"The Gospel for Losers" (Job 40-41)

 

Watch it here - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zo4GZ-LGCPU&t=1131s

Why?  I found myself asking that question, the "why question," Tuesday as I watched the reporting from polling locations across America.  Why can’t this election be ended simply, quickly, and peacefully?  Why can’t we be united?  Can’t this be easy? 

Rarely is the race for the presidency in America this close.  Leading up to election day there was talk of voter suppression, threats of lawsuits, and great anxiety.  If you’re one of the smart ones, you didn’t even watch.  But for the millions of us who did watch, this election had all we needed to stay miserable.

Supporters of President Trump went to bed feeling good Tuesday night, while those backing his challenger, Joe Biden, may have had trouble sleeping.  On Wednesday, more votes were counted, and it became apparent, that this race had not been decided.  The red and blue maps on the news websites tilted, ever so slightly, toward Biden. The roles of hopefully optimistic or dread were reversed.

I suppose in countries run by dictators where democracy is a myth, they might chuckle at how fragile we Americans are.  For us, 2020 has been a topsy-turvy year. Our election did enough to push both sides to their wits’ end. Why is it like this? 

Why!  Usually, there’s no satisfactory answer to “why.”  So, in the face of the unanswerable, the book of Job is the place to go.  Job was the subject of a wager we cannot fathom.  God dared the Satan, the Accuser, to consider Job’s righteousness.  Satan – a title, not a name – challenged God right back.  Job’s is only good because you have blessed him.  So, God allows Satan to destroy all of Job’s wealth, kill all 10 of Job’s children, and inflict hideous, oozing sores all over Job’s body.  All of it is done so that God can have the satisfaction of seeing Job remain righteous, obedient, and faithful.

At that point, Satan, the Accuser, steps out of the scene, never to return.  When Job and his three friends begin discussing this troubling turn in the course of his life, the issue is no longer God’s pride in Job’s righteousness.  Job and the friends don’t know of the conversations between God and Satan.  As chapter 3 begins, the focus shifts to the debate around unjust suffering.  Why would this happen? 

            Job wanted the pain to end, to go away.  If that could not happen, then he wanted justification.  Convinced that the only reason he agonized as he did was that God caused it or allowed it to happen, Job wanted God to answer for this. 

            Suffering, something each of us have endured, or at some point will endure, stands as the problem.  We want to remove it, but we can’t.  So, we want justice or at least answers.  Job’s friends, using a variety of arguments but always ending at the same spot, claimed without any evidence that his suffering was tied to sins he had committed.  It had to be his fault.  They were his true friends and knew him to be a righteous man who diligently worshiped God and atoned for his sins.  They knew Job, but their theology of retribution insisted that suffering is a punishment from God.  They didn’t have a category for unjust suffering. 

            Job knew he was innocent of the kinds of sins theology typically listed as provocations for such pain.  He knew his claims of innocence were outside the realm of conventional thinking.  Yet he doggedly insisted he was right.  He was innocent.  He wanted answers.  He demanded that God give those answers. 

            Did God give answers?  Do you remember the story of Job, a book unlike anything other in the Bible, a story set outside of normal time?  We don’t know when Job was written.  No mention is made of Israel.  Yet as far removed as this story is, it speaks.  The story of Job is our story.  Terrible things happen and only God can explain it.  In Job, does He do that?  Does God give Job what’s he’s asked for?

            In chapters 3-31, God is utterly silent as Job and his three friends debate his guilt, theology, ethics, and justice.  In chapters 32-37, a younger man, Elihu upbraids Job’s three friends for their failure to convince Job of his sin.  Then, for six chapters, he tries to convince Job using similar arguments.  Through it all, the arguments, Elihu’s monologues, and the waiting, God is silent.

            Finally in chapter 38, the heavens rumble.  The three friends and Elihu exit stage right.  Job, with his open sores oozing puss, sits silent and still to face God alone, as God speaks out of the whirlwind.  The question hangs in the air.  Will God give the Job the answers he has defiantly demanded? Will God tell Job why this has happened?

            No!   God begins, “Who is this that darkens counsel by words without knowledge?  Gird up your loins like a man, I will question you, and you shall declare to me” (38:2-3).  If Job wants to put God on trial, fine!  Job will be the witness who has to testify under God’ interrogation.  Except it doesn’t go like that.  Instead,  God takes Job on a tour through the cosmos and the animal kingdom.

            Job thinks he has asked fundamental questions about the justice of the universe.  God shows Job, not only does he, Job, not know what he’s talking about.  He has no idea what is happening behind the scenes.  God has created this world with intimate, loving care.  We are caught up in the outcome of this past Tuesday’s election, and rightfully so.  Job was obsessed with his pain, loss, and suffering, and even more rightfully so.  God does not diminish our concerns or deep seeded anxieties.  God did not dismiss Job’s pain or longing for resolution.  God did show Job and us that there’s more going on than we know, and he – God – truly does have the world in His hands.

            In chapters 40 and 41, God gives extended discourses on the largest land animal, Behemoth, and the most-feared sea animal, Leviathan.  Both are of a mystical quality.  It is fruitless to try to identify an actual animal with these mythological creatures. Some commentators believe Behemoth indicated an elephant or hippopotamus.  The Hebrew word means “powerful creature.” Power and might. 

Some supporters of Donald Trump like him because he projects power.  He doesn’t do it with flowery eloquence.  He’s brash, abrupt, and loud.  His admirers say he “tells it like it is.”  They raucously shout their support at his rallies and feel that some of that power rubs off on them.  God’s depiction of Behemoth shows that we don’t even know what power is.

God tells Job, “I made [this great animal] just as I made you” (40:15).  We fear the Behemoth as we should, but God can approaches the mighty animal.  This beast of legend is one of God’s great acts of creation (40:19).  We are, not surprisingly, captivated by our times, but God is above time, outside of time, the maker of time, and beyond time – our times, times past, the future.  We can take comfort in seeing that God is the sustainer.  God has the world in his hands.  In the short term, we feel uncertainty, but God does not share our apprehensions.  God has not lost control.  The God who toys with his great creation – behemoth – watches over us knowing everything we are going through.  God is with us. 

If Behemoth calls to mind the terrors of great land animals, Leviathan evokes shudders in the deepest parts of one’s soul.  The ancients feared the oceans, only able to imagine their depths and the wonders and horrors within those depths.  Leviathan is the great sea-serpent lurking, waiting to swallow up men, ships, swimmers, everything.  One writer I read even believes Leviathan is Satan, the great evil mentioned in Revelation 12:9, God’s ancient foe.  Indeed, the description in Job 41:12-24 sounds like a dragon from ancient lore even including the scales and the breathing of fire (41:19-21).  Verse 25: “When [Leviathan] raises itself up the gods are afraid.”

Yes, the gods are afraid, but not the one true God.  With the one true God, Leviathan makes a covenant, to be God’s servant forever (41:4).  Leviathan the mighty, terror to all human beings, is happy to be God’s pet (v.5).  I appreciate the commentator linking Leviathan to the Satan.  It’s an intriguing interpretation, but one I reject.   Leviathan, like Behemoth, exists to humble human beings with its power, ferocity, and mystique.  Yet before God, the Leviathan bows because the animal remembers what we have forgotten.  God is Lord supreme, ruler of all.

Reciting this divine resume to Job, God reminds Job of who he – God is; He also reminds Job of who Job is.  Hopefully upon entering this story, we remember who we are.  The world is God’s.  We are small.  We get anxious, mystified, and disappointed.  We lose.  This week, at different points, we quite possibly all felt like losers!  That’s okay!  The Gospel is for losers. 

God didn’t have to listen to all Job’s complaints or give Job this grand display out of the whirlwind, but God did, out of love for Job.  God loves us just as much.  God knows the fears we carry. 

As we consider our lives and take stock of our feelings, especially as we come out of this post-election haze, consider this.  Consider setting your sights on God.  Look to the stars and see God’s handiwork.  Looks to the animals and the natural word, and see what a caring artist God is.  Look and know that the world has not gotten away from God.  He loves us.  He loves you as an individual.  He is here.  Does he tell us why things are the way they are?  Sometimes.  Sometimes he does he not.  Sometimes, he just says, “I am here.”  And that is enough.

AMEN

 

"A Warning" (Jeremiah 1:9-10; 9:1-16)

 

"A Warning" (Jeremiah 1:9-10; 9:1-16)

Sunday, November 1, 2020

(The Sunday before election day in the race between President Donald Trump and challenger Joe Biden)

Watch - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UwXuHk9JGbs

 

            How does God feel about politics in America?  Sit with that question.  What is God thinking?  Our North Carolina senate race has been rocked by a sex scandal.  Our governor’s race is a referendum on how we’ve handled the Coronavirus.  And what can we say about the presidential race, so filled with strife, anger, and hatred?

            I heard a word from God.  At least, that’s how it felt.  Not some secret message.  What I heard is there for anyone willing to open the Bible, read Jeremiah, and listen and honestly face what God has put before us. 

            Jeremiah prophesied in the 6^th century BC in Jerusalem, the capital of Judah.  God’s people faced annihilation.   A century and a half earlier, the mighty Assyrian empire had all but destroyed the northern kingdom, Israel.  Broadscale intermarrying with people the Syrians relocated diluted the genealogical ties to the original 10 northern tribes of Abraham’s descendants. 

            By Jeremiah’s day, Judah remained as the nation of God’s chosen people.  Babylon had taken Assyria’s place as the world super power and was about to overrun Judah.  Jeremiah prophesied that the end was inevitable.  His words ring ominously in our time, if we will listen.  I don’t think some other nation will overrun the United States as Babylon did to Judah, nor do I think the United States is a chosen nation as Judah was.  America is more like Babylon, a super power imposing its will on everyone else.  But Jeremiah’s words still speak because God is as angry at our self-centered arrogance.  God allows sin to run its course and sin always ends up hurting humankind.  

            Bible scholar Walter Brueggemann writes, “I believe the great pastoral reality for the church in the United States is that we are watching the termination of the world we have loved too long and lost – a world of Western, white, male, heterosexual domination, privilege, and certitude.”[i]  Of course there’s nothing particularly good or bad about being white, male, heterosexual or western, but there’s something unjust about a world where all those qualifiers gives a person a slew of unfair advantages.  People of color, women, and others are tired of bowing before white male dominance. 

Brueggemann’s prescription for pastoral response to the changes in America, came in his book about Jeremiah, written in 2006.  Since he wrote that, we’ve had a white woman as a vice presidential candidate, a black man elected president, a white woman was one of the presidential candidates four years ago, and on Tuesday, if you haven’t voted already, one of your vice-presidential choices is a woman who is both African American and Asian American. 

Termination of a world is the way Brueggeman described the reality pastors must address.  Sinking into Jeremiah’s message, we see the issue is much deeper than the race or gender of our leaders.  We are a materialistic society who relegates God to the margins.  We are hedonistic society whose god, as Paul writes in Philippians is our bellies (our craven appetites for excess, sex, and pleasures we often have not earned).  We are an impatient people who want what we want, and we want it now.  We see God as a possession here to serve us, not as the Lord we must obey.  When God allows the consequences that result from our collective sin, pain and darkness far worse than that wrought by the Coronavirus pandemic follow. 

Termination of a world is how Brueggemann put it.  God’s warning in Jeremiah 9 – I will make Jerusalem a heap of ruins, a lair of jackals … a  desolation – is God’s warning to American Christians regardless of who wins on Tuesday.  God’s disgust at how easily we disregard His holiness eclipses the noise of Trump v. Biden. 

Thus paying attention to the real issue, we listen to Jeremiah 1:9-10.  “Now I have put my words in your mouth,” God tells his prophet.  “See, today I appoint you over nations … to pluck up and to pull down, to destroy and to overthrow, to build and to plant.  Pluck up.  Tear down.  Build.  Plant. 

You’ll hear pastors and religious leaders desperately implore us to pray for this election, the most important one of our lifetimes.  Such rhetoric is nothing more than a cheap fear tactic used to cajole us into praying for victory for the candidate that religious leader supports.  In every election, someone, in a voice dripping with desperation, declares it the most important of our lives. Jeremiah and the other prophets of God did not tie their hope to political leaders. 

The prophets spoke hope, but “their hope was not grounded in their sense that things are going to get better, nor in the notion that things were evolving in a desired direction.  Therefore, they were not … undone with things got worse.”[ii]  We will see things get worse.  Count on it.  However, we need not get rattled.  Our hope is the same as that of the prophets – in the new world given as a gift from God.  We have a clearer picture of it than Jeremiah did because we know God’s promises are fulfilled in Jesus, regardless of who lives in the White House.

Jeremiah’s charge from God: pluck up!  He will be the play-by-play commentator calling the action as the structures, conventions, and institutions of our time are uprooted. 

This is God’s warning.  In Jeremiah 9 God spoke to his chosen people, the ancient descendants of Jacob, those who lived under kings in the line of David.  With the fall of Jerusalem, the destruction of the temple, and the exile, it appeared the old covenants with Abraham and with David were ended.  God addresses this in Jeremiah 9:12. “’Why is the land ruined and laid waste like a wilderness, so that no one passes through?’  And the Lord says, ‘Because they have forsaken my law that I set before them, and have not obeyed my voice, or walked in accordance with it.’”  God will uproot the ground our society stands on for we have forsaken His ways. 

Pluck up.  Tear down.  Understand that God does not relish the state of things.  Listen in Jeremiah 9:1 as God speaks his sadness. “O that my head were a spring of water, and my eyes a fountain of tears, so that I might weep day and night for the slain of my poor people!”  Can God love us, and at the same time allow us to fall into destruction?  Have you ever loved an addict, done all you could to help them, and then watched as their life descended into hell anyway, in spite of your love and your attempts to help them find a new course? 

God’s warning is full of God’s deep sadness when He sees us suffer what comes of the sins we commit.  It has to mean something when we say ‘God is love.’ It has to mean something to people in pain, even when they’ve brought that suffering on themselves.  “If the love of God is more than an empty metaphor, then the suffering of God must also be regarded as real.”[iii]

Pluck up.  Tear down.  Societal destruction.  God’s sorrow at our suffering – suffering we’ve brought on ourselves. What else did God tell Jeremiah?

Build. God tells Jeremiah.  Prepare.  Plan.  Remember, Jeremiah was quite certain.  Destruction and exile are coming.  Your life will never be the same.  But, through prayer and study, learning to see with God’s eyes, we get ready for what’s coming, whatever it may be.  Whatever happens next – extended pandemic, backlash from the election results, or some new horror we haven’t anticipated, none it compares with the God who loves us.  That’s why, with confidence, we can say, we meet God even in dark days.  When every warning comes true, we know God is in it, God loves, and is with us.

In chapter 29, Jeremiah tells the exiles, “Seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you … and pray to the Lord on its. Behalf” (29:7).  After Tuesday, we will have the same calling that we had before President Trump was elected.  Again, from Philippians 3:20, “our citizenship is in heaven.”  We vote and try to be good neighbors, but this is all temporary.  We seek the welfare of this city because of the love God showed us as Jesus hung on the cross, dying for our sins.  We build lives here, we glorify God, and we invite our neighbors to put their faith in Him.

The warning ends as all God’s warnings do; with the hope of a new day.  Pluck up.  Tear down. Build.  And finally, plant.  Our culture is not moving farther away from God, or sinning more egregiously.  We are just more open about our rejection of the Lord than ever before.  As many people rejected God in prudish Puritan New England as today, but today, we tattoo our idolatry on our arms. 

As Jesus declared himself sent to the lost (Mk 2:17), so too are we.  Having accepted God’s assessment of the world, having built up lives of faith within the fallen world, we then go to the world as God’s messengers, witnesses, telling the truth.  God is love, Jesus is Lord, and if people turn to him, they will receive forgiveness of sins and new life in his name. 

If you haven’t already, vote.  Handle your relationships with friends and neighbors whose vote is different from yours with grace, and kindness, humility.  We’re followers of Jesus.  Our calling is about helping people become followers of the king.  No matter who the president is, we answer that call.  We love others, follow Jesus, and share the hope of the gospel.

AMEN

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[i] Brueggemann, W. (2006), Like Fire in the Bones: Listening for the Prophetic Word in Jeremiah, Fortress Press (Minneapolis), p.27.

[ii] Brueggemann, p.182.

[iii] Craigie, Kelly, and Drinkard (1991), Word Bible Commentary: Jeremiah 1-25, Word Books (Dallas), p.145.