October 7, 2012
St. Augustine of Canterbury
Episcopal Church, Augusta GA
The Nineteenth Sunday after Pentecost, Proper
22 B
Psalm 26; Job 1:1; 2:1-10; Hebrews 1:1-4;
2:5-12; Mark 10:2-16.
The Righteous, we are told by the psalmist
this morning, will walk on level ground.
“I have lived, and will live, with integrity.”
That sounds pretty good for the most
part. Live the right way; do the right
things (and avoid the wrong ones) and all will be well. Presumably in the opposite case, the one who
does not live righteously, who does all the wrong things and breaks the rules
will be punished. We sort of like that
idea—it certainly undergirds our notions of justice, and many of our modern
public discussions (or battles) over a number of hot-topic issues. The deserving should be rewarded and the
undeserving passed over; the good people should get the good stuff, and the
wicked ones cast into outer darkness. We
want (or we think we want) everyone to get what they deserve.
Here’s the problem: Life doesn’t work that way. In spite of his protestations of right
behavior, nevertheless the Psalmist is asking for God’s mercy. He (or she) pleads for a favorable judgment
against foes and adversaries: “Give
judgment for ME, O Lord…redeem ME and have pity upon ME.” Something is already amiss; something has
gone terribly wrong. How is it, that
those who do the right thing often are not rewarded; or even worse (or so we
think) that those who blatantly do the wrong thing are not punished?
“It’s not FAIR!” we screech in our best
five-year-old temper-tantrum voice…internally or externally. I don’t deserve this—this sickness, this hardship,
this unemployment, this struggle. And
mostly, we are right to say so. Because
mostly it’s not about deserving. Mostly,
IT happens. IT happens to everyone. We can tell our own stories of when IT
happened to me; we can tell other stories, of people we know and love, when IT
happened to them.
This morning we begin to read the book of
Job. Whom, we are told from the
beginning, is a righteous man, who honors God and oversees the well-being of
his family and those around him; who pays all his bills on time and gives generously
to those in need; who goes to the gym every morning and works out, does his
cardio routine and eats plenty of leafy green vegetables…and yet. And yet.
In one day (the passage is omitted from the reading this morning) IT
happens: Job loses all ten of his
children in a terrible accident; he loses all of his livestock and slaves to
foreign invaders; and now he loses health and strength and bodily comfort as
well.
Thus begins the story of Job, written
centuries before the time of Jesus. The
book of Job is the closest thing we have in the Bible to a theatrical play,
with a cast of actors and dramatic speeches on all sides. The book of Job takes as its subject a
sustained inquiry into the ways of God, which do not always make sense to us
human beings. Perhaps there is a
pattern, or a plan we can’t see. Perhaps
God is intending something in all of this, which is yet beyond our
comprehension. Perhaps it’s just
random—as the bumper sticker has it, “Stuff Happens”, with no pattern or plan
at all. The fact is, we don’t know. It remains beyond our ability to know, in the
sense of possessing sufficient factual evidence to construct a plausible
scenario according to the rules of human logic.
God is beyond human logic, as Job will find out.
When Job’s friends come to comfort him, they
sit with him on the ground for seven days and seven nights, in absolute silence. No one says a word… “For they saw that his
suffering was very great.”
I have often counseled families who are in
mourning, after losing a loved one, that they are now in the ding-dong
zone. The Ding-Dong Zone is that
emotionally fragile time where friends and neighbors mean to be comforting, but
often try too hard and say things that don’t really help at all. They mean well…BUT.
For which reason, Job’s friends (in this at
least) are a good example. They sit with
him in silence. They don’t try to explain,
or excuse, or make it all better. They
do not fill the silence with chatter to relieve their own discomfort. They simply go to be with him. They are there to weep with him. And for that occasion, it is enough.
When IT happens, all explanations ring
hollow.
Only later, when there has been silence, and
weeping, and rage; when IT has been received and acknowledged and dealt with
insofar as possible, can explanation and interpretation possibly begin to
unfold. And that is what happens in this
morning’s second reading, from the Letter to the Hebrews.
It’s not really a letter at all—it’s a sermon
or teaching document, looking at the ministry of Jesus, using the work and
ministry of the high priest in the Jerusalem
temple as an interpretive key. Over and
over the writer (who was not St. Paul,
by the way) contrasts the ministry of the earthly priest in the temple with the
ministry of Jesus, understood to be the heavenly pattern and perfection of the
earthly temple ministry.
The writer of the letter to the Hebrews is
trying to make sense of what has happened:
Christ died and was buried; Christ was raised, and was seen by many
before his ascension and return to God.
Who is this Jesus after all, and how are we to understand him? The writer makes significant claims for who
Jesus is—listen again to the opening lines:
(1:3-4)
“He is the reflection of God's glory and the
exact imprint of God's very being, and he sustains all things by his powerful
word. When he had made purification for sins, he sat down at the right hand of
the Majesty on high, having become as much superior to angels as the name he
has inherited is more excellent than theirs.”
And yet…and yet. In spite of this magnificent beginning (from
the beginning, IN the beginning, was the Word…we hear the echoes of the gospel
of John, itself echoing the first chapter of Genesis), in spite of all these
amazing credentials, nevertheless… “we…[have seen] Jesus, who for a little
while was made lower than the angels, now crowned with glory and honor because
of the suffering of death, so that by the grace of God he might taste death for
everyone.”
Somehow that suffering, in his arrest and
trial and crucifixion at the hands of the Roman soldiers and as he hung on the
cross, had meaning in it, or perhaps meaning was found out later. “Christ died, and was buried; Christ rose,
and was seen.” (I Cor. 15: 3-5) The suffering, in and of itself, is only
suffering, even for Jesus; when IT happened, IT required the others, watching
and waiting, in silence, to discover that IT was more than just suffering. To see the resurrection on the third day, and
thus begin to understand what could God be up to, in THIS?
In “tasting death for everyone”, Jesus
participates fully in what it means to be human. There is nothing left out, from birth to
death, that he does not undergo as part of the human experience. And so there is no part of our human
experience that gets left out of his redeeming, saving work.
When IT happens in our lives—the deaths, the
undeserved sufferings, the stuff that makes us look up and ask WHY?—we may not
get the answer we’re looking for at all.
Because mostly we’re not looking for explanations. We’re looking for someone to be with us. Someone to sit on the ground and weep with
us. Someone to help us feel that we are
loved, and that we have not been abandoned, and that we will be able to take
the next breath, the next step. That
light and life and love will come again, even into the midst of our own loss
and grief and pain.
Our gospel this morning addresses a subject
that has caused enormous loss and grief and pain in many lives. Every person in this room has been touched by
divorce, either their own or that of someone close to them. It is a fact of the world in which we
live.
The Pharisees are looking to get Jesus into
trouble—the verse immediately prior to the section we heard read tells us that
they are back in Judea near Jerusalem. In their world, King Herod the Not-So-Great
and his courtiers made a regular practice of divorce and remarriages for
political advantage, at times between family members of blood kinship. So it may be that this passage is reflecting
a political soap opera going on in the background. Again—we don’t know.
We do know that Jesus has been preaching the
kin-dom of God from the beginning. He is
always directing hearers in a consistent direction: That God, who created all
things and called them good, desires the well-being of all the creation and
everyone in it. That the world and all
who dwell therein have one Maker, and share one source and one ultimate
goal. And that when we lose sight of
that, and start drawing lines in the sand and circles to keep one another
apart, we’ve missed the point altogether.
“What God has joined together” doesn’t just mean the bride and groom on
their wedding day; it means you and me and all of us together in this world,
along with the stars and the starfish and the sub-atomic particles. We are all part of one another, at the heart
of things. We may try to divide ourselves
from one another—and we do try. We may
imagine that we can just walk away, not look back, you go your way and I’ll go
my way—but life in God’s creation really doesn’t work like that.
One of my wisdom people, a great mentor and
priest I knew in New Jersey
(who was himself divorced years before I knew him) once made the comment that
“You can’t ‘un-marry’ someone. You
always have them with you, regardless.”
This gospel passage and others like it have
been misused over the years, creating guilt and shame, to keep people in
miserable and even violent relationships that had long since lost any quality
resembling Holy Matrimony. That is no
longer AS true as it used to be—although we could all tell stories about people
we know, for whom that twisting of the Gospel is still operative.
Although I suppose there are persons who
thoughtlessly get married and then divorced, I don’t think I know any. (Well, maybe one. But he’s got much bigger issues that have yet
to be addressed…) No one I know goes
into marriage “unadvisedly or lightly” as the Prayer Book says, and part of my
ministry as a priest is to help folks who are intending to get married to do so
with the best possible preparation available, so that they can be successful in
their marriages.
But sometimes IT happens there too. Even with the best preparation, even with the
best intentions on all sides. For
whatever reason, under whatever circumstances may be operative.
And there also, in the midst of loss and
brokenness and shame and anger and all the other attendant emotions that may
show up, we look for God’s presence. We
look for Jesus’ word to his followers on that Sunday afternoon, on the Day of
the Resurrection, locked behind closed doors in the upper room: Peace be with
you. We look for the Holy Spirit to come,
with fire for cleansing and healing, with breath for life and renewal. We look for Grace, believing always that it
is indeed holy, transforming, Amazing Grace that saves us, and restores us, and
that will lead us home to God, who created us in his image and likeness and
loves us always, even (especially) in the midst of the IT of our lives.
We don’t always get to know what God is up
to, even in our lives, much less in the lives of other people. Occasionally we get a glimpse—the tapestry
gets flipped over for a moment, and instead of random threads going every
which-a-way we see the big picture. But
mostly we’re looking at the back of the tapestry, trusting that even if we
don’t understand, even if we don’t see anything sensible in all this, that God
is still God, and that we need not be afraid. As people of faith (and even just
the tiniest little mustard seed bit of it some days; and some days we have to
go next door to borrow some because we are all out ourselves), we hold fast to
the belief that God is always present. That
Bidden or Unbidden, God will be there. And
that it will be enough.
In the name of the Father, and of the Son,
and of the Holy Spirit.
