SERMON PREACHED AT St ANDREW’S, MAHENO
and St LUKE’S, OAMARU
ORDINARY SUNDAY 32 (November 10th) 2019
READINGS:
Job 19:23-27a
Psalm 17:1-9
2 Thessalonians 2:1-5, 13-17
Luke 20:27-38
I recall only too well the day I
learned to swear at God. (This is not necessarily a practice I recommend as
some sort of pious discipline, at least on record or when wearing my Educator’s
or Archdeacon’s hats. I'm keen to keep my job! Yet in a strange way I do
recommend it, and so, for those who reach for their pens to complain, I’ll
stand by my words).
I was in my early twenties, walking
across a large block, an acre or two of vacant land on my way home from
university in Palmerston North. I was hurting. At the time I was dating the
vicar’s daughter, and constant interference from fellow-parishioners who
rightly or wrongly did not think I was a suitable companion for her had placed
immeasurable strain on the relationship. We broke up, and as I walked I told
God how I felt.
It wasn’t pretty.
Okay, a bit of post-adolescent Romeo
and Juliet angst is not really the
stuff of grand spiritual or theological profundity. I was grumpy with God.
There was little point in hiding it. The God of our faith is not a god we can
hide from. “Omniscient” is the technical word. Omniscient, omnipotent … lots of
“omnis” are applied to God and it’s pretty darned clear to me that while God
may not choose to flick the “on” button on those “omnis” at any given time or
any time at all, a god without them is pretty second rate. I was angry with God
because God wasn’t doing what I wanted. I suspect I didn’t have the final word
that day, nor should I. Ever. And sometimes that hurts.
Still: Job was having a worse day than I was. He
and his so-called mates were engaged in a bit of a tussle, but Job was engaged
in far more than that. The “mates” were the sort who knew best what was good
for Job. The sort of sanctimonious mates you do not want when life is full of
nasty things, when the fan is slowly turning and the nasty things hit it, and
the only words you can find are what Paul Simon errantly called “words I never
heard in the Bible.”
Job had far more to contend with than a love-struck 21
year-old did.
Old Testament theologian Norman Habel puts it succinctly: Job
saw himself to be a “solitary mortal under siege, surrounded by the troops of
God” (Habel 1985:295). It’s too easy to read Job 19 from a position of complacent comfort, too
easy to lean back in our spiritual armchairs and hear, as another commentator
Carol Newsom puts it, “the strains of Handel’s Messiah in the background” (Newsom 1996: 477). We can of course know that our redeemer lives, but that wasn’t Job’s
experience.
Sometimes we have to acknowledge the deep pain of human existence,
the deep morass that gives New Zealand the highest rate of teen suicide and one
of the highest rates full stop of suicide in the western world. We may know that our redeemer lives, but we
also live the grungy side of hope. The
hope we find in the death and only-then resurrection of Jesus was no picnic in
the park, after all.
Job like Jacob long before dared to wrestle with God, and his
friends were unimpressed. God is not a matey, tame God, as C. S. Lewis once
reminded us. But on the other hand there’s no point in playing games with an
omni-many things God. God is not a mate, but in Christ we are enabled to be out
there, to be honest, to be transparent to God the Father of the Crucified Son.
So I learned to swear at, within
even, God. It’s a pity in some ways that the Thessalonian Christians hadn’t. Because
they were beginning to play games with God, worse, to turn God into a
plaything, “God on our side” as Bob Dylan famously put it.
The Thessalonian Christians were a
cosy bunch. Like the Corinthians and Galatians that Paul would address later in
his writings, these Christians had become complacent. Thessalonica itself was a
city and region that prided itself in its cosiness to that other Lord, Lord Augustus
Caesar. But the Christian converts were the God thing a little too far. They
had become complacent, holier than thou. God was their mate, the return of
Jesus was imminent, and they gave less than a fig about the world around them.
I am reminded of a strain of
pseudo-Christianity in the world today. These pseudo-Christians are convinced
that Trump is the chosen one of God, that the Temple will be rebuilt in
Jerusalem, that Christians don’t need to worry one iota about the environment
or any other human predicament because they soon will be rescued from mere
mortal existence, and literally to hell with the rest. This, the author of
Second Thessalonians saw clearly, was obscene.
These are strange times. Apocalyptic
even. Times often are. These may not be the last time foundations of human
experience are shaken. In the wake of World War Two Paul Tillich wrote (I have
altered his pronouns in the interests of inclusive language):
… humanity is not God; and whenever we have
claimed to be like God, we have been rebuked and brought to self-destruction
and despair. When we have rested complacently on cultural creativity or on technical
progress, on political institutions or on religious systems, we have been
thrown into disintegration and chaos; all the foundations of our personal,
natural and cultural life have been shaken …
These are strange times, and not the
first. So too were the times of the New Testament authors. Today there may well
be a “lawless one” (the word in 2 Thess. 2:3 is untranslatable), a leadership
of chaos unleashed on the world wherein lies are truth and truth is fake. Donald
Trump is not the first, and may not be the last anti-Christ to saunter God’s
earth. [In the light of responses to this comment in my sermon I was delighted to find these thoughts from a worthier source. ] There will always be thuggery and corruption in corridors of power until
the final surviving apocalyptic cockroach breathes its last.
This though is no reason for
Christ-followers to dance arrogantly on the hopes and fears of Greta Thunberg’s
Millennials, or to ignore the plight of dying species or surrender our
Christ-mission in any other way. God is not our mate, even if we stand in the
embrace of the Son who pleads our case.
We have a God of hope, who “loves us and through grace gives us eternal comfort and good
hope, who comforts our hearts and strengthens them in every good work and
word.”
Yes.
Nevertheless we are still called by God’s Spirit to be a people who
perform good works and deeds, whose good works and deeds match or better those
of the most sacrificial givers and doers of the community around us, empowered
to be so by God’s Christ-bearing Spirit.
Only
in that way can we proclaim to our world the death- and
annihilation-transcending God who turns Good Friday to Easter, who transcends
suffering and death, who reaches beyond the empty world of the Sadducees to
eternal hope.
We will not proclaim the one who many will
consider to be our rather invisible and laughable friend if we do not reveal
divine love, mercy, justice and compassion by our lives. I may well have
learned to swear at – or at least to be brutally honest in my relationship with
– God, but there is no earthly or heavenly use in my having anything to do with
God at all if I am not willing to put my hands and heart and feet and mind,
such as they are, in the service of God’s love and justice and compassion and
hope.
I
may learn to be honest with God, to worship God, to dance and pray and read and
mow church lawns and attend church meetings, all these things and more. But if I have not, as Paul hinted in a letter
to another troublesome group, if I have not the love made possible only by
again and again surrendering to God’s rather prickly Spirit, then I am no more
than a noisy stone in a tin can or nails on an old fashioned blackboard.
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