"Do not be afraid; I am the first and the last, and the living one. I was dead, and see, I am alive forever and ever; and I have the keys of Death and of Hades. Now write what you have seen, what is, and what is to take place after this." Rev. 1:17-19.

Saturday, October 27, 2012

Speak up, we can't hear you!


         Believe it or not, I did not always have the loud “teacher’s voice” that I have learned to use in church and in the classroom. As a matter of fact, when I was in first grade, my teacher told my mother that every time I wanted to say something in class (which, given my shyness, was not often) she had to get up and walk over to me at my desk and put her ear down to my mouth, so that she could hear my thin whispers and translate them for the other children. To top it off, I was taught early in life that a polite and well-brought-up little girl does not raise a ruckus or ask boldly for things.  “Don’t bother people,” I heard over and over again. Don’t call people on the phone unnecessarily; don’t knock on your neighbors’ doors; don’t ask mom and dad more than once for anything, unless you want a scolding. Perhaps some of you, especially the women among us, were brought up with these guidelines, as well?

       Even as an adult, I can still remember the horror of clinical pastoral education, when, as hospital chaplain, I had to learn to knock on the doors of hospital patients whom I didn’t know, making “cold calls,” with offers of prayers and help. I would stand outside each door as tense and afraid as if a fire-breathing dragon were waiting for me inside. Even now, making what I perceive to be possibly annoying phone calls to ask for help in the parish goes directly against my childhood scripts. It takes quite a bit of prayer for me to pick up that phone and ask you to join some committee, and I doubt that I am alone in this reluctance—just ask our brave stewardship committee members, who are fervently praying that you turn in your pledge cards so that they don’t have to call you and ask for money.

          Often, it’s the same thing in our prayer lives, too. We tiptoe around God in our prayers: “O God, please help me, if it is your will …. if I don’t somehow deserve this suffering …. If  you have time … if you can hear me …. if it’s not too much trouble …” God, however, doesn’t seem to care about our parents’ or our society’s rules or about any innate shyness on our parts. In today’s readings, God seems to reward both Bartimaeus and Job for raising a ruckus as they sit beside the Way, needing help and deserving justice. Surprisingly, both men are allowed to clamor for help and justice from God, to shout outrageously for God’s attention.

With Bartimaeus, the text is clear. He is a blind beggar, subsisting by asking for alms by the roadside, brushed aside and “beside the way.”  Having heard of Jesus’ powers, he begins to shout for help so loudly that he annoys everyone around him. With all of his heart and soul and lung power, he hollers out our desperate human cry to our God, “Have mercy on me.” I imagine that I would have been one of the bystanders who was looking at poor Bartimaeus in horror as he shouted at Jesus. “Show some manners,” I would have thought. “You are making a fool out of yourself in public.” But Jesus doesn’t seem to be bothered by the blind beggar’s behavior. Jesus does not hush him like the rest of the crowd does. Jesus hears him, calls him, heals him of his blindness, and pronounces him saved through his loud, annoying faith. Immediately, Bartimaeus can see, and he takes off to follow Jesus, on the Way, rather than beside it. His story seems to tell me that it is all right for me to clamor for salvation, for healing, for help onto the path.

          Job’s story is more complex. At first glance, it seems as if our text from Job is in direct opposition to my theory that God expects us to shout at Him from the sidelines. A few weeks ago in our readings, we saw Job, in the prologue to the book, sitting in silence on the ash heap in the face of his extreme suffering. Everyone except his wife seemed to praise him for his silence, for his refusal to curse God for his misfortune. In the middle of the book, however, Job does get to complain. He rails at God for his suffering, as all of the impossible “why” questions come pouring from his mouth. Finally, as we heard last week, God speaks in the whirlwind, bowling Job over through the majesty of Creation and the utter incomprehensibility of God’s ways. Today, at the very end of the Book of Job, though, it looks as if Job is once again reduced to final silence upon his ash heap. “Now that I see your majesty,” Job seems to say to God, with bowed head, “I despise myself, and repent in dust and ashes.”  Once he repents of his sharp words toward God, having been humbled at the fragility and sinfulness of his human condition, it then appears that God rewards him, giving him back family and possessions and a happily-ever-after life. Would God really restore our possessions, though, as a reward for silence in the face of injustice?

          According to scholars, God actually goads Job on to loud and energetic protest. Like we heard last week, God twice summons Job to get up off of his ashes, to “gird up his loins,” like a warrior and to look at what God has to show him. Then, in the famous divine speeches on Creation, God holds up to Job the examples of the monsters Behemoth and Leviathan: proud, beautiful, strong, dangerous creatures that God has made. Behemoth does not let itself be caught or trampled, says God. Leviathan has no fear and “is king over all that are proud.”  Human beings are also created to have power and dominion over their world, God seems to suggest. We must stand up and fight for justice, sometimes with God and sometimes against God, even if it means that we will lose the fight.[1]

Hebrew scholars point out that Job’s admission in our reading, “Therefore I despise myself, and repent in dust and ashes,” could well be a mistranslation. Without putting you to sleep with a Hebrew lesson, let me just say that Job’s final comment in verse 6 could read, “Therefore I retract my words and have changed my mind concerning dust and ashes.”[2]  In Genesis, Abraham also calls himself a man “of dust and ashes” as he argues bravely with God over the fate of Sodom—and Almighty God remains standing in Abraham’s presence. The human condition of “dust and ashes” does not necessarily produce silence and powerlessness. As 19th century Rabbi Bunam points out, “’A man should carry two stones in his pocket. On one should be inscribed, ‘I am but dust and ashes.’ On the other, ‘For my sake the world was created.’ And he should use each stone as he needs it.’”[3]       

 Perhaps God wants Job—and Bartimaeus, and us—not to take innocent suffering lying down. Perhaps God wants us not just to cry out for our own salvation, as Job and Bartimaeus do, but also to protest all innocent suffering and to contend with the powers that bring it about. I was interested to read that the Law states in Exodus that a thief who is caught stealing must repay his victim double what he took from him. That is strangely what God restores to Job at the end of the story: double the livestock and fortune that God had taken from him. When Job takes on the risk and responsibility for standing with and against God, God—who stole unjustly from Job-- is also perhaps the one who is being restored in the strange “fairy-tale ending” of Job’s story. What if God needs Job’s courageous protest against unjust suffering?

Concentration camp survivor Elie Wiesel writes, “Once upon a time, in a faraway land, there lived … a just and righteous man [named Job] who, in his solitude and despair, found the courage to stand up to God. And to force [God] to look at his creation. And to speak to those men who sometimes succeed, in spite of [God] and of themselves, in achieving triumphs over [God], triumphs that are grave and disquieting… What remains of Job? A fable? A shadow? Not even a shadow of a shadow? An example, perhaps?”[4]

An example for us each of us whisperers to take to heart, whether we travel on the Way or have been momentarily forced to sit beside it. An example that shows us that God is waiting for us to gird up our loins, to shake off our dust and ashes and to make our voices heard. Voices that insist on nothing less than mercy and compassion—from God, from ourselves, for ourselves, and for the whole Creation.



[1] Samuel Balentine. “My Servant Job Shall Pray for You,” in Theology Today, January 2002. Internet source.
[2] Samuel Balentine, Job, (Smyth and Helwys Bible Commentary, 2006), 694.
[3] Ibid., 698n.
[4] Ibid., 718n.

Saturday, October 20, 2012

Thumbs Up



         Did you see the story about 13-year-old Lane Goodwin on Facebook perhaps, or in Friday’s paper? The Courier-Journal headline read, “Youngster who inspired ‘Worldwide Miracle’ dies.” Lane had a rare form of childhood cancer, and like many people do, his parents had created a Facebook page to keep friends and relatives updated on his daily struggle to beat the disease. One picture that they posted showed Lane, a fragile, thin boy with beautiful blonde hair and trusting eyes, smiling and giving a “thumbs up” sign of confidence and hope, even as the cancer was filling his body. A stranger was moved by the picture to create a “Thumbs Up for Lane” Facebook page that soon went viral on the Internet, as people all over the world connected with the little boy’s courageous gesture and sent pictures of themselves responding with their own “thumbs up” sign. Movie stars, sports figures, and even an entire stadium at a Western Kentucky University football game responded in a huge outpouring of solidarity and hope. When Lane realized the wide scope of the response and the attention that his photo was bringing to raising money to fight childhood cancers, the young teen, who knew that he would soon die, told his parents, “This is what’s going to find a cure … This is what we have always prayed for … Childhood cancer is all going to go away.”[1]
          Through Lane’s courage in the face of great physical suffering and his loving concern for others who suffer from disease, God issued a Facebook call to all of us, as he does to Job, to “gird up our loins like a man”—to see and to fight for new divine possibilities where none seem to exist. Lane’s picture put a new face on sickness and death, and that new face spread across the globe, lighting up other faces with hope and awareness, just like strings of newly lit Christmas lights that spread out from tree to tree and building to building, until the night sky sparkles.
          As it does all of us, suffering has made Job turn inward and has blinded him to the joy and wonder of life. He longs to return to the darkness of his mother’s womb or to the emptiness of death. He has lost all hope, begging God to let him go, “never to return, to the land of gloom and deep darkness, the land of gloom and chaos.” (Job 10:21-22) In the section of the story that we read today, God finally responds to his suffering servant Job, descending upon him with awesome, terrifying power and bombarding him with a deafening series of rhetorical questions. While it might seem from the verses in our lectionary text that God’s booming voice is bent merely on grinding poor Job down into dust, a careful reading of the whole chapter shows that God is instead reframing the way that Job sees the world. God is taking “thumbs up” pictures of the foundations of the earth, the depths of the sea, the lights of the heavens, the depths of the netherworld, the tumult of the weather, and the splendor of the animal kingdom, and God is bombarding Job’s inner “inbox” until it bursts open with the powerful possibilities poured into Creation through God’s ever-generative abundance.
          The power of the snapshots that God assembles to create this panoramic vision of the splendor and vastness of life[2] in chapter 38 is remarkable, but I believe that our lectionary leaves out the most striking example of what I am talking about here. In verse 25, God asks Job: “Who has cut a channel for the torrents of rain, and a way for the thunderbolt, to bring rain on a land where no one lives, on the desert, which is empty of human life, to satisfy the waste and desolate land, and to make the ground put forth grass?” As Samuel Balentine explains, God irrigates and brings to life the desolate wasteland with a surge of divine water, even though no one lives there to use the gift.[3] Irrigating an empty desert certainly seems to us to be a waste of time and energy! Yet even the wilderness sends its thumbs up picture to Job, proclaiming the potential for life that our prodigal God can sustain there. For if God chooses to sustain life in the desert, can God not also sustain life in the barrenness of human suffering?
          God’s powerful affirmation of life in the face of our affirmation of death is a wake-up call for all of us human beings, not just for those of us who suffer from pain or disease. As a matter of fact, I heard Lane’s story and God’s answer to Job as a striking call to us this week as we begin to talk about Stewardship. The cares, concerns, and humdrum realities of our lives often reduce the expanse of our vision almost as much as extreme suffering does. When we are focused in on controlling our own problems, small or great, it is so easy to forget the abundant grace that our Creator pours out upon us every day. As I learn more about serving as the rector of a parish, I have become aware that my desire for competence and success, my drive for us to “do things right,” to plan and to strategize and to make progress—all those things can act as blinders, blinders to God’s magnificently open and panoramic vision, blinders that limit joy and love, blinders that don’t let me see that water is flowing in the wilderness. What is it that keeps your own vision narrow? Is it the physical pain of illness or age? Is it depression or spiritual desolation? Is it a certain rigid understanding of what church is supposed to be? Is it a goal that you want St. Thomas to pursue, something that you think just has to be done before you can fully participate in and give yourself to the life of the parish?
          Listen to the words attributed to Archbishop Oscar Romero, the martyred Salvadorean priest. They speak to us like God from the whirlwind:
          “The kingdom is not only beyond our effort
It is even beyond our vision.  
          We accomplish in our lifetime only a tiny fraction
          Of the magnificent enterprise that is God’s work…
          No statement says all that could be said.
          No prayer fully expresses our faith …
          No program accomplishes the church’s mission.
          No set of goals and objectives includes everything…
          We plant the seeds that one day will grow.
          We water seeds already planted,
          Knowing that they hold future promise…
          We may never see the end results…
          We are workers, not master builders …
          We are prophets of a future not our own.”[4]

          Before we fill out our pledge cards, before we hunch over our calendars to figure out how much time we have to give to God in 2013, before we hunker down over our checkbooks to figure out how much money we might have left over at the end of each month to give to God’s work at St. Thomas, let’s pray for the gracious abundance of Almighty God to knock us out of darkness into light. Joining the miracle of Creation, the miracle that brings water to an uninhabited desert and hope to the death of a 13-year-old boy, may every one of us gird up our loins like a warrior, standing strong against any dark smallness that would limit God’s free action in this place. Look up at the infinity of stars; squeeze the cool, loose soil from which we come and in which we will someday rest; admire the strong wings of the birds and the sleek coats of the deer; let the powerful wind sweep your soul clean. Only then let us pick up our pens and make our pledges a “thumbs up” to the needs of the world around us, a vehicle for divine possibility, a chance for God’s love to “go viral.”


[1] Emily Hagedorn, “Youngster who inspired ‘Worldwide Miracle’ dies,” Courier Journal, Friday, October 19, 2012.
[2] Robert  Alter, “Voice from the Whirlwind: God Answers Job in a Panoramic Vision,” http://www.jhom.com/topics/topics/voice/job.htm.
[3] Samuel Balentine, Job (Smyth and Helwys), 638.
[4] Cited in Michael Jinkins’ blog, “Thinking Out Loud,” October 17, 2012.

Wednesday, October 17, 2012

A Prayer at the Change of Seasons


The ground is the same: gray, sandy and uneven, with sparkling flecks of mica that mirror the rocky path.

The smells are the same: damp earth and pine, clean air and forest floor.

The sounds are the same: eternal quiet broken by bubbling brooks that rush off in a hurry—time like an ever-rolling stream bearing my life away …

Western North Carolina in the fall bears many similarities to Western North Carolina in the summer.

Only the leaves and I are different.

In the summer of my twelfth year, the green leaves were suffocating and dark. The shadows of trees hung over my head like my mother’s anxious hovering. The piles of mountains hemmed me in, tying me to a summer camp community and to a schedule that wore me out and bound my imagination. The limitless possibilities of the plain, the blue Texas sky that raised earth to heaven, the freedom of the lonesome cowboy—all that was blocked by the looming emerald mountains that held me captive.

In the fall of my fifty-first year, however, the strong trees seem frail, the truth of their skeletal branches exposed by falling leaves. Their spidery complexity is as full of holes as the fragile world of human relationships. The monolithic green barriers give way to diverse color, to reds and yellows and browns that even the somber lake takes into itself with bursts of welcome. The mountains no longer threaten my freedom. They hold me close, heaped around me like the comforting folds of blankets on a bed, cupping colorful community that might otherwise slip into heaps on the floor.

I want God to hold me tight as my greenness fades, and I fall like the leaves. I no longer want the sky to be the limit.

Amen.

Saturday, October 6, 2012

Leaving the Land of Uz



       “Once upon a time in the land of Uz…” Have you ever been there? I often like to visit. Many of us were born there but have had to move on. It is a beautiful country, where the sky is deep blue, and the rivers run clear and clean. There is no need to watch for trouble lurking in dark corners, and there appears to be a good reason for everything that happens. Uz is a safe and secure country, full of bright colors and straight lines, where the righteous flourish and where the wicked are banished for their evil deeds. Those who live upright lives dwell there in spacious homes, surrounded by loving families, protected by a divine fence. Some televangelists have their tents pitched in Uz right now, where they take pictures for us of the many blessings that they see raining down on those who follow the rules.
Even in Uz, however, suffering is eventually going to rear its ugly head, and its inhabitants are never prepared. Cancer survivor Carol Shields writes: “Happiness is the lucky pane of glass you carry in your head. It takes all of your cunning just to hang on to it, and once it’s smashed you have to move into a different sort of life.”[1] Once it is smashed, we find ourselves sitting on the outskirts of Uz, tossed aside like the trash, using the sharp, broken pieces of our happiness to pick at our painful wounds. Once it is smashed, we are Job. Once it is smashed, we have to figure out how to keep our integrity, what it means to be whole when our world breaks open.
There are two sides to “integrity” or wholeness. There is the moral integrity that is the upright “fulfilling of commitments.” [2]  This is the kind of integrity that is expected in the land of Uz. As Job says later in the book, “Until I die, I will not put away my integrity from me. I hold fast my righteousness and will not let it go.” This desperate holding on to traditional religious duties, no matter what, is one side of Job’s integrity. Indeed, as the most perfect man in the Hebrew Scriptures, more graced with virtues than Abraham or even Moses, Job is completely righteous in his dealings with others, and he respects the divine will, serving his Creator in all things. He walks with “integrity,” fitting seamlessly into the Creator’s flawless design for the world. And as a direct result of his integrity, he receives blessing upon blessing from God’s hand.
But wait! Integrity is also “giving credence to one’s experience,” finding meaning in a wholeness between our inner selves and the world around us.[3] We cannot be whole without being true to our experiences. When things are turned upside down in the land of Uz, and Job’s children are all killed and his livelihood destroyed, the text in today’s reading praises Job for “[persisting] in his integrity” and refusing to blame God. But how can Job walk in integrity when he knows that he is blameless before God, yet finds himself suffering as only sinners are supposed to do? Job’s wife sees the problem before Job does. As he sits among the ashes, picking his sores and refusing to be moved, she comes over to him and sighs, “Do you still persist in your integrity?” In other words, the ground on which your piety was based has been yanked out from under you. Your experience no longer fits with the way you are acting. If you continue to bless God, you will lose your integrity. It would make more sense for you to curse God and suffer the consequences.
So what are all we Jobs to do when faced with tragic, meaningless suffering? Aren’t we supposed to “keep the faith?” Aren’t we supposed to trust in the Lord, no matter what, like today’s Psalm encourages us to do?  “I have lived with integrity,” the Psalmist boasts, “I have trusted in the Lord and have not faltered. Test me, O Lord, and try me; examine my heart and my mind.” I haven’t done bad things like those other sinners. In the end, I won’t get punished like they will. I should be redeemed because I live with integrity.
Of course we are to trust in the Lord, but we are not to trust in God based on the system of protection and reward that is practiced in the Land of Uz. What the book of Job wants to make clear, is that our relationship with God is not based on this kind of theology of retribution. We don’t have to be one of those Prosperity Gospel people who think that God sent hurricane Katrina to punish New Orleans for the sinfulness of Mardi Gras, in order to share an ingrained theology of retribution that seeps from the land of Uz into our own thought processes. I hate to admit the number of times that I have sat on an airplane caught in scary turbulence and looked around, anxiously counting the number of cute babies and kind-looking people sitting around me, calculating somehow that God wouldn’t let a plane full of that many good people crash.
In Mary Doria Russell’s novel, The Sparrow, Jesuit priest Emilio Sandoz struggles with this theology of retribution in his travels to the faraway planet Rakhat. Upon arriving on the new planet, as one of the first humans ever to see its wonders, he feels chosen by God, a part of an amazing divine creation, part of an entire universe where everything has its place and faithfulness is clearly rewarded by God. He is empowered by a sense of divine purpose and feels that his whole life has been leading up to these crowning moments of mission. In the end, however, Emilio’s friends all die on Rakhat; human interference makes a mess on the new planet; and Emilio himself is left, like Job, a physically and psychologically broken man who bitterly mocks his own former sense of purpose. “If I accept that the beauty and the rapture were real and true [Emilio complains], then the rest of it was God’s will too, and that, gentlemen, is cause for bitterness.”[4] Russell comments on her characters: “we seem to believe that if we act in accordance with our understanding of God’s will, we ought to be rewarded. But in doing so we’re making a deal that God didn’t sign on to.”[5]
By the end of the The Sparrow, Emilio does not yet find a way out of his bitterness, but by the end of the book of Job, Job finally catches on. He allows himself to maintain a deeper kind of integrity by raling at God, by shining the light of his experience on his earlier notions of piety. At the end of the book, Job understands that God’s blessing is a free and wondrous gift, that God is a God of Covenant, a God who gives himself unconditionally to Job. Job can worship God in gratitude for the “gratuity of God’s creation,” rather than calculating where he stands with God.[6]
Our ever-creating, ever-loving, ever-self-giving God, calls us into the kind of relationship that cannot be weighed and measured and counted. God is indeed a God of justice, but it is a justice that is beyond our understanding. While we cannot understand God’s judgments, we can trust in God’s compassion, seen in the life and death of Jesus Christ. We can trust in that deep power that doesn’t look like power, that Resurrection power that can bring to life what is broken by pain and even by death. Yesterday, at Father Joe Smith’s funeral, we began the burial service by singing the Christmas carol, “O Come, All Ye Faithful.” As we all sang, “O come, let us adore him,” in the face of tragic death, we were marching bravely together from the Land of Uz to Bethlehem, to the city where God mysteriously yet graciously joins us in our pain and suffering, as a human child.
New Testament scholar Kathy Grieb wonders if Mark, in today’s Gospel on divorce, doesn’t include the story of Jesus taking the child in his arms, in order to show us that the reign of God is open to all who receive it in the way that only a little child can receive it: “as sheer gift to those with no power, no rights, no demands, no status, and no sense of their own achievement.”[7] In the Land of Uz, these remarks on divorce would cause us to condemn ourselves or others as deserving of punishment for our failure in God’s eyes. In Jesus arms, the God who became a little child holds all of us sinners, however, in a loving embrace. In our despair, in our incomprehension, in our pain, in our guilt, we hold up our arms to God, tears running down our cheeks, sobbing and screaming for all we are worth, like a baby waiting to be picked up from his crib and held in loving arms: in this cry is our integrity.


[1] Carol Shields, “Unless,” quoted in Samuel Balentine,  Job (Smith and Helwys, 2006), 16.
[2] Carol Newsom, quoted in David Hester, Job (Interpretation Bible Studies, 2005), 13.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Mary Doria Russell, The Sparrow, 394.
[5] Ibid., 415.
[6] Susannah Ticciati, Job and the Disruption of Identity, 73.
[7] Kathy Grieb, “Blogging toward Sunday.” http://theolog.org/2009/09/blogging-toward-sunday-is-it-lawful.html.