Preacher: The Rev Dr. Valori Mulvey Sherer, Rector
(Note: these are sermon notes again this week, i.e. the full text is not written out)
If I were to begin this sermon by saying, “Once upon a time…” how would you understand what comes next? (A: a tale, fable, story)
This is how the story of Job begins: Once upon a time, there was a righteous man named: Job (which means ‘persecuted,’ or ‘one who weeps’).
OT theologian Bruce Birch reminds us that OT stories disclose realities in different ways, creating a world in which the teaching can be offered. A modern day example of this is the Harry Potter series in which J. K. Rowling creates a whole world in which good and evil struggle.
The story of Job addresses the false belief that the righteous are rewarded by God while the unrighteous, the sinners against God are punished. It was a common belief in the ancient world and it is as alive today as it was then. I hear it in conversations all the time with fellow clergy. We hear it preached by televangelists and we call it the Prosperity Gospel.
But it isn’t gospel at all – and that’s the message of the story of Job.
The world of Job takes us back and forth between the earthly realm where Job lives to a heavenly realm where God and the heavenly beings gather watching what goes on on the earth.
In the earthly realm there is Job – the perfect human: blameless, wealthy and successful. Job had 7 sons and 3 daughters (the number 10 symbolizing completeness).
In the heavenly realm we meet “ha’ satan,” which means The Adversary. OT theologian Elizabeth Achtemeier points out, “We must be very clear… that the translation Satan does not point to the devil or a demonic figure. There is a definite article before the word in Hebrew, indicating that it is not a name but a title.” In the world of Job, The Adversary’s job was to go about the earth accusing people before God. As Achtemeier says, he is a sort of heavenly “Attorney General sent by God to call sinners to account.” (“Preaching the Hard Texts of the Old Testament,” p 96.)
The Adversary doubts Job’s faith and asks God to test him by taking away all he had, his family, his wealth, even his identity, symbolized by his “skin,” and see if Job’s faith holds up. God allows this, which trips people up. How can God allow such awful stuff to happen to a faithful person.
But remember, this is a story, not an historical account. The metaphor won’t be perfect and is stretched to teach the lesson in the story. The story of Job addresses very common issues in faith: Why do awful things happen to faithful people? Where is God? Why doesn’t God step in to save?
But this story isn’t about God, it’s about Job, the human, the icon of faithfulness to God. In the midst of his worst suffering, Job continues to believes in the goodness of God. He continues to pray to God, inviting God to show him to make it through. How does he do that?
He performs the rituals he learned to help him grieve and cope. He trusts in God’s wisdom knowing he himself can’t understand it. And he reminds those who love him, “Shall we receive the good at the hand of God, and not receive the bad?”
The rest of the story of Job shows us the long arc of salvation at the hand of our loving God. But we’ll save that for another Sunday. For this week, we’ll remember that God loves in a way humans can’t begin to understand.
We focus on what we do, whether or not we deserve love. God just loves us, and asks us to love one another as we are loved.
In the gospel story from Mark, Jesus demonstrates how to take down the boundaries to our love. This story is about divorce and children. Two seemingly different teachings, but really they aren’t.
Notice that in both, Jesus is lifting up as important and beloved someone the culture sees as unimportant and of little value. In the ancient world, a woman could not seek a divorce as she was the property of her husband. There was disagreement between religious groups about the ground upon which a man could seek a divorce. Some said for nearly any fault the husband found with his wife, others said only in cases where the wife committed adultery. The Pharisees were hoping to make Jesus choose which side he was on on this issue, thereby alienating the other group.
Jesus, however, goes a different direction. First he explains that Moses only allowed divorce because of their hardness of heart, then he blows away that hardness in an unexpected way, saying, “Whoever divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery against her.” Against HER. You can almost hear their minds blowing up…
Jesus is giving the woman has equal standing in the eyes of God in marriage. Then Mark goes immediately to the story of the children being kept from Jesus. People wanted Jesus to touch and bless their children and the disciples were stern in turning them away – dismissing them as an intrusion in Jesus’ otherwise important work. But Jesus is indignant… with the disciples. “Let the little children come to me; do not stop them; for it is to such as these that the kingdom of God belongs.”
Women. Children. The unimportant. Outsiders. It is to such as these that the kingdom of God belongs - because God loves in a way humans can’t begin to understand.
Many commentators talk about this as Jesus saying that we need to be like a child: humble, dependent, powerless and therefore ready to receive God. That’s true. Jesus refers to us often as children of God.
But this particular story isn’t about us. It’s about God and how God loves: beyond our ability to understand. Jesus makes clear that the kingdom of God includes those we are likely to exclude: those who believe differently, those who don’t believe at all, those who look like they’re being punished by God, those whom we blame for their own suffering.
In a few minutes, since this is the first Sunday of the month, we will be offering anointing with holy oil, laying on of hands, and healing prayer as part of our worship service. At some time in each of our lives we will stand before God like Job, weeping over loss, scratching and scraping at the sores on our identity.
I hope we can let go the notion that good behavior is rewarded and bad behavior is punished. That’s a human system of justice. God’s is different – and thank God for that. There is no perfect human, except the one who perfected humanity by his own death and resurrection. There is no perfect human system either, not even the church.
Thankfully, God loves us anyway – all of us, in all of our imperfection - and is with us suffering with us when we suffer, sharing our joy when we celebrate. Like Job, we must remember that we receive good and bad in the world, but God is always good, and always there with us.
Come then. You are invited to stand or kneel before God who waits faithfully, ready to feed us with holy food, to touch us with healing love, to give us an abundance of mercy. All we need to do is show up, approach God in humble prayer, and ask.
Amen.
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