Getting the word out.
Job
Scriptural Sermons
Old Testament: Job
I spoke over the summer about my late friend Dean. My dad was his good and great friend for over fifty years, and when my dad died, I stood in for my dad as best as I could until Dean’s death this past spring. Dean was no slouch intellectually. He earned an undergraduate degree in theology from Northwestern University and graduate degrees in theology from Yale University. So Dean knew his theology, but his true gift was as a wordsmith. He ended up in the perfect job. He was an editor at the theological journal The Christian Century , a position he held for sixty years. Dean was not someone you would be keen to play Scrabble with, unless you liked to lose. My dad and I could hold our own with him, but when the Scrabble game came out at Thanksgiving, everyone else left the room. 1972 may not seem like a significant year for you, but it is in my family. 1972 is the year the game Boggle came out. Dean brought Boggle to Thanksgiving that year. Boggle allowed him to up his game, because in Scrabble you are limited to 7 letters. In Boggle your letters are unlimited. You can spell as long a word as you can. A few months before he died, Dean was in a rehabilitation facility, and we were playing Boggle in the Recreation Room. A man asked if he could join us. “You really don’t want to do that,” I said. “This man may look innocuous, but he is not. He is as deadly as a shark. Trust me.” “I’ll take my chances,” he said, with naïve confidence. The first word Dean spelled was Anfectung. “Nice one!” I said. “Wait a minute,” the man said. “What in the world is Anfectung?” It sounds foreign. “It’s German,” I said, “but it passed into English untranslated so in my opinion he gets credit.” “But what is it?” He persisted. “It’s when it feels like Satan is pummeling you,” I said. Dean continued, “The word was made famous by Martin Luther. It refers to times of spiritual affliction and trial and terror and despair.” At that point the man said he was throwing in the towel. “I told you he was deadly as a shark,” I called out after him. Anfectung. I guess it’s an insider’s word. But it’s not an insider’s experience. It’s when life hits us; and hits us hard. It’s when we feel crushed under our burdens. It’s when we feel we can’t go on. It’s when we lose loved ones. It’s when we lose jobs. It’s when we develop health problems. It’s when we have accidents. It’s when we find ourselves mired in dysfunction relationships. It’s when we find ourselves in financial trouble. It’s when we learn we have been betrayed. It’s when we wake up in the middle of the night awash with existential dread -- thinking of all the bad things we’ve done; thinking of all the suffering and injustice and misery and violence have wracked existence. It’s when we fear death. At any rate, the Bible gets Antectung. The Bible is not superficial. It doesn’t present us with fake people living fake lives. It presents us with real people with real lives living real lives. And this means it presents us with Anfectung. Think about Job. The thing about Job is that he was a really good person. He had no bad karma. We tend to have this idea that if you’re a really good person, life will reward you. That’s the way it should be anyway. Such was not the case with Job. His servants were murdered and his livestock stolen when marauders fell upon them. Directly thereafter, he lost all ten of his children when their house collapsed on them. But that was not the end for Job. He fell victim to a horrendous wasting disease that covered him with weeping sores. To make matters even worse, his friends turned on him and said he really must not have been a good person all along, for God to visit all these afflictions upon him. “Let the day perish in which I was born! Why did I not die at birth, come forth from the womb and expire?” He cried out. And then there is Paul. Truth be told, he was not as good a person as Job. In his early years he persecuted the nascent church, presiding proudly over the stoning of Stephan. But he turned his life around after he encountered the risen Christ along the road to Damascus. I guess it’s truer to say that Christ turned his life around. At any rate, he put his past behind him. And that’s when his troubles began. He was whipped, beaten with rods, stoned, jailed, and eventually executed. And Job and Paul aren’t isolated examples. God himself demanded that Abraham sacrifice his beloved son. Imagine how you’d feel in the wake of that demand. David’s beloved son was murdered by his own general -- that after David had begged his general to protect him. Jeremiah was persecuted non stop over the course of fifty years. And what about Jesus for crying out loud? The Son of God. The one person in all of history who should have been loved and respected and honored and obeyed. The one person in all history who actually deserved to be worshiped. No, the Bible gets Anfectung. And speaking of Jesus, in the morning’s gospel lesson, his death lay squarely before him. He, however, was more concerned for his disciples than himself. I suppose we can relate to this. As a parent a large part of the reason I hold life so dear is for the sake of my children. At least for now, they need me. I am irreplaceable to them. I couldn’t bear them to grieve my loss then navigate life without me. So Jesus tried one last time to do what he could for his disciples. He gave them twin assurances, first bad news and then good. The bad news: You will have tribulations. They come with life. You will have tribulations. But then the good news. I have already conquered the world. I have already conquered the world. And on his cross he experienced the full gamut of Anfectung. Betrayal. Desertion. Injustice. Pain. Cruelty. Suffering. Loneliness. Desolation. And in his resurrection he overcame them for our sake, so that we can too, starting now and stretching into eternity. He has already conquered the world. And he continued. When we believe this. When we really believe it -- in our hearts and in our minds and in our souls, then amidst our tribulation we will experience the peace that passes understanding. Everyone should read C.S. Lewis. He is perhaps the greatest Christian apologist of the twentieth century. He was writing a letter to a dear friend who was dying a death that was particularly painful. Not surprisingly she experienced Anfectung. This is what Lewis wrote to her: “Pain is terrible, but surely you need not have fear as well? Can you not see death as the friend and deliverer? It means stripping off that body which is tormenting you: like taking off a hair shirt or getting out of a dungeon. What is there to be afraid of? …. Has this world been so kind to you that you should leave it with regret? There are better things ahead than any we leave behind. Remember, though we struggle against things because we are afraid of them, it is the other way round—we get afraid because we struggle. Are you struggling, resisting? Don’t you think Our Lord says to you ‘Peace, child, peace. Relax. Let go. Underneath are the everlasting arms. Let go, I will catch you. Do you trust me so little?’" Friends in Christ, do not trust him so little. Trust him much. Amen.
One of my favorite poems was written by the Christian poet John Donne. I am sure you are familiar with it. It begins, “No man is an island.” The reason I love that poem is because it corrects the sense we tend to have, the fear we tend to have, that we are indeed islands. We are different from one another. We are separate from one another. We are alone. Because we do have that sense. This is why, I suppose, we project images of pleasantry and normalcy and sameness. We want to fit in. We want to be, in Donne’s words, “a piece of the continent; a part of the main.” No one wants to be an island. I had an experience last week that was really revealing. A student of mine asked me to come to her vocal recital. “You sing?” I asked, trying to conceal my surprise, because she is really quiet and self spoken. “Actually, singing is my passion,” she said. So I went to her recital -- sat with a colleague from the music department. Her performance was nearly indescribable. Her vulnerability was in full display. It was so obvious she was risking herself; and taking that risk because of who she wanted to be, but was held back by her shyness from being. Her performance was magnificent, made all the better because her full humanity was on display. It was met by thunderous applause. Afterward, my colleague and I rushed her. “You were fantastic! You are an inspiration to everyone to hazard yourself to the world!” I exclaimed. “Never mind that,” my colleague in the music department said. “Your performance was, musically speaking, flawless.” She teared up. Then tears were rolling down her face. I sensed it was more than gratitude for the compliments. “All my life I have felt so trapped by my shyness,” she confessed.. “I felt like I never belonged, like an outsider looking in on life. It’s hard to explain.” “I understand perfectly,” I said. And I did because of Donne’s poem. She felt different, separate, and alone. She felt she was an island. When she performed, she felt like she had finally joined the human race. I noticed my colleague in the music department wasn’t saying anything. “I understand perfectly too,” he in his turn confessed. “My late mother was an alcoholic. I spent my entire childhood hiding that fact. I had no friends outside school. If someone invited me over I had to say no, since I could never invite them back. Talk about feeling like an outsider looking in. I looked in at everyone who seemed to be living their lives free of shame and secrecy.” He felt different, separate, and alone. He felt like he was an island. “I suppose music was my way out too. My fellow musicians became my family.” As I said, it was a revealing experience. What it revealed is that it’s true. It’s a fact. We probably all, for one reason or another, tend to have the sense, the fear, that we are islands. It could be the result of shyness, or as the result of an alcoholic parent. It could be the result of a disease or disability. It could be as the result of some hidden vice. It could be the result of a non-traditional family. It could be the result of being the black sheep in a traditional family. It could be the result of money problems. It could be the result of creed or race or orientation. We could all cry with Job, “My brethren are wholly estranged from me!” Jesus was walking from Judea to Galilee, a distance of about 100 miles. When’s the last time you walked a hundred miles? That’s quite a distance. And it was seriously hot in that region especially at noon. 100 miles and 100 degrees. Jesus was tired, so when he came upon a well he sat down to rest. The only wrinkle is that the well was in Samaria, enemy territory. There was no love loss between the Jews and the Samaritans. A Samaritan woman came to draw water. But this would have been odd. Unless you were a traveler, no one came to draw water at noon. No one came out at all at noon. The sun was too high in the sky. It was too hot. Noon was lunch time and nap time. Only after the sun was nearly set did people come to the well to draw water. But she couldn’t come at that time. She felt different, separate, and alone. She felt like an island. Worse, she felt like an outcast. But why? It was because she had had five husbands, and the man with whom she was presently living was not sixth. The passage does not tell us why. Why did the Samaritan woman have this string of men in her life? I suppose it could be that she was a brazen and licentious woman. It could be, but I doubt it. Women didn’t have the choice to be brazen and licentious in those days. It’s probably more likely she was some kind of a victim. In those days women’s fortunes turned on their husbands. Their lives were lived largely in the private sphere as opposed to the public sphere. They had no outlets in any public arena. If women had a bad husband, their lives were largely reduced to that. So for her first husband, she probably had a bad husband, hence a bad life. But by the same token a woman needed a husband to subsist. The first husband either died or left her. Then she needed to find a new husband. Who would want her? What value had she? The cast off of a bad husband. And so she probably went from bad to worse, with her second husband even worse than the first. And her value decreased with each successive husband. The man she was with presently wouldn’t even marry her. I am speculating, of course, but my guess is that she had that string of men in her life because it was the only way she could survive. Who would choose that for herself, after all? But here’s the thing. Jesus refrained from judging her. A Samaritan woman with a string of men in her life. He instead engaged in a conversation with her. And he was no fellow outcast. He was the word made flesh, the Son of God. But he engaged with her in a conversation -- talked to her like she mattered, like she had a mind. He made her feel less different, less separate, less alone, less like an island. Even his disciples were blown away by this. And she was so elated by her feeling that someone had addressed her like she was actually a member of the human race, she rushed back to her fellow Samaritans, those who had stigmatized her. She announced with thrill that she could only have just met the Messiah, and she introduced Jesus to them. And he stayed among them, they who were now unified by their common allegiance to him. Now we should get this. We all unified by our common allegiance to Jesus the Messiah. And it helps us to overcome our feeling, our fear, that we are different, separate, alone...that we are islands. But what we may not get is that there is a world of strangers out there who we may presume feel that they are different, separate, and alone, that they are islands. And so Jesus bids us to follow his example. We are to forswear all judgement. We are to engage all people in ways to make them feel that they are loved and honored and respected, that they belong to the human race. Because the bottom line is that we need each other. We need each other because God created us to need each other. At the end of my favorite poem, someone has died. A bell is tolling that death. “Do not ask for whom the bell tolls,” Donne wrote, “It tolls for thee.” We have that in common, at least. We are all going to die. And Jesus through his cross has used our common fate as a way to unify us eternally with his father. That is our destiny, so until that time, let us all prefigure it. Amen.
Subscribe to be the first to know.
Contact Us
Social
Created by Olive + Ash.
Managed by Olive Street Design. 