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You are here: Home / Archives for Job

22 Pentecost 2019: A Data-Driven Theology

November 11, 2019 by Cam Miller

“I know that my redeemer lives.”
That line in Job seems pretty clear
and it forms the heart of the anthem
that begins the Episcopal burial liturgy.
Clearly the Lectionary Committee
that fastidiously pairs these readings
as if entrées with wine,
wants us focused like a laser on resurrection.

But that is not what Job is about,
and it is not what even this line from Job is about.
And even the translation of the lines before
and after “I know that my redeemer lives,”
is totally uncertain.

I am not a Hebrew or Greek scholar
and so all I can tell you is that those who are
have a lively debate
and serious disagreements
about this very passage from Job.

I don’t have a dog in that fight
so that is not where I want to spin our tires.
But here is what I think is amazing
about this section of Job.

Listen to an abbreviation of some lines
that come immediately before the part we heard today.
“(God) has put my family far from me,
and my acquaintances are wholly estranged…
my serving girls count me as a stranger…
My breath is repulsive to my wife;
I am loathsome to my own family.
Even young children despise me…
All my intimate friends abhor me
and those whom I loved have turned against me…”

THEN, Job turns around and says,
but still “I know that my Redeemer lives.”

Much of what we may have learned
about the Book of Job
is written, preached, or taught
through the filter of Christian beliefs.
That filter misreads Job
in favor of using it as proof of Christian ideas,
like resurrection.
That is not what Job is about.
What Job is doing here
is standing up to God,
and standing up to his own friends
who he accuses of siding with God
instead of performing their obligation –
which is to be HIS “Goel.”

Goel is a Hebrew word and core concept
in the ancient Hebrew religion.
It was and is a big word –
like resurrection is a big word.

Goel represented a worldview,
and at the same time,
a detailed prescription for living life.
Goel could refer to a human being or God.
A Goel, or to be a goel,
was to be a vindicator,
an avenger,
a protector of the family line,
a redeemer of lost lands or fortunes.
A goel looked after the vulnerable,
like widows and orphans
who had no natural protector or redeemer.

Every family had a goel,
someone whose task it was
to continue the family line
or avenge the blood of someone in the family
whose life or limb was taken from them.

If an individual within the family,
or the family itself,
lacked the power to redeem losses
or avenge injustice
or protect the family line,
then another family
or another person
or another God for that matter,
was recruited to be a new or additional goel.

A goel required power
and power sufficient to protect the family.
It comes from the Book of Leviticus
and is deeply rooted in the DNA of Israel.

When the prophet Isaiah comes along,
he makes the bold imaginative leap
to claim that the God of the cosmos
is Israel’s go’el – literally, “Go’el Yisrael”.

So when Christians talk about Jesus as “Redeemer”
and sing Handel’s “Messiah,” it springs from Goel.

Job is declaring then,
that he will get another god
to stand up for him as his avenger
against the god who has wronged him
because he is an innocent man.
Job is standing toe-to-toe with God
and with maximum confidence and hubris,
declaring his innocence
while prosecuting God as a wrongdoer.
Now prosecuting God
may not seem like a wise thing to do
for a human being,
but that is what Job was doing.

Nowadays we have a difficult time
allowing the text to speak for itself
because we want to harmonize it
with our preconceived notions.
How could there be more than one god
we ask from our 21stcentury perch.
How could a Biblical text
suggest more than one God?

So, we harmonize it by declaring
it means something else even though it does not.
And because early Christians
were always on the lookout for Hebrew texts
to reinforce their ideas
about redeemers and resurrection,
Job was a low hanging fruit to pick
and pretend it was about Jesus and resurrection.

But that is not what the Book of Job is about.
Rather, it is about God put on trial
by an innocent man
standing up to the god, family, and friends
who done him wrong.
It would make a great Country Western song.

Don’t worry, no spoiler alert here.
If you haven’t read it yet,
I am not going to tell you how it ends.
But I do want to hunker down
on that idea of goel, redeemer,
in a very specific and very 21stcentury kind of way.

I think the data is pretty convincing
that God is not going to save us from ourselves.
The notion that God is our goel
who will protect us from environmental disasters
provoked and enflamed by human behavior,
seems a foolish theology
based in nothing we have ever seen.

On the other hand,
the idea that God empowers us to be goel
for the planet earth and forone another –
the protectors and care-givers of our own garden –
seems much more plausible.

If we want a data-driven theology
it seems pretty clear: When we are good stewards
of the land and the resources that come from it,
and when we live in community
that takes it upon itself
to care for all its members,
and especially the most vulnerable within it,
then the garden grows pretty well
and so do we right along with it.

Conversely, the evidence is also clear
that when we simply use the earth
and do nothing but gluttonously consume it,
and when we create a steep hierarchy of privilege
with justice for those at the top
and injustice for everyone else,
then things go badly for us as a species.

It is not a big spiritual secret and there is no magic to it.

We may have a redeemer in heaven
that makes it all better in the afterlife,
but we will never really know until then.
On the other hand,
we are the redeemer
when it comes to doing what Jesus
asked us to do:
which is midwife the kingdom –
the one that is to spring forth
on earth
as it is in heaven.

We keep looking at Jesus as the redeemer
but Jesus commissioned us as goel.
Indeed, we are co-creators with God,
authorized and assigned
as stewards of the garden.

So, if we need to redeem the earth
and bring about the kingdom here –
instead of the miserable situation we have created –
then we better have each other’s backs,
and we better be “goel” for one another
in the here and now.

That brings us to what the heck we are doing here.
Whether we are a small group of people
working out of an old wine bar
in downtown Geneva,
or a small group huddled
in the holy darkness of a college chapel,
what is this thing we are doing
and why are we doing it?

It is essentially a stewardship question –
not necessarily a money question
but a question about who we are
and whosewe are,
and really,
underneath it all,
whywe are.
My theory of spiritual community is that
it nurtures and empowers us to be goel –
redeemers – in the places
and among the people
with whom we live and work and play.

Here are three ways spiritual community
nurtures and empowers redeemers.

First, it provides a thin-place for an encounter
with the holy.
Now there is not a lot to say about this part,
because God is quite mercurial
and will be who
and where
God will be,
and there is not much we can do
to force an encounter.

But we can soften ourselves
and become more open to being touched by the holy
in the places
and among the people
that foster it.
Because, truth be told,
all of us are like the haunting call of a loon at night
in that we live alone within ourselves
and deeply desire to be touched inside –
to touch and be touched
by a power greater than ourselves.
Within us is a dry thirsty voice
calling with a hope against hope
for a whispered response.

You may prove me wrong,
but I truly sense most of us come to a place like this
in search of an encounter
with a power greater than ourselves;
or a wisdom wiser than we are;
or a flame more passionate than our own;
or a hope more trustworthy than what we wish for;
or a vision so much clearer than ours.

We want it.
We need it.
We hope, often secretly, to find it
in a place like this.

So that is the first thing – an encounter.

Secondly, spiritual community
can provide another kind of connection.
I am thinking of the human connection,
touching and being touched by ‘the other.’

Just as we wander the universe
in our solitary bodies,
and we hanker for a deeper spiritual connection
with that power greater than ourselves,
we also wander about in human society
among our small,
fragmented bands of family and friends.

We often feel dislocated,
fragmented,
strangers in our own land.

Even those of us with strong, healthy families
can feel the vulnerability of the few.
Even the sweetest of small tribes
is but a molecule
in the ocean of humankind.

The painful irony of our sorrowful fragmentation
is that every single one of us
has been taught to believe
we should be self-sufficient.
We were nursed on a mother’s milk of individualism
that brainwashed us into believing
we are not quite mature enough,
not quite healthy enough,
not quite together enough
if we can’t make it on our own.

It was an awful socialization
that makes our desire for community –
for connection with people we may otherwise
have never known or cared about –
all the more confusing and complicated.
We are not supposed to need other people,
especially other people outside of our own tribe.

We were taught,
and it is likely still nagging at us,
that there is something wrong with needing it –
something not quite right.
And yet once we get a little taste
for that connection, it is really good.

Maybe we stumble into a friendship
with someone whose politics or lifestyle or background
are very different from our own.

Maybe we find ourselves in an unintended
conversation with somebody we don’t know well,
making self-disclosures we don’t normally make
to people outside our own family.

It is an encounter with a kind of power
greater than ourselves.
An encounter with community
that locates us as a small part of something bigger.

The power of community
is accumulative over time
and deepens its resonance within us
like an aged wine.

The more we get the more we want,
and the more we have of it
the more powerful its influence
and healing can be.
Community is in fact, redemptive
for the redeemers.

Finally, spiritual community is healing.
And who doesn’t need some of that?

There are all kinds of wounds.
Some deep, some shallow;
some mortal, some festering.
There are routine wounds –
the kind of dings and scrapes and dents
that are going to happen to anyone.
There are extraordinary wounds
that should never be inflicted on anyone.
There are in-between wounds
that are injuries awaiting us all
but that all of us do not receive.

Every one of us here has multiple wounds.
I dare say that every one of us here
has at least one wound that has been debilitating,
and that can be counted upon
to be debilitating again.

It might be some kind of limitation
that has been painful over time,
and that held us back.

Or maybe we have just been a round peg
placed in a square hole,
and over time the wedging and pinching
has rubbed us raw.

It could also have been a deep loss
and the grief of it
sits in the pit of our stomach like a tumor.

Whatever the wound
or more likely wounds,
we pretty much want to get rid of it.
We get tired of the pain.
We get sick of its onerous presence.
We want to be cured of it – to be free.

But what spiritual community
can help us discover
is that healing
is not the same thing as curing.

We want our wounds magically cured –
taken away as if they never happened.
But that is not very likely.
If we are lucky
and if we are open,
we may discover that a healing wound
is more like a fountain than a cut.
It somehow restores and transforms
more than it bleeds.

In redemptive community,
recovery from whatever hurt we carry
can become a source of wisdom and strength
even as it continues to be a wound.

All woundedness is like that:
offering the possibility of wisdom and strength
when we allow them to heal
instead of demanding
they just go away.

Spiritual community
can offer a safe place for healing,
and that is redemptive because it allows us
to be fully engaged in midwifing the kingdom
among the people with whom
we live and work and play.

So, when it’s working,
spiritual community
nurtures and empowers us to be a goel –
a source of redeeming presence
for the kingdom
that is to come on earth
as it is in heaven.

We can be redeemers to one another,
and to those who find their way to us,
by providing access to the holy,
an experience of deep community,
and a place of healing.

 

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Filed Under: Sermons Tagged With: Job, Redeemer, spiritual community

Proper 24B 2018: Agnostic Faith

October 21, 2018 by Cam Miller

The woman in the red dress
“…shook a fist, then opened hands in praise.”
(Last line from “Job’s Question on Nevis” by Grace Schulman)

As I finished this sermon,
closed my computer,
and watched a man and his son
walk their Golden Retriever down the sidewalk,
I realized I was about to preach a sermon
that goes against 21stcentury secular wisdom
as well as a great deal of Christian theology.

It is also a sermon that is none-too-linear,
like faith itself is not really a shape we can define.
So I will just tell you straight out the conclusion
in case I lose you while trying to get there:
Acceptance of ignorance,
the humility of smallness,
and an agnostic faith
.

What I love about that piece from Job
we heard this morning,
is that God turns Job’s questioning around on us.
It is such a beautiful prosecution
of the human mind,
and it so graphically answers
our indictments against God –
all those times we shake our fist
and demand to know “Why!”

God answers Job’s long river of questions,
and it says God answers him, “out of the whirlwind.”
God always talks to characters
in the Hebrew Scripture
from out of something wild:
a burning bush,
a smoking mountain,
a whirlwind.

“Who is this
that darkens counsel
by words without knowledge,” God asks.
What a great line.

God says the same thing to
Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologica,
and Rabbi Kushner’s, “When bad things happen to good people” –
and all the sophisticated
and unsophisticated
efforts to explain the existence of evil
and suffering
and darkness
in a world created by a loving God.
“Who is this
that darkens counsel
by words without knowledge?”

About such things we have no knowledge.
What we are asked to do is just rest
in that splendid agnosticism of faith
and truly trust God,
as God asks to be trusted.

Yes, agnosticismof faith;
the acceptance of ignorance
and the humility of smallness…
Swallow that just once:
the acceptance of ignorance
and the humility of smallness
.

In other words…there are things
we do not get to know
and making up beliefs
that fill the gaps in our knowledge
is an act of faith-less-ness
and a radical MIS-trust of God.
There are things we do not get to know!

But we are like the Zebedee boys
and host a restless child within us,
the one that never actually grows up
and who haunts our adulthood unto death.
That little kid inside
is always angling for a better place
and more knowledge
and more privilege
and more blessing
than we ever really get.

No matter how mature,
wise, and worldly
we become, there is always
that child within us
asking for more
and better and safer.

That same sad presence within us gets furious
when our smallness
and vulnerability
is revealed.
When we are confronted with uncontrollable outcomes,
and unfathomable ignorance,
plus our clear and absolute limitations,
that child within gets as angry and rageful
as any actual child with a temper tantrum.

But God is indifferent to our rage,
and God seems to be detached from our anger.
Instead, in Job and through other
sagely antiquity, God asks:
Where were you
at the beginning,
when the waters covered
the face of the earth?

Where were you when the sky was void of light,
and not a single heartbeat
could be heard
in the vast expanse
of interstellar space?
Where were you?

It is as if God says to us,
“Look, you are too small
and your perspective is too limited,
and your capacity to understand is outsized
by your desire to know.

“You can trust me or not,” God says,
“but there are some questions
you must live without the answers to,
so get on with it.”

Religion, deeply authentic religion,
the kind with a soul of depth,
is able to hold agnostic faith in its arms
and cradle it with tenderness.
Such faith is what the Hebrew Psalmists wrote –
what we call, ‘Laments.’

The ancient lament,
found in psalms like the one
Jesus quotes while hanging on the cross,
does as the woman in the red dress
when she tossed her spiked heels
and entered the ocean waves:
she shook her fist, then opened hands in praise.

It seems like a contradiction
but it is not.
It is the ultimate act of trust.

The lament that ends in praise,
is the moment of agnostic faith
when we rage against senseless suffering
or mindless evil and destruction,
THEN accept that we are in the humble position
to trust God or not.
At that moment,
at that intensely inflated moment,
we move forward
with a fierce and relentless hope
toward the world we are supposed to create, or,
we move forward with total cynicism
and resignation
that we live and then we die.

I am talking about a grown-up faith here,
not the religion of that inner child.

I am talking about a grown-up faith
that can stand to listen
to God prosecute our arrogant complaints:
“Where were you
when the earth was created
and a formless void?
Tell me, if you know so much,
how the Cosmosshouldwork.”

And so we are left on the beach
or outside a hospital room, at the grave,
or watching the madness unfold on television,
and all we can do
is shake our fist
then,
open both hands in praise.
And then…get on with it.

“Why!” we rage,
and then,
in the ultimate act of trust –
the deepest knowing there is –
we open that fist,
both of them,
in praise to a God
who loves us
and whom we are left to trust or not.

That, my friends,
is the acceptance of ignorance
and the humility of smallness
and an agnostic faith.

By agnostic faith,
I do not mean “no faith” or faithlessness.
Agnostic is actually a modern word,
first used in the late 19thcentury.
It is rooted in a Greek word, gnosisor knowing.
But it is a-gnosis,
in other words, not-knowing.

The most radical faith of all,
like the one that allowed Jesus to be arrested,
is to know
and to accept
that we do not knowthe mind of God –
but we will move forward
with relentless hope
and rock solid trust, anyway.
We do not know,
and we do not get to know,
and we refuse to make up answers
to fill the gaps in our knowledge.
Instead, we trust God and move forward.

That is a big, pull up your pants kind of faith
that puts in check the child within,
and accepts our ignorance and smallness.

So, I have just spent ten minutes
telling us what we do not know,
and encouraging us to resist pretending
we know more than we do.
Fine, so what can we know?

We have to shift our understanding of gnosis.
The definition of knowledge in our world
sounds quite a bit different than anything
we can know about God.
Knowledge today is defined as,
“facts, information, and skills acquired
by a person through experience or education;
the theoretical or practical understanding of a subject.”

Knowledge in our world is fact-based
and is defined by understanding.
The kind of faith the story of Job commends to us,
is without understanding – but it is experiential.

The gnosis of God,
knowingGod,
is an experience
and not knowledge as we now define it.
Whether it is a still small voice
silently speaking to us from out of the whirlwind
of chaos in our lives,
or a loud and ecstatic Pentecostal explosion
of religious rapture,
knowing God is experiential.
There is no one language
and no single medium
through which this gnosis is received.
It can emanate from the verdant slopping bluffs
holding the rounded bowl of a teal blue lake,
or it can be received in the cacophonous chatter
of urban noise in which the crush of humanity seems too miraculously absurd to be accidental.
The poetry of life in all its forms and mysteries
whispers and shouts the gnosis we want most.

To be held by God
for even a nanosecond,
is to be marked forever.

We may question the experience
as it fades in the memory over time,
but even the thinnest of such holy moments
will not disappear as a mark on our soul.

Once we experience God
in nature,
in the touch of a friend,
mingled with the love we most desire,
encountered in a moment of despair,
arriving when least expected,
in beauty,
in suffering,
in a burst of hope,
in a sacrament,
in transcendental majesty in a whirlwind…

Whenever,
wherever,
however, we encounter
that power so much greater than ourselves,
it is a gnosis that never completely disappears.
It is a knowledge-without-understanding
that leaves its kiss inside forever.

Acceptance of ignorance,
the humility of smallness,
and an agnostic faith 
–
which is a faith that knows without understanding.

That kind of faith is powerful,
indelible,
without understanding
yet enough to move forward with hope.

 

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Filed Under: Sermons Tagged With: Humility, Job, Trust

Proper 6B, 2018: And finally, God speaks…

June 24, 2018 by Cam Miller

This artist’s concept illustrates a supermassive black hole with millions to billions times the mass of our sun. Supermassive black holes are enormously dense objects buried at the hearts of galaxies

“This artist’s concept illustrates a supermassive black hole with millions to billions times the mass of our sun. Supermassive black holes are enormously dense objects buried at the hearts of galaxies.” NASA

You have heard this sermon before.
Maybe not this exact sermon,
but something close to it.

It is said, and you are a better judge of this than me,
that preachers have only a few core sermons.
Even the very best, most insightful preachers,
they say, have at most six or seven sermons
on top of which everything else is a repetition.
If that is true, today is one of my seven.
It may be number one even.

Blame it on Job.
That excerpt from the Book of Job
is one of the best, if not thebest, speech
written onto the lips of God
in all the thousands of pages of the Bible.
I am not shooting sparks here;
that speech in Job
is the coup de grace of divine utterances.

But before God’s big speech,
it is Job who has been making speeches.
Job earnestly explains,
and at length,
why God has done or allowed
so many bad things to happen…to HIM!

He has been explaining with eloquence
and a degree of plausibility, WHY –
when HE is such a good guy –
all the darkness and suffering of life
has found its way to him.

No one argues with the premise that Job is a good guy.
He is sweet, trusting,
loving, kind,
and loyal.
He has all the qualities of a good friend
and all the characteristics that a just and loving God
would want in a human being.

And yet…he suffers.
There is a backstory
to both the Book of Job and your story
and mine.
As good and kind
and sweet at Job is,
he does not have a clue
as to the depth of his own ignorance
or his unintended arrogance.
His ignorance
and his arrogance
are so deep a BP oil rig couldn’t plumb them.
And remember,
Job is you and me.

What Job wants most of all
is to have God declare him innocent.
Job wants God
to explain to his family and friends
how all his tragedies came to be,
and how they are God’s providence
not the result of his failure.

Just as an aside,
the minute you and I feel ourselves
pointing the finger of blame
it is time to get out the mirror.

Seriously, as soon as we feel that urge inside
to blame someone else for something –
or have ourselves declared innocent and wonderful –
we can be darn certain
that we are operating with our blinders on
and wandering around without sight.
That is just a little aside
that the story of Job has for us,
but that isn’t the main point.
Here comes the good stuff in Job.

So God has listened for thirty-some chapters
to both well-reasoned
and superstitious explanations
from Job’s family
and his friends
and from Job himself.
Finally, after demonstrating amazing patience,
God speaks.

It says that God speaks out of a whirlwind.
That’s a pretty cool image.
As if a batter that had been returning soft lobs
suddenly hits a line-drive with horrendous force,
God hits Job between the eyes.

“Who darkens counsel by words without knowledge?”

Words without knowledge…
Hold that now: Words without knowledge.

Let’s stop and think about how often
we make statements and declarations
without knowledge.
Here is just one little innocuous example
we hear all the time in everyday conversation,
and we may have said it ourselves.
“Everything happens for a reason.”

Really?
Everything happens for a reason?
That is an arrogant Job-statement
if ever there was one.
How do we know everything happens for a reason?

It is said so glibly
and with such earnestness
that Job himself could have said it.
But what do we know?
“Everything happens for a reason?”
Those are clearly words without knowledge,
said to make us feel better about our ignorance.

Anyway, after smacking Job with that opening line
God goes onto say,
“Pull up your pants, boy!
It’s my turn to question you
and your turn to answer me.”

Gulp.

In the 21stcentury
we don’t like God talking to us like that.
It seems a little too much like bullying
and we don’t like our god with a hard edge.
We like our god to be serene,
an Earth Mother,
ever-so-gentle and unconditionally kind.
I am so very glad
that the Bible was not written in the 21st century.
Instead, what we have in Job
is a cigar-smoking prosecutor.
God, with a Churchill-like posture,
chomps down on the nasty wet end of his stogy,
squints hard as he stares Job in the eyes,
and barks:

“Okay pup, you answer me this:
Where were you
when I rolled out the universe?
Huh? Where were you?
If you know so much, tell me:
Where does it all begin
and where will it all end?
Does the universe end?

When the morning stars sang
and the heavenly bodies shouted for joy,
did you hear it?

Hey Job! I’m talking to you.
Have you even heard the stars sing? Ever?
Well son, where were you then?”

It is a brilliant scene, just brilliant.
What a story.
Job is a story that creates dissonance
inside our heads.
If we allow it,
it will create dissonance
inside our lives.

And that is what biblical wisdom does:
it’s not a comfort pillow,
it is a source of dissonance that,
if we allow it to,
creates for us a new vision
or the ability to see something
that has always been in front of us
but from a startling new perspective.
For example, the story of Job was told to a people
who could not understand why God
had abandoned them.

Israel had been a people
and a religion
based upon the promise of land;
for over a thousand years
Israel was defined by the land.
God had promised they would be in covenant –
in a special relationship with God –
and that the land
was the physical proof of that relationship.

The landwas like a wedding ring
that is a symbol of the vows
by which two people enter into marriage.
But suddenly, the people of Israel
were in exile without the land
and with no foreseeable way to ever get it back.
To them, it was as if the ring
had been ripped off their finger
and given to someone else –
someone they hated,
someone they feared,
someone they thought was beneath them.

It seems to me that the United States is suffering
from that kind of cognitive dissonance right now,
and that instead of looking in the mirror
we are pointing fingers of blame at each other,
and of course immigrants from other countries.

We have always told ourselves
that the U.S. is the biggest
and the bestest
and the richest
and the most just and righteous
of all nations in the world.
If we are not the best
we are nothing at all –
that’s the way the logic was constructed.
But then things happened
to create dissonance with that self-image.

When there is dissonance between what we believe
and what we see and hear,
it slaps us in the face with a choice.

When our view of reality
does not match up with the reality we are living,
then we can either
go on pretending – which means
denying our actual experience –
or we can open ourselves up
for a new discovery and a new perspective.
But I want to get back to Job,
and underscore this particularly powerful
and pointed tip of the Job story,
which is the very soil of spiritual growth.

Cognitive dissonance
is what a great deal of religious history
has not dealt with very well.
Galileo, for example,
was told by the pope to put the genie back in the bottle,
which he pretended to do for a little while.

But human history is rife with many such examples
of church or mosque
or synagogue or temple
being presented with new insights
that jar or crack open, even shatter
what the religion has declared
as orthodox (“right belief”).
And when that cognitive dissonance arrives
and our worldview
and our values
and our ideas and our assumptions…
are challenged by new information, new insight
or new understanding,
we can openly consider the possibilities
OR we can snap shut
and insist that things are the way we say they are.

But religion is not the only human endeavor
to resist openness.
It is also so very evident in our politics
and economics
and science –
all of which have a propensity toward dogmatism.

When the old answers have not had the intended effect,
but they keep getting declared louder
and with more vehemence anyway;
and still more resources are thrown at the problem
in the hopes of making the old answers work
even though it has little impact;
then we know we are at that place
of cognitive dissonance.

It seems to me that we are currently
wandering through a small epoch
of cognitive dissonance
in which many of our institutions
and tried-and-true solutions
are crumbling.
We can fiercely defend and blame
or we can open and listen.
Defend and blame or open and listen?

Back to Job.
To all of Job’s questions
and in response to his very sincere
and eager desire to have answers,
God offers…nothing.
All God does is show Job how small he is.

Reading it this time, reminded me
of what we are told these days about the Cosmos.
We are told by awesome and brilliant physicists
who study the cosmos
that twenty-five percent of the universe
is composed of Dark Matter.
Dark Matter is stuff we cannot see
and we cannot touch or study it.
As a matter of fact, they tell us Dark Matter
is the very substance that holds the universe together.

On top of that, they say,
seventy percent of the universe
is actually Dark Energy.
Dark Energy is what is pushing the universe
to expand outwardly from its core moment
at the Big Bang.

Plain old Matter – the stuff we can touch and feel –
not Dark Matter or Dark Energy,
comprises only four and half percent of the universe.

In other words,
the stuff we CAN actually see
and touch
and feel
and study,
is less than five percent
of what actually exists in the cosmos.

Now I don’t have a big problem with all of that
because, like most of you,
I haven’t got a clue about any of it.
And even though I love to read about it
my understanding of what I read
would not even fill a thimble.
So, if some really smart people
that spend their lives looking through telescopes
and creating mathematical models
tell me that ninety-five percent of the universe
is composed of stuff we cannot see
or feel or study,
and that we may never be able to see…
well then, I can live with that
in the same way that Job could live with God
when God was done
with God’s great and wonderful speech.

God gave Job no answers.
God said simply,
“I am God and you are not.”

Job did not turn around and create dogmatic answers
in order to fill his ignorance.
Instead, Job said,
“Hmm, it turns out I am very, very small.”
He did not stop believing
or seeking
or knowing God
simply because he received no answers.
Instead, Job learned to hold that place of silence.

Please, get this now,
because it is right there for us the reach and hold:

Job learned to hold that place of silence
in whichwisdom is not composed of beliefs,
and words without knowledge
are not spoken.

We live in a cloud of unknowing
that swaddles the thick darkness,
and if we can hold that place of accepting our ignorance
it will lead us to an encounter
with the mystical presence of God;
a presence that is always and everywhere
in our midst.

So here is my best advice
from one of the very few sermons I preach.
When we encounter tragedy;
when we smack up against a universe that seems
to prefer injustice to balance;
when we sit in the shadow of death
grieving for those we just want to hold again;
when we do everything we are supposed to do
and still things do not work out right…
please do not reach
for old answers
that have yellowed and cracked
and been made brittle by our dissonant experiences.
Instead, hold the silence.
Hold the silence and listen.
Hold the silence
and open up.

Hold the silence
and listen
and open up
to the mystery of a God that is present
here and now –
and even here, even now.

 

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Filed Under: Sermons Tagged With: God speaks, Job, Mysticism

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We are striving to be as open as the table Jesus hosted, in solidarity with the people of Geneva, and an accessible partner to others who share our sense of the gospel.

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