant in the great big vastness of space." 

 

If this is such a terrible world, then why joy and happiness? God does note that the world is complex. It has wild animals and tame ones. It has storms and calm. It has suffering and the sheer, exultant joy of nature. The shift in perspective will allow Job to count his blessings and his pain. God is not commanding him to grin and bear it. God is not telling him to not complain. God's perspective will allow Job to count his blessings along with his pain. It is just as unrealistic to look at the world with grief-tinged glasses as rose-colored glasses.

 

Our section concludes with a discussion of something we still do not control, the weather. God makes an argument about human incapacity to manage creation. We do not control as much as we would like. We are often unable to control ourselves.In one sense, Job could feel very small and insignificant at this point. On the other hand, wait. God has responded to him in the midst of this buzzing hive of universal activity. For Christians, out of all of the worlds yet unknown to us, we know that God  worked through one of us, Jesus Christ, to bring a message of healing and hope. God so loved the world. this world, that Jesus was born and raised into it. Through that life, you know, you know that God knows you, not something about you. God knows you. God follows your life, in the midst of a universe, God knows you.

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Job 23:1-10, heb. 4:12-16 Sermon October 11 2009

At this point Job's friends have gotten nervous about job complaining that it is not fair that he suffers so. They have defended God by telling him that he must have done something terribly wrong. he insists on his innocence, but he is falling into deep despair. The trial image  keeps a suicidal Job alive is his desire for a trial. He wants to face his accuser. he wants habeus corpus, a face to face encounter. God is ineffable and elusive. How do you serve a legal notice to God? God sees us , but we don't see God. Sometimes prayer seems as if we are talking to the wall. We feel nearsighted in our prayer, unable to focus  through the separating distance. Seeing is different for the hunter and the hunted? In its way, liturgy is a form of trial. Is Ps. 139 being parodied? Is this an accusing eye, a loving eye, a searching eye? Who wants a punishing God to be close? We do want the helping God to be close to our needs and condition.When we lose someone, we have unconscious searching behavior. We think we see that person in someone else.

 

As we said, Hebrews is written to give encouragement to people who are tired of trying so hard to be good. Now they hear that someone is on their side. Hebrews imagines a sympathetic high priest, or a judge who is sympathetic more than objective, or critical and accusing. This high priest sees inside of us.He can slice through our defenses, the layers upon layers of protections and find our core self. This high priest knows intimately what we go through. This high priest knows what we do not or cannot face about ourselves. I would like to imagine that the prayers of Jesus on our behalf are ever bit as potent as Job's challenge. This passage tells us to be bold in our prayer, as bold as Job in his desire for a divine trial.

 

Is Job's complaint bitter or defiant? In the end, it doesn't matter. God supports Job in his fervent desperate prayers for justice. In other words, the relationship between us and God is so strong that our prayers can be full-throated pleas for help, frustrated arguments, as well as songs of praise and adoration. In relationship with us, God is open to our full lives, in ups and downs, in their pleas for making sense of things when they are unravelling.

 

After seeing Bill Smith before his surgery, I went to CTS. I couldn't resist going to the bookstore, and I picked up a new book on  Job by Gerald Janzen who taught there. He had written, 20 years ago, one of the best, if not the best, commentary on the book of Job. The nice lady at the counter said that he had been fighting prostate cancer but was doing well.Then, the new Dan Fogelberg CD came in the mail. It was composed when he was fighting the cancer that took his life. People suffer as did Job for no clear discernible reason. It is part of our common human experience. Hospital doors do not shut out God.  Nursing home locks do not exclude God. God has the distance to see us clearly, and is close enough to know our inmost thoughts.If god didn't keep some distance, we would be engulfed, overwhelmed. At the same time, God is as near as the next breathed, or shouted, prayer.We are never far enough away from God so that God is not much more ready to hear us pray than we are to pray. Whenever we pray, we are heard by someone sympathetic to our plight and our cause, a reliable listening ear.

Job 23:1-9

1) It may well be that Job is contemplating suicide. One thing is keeping him alive,k the thought of having a trial where god is on the defensive.

2) By the way, with the passing of william Safire, ntoe that he wrote a book on Job as dissident.
3) Job has just been told that he must have done something wicked to deserve all this pain, but he persists in his integrity.

4) Not submission for Job but a dispute contest, a rib, in hebrew.Job wants vindication.He is definat (meri) I don't know if that is close to the bitterness of mar, as in naomi, a female Job, wanting to be called marah, bitterness.Lament is insufficient.Job needs a contest to show justice. this is protest within a structure.

5) Surely God will give him a just verdict (v. 7) See Wiesel's The Trial

6) We worship an elsuive God, however. All religious people fluctuate between the revealed, accessible god, and the distant, mysterious, elusive God

7) So, if he can't find god, God certainly finds and knows him. the trial undercuts the hunter and prey aspect of God's sight into one of vision.

8) Job chooses a motif, of metal being tested, that is picked up in the NT struggle with suffering.

9) I don;'t recall if I mentioned last week that my favorite Job book is by Janzen of CTS in the Interpretation series. In Theology Today or Princeton Sem. bulletin, he goes over some of the arguments again.

Sermon Job 2:1-10 and Heb. 2:1-10 October 4, 2009

 

No theological issue captures me as much as the issue of God and human suffering. Job is the most sustained piece in the Bible on this topic. Our prose beginning is a way of framing the issue, of getting us started, but I certainly don't take it to be a transcript of a heavenly conversation. I do not recognize this arbitrary God as the God we see in Jesus Christ. In the same way, one can hardly see the cruel response of Mrs. Job as a loving response. Still, I will give some leeway to her for she has lot property and children the same as her husband. She cannot face another problem; the straw has broken the camel's back, and she lashes out in anger at her ill husband. As Hebrews quotes Ps. 8, we are a little lower than the angels, so I cannot imagine God treating us as mere playthings for a wager. It is set up to see that Job cannot possibly deserve suffering. How will he respond to unjust, arbitrary suffering? It is a way of setting up Rabbi Kushner's great question about when bad things happen to good people. 

 

Jesus is comparable to Job in suffering, but at least Jesus grasps the meaning and import of his suffering. Job is left out in the cold. If anything should tells us that no one is immune from suffering, Job and Jesus show us that. To cry out why and find only silence or poor answers is hard to bear.

 

In Communion we take in, receive,the life, death,and resurrection of Jesus. It is more than a mere recitation of the first Lord's Supper. In Hebrew to remember, zakar, has the sense of the past coming alive in the present.That life included suffering. We are in communion in joy, but also in sorrow; this we share with all of our fellow human beings, just as in the marriage vows. In baptism, Paul says that we carry the death and resurrection within us. In Communion we carry the life of Jesus within. Communion joins us to the emblem of the cross so that it  lives within. Jesus is in communion with us in sorrow and joy, want and plenty, sickness and health. Sometimes i wonder that our hymns sound too mournful for communion. this Sunday, they have the right feel, as I am wondering if the lament, that biblical cry of pain and protest is a Communion song as well. Brothers and sisters in Christ gather around the family table this morning. Our entire lives are joined to the life of Christ in this sacrament.

 

so communion gives us one aid in suffering: we are not alone. Second, the examples of Job and Jesus tell us that god is not about the business of hurling divine thunderbolts at us to gt our moral attention. We can and do learn through suffering, but the lesson is not that we are unworthy wretches who deserve punishments for sins, real or imagined. Third, we are not above other people, but as Jesus said the rain falls on the just and unjust alike. Suffering is part of the human condition. finally, may we act on the sources of lament after communion. We who are fed to the brim in this spiritual feast should shake our fist at the thought of hungry in this country. We who receive the sacrament of healing should sit dumbfounded at a system that consigns one in five of our citizens to poor health care and more if we include dental and mental health services. Suffering is not the last word in our faith, healing and restoration are. Know that as you receive bread and cup, we get a taste of the heaven where suffering at long last is ended.

Esther 7 September 27, 2009 Sermon

Most days, we go through the motions. We drive to work and barely notice that we've somehow gotten ourselves home. Sometimes, we enter a confluence of forces that demand a decision. We enter into a moment of truth. Timing is important in comedy, but in life. We do encounter windows of opportunity. Sometimes it is wise to strike when the iron is hot. At other times, a decision is forced upon us.

 

Esther used her looks and personality to become queen in a beauty contest to become queen of the Persian empire. Esther was doing well, but what of her people? A royal advisor with power, Haman, has started a plot, signed by the oblivious king, to exterminate the Jews in the far-flung Persian empire. No one knew that Esther was Jewish; she could avoid the coming slaughter of her people, insulated in the palace. Her revelation could mean her death. She has to figure how to influence the king with little formal power.

 

God seems to rarely act with parting of the seas. but God seems to prefer to work through human decisions and human actions. Here, god is working with a woman who is living out the Cinderella story. God working behind the scenes; God's hand is often hidden. Is it a result of the prayer and fasting? James is convinced of the power of prayer.Notice that he emphasizes it in all conditions, good or bad. those prayers can affect our internal struggles and even the weather. I don't imagine Esther is asking for fasting as a dietary regimen; she is asking for what accompanies fasting, prayer. She needs the assurance that others are praying for her and with her. At this point, i always think of the pastor who did nmy installation sermon in LaGrange. Stricken with cancer more than twice, he said that on rough days his sense was that the only thing that got him out of bed were the prayers of people for him.

 

Esther could be doing well all her life, but her people were in deep trouble.she had a choice. She could live in the safety of the palace, in the lap of luxury all her life. To try to save her people, she could risk it all. She had to discover courage. Esther needed a plan. She needed insight into her fickle husband and be able to predict his reactions. Just becuase Mordecai told her that help could come from another quarter, it dows not absove her of her particular resposnibility. Her plan did work, and we cannot know if it was the hand of god or the craftiness of her plan. The plan could easily have failed, but she did her best within the vast set of limiations and difficulties before her.

 

The name of God does nto appear in the story of Esther.Some think that is why it does nto appear int eh Dead Sea Scrolls.  The name of God is not always on our lips either. Still, in both cases, God is there: alet, active, alive to what we do. In ourt complex world, God works with and against human decisions to keep working for a better world. The story of Esther, and our own lives, is one where God doesn't seem to follow a rigid script but is more improvising and adapting to the circumstances on the ground. Like Esther, we can use what resources we have available to make this world jsut a little easier, just a little better. As we practice those good seemingly small deeds, the time may come when we are called to an important decision that requres discernment, faith, and courage. What we do matters as they flow into God's constant working of a plan to make this worth fit for human habitiation, and fit for the divine presence.