Over the past three weeks, our Old Testament readings have been coming from the Book of Job. We’ve not read the whole book, but we have gotten the contours of the narrative. It will conclude next week and we won’t circle back again until 2024. So I could not resist this text, on this occasion.
Let me review… Job had it all: a strong faith, a beautiful partner, well-adjusted kids, financial security, good health, and lots of friends. And then the bottom fell out. He lost it all overnight. It sounds a bit like a fairy tale and maybe it is just that, taking place as it does “once upon a time in the land of Uz.” But we don’t need to go on a quest for the historical Job to find truth in this story. What is so scary is that these things can happen to people we love. They can happen to us. Bad things do indeed happen to good people every day, and Anna, as you and David will no doubt find yourselves saying more than once to Jarena over the years: life is not fair.
We have all met people who have way more than their share of troubles. What is amazing to me, and quite frankly scary to me, is just how quickly a well-ordered life can unravel. The pandemic has reminded us of this in new ways. But truth be told it can happen in any time or place and not just once-upon-a-time in the land of Uz.
In the reading we heard last weekend, Job complains to God. It’s a time-honored tradition for people of faith. Atheists don’t wrestle with theodicy, with how a good and powerful God allows bad things to happen. Bad things happen to all kinds of people: religious and spiritual-but-not-religious and agnostics and atheists alike. But it’s only the theists who need to work it out with God. So we hear Job crying out to the God whom he feels has abandoned him. He needs to find God because he wants his day in court. He wants to make his argument. He wants to make his case before the Almighty because what has happened to him…is not fair. Job is no whiner. His complaint is justified and his questions go to the heart of Biblical faith. Why is there so much pain and suffering in this world, especially of the innocent? And more poignantly and existentially: why me?
Today the story continues and God shows up like a whirlwind in the midst of thunder and lightning! Imagine that! Imagine yourself praying for a sign, praying for God to show up and it happens just like that. Only God doesn’t show up sheepishly to be cross-examined by Job. Nor does God show up with answers as to why the just suffer, or to be more specific why this bad stuff has happened to this particular good man. God shows up with God’s own set of questions. Job had one question for God: “why me?” God literally comes at Job with a whirlwind of questions:
- Who is this…?
- Where were you…?
- Who determined…?
- Who stretched…?
- Who has put…?
- Who has given…?
- Can you lift..?
- Can you provide..?
- Can you send…?
- Can you hunt…?
Another interpretive trajectory starts at the opposite end, with Job. One thing about suffering (and this is an observation based on experience, not a judgment) is that it can make us very self-centered. Our world can get smaller and smaller. Elizabeth Kubler-Ross, in her work on the stages of grief, spoke about isolation and depression as stages one who is going through loss has to navigate. That is very real, I think, and part of what has happened to Job and maybe to some gathered here today. Granted, Job’s friends are real schmucks. Nevertheless, Job’s very real pain has led to isolation and it feels as if even God has abandoned him.
So notice that God’s whirlwind speech points Job outward to the natural world. I once took a class on Job that was team-taught by a Biblical Scholar and a Professor of Pastoral Care. The latter insisted that we misunderstand and confuse pastoral care with being nice. So we think a good pastor (and by extension, God) ought to focus with Job on his loss and ask him how he is feeling about that. But in fact that kind of approach can inadvertently contribute to keeping a person stuck. This professor argued that God is like a tough but wise therapist who helps Job make a break-through to a new place. So one might hear God’s whirlwind speech as something like this:
Job: you need to go on a whale watch and consider Leviathan that I made for just for the sport of it. Or take a walk along the ridge of the Grand Canyon. Or go hike the Appalachian Trail, and camp underneath Pleides and Orion. Or go grow a garden! Or just go for a walk on a clear fall day in Northampton and consider the glorious array of amazing colors. Consider the lilies of the field, Job….take a breath. Just breathe.
Anna, you aren’t in control either. You are a rock star and a published author. But even this day is not all about you. And I can say those words because I know you know this already and agree. You are a deeply humble servant leader. I’m saying it to remind the rest of us that ministry is a team sport and that Anna isn’t called to be the messiah here; that job is taken also. But today we get an image of who the workers are and it’s not just the members of this congregation but also our bishop and his team and your clergy colleagues. We are all in this together. We are fellow servants in the vineyard and that harvest is indeed plentiful. There is plenty of work to be done. Priestly ministry is meaningless if we don’t understand the ministry of all the baptized. Read the late Verna Dozier if you don’t believe me! An occasion like this is an invitation to us all to recall the Dream of God.
And the occasion of a Celebration of Ministry is an invitation to return to shared purpose. The world desperately needs the Church to be the Church right now. Northampton desperately needs St. John’s to be a shining light and a beacon of hope. Not to be a little club or a political action committee or a place for private spiritual thoughts, but to be the Body of Christ. To be a place where the broken are healed and where questions of faith are taken seriously. To be a place where mercy and compassion and hope are at the center of our life-together. The neighborhood needs for you to be real and authentic and faithful. Those young people on that campus in the backyard need for you all to do the work God has given you to do!
Some of you know we have a program in this diocese called “Loving the Questions” which is a place for discernment of ministries, ordained and lay. I worked on the initial prototype of that program with Robin Carlo and Nancy Strong that has now come into its own under the leadership of Jenny Gregg (who preached at Anna’s diaconal ordination) and your very own Craig Hammond. We took as our inspiration those words from Rilke:
Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart
and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that
are now written in a very foreign tongue.
I wonder: what if God’s whirlwind speech with that barrage of questions is meant to move us to be people willing to love (and to live) the questions together?
And I wonder: what if we are,
right now, on the verge of some kind of “great awakening” about what it means
to be followers of Jesus in this time and place? It wouldn’t be the first time,
Northampton!
I know it’s popular to talk about a Church in decline. But I think we are a Church where God is about to do a new thing. (Have you not heard? Have you not seen?) That new thing may include some dying, but dying never gets the last word. Even at the grave we make our song.
I heard and saw and felt the Holy Spirit at work in this search process from beginning to end and I had a ringside seat. It began with this Swedenborgian pastor sitting in my office and telling me about her journey and why she felt called to this very day. (I had to Google Swedenborgian the second she left my office!)
And it began when the former rector of this parish, Cat Munz, asked me to lunch and told me she was going to retire. That very same afternoon my phone was ringing and there was someone named Nancy Harvin on the other end of the call. And then a long interim period interrupted by a pandemic. And a whole, faithful process unfolding here and it all converges today. I could not possibly see, at that point, how these two things would come together. I could not control it if I wanted to. Canons don’t get to be “god” either. The inscrutable God gets to be God and the Holy Spirit never stops.
The Living God claims and marks and seals us and calls on us to keep loving the questions and to keep living the questions toward a common purpose. That same God calls and shapes and forms disciples to be the Church in this time and place.
Anna does not come here as a rookie. If you Google “Anna Woofenden” you’ll find yourself on a website called The Garden Church, which I hope many of you already know about. And you’ll read these words:
Rooted in the Christian tradition and
Swedenborgian theology, the Garden Church provides a living experience of
encountering the Divine in community, scripture, nature, and the life of useful
service, and being the church together on multiple levels. Through worshiping,
working and learning together, feeding the hungry, and addressing the needs of
the local community, this church is living sanctuary for all who seek a place
to grow, to love and be loved, and to belong. Creating a place of spiritual
community where God’s love is made visible as people are fed in body, mind, and
spirit.
Today marks a new beginning, for sure. And we give God’s thanks. But St. John’s, you’ve been here for a while now, learning how to be Church. And Anna’s ministry is a continuing ministry in a Body of Christ that has many members. In that spirit, I offer two friendly amendments to those words about The Garden Church and then I will sit down.
And second, this is what I
pray now happens not only at the Garden Church, but here at St. John’s and
across our diocese, always with God’s help. Let this, too, be a place “where
God’s love is made visible as people are fed in body, mind, and spirit.”
Love one another. Outdo one another in service. St. John’s: love your new rector and love David and Jerena Grace too, as living members of this living body. And Anna – love these people. Love them all, even the ornery ones.
And then go out and love your neighbors. All of them. No exceptions.
