IS It BAD TO BELT THE BOSS?
Sermon by Dwyn M. Mounger, M.Div., Ph.D. Interim Pastor
Community Presbyterian Church, Deerfield Beach, Florida, July 18, 2010
The Sixteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time
8:30 and 10:30 a.m.
Scripture: Job 7:1-7; Psalm 136 (paraphrase); I Corinthians 1:18-25; Luke 10:38-42.
Sermon by Dwyn M. Mounger, M.Div., Ph.D. Interim Pastor
Community Presbyterian Church, Deerfield Beach, Florida, July 18, 2010
The Sixteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time
8:30 and 10:30 a.m.
Scripture: Job 7:1-7; Psalm 136 (paraphrase); I Corinthians 1:18-25; Luke 10:38-42.
Is
it bad to belt the Boss? --By this I mean, is it wrong to
question God? When some tragedy, some calamity, befalls us, is it
sinful to ask, “Lord, why THIS? What can you possibly MEAN by
this?”
Our First Lesson today, is from Job--at once, one of the saddest yet one of the noblest books of the Bible. Has anyone in history or legend SUFFERED as much as Job? How swiftly the disasters came! His cattle, sheep, camels, donkeys all stolen or slain! His fortune SWALLOWED UP at one fell swoop! The lives of his seven sons and three daughters SNUFFED OUT by a tornado! And the body of Job himself broken out in horrid, festering SORES!
Here in the seventh chapter, you and I see Job sitting on a heap of ashes. His head is shaved in mourning. His robe is torn. And he’s wracked by the pain of his disease and sorrow! Job opens his mouth and utters most depressing things. Listen: A human being, he exclaims, is “like a slave who longs for the shadow, and like laborers who look for their wages. So I am allotted months of emptiness, and nights of misery are apportioned to me.” Job continues, “My days are swifter than a weaver’s shuttle, and come to their end without hope. Remember that my life is a breadth; my eye will never again see good.”
Frankly, Job’s words disturb us, don’t they? How distant they are from “The Power of Positive Thinking!” and all other clichés of optimism! How far removed they are from the cheap faith and cheap grace peddled by so much TV religion and popular piety today!
Now you and I understand how Job can conclude that life’s only heartache, given the tragedies that have befallen him. But what would you say to him? If you were one of Job’s would-be comforters, how would you try to console him? Many folks, I’m sure, would tell Job, ‘QUIT YOUR GRUMBLING! Instead, submit, silently yield to God and God’s wisdom, which is so much higher than yours!” How often have I heard well-meaning Christians--even well-meaning pastors--take such an approach. Glibly they say to the bereaved, “ Our minds are too small, our human understanding, too dim, to grasp it all. So STOP QUESTIONING GOD! SUBMIT TO GOD’S WILL!”
Now, friends, there are wisdom and truth in this approach to suffering. But they aren’t the wisdom and truth of Christianity! ON THE CONTRARY, they constitute pagan Greek Stoicism! The Stoics, you remember, said simply, ‘GRIN AND BEAR IT! KEEP A STIFF UPPER LIP! DON’T LET YOUR CLUMSY EMOTIONS GET IN THE WAY! YIELD TO WHATEVER LIFE MAY BRING!”
But the god of the Stoics wasn’t a person; their deity was reason--cold, unfeeling, immovable. How DIFFERENT is our God! The Good Shepherd who cares for the sheep! The Parent who delights in the beloved children! The One who actually welcomes our questions! -- “Ask, and it will be given you; seek, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened for you!” (Matthew 7:7). Yes, Jesus eagerly SEEKS our questions, even our hardest ones, even the ones we ask in anger and resentment!
Yet how many of us, in the face of tragedy, confuse Stoicism with Christianity! Especially when that tragedy’s someone else’s and not our own! Sometimes we phrase our Stoic advice this way: “Remember, you’re not alone in your suffering! Look around you. Eventually all of us lose what we love.” -- Or, as one of Job’s so-called comforters puts it, “Human beings are born to trouble just as sparks fly upward!” (Job 5:7)
But such advice doesn’t help at all! Paul Scherer told of a devout woman whose talented son was killed in war. And her Christian friends only seemed to aggravate her grief. “They remind me,” she said, “that I’m not the only one who has suffered such bereavement, I must think of the thousands like myself. If I should think of them, I’d go mad. And if I found any solace in thinking of them, I should be a monster!” How true! In the words of Tennyson’s In Memoriam:
But let’s get back to Job. All right, if Job shouldn’t meekly submit to his tragedies, what should he do? --Some folks, I’m sure, would give him just the opposite advice: “RAGE AGAINST GOD! DON’T TAKE IT LYING DOWN! TELL GOD, ‘I’M WISE TO YOU! I’VE FIGURED YOU OUT! YOU’RE THE CELESTIAL SADIST! YOU’RE LIKE A CAT TOYING WITH A MOUSE BEFORE THE KILL!'"
That’s what Job’s own wife tells him to do, remember? -- ”CURSE GOD AND DIE!” she screams to her miserable husband (Job 2:9).
Now maybe you, at times of intense pain in your own life, have been tempted to take this approach. In all honesty, doesn’t such a temptation come to us Christians more often than perhaps we care to admit? Quite understandably, many folks yield to such rebellious despair. Quite understandably, some conclude with Shakespeare’s Macbeth that life must be “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”
Yes, “CURSE GOD AND DIE!” screams Mrs. Job. But, Job, DON’T LISTEN TO YOUR WIFE! That’s the easy way out! --Or, rather, it’s no way out at all!
What, then, would you advise Job to do? If, on the one hand, neither meek submission is adequate nor, on the other, rebellious defiance, what course of action should Job take? --Should you and I take? -- THE COURSE OF QUESTIONING! Tell me, where’d we ever get the idea that God doesn’t want us to pose hard questions? Where’d we ever get the idea that to express our doubts and perplexities about the divine ways is somehow unchristian? How RIDICULOUS! God expects us to probe into these mysteries, just as you and I expect our small children and grandchildren to ask us hard questions! If you don’t believe me, look at the Bible! Why the Book of Psalms alone is crammed with complaints and searching laments over God’s seeming indifference, at times, to human grief! One of many examples I can mention is Psalm 77, where the poet cries, “Has God’s steadfast love ceased forever? And his promises at an end for all time? Has God forgotten to be gracious? Has he in anger shut up his compassion?”
And look at the agonizing questions of Job here in our lesson. And listen to that heart-breaking enquiry of Jesus on the cross, as about 3 o’clock that Good Friday afternoon, according to both Matthew and Mark’s Gospels, he wails, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Matthew 27:46). If that's not questioning, if that's not angry questioning, I don't know what else you might try to call it.
Yes, friends, the Lord expects us, God’s children, to raise our doubts, our questions--even when our grief makes us do so in rage. Fitzsimons Allison, a retired Episcopal bishop and writer, makes this observation, “God can take our anger so much better than our spouses, leaders, children, parents, authorities, and selves. . . .” The late Carlyle Marney, while pastor of Myers Park Baptist Church, near the campus of Queens University, in Charlotte, North Carolina, once wrote to a fellow pastor whose eight-year-old daughter was dying of leukemia. In his letter, Marney confessed that neither he nor any other preacher in the world could ever explain the suffering of the innocent. but, he continued, “I fall back on the idea that God as a lot to give an account for.”
Those words shock us, don’t they? But they shouldn’t! God does have a lot to answer for. God wants and cherishes our burning questions. It’s not blasphemous at all for us to raise them; QUITE THE CONTRARY! Nobel prize-winner Elie Wiesel, as a young Hungarian Jew, was taken to Auschwitz, the Nazi death and slave labor camp in Poland. Out of all his immediate family, Wiesel alone survived the Holocaust. And his novels and other writings represent at their best what you and I can call the ancient, Jewish “Lover’s quarrel with God.” Wiesel dares declare, “We raise ourselves towards God by the questions we ask him.”
Yes, friends, posing hard questions to the Lord isn’t an act of rebellion but an act of faith! To be sure, you and I can’t expect God to answer all our questions immediately. Did it ever occur to you that if God did, right now, gave us such answers, we wouldn’t be able to understand them? No, with our finite minds, we couldn’t comprehend them. It would be as if your four-year-old son or daughter should ask, “Daddy (Mommy), what makes the stars twinkle?” --And you’d reply with a lengthy lecture on the science of astronomy! Or if your little grandson or granddaughter should ask you, “Grandfather," ("Grandmother)," where do babies come from?” --And you’d answer with a complete description of the physiology of human conception and modern obstetrics!
Awhile ago I mentioned Jesus’ death and how, just before the end, according to Matthew and Mark, he cried, “My God, why have you forsaken me?” --The cross is God’s most complete answer to our deepest questions. Even though Calvary doesn’t clear them all up for us, even though the cross itself is a great mystery, doesn’t it come closer to explaining the problem of innocent suffering than anything else in the world?
British novelist Dorothy Sayers, author of the Lord Peter Wimsey detective stories, and herself a lay theologian, discussing the cross, made a profound observation: “For whatever reason God chose to make man as he is--limited and suffering and subject to sorrows and death--He had the honesty and courage to take His own medicine.” She continued, “Whatever game He [God] is playing with His creation, He has kept His own rules and played fair. He can exact nothing from man that He has not exacted from Himself. He has Himself gone through the whole of human experience, from the trivial irritations of family life and the cramping restrictions of hard work and lack of money to the worst horrors of pain and humiliation, defeat, despair, and death.” And Sayers concluded, “When He was a man, He played the man.”
So, my friends, is it wrong to belt the Boss? To question God? --YES, if by this you SHAKE YOUR FIST in the divine FACE! YES, if by this you REJECT God and choose, instead, the empty path of nihilism and absurdity.
But if by questioning God you mean simply pressing the Lord for an EXPLANATION for all the pain of this world, it’s BY NO MEANS wrong! GO RIGHT AHEAD! DEMAND TO BE HEARD! Ask God even the HARDEST of questions! Ask even in TEARS, even in ANGER! For that’s YOUR RIGHT as GOD’S CHILD!
And, be assured, God always HEARS you! --And that one day, in God’s own good time, you’ll understand ALL the painful, puzzling mysteries of human existence!
PRAYERS:
Deliver us, O God, from those well-meaning Christians who would scold us for asking questions. Deliver us from those whose own vision of you is so immature that to question is unthinkable to them!
How grateful we are for your willingness to enter into dialogue with us, your beloved children! May we respond to you with intense curiosity and wonder, as did Job, as did the psalmists, as did Jesus. Unstop our mouths, that we may speak to you. More importantly, unstop our ears, that we may hear you. And graciously engage us in continual, life-long conversation: not only about the good and the beautiful, but about the tragic and the puzzling.
Merciful God, we remember all those who today, like Job, are suffering in any way--particularly your sons and daughters who, to this place of worship, have brought burdens and cares perhaps known but to themselves. Strengthen, uphold, and deliver them, we beg you. Point them to the Christ of Calvary, that, seeing again his sacrificial love, they may receive new hope and faith and joy.
Comfort those who mourn. Heal your children who are sick. Bless this church of your people--and all congregations and parishes here today. Lord of all nations, bring peace to this earth, as it is in heaven.
Finally, God of all the ages, keep us in fellowship with our brothers and sisters who, having known the salvation of Christ and walked in his presence in this world, now experience the blessedness of his perfect revelation in the next.
For we make these and each of our prayers in his strong name. AMEN.
Our First Lesson today, is from Job--at once, one of the saddest yet one of the noblest books of the Bible. Has anyone in history or legend SUFFERED as much as Job? How swiftly the disasters came! His cattle, sheep, camels, donkeys all stolen or slain! His fortune SWALLOWED UP at one fell swoop! The lives of his seven sons and three daughters SNUFFED OUT by a tornado! And the body of Job himself broken out in horrid, festering SORES!
Here in the seventh chapter, you and I see Job sitting on a heap of ashes. His head is shaved in mourning. His robe is torn. And he’s wracked by the pain of his disease and sorrow! Job opens his mouth and utters most depressing things. Listen: A human being, he exclaims, is “like a slave who longs for the shadow, and like laborers who look for their wages. So I am allotted months of emptiness, and nights of misery are apportioned to me.” Job continues, “My days are swifter than a weaver’s shuttle, and come to their end without hope. Remember that my life is a breadth; my eye will never again see good.”
Frankly, Job’s words disturb us, don’t they? How distant they are from “The Power of Positive Thinking!” and all other clichés of optimism! How far removed they are from the cheap faith and cheap grace peddled by so much TV religion and popular piety today!
Now you and I understand how Job can conclude that life’s only heartache, given the tragedies that have befallen him. But what would you say to him? If you were one of Job’s would-be comforters, how would you try to console him? Many folks, I’m sure, would tell Job, ‘QUIT YOUR GRUMBLING! Instead, submit, silently yield to God and God’s wisdom, which is so much higher than yours!” How often have I heard well-meaning Christians--even well-meaning pastors--take such an approach. Glibly they say to the bereaved, “ Our minds are too small, our human understanding, too dim, to grasp it all. So STOP QUESTIONING GOD! SUBMIT TO GOD’S WILL!”
Now, friends, there are wisdom and truth in this approach to suffering. But they aren’t the wisdom and truth of Christianity! ON THE CONTRARY, they constitute pagan Greek Stoicism! The Stoics, you remember, said simply, ‘GRIN AND BEAR IT! KEEP A STIFF UPPER LIP! DON’T LET YOUR CLUMSY EMOTIONS GET IN THE WAY! YIELD TO WHATEVER LIFE MAY BRING!”
But the god of the Stoics wasn’t a person; their deity was reason--cold, unfeeling, immovable. How DIFFERENT is our God! The Good Shepherd who cares for the sheep! The Parent who delights in the beloved children! The One who actually welcomes our questions! -- “Ask, and it will be given you; seek, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened for you!” (Matthew 7:7). Yes, Jesus eagerly SEEKS our questions, even our hardest ones, even the ones we ask in anger and resentment!
Yet how many of us, in the face of tragedy, confuse Stoicism with Christianity! Especially when that tragedy’s someone else’s and not our own! Sometimes we phrase our Stoic advice this way: “Remember, you’re not alone in your suffering! Look around you. Eventually all of us lose what we love.” -- Or, as one of Job’s so-called comforters puts it, “Human beings are born to trouble just as sparks fly upward!” (Job 5:7)
But such advice doesn’t help at all! Paul Scherer told of a devout woman whose talented son was killed in war. And her Christian friends only seemed to aggravate her grief. “They remind me,” she said, “that I’m not the only one who has suffered such bereavement, I must think of the thousands like myself. If I should think of them, I’d go mad. And if I found any solace in thinking of them, I should be a monster!” How true! In the words of Tennyson’s In Memoriam:
That loss is common would not make
My own less bitter, rather more;
Too common! Never morning wore
To evening, but some heart did break.
My own less bitter, rather more;
Too common! Never morning wore
To evening, but some heart did break.
But let’s get back to Job. All right, if Job shouldn’t meekly submit to his tragedies, what should he do? --Some folks, I’m sure, would give him just the opposite advice: “RAGE AGAINST GOD! DON’T TAKE IT LYING DOWN! TELL GOD, ‘I’M WISE TO YOU! I’VE FIGURED YOU OUT! YOU’RE THE CELESTIAL SADIST! YOU’RE LIKE A CAT TOYING WITH A MOUSE BEFORE THE KILL!'"
That’s what Job’s own wife tells him to do, remember? -- ”CURSE GOD AND DIE!” she screams to her miserable husband (Job 2:9).
Now maybe you, at times of intense pain in your own life, have been tempted to take this approach. In all honesty, doesn’t such a temptation come to us Christians more often than perhaps we care to admit? Quite understandably, many folks yield to such rebellious despair. Quite understandably, some conclude with Shakespeare’s Macbeth that life must be “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”
Yes, “CURSE GOD AND DIE!” screams Mrs. Job. But, Job, DON’T LISTEN TO YOUR WIFE! That’s the easy way out! --Or, rather, it’s no way out at all!
What, then, would you advise Job to do? If, on the one hand, neither meek submission is adequate nor, on the other, rebellious defiance, what course of action should Job take? --Should you and I take? -- THE COURSE OF QUESTIONING! Tell me, where’d we ever get the idea that God doesn’t want us to pose hard questions? Where’d we ever get the idea that to express our doubts and perplexities about the divine ways is somehow unchristian? How RIDICULOUS! God expects us to probe into these mysteries, just as you and I expect our small children and grandchildren to ask us hard questions! If you don’t believe me, look at the Bible! Why the Book of Psalms alone is crammed with complaints and searching laments over God’s seeming indifference, at times, to human grief! One of many examples I can mention is Psalm 77, where the poet cries, “Has God’s steadfast love ceased forever? And his promises at an end for all time? Has God forgotten to be gracious? Has he in anger shut up his compassion?”
And look at the agonizing questions of Job here in our lesson. And listen to that heart-breaking enquiry of Jesus on the cross, as about 3 o’clock that Good Friday afternoon, according to both Matthew and Mark’s Gospels, he wails, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Matthew 27:46). If that's not questioning, if that's not angry questioning, I don't know what else you might try to call it.
Yes, friends, the Lord expects us, God’s children, to raise our doubts, our questions--even when our grief makes us do so in rage. Fitzsimons Allison, a retired Episcopal bishop and writer, makes this observation, “God can take our anger so much better than our spouses, leaders, children, parents, authorities, and selves. . . .” The late Carlyle Marney, while pastor of Myers Park Baptist Church, near the campus of Queens University, in Charlotte, North Carolina, once wrote to a fellow pastor whose eight-year-old daughter was dying of leukemia. In his letter, Marney confessed that neither he nor any other preacher in the world could ever explain the suffering of the innocent. but, he continued, “I fall back on the idea that God as a lot to give an account for.”
Those words shock us, don’t they? But they shouldn’t! God does have a lot to answer for. God wants and cherishes our burning questions. It’s not blasphemous at all for us to raise them; QUITE THE CONTRARY! Nobel prize-winner Elie Wiesel, as a young Hungarian Jew, was taken to Auschwitz, the Nazi death and slave labor camp in Poland. Out of all his immediate family, Wiesel alone survived the Holocaust. And his novels and other writings represent at their best what you and I can call the ancient, Jewish “Lover’s quarrel with God.” Wiesel dares declare, “We raise ourselves towards God by the questions we ask him.”
Yes, friends, posing hard questions to the Lord isn’t an act of rebellion but an act of faith! To be sure, you and I can’t expect God to answer all our questions immediately. Did it ever occur to you that if God did, right now, gave us such answers, we wouldn’t be able to understand them? No, with our finite minds, we couldn’t comprehend them. It would be as if your four-year-old son or daughter should ask, “Daddy (Mommy), what makes the stars twinkle?” --And you’d reply with a lengthy lecture on the science of astronomy! Or if your little grandson or granddaughter should ask you, “Grandfather," ("Grandmother)," where do babies come from?” --And you’d answer with a complete description of the physiology of human conception and modern obstetrics!
Awhile ago I mentioned Jesus’ death and how, just before the end, according to Matthew and Mark, he cried, “My God, why have you forsaken me?” --The cross is God’s most complete answer to our deepest questions. Even though Calvary doesn’t clear them all up for us, even though the cross itself is a great mystery, doesn’t it come closer to explaining the problem of innocent suffering than anything else in the world?
British novelist Dorothy Sayers, author of the Lord Peter Wimsey detective stories, and herself a lay theologian, discussing the cross, made a profound observation: “For whatever reason God chose to make man as he is--limited and suffering and subject to sorrows and death--He had the honesty and courage to take His own medicine.” She continued, “Whatever game He [God] is playing with His creation, He has kept His own rules and played fair. He can exact nothing from man that He has not exacted from Himself. He has Himself gone through the whole of human experience, from the trivial irritations of family life and the cramping restrictions of hard work and lack of money to the worst horrors of pain and humiliation, defeat, despair, and death.” And Sayers concluded, “When He was a man, He played the man.”
So, my friends, is it wrong to belt the Boss? To question God? --YES, if by this you SHAKE YOUR FIST in the divine FACE! YES, if by this you REJECT God and choose, instead, the empty path of nihilism and absurdity.
But if by questioning God you mean simply pressing the Lord for an EXPLANATION for all the pain of this world, it’s BY NO MEANS wrong! GO RIGHT AHEAD! DEMAND TO BE HEARD! Ask God even the HARDEST of questions! Ask even in TEARS, even in ANGER! For that’s YOUR RIGHT as GOD’S CHILD!
And, be assured, God always HEARS you! --And that one day, in God’s own good time, you’ll understand ALL the painful, puzzling mysteries of human existence!
PRAYERS:
Deliver us, O God, from those well-meaning Christians who would scold us for asking questions. Deliver us from those whose own vision of you is so immature that to question is unthinkable to them!
How grateful we are for your willingness to enter into dialogue with us, your beloved children! May we respond to you with intense curiosity and wonder, as did Job, as did the psalmists, as did Jesus. Unstop our mouths, that we may speak to you. More importantly, unstop our ears, that we may hear you. And graciously engage us in continual, life-long conversation: not only about the good and the beautiful, but about the tragic and the puzzling.
Merciful God, we remember all those who today, like Job, are suffering in any way--particularly your sons and daughters who, to this place of worship, have brought burdens and cares perhaps known but to themselves. Strengthen, uphold, and deliver them, we beg you. Point them to the Christ of Calvary, that, seeing again his sacrificial love, they may receive new hope and faith and joy.
Comfort those who mourn. Heal your children who are sick. Bless this church of your people--and all congregations and parishes here today. Lord of all nations, bring peace to this earth, as it is in heaven.
Finally, God of all the ages, keep us in fellowship with our brothers and sisters who, having known the salvation of Christ and walked in his presence in this world, now experience the blessedness of his perfect revelation in the next.
For we make these and each of our prayers in his strong name. AMEN.