Two weeks out of the pulpit was refreshing for me!  Vacation with family always fills my soul and makes me so proud of the family Dave and I started 36 years ago!   We are still in the book of Job and the following is my sermon from 7/24...

What kind of God do you Serve?

Grace, mercy and peace be unto you from God who is Creator, Christ and Comforter.  Amen

I certainly am enjoying this six week study on Job!  I hope you are, too.  For those of you who haven’t been here for the last 4 weeks (including me – we were on vacation, too), here’s where we are to date: 

Job was an upright, pious, devout man who loved God with every inch of his being.  His life was perfect!  Perfect children, perfect flocks and herds, perfect slaves…living the good and upright life of a servant of God. 

Until…until The Accuser (NOT the devil as we understand him – but one of God’s angels whose job it was to seek out those NOT living God’s way and bring them to bear for their sins)…the Accuser got hold of him with the one caveat that Job could not be touched. 

So in a span of just a few short minutes, everything was taken from Job – children flocks, herds and slaves.  Job said, “Naked I came from my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return there; the Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord.”  He did not sin or turn away from God. 

So…The Accuser comes back to the heavenly court and this time asks that he be allowed to mess with Job himself.  God allows it…with the caveat that Job’s life had to be spared.  So…Job is covered with hideous sores from the sole of his feet to the top of his head.  He sits in an ash heap, using broken pieces of pottery to scrape his sores.  Job’s wife is fed up with his pious lifestyle and tells him to curse God and die!  Job’s reply is, “…Shall we receive the good at the hand of God, and not receive the bad?”

Then Job’s three friends show up: Eliphaz the Temanite, Bildad the Shuhite, and Zophar the Naamathite….They met together to go and console and comfort him.  They sat with him on the ground seven days and seven nights, and no one spoke a word to him, for they saw that his suffering was very great.

They talked together from Chapter 3 to Chapter 37.  Then God answers from a whirlwind in Chapter 38 from our reading for today.  (I wonder if it was similar to the whirlwind that took Elijah to heaven?!?!)

I also often wonder if we have the right ideas about God. (I am sure we don’t but God loves our effort!)   When I was studying religion in college, we were given the three “Omni’s” of God: Omnipotence, Omniscience, and Omnipresence defined as follows:

Omnipotence means all-powerful. God can do what God wants. God is not subject to physical limitations like humans are. Being omnipotent, God has power over wind, water, gravity, physics, etc. God's power is infinite, or limitless.

Omniscience means all-knowing. God is all all-knowing in the sense that God is aware of the past, present, and future. Nothing takes God by surprise. God’s knowledge is total. God knows all that there is to know and all that can be known.

Omnipresence means all-present. This term means that God is capable of being everywhere at the same time. It means God’s divine presence encompasses the whole of the universe. There is no location where God does not inhabit. God is distinct from the universe, but inhabits the entirety of it. God is everywhere at once.

Does any of this sound familiar to you? 

When you think of God like this, how do you think God’s voice sounded to Job from that whirlwind?  Strong?  Angry?  Righteous?  Annoyed?  Authoritative? 

Our all-knowing, ever-present, all-powerful God is who we serve and who Job served!!!  We, like Martin Luther said in his Catechism, “are to fear and love God” because of ALL that God is..and ALL that we are not! 

It wasn’t until I was in Grad School and we were in Gospel as Performance class,  and working on this passage from Job 38, that I came across another “Omni” of God.

One of my classmates presented God as a father instructing his son – in total love and acceptance.  It was like God, in that whirlwind, reached God’s arm out and put it around Job’s shoulders and began to speak, “²“Who is this that darkens counsel by words without knowledge? ³Gird up your loins like a man, I will question you, and you shall declare to me. ⁴“Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth? Tell me, if you have understanding.

He showed God as …omnes pia…which means all-loving.  It changed everything my reading of Job’s last chapters.  It was out of love that God spoke!  And, it is out of love the God continues to speak to us today. 

Love so amazing and so divine that this whole universe was created; that the prophets came to bring Israel back to the fold; that Jesus came to bridge the gap between God and humanity forever; that we serve and love and strive to become more and more like Jesus. 

In the light of the events that have happened these past weeks, in our nation and around the world, I pray that we cling even more to the Omnes Pia – the all-loving love of God…and convey that love everywhere we go and to everyone we encounter.  We have more than enough: fear, hate, skepticism, sarcasm, and hopelessness in our world. 

We need so much more: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, gentleness, generosity, and self-control – all gifts of the Holy Spirit readily available to everyone from our…omnes pia…our all-loving God. 

I pray that we will be bearers of this love, in our circles of life, this week.

In the name of the Father and of the + Son and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen

Job, the Man of God

Job, the Man of God

Grace, mercy and peace be unto you from God who is Creator, Christ and Comforter.  Amen

Today we begin a 6 week study of the Book of Job.  You are very blessed because you will hear not only from me, but from Pastor Carole and Aaron as we journey through this book together.   I know it’s not a very Lutheran thing to do, but if you would like to, bringing your own Bible each week, to write in the margins wouldn’t be a bad idea.  Today, we offer you a blank page in the bulletin to take notes, should you wish.

If you don’t have your Bible with you, pull out that pew Bible in front of you and let’s look at this story together.  The book of Job is on page ­­­­_______.

The story of Job has been called a folktale by people, and quite honestly, in chapters 1 & 2, there is a real degree of a folktale in it.  And, the character of Job is not solely a character known in Israel, but in many traditional folktales.  The plot is very similar, too.  Who here can tell me a story from another culture of a person being tested, who doesn’t know that they are undergoing a test?  Of course you can, if you remember in school all the Greek and Roman and Native American, and African folktales you studied. 

But, the similarities stop there.  Job is really best understood as a didactic story…which means it’s a story that is intended primarily to teach rather than to entertain.  We have another classic didactic story in the Bible that has to do with King David – and Nathan the prophet – who told the story about a rich man and a poor man’s lamb. 

Back to Job.  Didactic stories are told to help people make sense of apparent contradictions in values or beliefs within a community.  What is the contradiction here?  I lost count as to the number of times people of faith would come into my office and ask this question, “Why has ­­­_____ happened to me?  What have I done to deserve this?” 

Know the feeling?

So does Job! 

Job doesn’t live in the Promised Land.  He lives in Uz.  His name isn’t even Hebrew!  What he is…is a man who worships Yahweh, the God of the Hebrews, the Israelites. 

Job was a man who followed God – to the point of perfection!  He had the perfect number of children – 7 sons and 3 daughters.  In Hebrew numerology the numbers 3, 7, 10 and 12 represent perfection and completion.  You see the 7’s and 3’s again in the number of sheep and camels.  And then come the 5’s…in oxen and donkeys which added up, equals 10 again. 

Does Job just happen to be rich and have a large family, or does he have these things because he is a man of exemplary piety?  The narrator of our story doesn’t come out explicitly and say this…but we are led to assume that the reason Job was blessed so richly was because he was “blameless and upright, one who feared God and turned away from evil.”

Job’s sons live like kings!  It’s pretty unheard of that a son would have their own place in the Old Testament.  They each have their own homes and celebrate their birthdays with the appropriate feasts.  They are very considerate of their sisters, too, and include them in these celebrations.  These brothers and sisters get along!  This is very unlike some other Old Testament siblings – Cain and Abel, Jacob and Esau, and Absalom and Amnon.  They even let the old man in on the feast-time celebrations, so he can at the end of the feast days, offer sacrifices “just in case” one of his children has sinned…not outwardly necessarily…but “in their heart.” 

Beginning in verse 6, we have an interesting story.  Like its ancient neighbors, Israel imagined that God would hold court, taking counsel from the angels, and rendering judgment about certain matters – heavenly and earthly.  So, God calls a counsel, and the heavenly beings assemble.  And now, we get to talk about  the Satan. 

Also, I want to point out the use of the word LORD here.  You can see that this word is all capitalized.  This helps us who are reading in English to understand that this word LORD is the substitute for the most holy name of God. Yahweh, we think.  YHWH is the way it was written, and whenever that word came up in reading, any Israelite would instantly substitute “the Lord” for that name.  It was not to be spoken – except on the Day of Atonement, by the High Priest, in the Holy of Holies.  The reason we don’t know?  When the Temple was destroyed for the last time, there was no longer a need for the High Priest to know the name…and it has been lost to us…just like the musical settings for the Book of Psalms.  So, we here in the 21^st century, we make our best scholarly guesses and pray we aren’t offending God! 

It is very important to understand something here.  This is not Satan-the-devil that we know that name to represent.  To do this, is reading into the story something that is NOT there.  ‘ha satan is simply “the accuser” a heavenly being whose job it was to seek out and find people disloyal to God. 

There is ambivalence between God and the accusing angel.  This angel is subordinate to God…and NOT God’s adversary, but the adversary of sinful and corrupt human beings!  The Accuser is very smart and witty and is able to stand ground when talking to Yahweh. 

God talks about Job as “none greater in all the earth,” to The Accuser.  The Accuser shifts the focus and asks the question: which came first, the blessing or the piety?!?!   Let me have him for a while and we will see! 

And then?  All of the disasters happen!  Sheep gone…camels gone…oxen gone…donkeys gone…all but four servants - gone…and worst of all…children gone.  Job and Mrs. Job are left with virtually nothing except grief upon grief upon grief.  What does Job do? 

Then Job arose, tore his robe, shaved his head, and fell on the ground and   worshiped. ²¹He said, “Naked I came from my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return there; the LORD gave, and the LORD has taken away; blessed be the name of the LORD.” ²²In all this Job did not sin or charge God with wrong-doing.

His shaved head shows a visible sign of grief and mourning.  He has much to mourn.  And he has every right to ask that age-old question, “WHY ME?!?! What did I ever do to deserve this?” 

Several years ago, before I went to seminary, Dave and I went through a terrible time in our life.  It was devastating to Dave’s future as an engineer; and horrible for our children to live through.  Job became my best friend.  I read this book over and over struggling to hold onto my faith.  I learned in this time of intense trial that it’s okay…

·        to question – everything!

·        to be angry with God (believe me, God’s big enough to take it!)

·        to feel alone!

·        to feel that my prayers bounce off the ceiling all the while knowing that the rope that I’m clinging to is being held on the other end by God who listens to every prayer!

·        to accept the help of those who love you (probably the hardest lesson of all – I want to be the giver, not the receiver)! 

·        to realize that God is right there with me, catching every tear, and holding my broken heart in nail-pierced hands.

Rabbi Harold Kushner in his book When Bad Things Happen to Good People put it this way: The painful things that happen to us are not punishments for our misbehavior, nor are they in any way part of some grand design on God’s part. Because the tragedy is not God’s will, we need not feel hurt or betrayed by God when tragedy strikes. We can turn to [God] for help in overcoming it, precisely because we can tell ourselves that God is as outraged by it as we are.

I love serving a God who is with us…in everything! 

What will happen to Job?  Come back for the next five weeks and find out! 

In the name of the Father and of the + Son and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen