19 PENTECOST, PROPER 23, YEAR B

SERMON PREACHED AT CHRIST EPISCOPAL CHURCH, NORWAY, MAINE

THE REV. ANNE STANLEY

11 OCTOBER 2009

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

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

If the readings today leave you with more questions than answers, you’re not alone. Can any of us come up with easy answers about suffering and where God is in the midst of suffering? Can we easily describe our relationship to money as it relates to our faith? Perhaps it helps to remember that the Bible is not an answer book.  We want certainty, but the Bible doesn’t always give us certainty. The religion section of bookstores, though, are lined with books that give us easy answers and safe interpretations of scripture. Attempts to help us. They might give us temporary satisfaction, but they don’t get to the rock bottom of life’s most persistent questions. Especially questions about suffering and money.

Our faith and these questions remain mysteries.

As Job discovered. Job, the faithful, blameless and successful man for whom life was really quite good there for awhile. Until God permitted God’s servant, Satan, to visit Job and inflict mind-boggling horrors on him. We heard about God’s servant, Satan, last Sunday in chapter one. Now, twenty-two chapters and great suffering later, we hear Job talking to one of his pastoral care providers. These do-gooders wouldn’t get licensed today in any program I know of. “You must have done something wrong to have brought all this on yourself,” says this so-called chaplain-friend. And Job answers back. Job is so far gone and so distraught that he is unafraid to admit his confusion and despair, even to this unhelpful  helper.

Job wants to appeal directly to God.  “I want to lay my case before God. But God is nowhere to be found, neither in front of me or behind me or on my right hand or my left. I can’t see God. I can’t hear God.  The Almighty has terrified me. If only I could vanish in darkness, and thick darkness would cover my face!”

Where is God in the midst of Job’s suffering? Where is God in the midst of our suffering?

This is not the end of the Book of Job; we’ll hear more next week. But the mystery of suffering and the silence of God when we most want a response, when we most want answers, remain with us today, and will even when the book of Job is finished.

If only we could have this mystery solved!  Is it too much, O merciful God, to give us an answer? Job stands all alone to confront the emptiness of God. What good does that do him? we might ask. Another unanswered question. One commentator describes this emptiness as an “unhinged place of confession.”  She says that this unhinged place can be a stage in our spiritual development. That’s nice. But when we are in the midst of our unhinged-ness, that is of small comfort.

The most we can do, it seems, is linger in this place. As Job did. Waiting. Listening. And as pastoral care-ers, listening is the name of the game as well. Would that Job’s “helpers” had simply listened to him. Glib answers can do more harm than good. For who are we to define the will of God?

And what about the other great mystery of life, our money? Jesus talks more about money than any other single thing. Money. Our accumulated wealth. The mark, we so often think, of our success in life. “God has blessed me with all that I have because I am good….Look what I’ve done!” There are pastors today, not Episcopal ones, I’m happy to report, who point to their fine houses and posh cars and preach to their congregations to pray correctly and say the right words and live right so that they, too, might have what the pastors have. This is called the “Gospel of Success.” The idea is that if we get Jesus on our team, we’ll be successful. “Come to Jesus and get rich.” I kid you not. The rewards are great, the cost minimal.

And what does Jesus say? Have these folks not heard Jesus’ warning about hording and accumulating wealth? Have they not heard him tell the rich young man to turn over his money, indeed everything he has, to the poor, and only then to turn and follow Jesus? What would Jesus say to us as we contemplate our own resources and our annual giving to God through the church this year?  As the little boy said to his father while the dad was figuring out the check at the restaurant, “Hey Dad, how come you give 15% to the waitress and only 10% to God?”

As Job may have thought, so often we humans figure that our security comes from our money, that having enough isn’t really enough at all. More will be better. How much is enough, anyway?  We go to great lengths to hang onto life as we want to live it. The more the better so the safer and more secure we’ll be. Our mothers give us over to life at our birth. We give ourselves over to God when we die. I think about wonderful Zeke this past week finally letting himself go, as Henri Nouwen says, giving his life over to God, who gave it to him in the first place, a gift to God. What are we willing, while we are still walking and talking, to give back to God for the work of the gospel on earth?

Our security, as Job came to find out, comes not from our money and possessions but from the trust, from the faith we place, as Christians, in Jesus, the one who has passed through the heavens, who has passed through the cross, who has suffered as we do, who was tested as we are tested, and who invites us to hold fast to him no matter what. Because what matters most, as Zeke told me two weeks ago, is Jesus.