Many Christians demand that the Ten Commandments be posted in public buildings. … I haven’t heard one of them demand that the Sermon on the Mount, the Beatitudes, be posted anywhere. “Blessed are the merciful” in a courtroom? “Blessed are the peacemakers” in the Pentagon?

Kurt Vonnegut, “Cold Turkey,” In These Times

We are almost done the beatitudes this summer.  It has been a good summer of being challenged to see what is really going on in this famous sermon by Jesus.  Let’s do a little summary of where we’ve been so far.  The first four beatitudes are poor in spirit, mourn, meek and those that hunger and thirst for righteousness.  Jesus works at two angles in this sermon.  In the first four he is describing a condition that we are in.  Mourning, meek, hungry, poor…..these are all describing conditions where God meets us.  The first four beatitudes is when God meets you where you are at.

The second four are merciful, pure in heart, peacemakers and those that are persecuted.  These last four are more about relations.  These last four are about how after God meets you, he then transforms you to interact with others completely differently.  After you’ve recognized and you’ve become the first four, you can no longer relate to others the same way at all.  God completely transforms the way you look at and treat people.

So we are looking at being a peacemaker, and apparently, by being one you get the great title of being called child of God.  Now there are a few terms that we should get out of the way in terms of what a peacemaker is.  For starters, a peacemaker is not the same thing as a peacekeeper.

Q: What is the difference between a peacekeeper and a peacemaker?

What I would see the difference between the two is that you can keep peace with guns.  Walk into a room with two people fighting and pull out a weapon and those two people are probably going to stop fighting.  Walk into a country conflict with your advanced machinery and you will keep the peace for a little while, they will all be awe of your presence.  What ends up happening though is instead of there being conflict between two sides, not there is just conflict on three sides and you become the third side.  Then we end up calling extremely destructive bombs, like Richard Nixon did, “the peacekeeper.”  This isn’t peace.  Oppressive and strong people call their attempts to control; peace, but we know better, you might create a sense of peace for a while, but there is no real peace there.  If you have to take sides, you misunderstand what peace is.

“True peace is not merely the absence of tension, but the presence of justice and brotherhood.”
– Martin Luther King, Jr.

Jesus, knowing that they intended to come and make him king by force, withdrew again to a mountain by himself

John 6:15

The peacemakers are are the ones who are not so convinced of their own truth that they are unable to see the truth in another.  They do not have to make the other wrong in order to believe that they are right.  The peacemakers are able to entertain the idea that truth might be bigger than their own particular piece of it…..they are those that are open to truth in others, even when it challenges their own truth.

– Kathleen O’Connell Chesto

“When I ask your opinion, you tell me what you think.  Now I have what you think and what I think.  If I argue with what you think, you give me five reasons why you think it.  And if I argue with each of those five reasons, you give me five more reasons for each of them.  Now I have thirty reasons why you think what you do.  And I can use them to make a good decision.”

“This is the argument of the peacemaker.  It is not the contentious arguing of those who are trying to explain or justify themselves and their actions.  The peacemakers do not argue to convince us of their truth, but that we can convince them of ours.  “Persuade me, Broaden my truth, enliven my vision with your own particular piece of reality.”  As my son would point out, it’s how they listen.  It is the listening that is essential, the listening that marks this as more than argument, the listening that leads to wisdom.  And when the need to explain ourselves and our position is greatest, then the listening demands total silence.”

- Kathleen O’Connell Chesto

“To be a peacemaker means not to judge or condemn or speak badly of people, not to rejoice in any form of ill that may strike them. Peacemaking is holding people gently in prayer, wishing them to be well and free. Peacemaking is welcoming people who are weak and in need, maybe just with a smile, giving them support, offering them kindness and tenderness, and opening our hearts to them. It is welcoming those with whom we may have difficulty or whom we may not especially like, those who are ….. different than us. It is to approach people not from a pedestal, a position of power and certitude, in order to solve problems, but from a place of listening, understanding, humility, and love. When we relinquish power, we become more open to the compassion of God.”
-Jean Vanier

Bing a peacemaker is part of being surrendered to God, for God brings peace. We abandon the effort to get our needs met through the destruction of enemies. -

Glen H. Stassen and David P. Gushee

Actually, we who engage in nonviolent direct action are not the creators of tension. We merely bring to the surface the hidden tension that is already alive. We bring it out in the open, where it can be seen and dealt with. Like a boil that can never be cured so long as it is covered up, but must be opened with all its ugliness to the natural medicines of air and light, injustice must be exposed with all the tension its exposure creates to the light of human conscience and the air of national opinion before it can be cured.”

– Martin Luther King, Jr.

“There is no peace because there are no peacemakers. There are no makers of peace because the making of peace is at least as costly as the making of war – at least as exigent, at least as disruptive, at least as liable to bring disgrace and prison and death in its wake.”
– Father Daniel Berrigan

The peace intended is not merely that of political and economic stability, as in the Greco-Roman world, but peace in the Old Testament inclusive sense of wholeness, all that constitutes well-being. … The “peacemakers,” therefore, are not simply those who bring peace between two conflicting parties, but those actively at work making peace, bringing about wholeness and well-being among the alienated.
Robert A. Guelich

You may have the bulldozers, planes and helicopters that smash houses to rubble, the commandos who descend from ropes on ships and kill unarmed civilians on the high seas as well as in Gaza, the vast power of the state behind you. We have only our hands and our hearts and our voices. But note this. Note this well. It is you who are afraid of us. We are not afraid of you. We will keep working and praying, keep protesting and denouncing, keep pushing up against your navy and your army, with nothing but our bodies, until we prove that the force of morality and justice is greater than hate and violence. And then, when there is freedom in Gaza, we will forgive … you. We will ask you to break bread with us. We will bless your children even if you did not find it in your heart to bless the children of those you occupied. And maybe it is this forgiveness, maybe it is the final, insurmountable power of love, which unsettles you the most.
- Chris Hedges

Now when Joshua was near Jericho, he looked up and saw a man standing in front of him with a drawn sword in his hand. Joshua went up to him and asked, “Are you for us or for our enemies?”
“Neither,” he replied, “but as commander of the army of the Lord I have now come.” Then Joshua fell facedown to the ground in reverence, and asked him, “What message does my Lord have for his servant?”

Now peacemaking is a divine work. For peace means reconciliation, and God is the author of peace and of reconciliation. … It is hardly surprising, therefore, that the particular blessing which attaches to peacemakers is that “they shall be called sons of God.” For they are seeking to do what their Father has done, loving people with his love.
John R. W. Stott

As we go through the beatitudes we have heard all sorts of different theories and perspectives on what they are. They are values of what people should hold in being part of the Kingdom. They are statements about the fate of the people they describe. They are evolving and natural characteristics of all Christians. We’ve talked about two of his statements thus far:

Blessed are the poor in spirit,
for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Blessed are those who mourn,
for they will be comforted.

The first beatitude is the very basics of the Christian faith. It asks us to have an honest look at who we are and realize our own poorness and inability to hold onto any righteousness on our own. All are poor in spirit, but only some realize this and live in this reality. As the parables as well teach us, anyone who thinks he can make it on his own or come even close to being better off than someone else (Pharisee and the Tax Collector) is not poor in spirit. When we realize that death to ourselves is the only option and that life only comes by the death and Resurrection of Christ, that is when we become poor in spirit. We’ve also heard the opinion that being poor in spirit is not a quality that we should seek or desire. This isn’t saying you need to be poor. This is making a statement that it is those that are poor in spirit that the kingdom of heaven belong too. However, this of course makes you want to be poor in spirit, so that you will get the kingdom of heaven also.

This inevitably leads to the second statement by Jesus which Aaron spoke about last week. We end up mourning and crying out along with all the father’s of our faith. The earth, the angels, our spirits and Jesus all cry out and mourn the coming and redemption of all things. We mourn because things are not as they should be. We mourn because it doesn’t feel right, something is broken, and that something is us alongside of every else that we are surrounded by. We mourn because we are pour in spirit.

Out of these two, comes the statement by Jesus that we are going to focus on this morning.

Blessed are the meek,
for they will inherit the earth.

This is a wonderfully backwards statement. The world in Jesus time, and conveniently enough for this sermon, the world today works completely different. In today’s world, in any world actually, the line would normally be something like

Successful are those that push to the top
for they can become anything they want

The world moves around through strength and power and success and self-congratulating and non-stop aggressiveness. We tell our children that they can be anything they want to be. Our schools are setup to be competitive in nature so our children are constantly compared to other children and then based on that we evaluate their performance based on a few letters. The more you assert yourself in this world, the better chance you have to get what you want. This is what we tell our kids, this is what we believe and this is how generally the world, and us, work.

Even in this Jesus time when he was saying these things, people would have not really grasped what was going on. The Jews had ideas for their kingdom that was going to be violent and militaristic. They were waiting for a Messiah to come and wipe their enemies and restore their power. They were trying to scheme all sorts of ways to speed up this process and bring back the control that they so longed for. They were expecting victory and world conquest. Then, this man who people claim is the Messiah launches into his victory speech. Remember the speech that Gladiator does before his army goes into battle? All his troops are lined up and ready to slit the throats of their enemy and then Russel Crowe gives his pump-up speech before the battle. That’s sort of an exaggeration, but this is kind of how I see Jesus’ sermon on the mount. Those that are listening to him are blood-thirsty and longing for freedom from their oppression by the Romans. They want vengeance. This Messiah is exactly that person who is supposed to lead them into that. Thousands follow him at this point in his ministry and it’s not just because he can do magic tricks. It’s because he was ushering in a new kingdom and people thought this meant forcing out the old. They were for their prophecies to come true and freedom to be taken a hold of.

If you’ve seen any war movie, the opening speech is usually a pump up speech that gets people ready to go into battle. People are hooting and hollering and banging their swords on their shields. They are all there to finally get what they deserve and give to the enemy what they deserve. This is how I picture the beatitudes. This kind of scene, with these kind of people just longing for God to end the suffering and free them from oppression and most importantly restore their power. Then Jesus gives his victory speech:

Blessed are the poor in spirit,
for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Blessed are those who mourn,
for they will be comforted.
Blessed are the meek,
for they will inherit the earth.

What? Really Jesus? What a downer. These are not what they would have expected. This was completely backwards and a little anti-climatic. Especially this blessed are the meek line. Like we get that the people who mourn are going to be comforted and we can even let the fact go that those that are poor will inherit their rewards later in heaven. But this blessed are the meek part doesn’t really fly. So why? Why not? What is meek and why is this so appalling?

Don’t get too caught up in trying to describe the word, sometimes it’s easier to describe the person. Generally the word meek as been thought to mean just humble. In many cases they are right, they definitely have similarities. Meek though has a whole bunch more meaning that doesn’t usually come with the word humble. Greek word Praus which mean gentle strength. So this word more denotes two different realities. Humility is only one of them. We can barely picture someone being strong and meek. A meek person is one who has great power and is confident yet full of humility and self-realization of who they actually are. It’s kind of a paradox. For this person will appear weak at times, but they will have great strength. They will have looked defeated yet they will be content with knowing they have won.

If we look at the word meek to simply mean “humble” then I think we have missed a step. We end up using teaching things like to go into the closet and pray, keep private, your faith doesn’t need to be on display. Jesus though constantly speaks against this type of humility in terms of becoming a disciple. Matthew shows us this in other chapters when he quotes Jesus saying things like ‘You are the light of the world.’ and ‘a city built on a hill cannot be hid.’ Jesus doesn’t want his disciples just to keep to themselves and be humble followers in a corner somewhere. He obviously wants his followers to be out there, not hidden, being light, not dark. Any attempts that we try to make ourselves invisible, Jesus diminishes. So meekness isn’t being hidden, or staying in a closet. So how does a humble person be meek?

So I’m just gonna throw this out there to get the conversation moving. Here is what I think a meek person looks like.

What qualities do you think I am wrong about in this list? Would you add any? What worries you about a meek person?

Lots of great discussion happened in this part.  Some said that you can still be worth something while not defending yourself.  Some said this description didn’t have enough outward action statements about what this guy does actually do.

So Jesus has done it again. He has flipped what was common feeling about how the world should work and he lifts up the losers and those that don’t have it together.

“…in the Gospels the kingdom message transforms those who meekly embrace it, just as it crushes the arrogant, the religiously and socially satisfied.”
- Craig S. Keener

So how do we be transformed into being more meek, if we have to meekly embrace the kingdom to do that? What comes first? Here is my suggestion. This is only one suggestion of a way that we can see the world and an attitude that I think will help transform us to become more meek. Paul echos the words of Jesus in a few of his passages in 2 Corinthians 6,  I think it might help us make more sense of what to do with Jesus’ statement.

We put no stumbling block in anyone’s path, so that our ministry will not be discredited. Rather, as servants of God we commend ourselves in every way: in great endurance; in troubles, hardships and distresses; in beatings, imprisonments and riots; in hard work, sleepless nights and hunger; in purity, understanding, patience and kindness; in the Holy Spirit and in sincere love; in truthful speech and in the power of God; with weapons of righteousness in the right hand and in the left; through glory and dishonor, bad report and good report; genuine, yet regarded as impostors; known, yet regarded as unknown; dying, and yet we live on; beaten, and yet not killed; sorrowful, yet always rejoicing; poor, yet making many rich; having nothing, and yet possessing everything.

It’s this last sentence that I think is quite similar with what Jesus is saying here. How can one have nothing and yet possess everything? The same question I ask, how does one be meek and yet inherit the earth? So here is my suggestion. My thought here is that typically when we see a paradox in the gospels is because there are two different realities colliding. One one hand you have to die, but by doing that you live. Now this doesn’t mean that if you jump off a bridge, you are going to be resurrected. What it does mean though is you have to die to yourself spiritually, so that you can come alive in all things. How can we be sorrowful and yet always rejoicing? Well it’s the same like Aaron pointed out last week. Jesus was somehow able to live in both worlds. He was able to mourn the loss of Lazurus all the while knowing he could raise him from the dead. So there is a paradox here, but it’s an easier one to explain because it’s talking about two different realities and living in the tension of both.

To be meek is to understand and live in this tension of both realities. The realities are this.

• You have nothing and are nothing
• You possess everything and are loved

How do these two things work together? A meek man has somehow figured it out. This would be a good explanation of someone who is meek. Someone who has learned to live in both these realities.

On the one hand a meek man recognizes his sinful nature and sees himself as nothing special, nothing to be worshiped, not one to deserve his own way. On the other hand he recognizes he is a child of God, valued beyond all measure, and all things are his for the taking. Meekness can live in both realities. I found this quote online recently, and it came to my mind for this sermon.

All of the computers on Ebay are mine. In fact, everything on Ebay is already mine. All of those things are just in long term storage that I pay nothing for. Storage is free.
When I want to take something out of storage, I just pay the for the storage costs for that particular thing up to that point, plus a nominal shipping fee, and my things are delivered to me so I can use them. When I am done with them, I return them to storage via Craigslist or Ebay, and I am given a fee as compensation for freeing up the storage facilities resources.
This is also the case with all of my stuff that Amazon and Walmart are holding for me. I have antiques, priceless art, cars, estates, and jewels beyond the dreams of avarice.
The world is my museum, displaying my collections on loan. The James Savages of the world are merely curators.
As I am the curator of their things, and thus together we all share the world.

When I first read this quote to people, they gawked because it obviously isn’t a reality. All of the computers aren’t literally mine. However, here would be where I think separates a meek person apart. A meek person would have the attitude where this quote is true whether or not it exists physically or not. This isn’t a statement that describes reality, rather it describes a approach and attitude to a way of looking at the world. Meekness has a large part to do with an attitude towards life, and very little to do with what actually happens in your life. Someone who is meek sees all humans as equal, all in the same boat, all deserving the same fate, all having access to the same gifts as anyone else. All the early church fathers saw all possessions as being in common with all, why would one have more rite to something? They can live their life with this reality. Someone could steal a meek person’s IPod and they wouldn’t really flinch, because they never had the belief that it was really theres in the first place. Someone could hurl insults non-stop at a meek person, and the meek person could go on living their life, because meek people live in truth, not try to create fake ones.

The next part of Jesus’ statement is that they will inherit the earth. When we look at this verse we could interpret it has someone who longs for power would look at it. This meekness is not simply a tool to gain power and inherit the earth. Some think that this verse means that the meek will one day rule over us all. I’m more inclined it’s more like what we were talking about earlier. There is a paradox here. There is statement of what will happen to meek people. What if it means that meek people, because they are meek, have an attitude towards the earth that sees it as all theres already. What if meekness is the quality needed to fully embrace everything that is yours already?

If you don’t have any lower to go. If you have already admitted to yourself that you don’t really deserve anything, that you aren’t all that you want yourself to be, only then can you be free to see the world for what it is and receive God’s grace and your value from a true source. If you don’t see everything in the world’s as being a gift to us all, then you will not see everything in the world as yours already. If you see yourself better than you are, then you only have down to go.

“He that is down need fear no fall.”
- John Bunyan

So this morning what I want to do is grab the journals and write down and answer a few questions, then I want you to comment on your own answers and internally wrestle with your own answers.

Do you get/stay offended when someone says something mean to you?
Do you complain a lot when you go through standard trials in life such as sickness or over material possessions?
Do you think you have anything to learn from children or the disabled?
Do other people annoy you a lot?
When was the last time you took the back seat so someone could surpass you?
Are you mostly a content/happy person?
Do you find yourself upset about where your life is at and unable to make change?
Do you love having new things and shopping?

After you have answered these questions, just write about it. Why did you answer these questions this way? Are they good answers that you are proud of or do you wish you would change? What steps are you going to make to change? I don’t ask these questions to make you feel bad. I think it’s important to ask these questions because they help reveal parts about you that you should begin to discipline yourself to change. Is we are going to be a community of meek followers of Christ, then we need to all be actively seeking this way of living. So be honest with yourself. Question your motives. Dig deep into yourself and ask these questions and then after, just write and reflect on your answers.

Let’s pray together.

We’ve spent two weeks now in the Book of Job.  We’ve spent some time with Job’s friends in the first week and took apart their accusations and why they would jump to such extravagant conclusions about Job’s life.  Then last week we spent some time with Job and asked questions like what does it mean to suffer and why we can’t accept suffering as real life and move on.  We always try and explain away our suffering as to feel like we are in some type of control.  This week we are jumping into God’s speeches.

God speaking is a pretty big deal.  Some scholars are so amazed that God actually pipes up and speaks at all, so much so that they barely pay attention to what he says.  They say that just the very fact of him speaking satisfies the deepest desires of Job.  We won’t stop there.  We will assume that because it is in there that his actual words have something for us to understand.  God’s speeches are split up into two different ones with a small part by Job in the middle of the two.  The first speech emphasizes God’s plan and as it evolves it gives meaning to all of God’s creative work and then second speech shows of God’s justice in how he runs the world.  The author of Job saves his best writing for God’s speeches.  This is considered beautiful poetry in the Hebrew language.  In his two speeches, God doesn’t even respond to Job’s questions.  He doesn’t bring up his problems, or pity him, or acknowledge any of the brutal things that has happened to him.  God opens up his speech with:

Who is this that darkens my counsel
with words without knowledge?
Brace yourself like a man;
I will question you,
and you shall answer me.

God instantly accuses Job of having no knowledge and starts right in on the offensive.  God doesn’t respond to anything that Job asks.  Not a single thing.  So much for the idea of prayer or speaking to God, right?  We think that praying or begging God for an answer works, but we might not get anything in terms of what we are actually asking.  We might just get God showing up.  Are we happy with that?  Is Job happy with that?  When we pray, when we are suffering and we beg of God for answers, we beg that God tells us what is going on and especially why things are happening, are we ok when he changes the subject?  In this case, God gives no answer of sort.  The only thing remotes helpful is he actually shows up.  Sometimes this just isn’t good enough for us.  We don’t want God to just show up.  We want answers.  As if God knew what we were thinking.  He dives right into his assault:

Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation?
Tell me, if you understand.

Who marked off its dimensions? Surely you know!
Who stretched a measuring line across it?

On what were its footings set,
or who laid its cornerstone-

while the morning stars sang together
and all the angels shouted for joy?

Who shut up the sea behind doors
when it burst forth from the womb,

when I made the clouds its garment
and wrapped it in thick darkness,

when I fixed limits for it
and set its doors and bars in place,

when I said, ‘This far you may come and no farther;
here is where your proud waves halt’?

God, or Yahweh, starts going through the initial stages of creation giving us different pictures of what that would look like.  He starts to show Job through his questions that his troubles mean nothing in terms of the brilliant governance and creation of the world that he is in.  See Job doubted God.  He doubted that God was consistent in managing the world in righteousness.  So God asks him if he really knows what he is talking about.    He asks him as if Job was there at the beginning.  He reminds Job that his plan has its origin in the gratuitousness of creative love.  However, from the Hebrew Bible perspective, wisdom was God’s sole companion at the creation of the world.  So Job lacks useful knowledge of anything that God is talking about.  So he can’t really answer God at all.  God is full of beautiful imagery of how the world was created and how he keeps sustaining it.

Not only did God plan everything, the world, the skies, the water. He also made sure that everything was created and held into place according to that plan.  It certainly wasn’t Job that did all that.  Did Job even help with laying the cornerstone?  Did he cut the opening ceremonies ribbon?  Since no human was there, humankind as a whole is left in the dark about how the universe really works and was created.  Job is in no place to answer any of these questions by God.  So we have Job who has just suffered the most extraordinary of bad circumstances and then God finally shows up on scene, tells Job to give it his best shot, and using hyperbole launches into a full out show-off attack.  Here is God, who didn’t seem to have any problems with volunteering Job for the worst of circumstances and now he just wants to make a point about how great he is?

How do you feel about God’s response so far?  Is it cold and callous or does it speak to God’s bigness and supreme reign over humanity?

David Bazan thinks it is cold and callous, in his song “In Stitches” his final verse is:

When Job asked you the question
You responded who are you
To challenge your creator
Well if that one part is true
It makes you sound defensive
Like you had not thought it through
Enough to have an answer
Or you might have bit off more than you could chew.

I think that what was going on here isn’t so much God showing off without any care for Job or what he’s going for.  I also don’t think it’s simply God changing the subject completely ignoring what’s happening telling him to suck it up.  I don’t think Bazan is right in calling God defensive either.  What I think is going on here is God is setting people in their place.  He comes onto the scene after over 30 chapters of whining, accusations, complaining, questioning God’s wisdom and character and depression.  He just wants to set the record straight that none of them really have any clue what they are talking about.  The very fact that God comes in and speaks tells me that no one is really doing a good job in speaking on behalf of him at all. Job hadn’t sinned, and God was confirming that by not even once bringing anything up.  At the very least, Job hadn’t sinned nearly enough to elicit a response from God about it directly.  Job’s friends obviously didn’t get it either, because God doesn’t even acknowledge their existence at all yet.  The text says that God answered Job, no one else.

God is responding to this deep sense of selfishness and self-entitlement that Job and his friends all seem to have.  Job and his friends had this idea that the world was created for them and no one else.  If you have this belief, then you believe that everything around you is for your immediate use.  They thought that they knew the reason it was created and if they knew the reason then they assume they know the specific path it is supposed to take.  The problem lies with the fact that they did not understand how it all started, like they thought they did.  If they don’t know how and why it is all there, then they certainly have no idea what the path it is going to take will be.

Like we talked about in the first week.  They thought creation existed for them.  Since they thought they knew how it started they assumed that they way it worked was according to retribution theology, good things happen to good people, bad things happen to bad people.  God steps up and criticizes that entire way of thinking.  He says look, you have no idea how this all started, so you certainly don’t know how it’s going to end and you absolutely don’t know all the steps in between.

“What God is criticizing here is every theology that presumes to pigeonhole the divine action in history and gives the illusory impression of knowing it in advance.”
- Gustavo Gutierrez

This book, we can pressume from how God answers, is not a lesson in how to suffer and come out on top.  This isn’t facing into the problem of evil in the world.  For all the messages we’ve heard how Job is a book about the problem of evil, the problem of suffering, or why do bad things happen to good people I don’t know if they have done us much good in helping us understand what God is saying.  Here we are at the end of the book, God has spoken and he hasn’t dealt with any of these issues at all.  Instead he faces right into the idea that we can know anything at all about the ways that God works.  We don’t, so stop pretending.  We cannot lay hands on God and try to fit him into our narrow way of thinking.  We cannot imprison him into our ignorant theological concepts.  He asks, do we really want to make ourselves the judge of his actions?  In that kind of universe, where the creation can limit and constrain God’s action, God would not be God.  This is how they saw absolutely everything, everything had an answer, everything was reduced to cause and effect.

“The revelation of God’s plan, when received with good judgment, will show Job that the doctrine of retribution is not the key to understanding the universe; this doctrine can give rise only to a commonplace relationship of self interest with God and others.  The reason for believing “for nothing” — the theme set at the beginning of the book–is the free and gratuitous initiative taken by divine love.”
- Gustavo Gutierrez

For nothing.  This is the part of this quote we need to take apart for a little bit.  This is what God seems to be saying in his speeches.  So no matter what questions Job and his friends asked.  They didn’t get answers.  They were told instead that the world does not turn and move on their questions and it does not behave the way that they expected.  Instead, the world was created because God loves it, and God loves us.  That is the purpose of the entire creation.  God created it because he loves it and finds pleasure in it.  He doesn’t create it to enact retribution laws throughout it.  The world is not about laws and having to work and move in a certain way.  Can you even fathom a world where things happen in it and you aren’t there?  God can.

Who cuts a channel for the torrents of rain,
and a path for the thunderstorm,

to water a land where no man lives,
a desert with no one in it,

to satisfy a desolate wasteland
and make it sprout with grass?

In ancient culture, rain was directly related to being cursed or being blessed.  If you got rain you were being blessed.  If you didn’t you were getting cursed.  However, God is stomping all over this way of thinking.  The world doesn’t work that way.  To prove it he says why in the world would it rain where there is no one?  Why?  Cause God loves it.  God wants it to.  It has nothing to do with you.  You aren’t even in the picture.  How selfish you are to think that it only rains just to bless you.  It’s raining everywhere, all the time, and for no reason at that.  The world doesn’t revolve around humanity and what it’s needs are.  The world revolves around God’s never-ending, forever gracious love.

“Not everything that exists was made to be directly useful to human beings; therefore, they may not judge everything from their point of view.  The world of nature expresses the freedom and delight of God in creating.  It refuses to be limited to the narrow confines of the cause-effect relationship.”
- Gustavo Gutierrez

God starts listing example after example of things that have nothing to do with humans.  He gives examples of things that make no sense at all.

The wings of the ostrich flap joyfully,
but they cannot compare with the pinions and feathers of the stork.

She lays her eggs on the ground
and lets them warm in the sand,

unmindful that a foot may crush them,
that some wild animal may trample them.

She treats her young harshly, as if they were not hers;
she cares not that her labor was in vain,

for God did not endow her with wisdom
or give her a share of good sense.

Yet when she spreads her feathers to run,
she laughs at horse and rider.

He spends a bunch of verses here expounding on the stupidity of an ostrich.  The ostrich makes no sense.  God says it doesn’t have to.  He made it and he loves it and the ostrich loves it.  What else could you ask for.  Stop needing to make sense of everything.  God expresses full delight in the world because he made it.  It rains on no one and it rains on nothing; it doesn’t need necessity because it just pleases God.  Utility is not the primary reason for God’s action.  It doesn’t need to make any practical sense.  Yet we seem to try to fit all God’s actions into our theological constructs and refuse to seek him outside of them.  We want answers to our questions.  Why is their evil?  Why am I suffering?  Why did she turn into this?  Why did this happen?  We don’t think outside of that.  We think that because evil exists, there must be a reason for it, and that we must know what it is.  Our theology tells us that God is good, and if that is true, our theology also tells us that there are good reasons for all these things that have happened.  They don’t exist so we make them up.  We say that God must be teaching us a lesson.  Or God is trying to strengthen us for the next hardship.  Or God is building up our character to be a better person.  We have so many reasons as to why everything happens.  One thing we are unwilling to do, at any time though for some reason is to make the obvious observation that God just straight up caused all this grief for no reason.

Think about it.  Let’s just read this part of the story together.

Then the LORD said to Satan, “Have you considered my servant Job? There is no one on earth like him; he is blameless and upright, a man who fears God and shuns evil.”

“Does Job fear God for nothing?” Satan replied.  “Have you not put a hedge around him and his household and everything he has? You have blessed the work of his hands, so that his flocks and herds are spread throughout the land.  But stretch out your hand and strike everything he has, and he will surely curse you to your face.”

The LORD said to Satan, “Very well, then, everything he has is in your hands, but on the man himself do not lay a finger.”

Then Satan went out from the presence of the LORD.

God totally sets up on Job, and it doesn’t even look like he has a reason.  Then to top it all off, after Satan goes out and kills everyone the story happens all over again and this time Satan gets to attach his body.  Thanks God.  After all this, you don’t even have the decency to give some explanation why you did these things.

Why did God allow this?  Is God directly responsible for the evil in Job’s life?

If he is responsible, we want to give him a reason.  If he’s not responsible we have to explain why he is not.  It seems to me that God doesn’t want off the hook for the evil.

“The point is this: if God seems to be in no hurry to make the problem of evil go away, maybe we shouldn’t be, either.  Maybe our compulsion to wash God’s hands for him is a service he doesn’t appreciate.  Maybe–all theodicies and nearly all theologians to the contrary–evil is where we meet God.  Maybe he isn’t bothered by showing up dirty for his dates with creation.  Maybe–just maybe –if we ever solved the problem, we’d have talked ourselves out of a lover….God neither apologizes nor explains, and he certainly makes no effort to solve the problem of evil for them.  He just goes on arranging rendezvous after disreputable rendezvous, no matter how little anyone thing of his choice of trysting places.”
- Robert Capon

Are we ok with allowing God to be the source and the reason for evil like in this story without trying to make it something else? Should Job have been OK with everything that has happened?  I don’t think he had to be OK with it, but eventually, to be part of this world, we need to learn what it means to give up ourselves to something else.  To be in a relationship with a creator that we can’t understand, sometimes we have to give up on what we think we know, or what we want to know.

“And what is love if it is not the indulgence of the ultimate risk of giving one’s self to another over whom we have no control?”
- Robert Capon

God is really not interested in cleaning up our stories.  He seems ok with it all being put back on his plate.  He seems like he wants to take the blame.  This isn’t really something that we should avoid.  We need to give it to him and let it rest on his plate.  The problem of every evil thing that happens in the world isn’t our fault.  So back to God’s response.  What he does want us to know, is that he is interested in being in love with his creation.  He created it.  He holds it all together.  He wants Job to know that he is in absolute love and is completely pleased with everything he is done including creating Job.  He is not regretting his decisions.  This makes it difficult for us.  This means that we are kind of stuck in this weird paradox of wanting and crying out for justice and wanting what is right and knowing that God also wants justice and wants what is right and in the same breath realizing that God is seemingly doing nothing about it.

Eventually we will see.  If God tells enough stories, maybe then we will realize that he doesn’t work even remotely like we imagined or thought.  The entire story of the Bible is completely opposite to where we would like to land.  Capon tries to explain it a bit using 1 and 2 Kings.

If you look at the author of 1 and 2 Kings, we an see that there was a theologian at work here trying to make a statement.  He didn’t just want to tell you what happened, but he had a theological understanding that the reason the history of God’s people went so badly was because their kings constantly broke and transgressed the law.  The theory of the author worked for quite a while.  You start with Eli the priest and his disobedient sons, which then the Philistines defeated the people of Israel.  Next, God sent Samuel to clean things up but the people pushed their way into needing a King.  Neither God or Samuel wanted that to happen but let it happen anyway.  They get a King, and Saul disobeyed.  David on the other hand did pretty good, but then gave it to Solomon who royally screwed it up which eventually lead to the kingdom falling apart.

So the kingdom is split and both the northern and southern kingdoms are failing to listen to the law whatsoever.  Every king that he lists did exactly what they were not supposed to do, none of them were good.  So the author thinks, that if there was only one King that would come along and really keep the law, and do it well, then everything bad would stop happening and everything would be honky dory.  So finally, King Josiah, King of Judah steps into the mix.  He keeps every law that was ever made.  He purifies the temple and keeps the passover and kids out all the idols, laws that weren’t kept since before any king existed.

“Before him there was no king like him, who turned to the Lord with all his heart, with all his soul, and with all his might….nor did any like him arise after him.”
2 Kings 23:25

Then guess how the story ends?  Josiah dies in battle, slain by Pharaoh Neco of Egypt, who also takes over Jerusalem.  Then he gets taken over by Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon who then leads Israel into their time of exile.  Even the authors of the bible can’t wrap their heads around what is happening.  They are convinced God works one way.  Even when he doesn’t.  The author of Kings is at a lost, he hits a block in his writing for a little bit and then chooses to ignore it and goes right on writing again as if all it would take is a king to obey the law.  He’s desperately trying to make sense as to why in the world Israel would constantly find themselves getting destroyed, so he makes up a reason.

“Christian theologians who address themselves to the problem of evil should treat it as a mystery to be entered, not as a puzzle to be solved.”
-Robert Capon

We come to the same conclusion as a few weeks ago.  Instead of trying to answer and explain away everything that happens we need to be humbled.  This means that instead of trying to seek all the things that God does, why don’t we just seek God.  Job’s friends are determined to lay hands on God, instead of abandoning themselves to God’s embrace and God’s inconceivable way of doing things.

Jesus has a similar situation in Mark, where he seems to respond the same way as God does here.

Then James and John, the sons of Zebedee, came to him. “Teacher,” they said, “we want you to do for us whatever we ask.”

“What do you want me to do for you?” he asked.

They replied, “Let one of us sit at your right and the other at your left in your glory.”

“You don’t know what you are asking,” Jesus said. “Can you drink the cup I drink or be baptized with the baptism I am baptized with?”

“We can,” they answered. Jesus said to them, “You will drink the cup I drink and be baptized with the baptism I am baptized with, but to sit at my right or left is not for me to grant. These places belong to those for whom they have been prepared.”

Mark 10

James and John are even a little more forthright than Job’s friends are.  They just say straight up: do whatever we want.  Jesus takes the same response as God.  Who do you think you are?  Do you even know what your asking?  Can you do what I’m doing?  Can you handle what I’m going to handle?  Then he goes off into a rant about being great and becoming a servant.

James and John are making the same mistake.  They think they are the center of the universe.  They think that nothing else matters but them.  In Job, God speaks of all the wonders of creation and nature and makes the gap larger than Job could comprehend.  They are different.  Job has no idea what is going on whatsoever.  In Mark, Jesus makes the gap just as large and I don’t really think James and John know what they are talking about.  They can’t do what he is doing or going to do.

What I love about both these passages is that neither Jesus nor God punishes or gets angry at Job, James or John for their questions.  The questions are allowed.  The lamenting is allowed.  They are allowed to be in their ignorance.  Job finds some type of freedom in his complaints and rebellion.  God doesn’t correct him, he simply puts him in his place.

You and I are indeed free to cry out, to lament, to scream—if need be. The God to whom we call does not ignore his dearly beloved creature. It is just that God refuses to be confined within to a system of predictable rewards and punishments. Jesus reminds us that “he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous.” (Mt 5: 45)
- Gustavo Gutierrez

It is difficult, but we must resist simply becoming like Job’s friends and creating reasons that don’t exist and trying to put God into our box of explanations.  Remember that Job never finds out why he is suffering.  God never gives him an answer.  God is completely uninterested in why and it seems to be that he has no interest on whether or not we care about why either.  He doesn’t answer why but he does reassure that Job is not simply a prisoner of retribution theology or karma.  He reassures him, and puts Job’s friends into place, by reminding them that God doesn’t work in the ways we want him to.

God wants to move us to a place of admiration.  The best people that can teach theology are not those that try to argue for the faith or explain away every single detail of some systemic rant.  The best theologians just display what they know.  Remember the blind guy in John 9?  I don’t know any of the answers to the questions you are asking me.  But I do know this.  I once was blind, but now I see.  Look at God’s answers.  I am not going to give you any answers to the questions you are asking me but look at the waterfalls, and the animals and the seas and the beautiful creation which I keep in tact every day all day long.

(ht naked pastor)

We need to move from explanation to appreciation.  Admiration will truly set us free.  God knew this.  So he sets up the stage and performs and reminds Job of all the wonders of nature, which God created.  I can only show you this paradox that leaves you upset and wanting more.  I cannot give you anymore thing more than that.  This is what God leaves us with when we are presented with the problem of evil.  His wonderful and awe-inspiring image of creation and everything his hand can do, that ours can’t.  This isn’t to stop us from asking questions, this is to remind us that all the questions and answers we are dying for might not be as necessary to right now as we think.  We don’t stop asking questions, we just need to remember that we are no longer prisoner to the answers.

So when people are dying to know where you stand on the subject of secular music, or birth control, or abortion, or homosexuality.  You can exit that situation with having to worry about what the right answer or Christian answer is.  Your truths don’t rest in systemic theology of right and wrong answers.  Instead your truths are proclamations that once you were blind but now you see.

“We arrive in our several pulpits not as the bearers of proof but as the latest runners in a long relay race; not as savants with arguments to take away the doubts of the faithful but as breathless messengers.”
- Robert Capon

This month is called Neighbours. The imagery we are playing with this month is the idea of different people living together, in different and unique looking homes but still being on the same street. This will lend itself for us understanding how God interacts with us and also how we should interact with each other. So we are going to shape this month by the book of Job. The book of Job is a unique book and it consists of two parts. There is the narrative account of Job’s trial and his restoration and then the majority of the text are speeches from his friends, himself and God that dialogue on the issue of suffering. We would call Job wisdom literature and there are many comparable other texts in other religious writings. There is the Protests of the Eloquent Peasant that is similar that is about a peasant who is robbed and the authorities refuse to listen to his complaint. Job could also be compared with The Admonitions of Ipu-wer where Ipu-Wer protests the upheaval in society and is distressed at the decline of morality. The most commonly known parallel is one called “I will Praise the Lord of Wisdom” also known as “The Poem of the Righteous Sufferer” or the “Babylonian Job.” A powerful man is suddenly reduced to dreadful suffering and laments in great detail. He knows of no sin in his life but unlike Job does not rebuke or condemn his God. There have been plenty of parallels made between Job and the righteous suffering servant in Isaiah and eventually Jesus. I mention these because it’s important to note that the problem of good and evil and suffering is a question that all cultures, and all religions are wrestling with and have been wrestling with since we know of humans existence.

This month we are going to pull apart the text just a bit and split it three ways. We have a whole lot of speeches in the text that typically when we hear the story we ignore completely. We enjoy focusing on the story where job gets tested a bunch of crappy things happen and then in the end he gets everything back but even better. However I think that is the entire problem with this text is that we don’t spend any time in the speeches.

If we look at the story of Job as a man who was innocent and then got crapped on from whatever powers he was subject too but because he was innocent and stay steadfast to God, he was then blessed later, then we are going to have some serious theological issues. It is these theological issues that I want to tackle today. I think we have embedded deep in us a sense of what is called retribution theology that I think needs to go. Retribution theology is a theology that tells us that good things happen to good people and bad things happen to bad people. The underlying assumption is that there is a God out there that rewards good behaviour and punishes bad behaviour. We even take this belief into our views of eternity. Unfortunately, that is the opposite of most things that the Scriptures teach us, and I think the book of Job faces into these questions pretty directly. So this month if you want to, you can read the story of Job on your own, just read the first two chapters and the last one and that basically summarizes what actually happens. However, it is important to note that most scholars agree/disagree that the story is different than the dialogue. Whoever wrote it probably took a similar story and reworked it so he could frame his dialogue. So this morning we are going to stick with Job’s friends, follow their framework of speeches and see how it fits into the larger story and then see how it fits into our story and if we have anything to learn from it at all. We’ll jump into Job’s speeches next week and then God’s speeches in the third week.

So, there are three sets or cycles of speeches in Job from the friends. In the first cycle we have Job’s friends that show up on the scene and they try to console Job by recounting to him the just and wise ways of God. They sit with him for a few days, but then it seems like they want to do a bit more than just have compassion, so they start talking. They make large and general statements about what blessed people look like and their blessings and compare them to the calamity that falls on the wicked. They push Job to keep seeking God, promising him prosperity and joy.

Resentment kills a fool, and envy slays the simple. I myself have seen a fool taking root, but suddenly his house was cursed. His children are far from safety, crushed in court without a defender. The hungry consume his harvest, taking it even from among thorns, and the thirsty pant after his wealth. For hardship does not spring from the soil, nor does trouble sprout from the ground. Yet man is born to trouble as surely as sparks fly upward.
Job 5:1-7

Blessed is the man whom God corrects; so do not despise the discipline of the Almighty. For he wounds, but he also binds up; he injures, but his hands also heal. From six calamities he will rescue you; in seven no harm will befall you. In famine he will ransom you from death, and in battle from the stroke of the sword. You will be protected from the lash of the tongue, and need not fear when destruction comes. You will laugh at destruction and famine, and need not fear the beasts of the earth.
Job 5:17-22

I know we’ve all experienced calamity in our own ways, and I want to get an idea of how and when you’ve been this type of friend or you have been this kind of friend. The kind of friend we are talking about here is the kind that sees the problems, that’s why they are there in the first place, and then just keeps reminding you that God is good, God is just, all things work together for the good of those who trust in God. Here is some of the things that Job’s friends were saying.

Have you ever been this type of friend? Have you ever had these types of friends? What are some of the positive or negative results of this type of thinking and friendship?

For me these verses do very little to comfort. There is the benefits of continually being reminded that God is good, and that he loves me and that he doesn’t want to bring harm to me in anyway. It is good to be reminded of these things. However, there is a few things wrong with this picture. For starters, the friends had to come from their homes to come and sympathize and comfort him. Their motives were good, but where they were coming from doesn’t help the situation really at all. All your friends coming from their places of wealth and privilege to sit with you in your place of misery is not a recipe for encouragement. Then as they come, they don’t spend a lot of time actually offering much in terms of comfort; he gets more of a sermon. He gets a sermon about what the fate of the wicked are. He gets another sermon on the fate of the righteous. Then he is told to seek God and has to hear proverbs read off, and other scripture that is just quoted to him. There is no real consolation happening here. Before he even really opens his mouth he is being told that the things that are happening to him are the types of things that happen to wicked people. He is being told that the lives that they are living are the types of lives that righteous people live. He is being encouraged to be more righteous so he might inherit the fate of the righteous. Talk about accusation and assumption to the poor man. Then Job jumps into his speeches back at them and spends most of his time describing the suffering, describing his fear and sorrow for all human suffering. It seems that Job wants to talk about something a little different. Not about what he may or may have not done wrong but rather just realizing that the present situation sucks. No matter how he got there or didn’t, it sucks, but it’s a present reality and there isn’t much point in analyzing it now. For him it wasn’t about analyzing the situation, because in his opinion, he didn’t do anything wrong. All Job wanted and needed was a little bit of comfort, someone to suffer along side of him.

This is the first thing that I think it’s important for us to remember when we deal with people, or when we deal with sorrow ourselves. Analyzing why things are the way they are does not help anybody or anything. It burns bridges and makes it more about what they did right or wrong than about the fact that they are suffering greatly. Christians still do this today. For some reason we have determined that it is our job to be the moral whistle blowers of the world so if someone is doing something that is wrong or sinful we feel the undeniable desire to tell them. We think our bible is full of answers as to why everything happens, so we make some sort of reason up for everything. Do this so this will happen, don’t do this so this won’t happen. Now the good Christians will only give you examples of other people and won’t accuse and judge you, but that’s what they are thinking. The bad Christians, while they just outright tell you why bad things are happening. We have lost the ability to sympathize, instead we analyze situations. This is the ultimate epitome of theology backfiring. When theology ostricizes us from community and relationships and turns what should be about a relationship into a theological example, we have gone a long way from where God intends.

We throw around key bible verses like God works everything for the good of those who love him or God has plans to prosper us. We completely lose touch of any ability to mourn alongside of or sympathize with those that are suffering. We turn the one situation into a lesson or some universal example of how things are and try to fit it into our box of how we understand the world works. So we tell stories about other miseries. We give examples of how this kind of stuff has happened to other people you know. We start splitting the world and every situation into two categories. Righteous and Wicked, Good and Bad. There is no other category for their world. They only see the world in black and white. So it’s easy then to make assumptions. Really all it is is failed logic.

We know that: Bad things are happening to you and Bad things happen to bad people. So we assume that: Bad things are happening to you because you are a bad person.

We know that: Good things are happening to you and Good things happen to good people. So we assume that: good things are happening to you because you are a good person.

This is pretty much along the same belief cycle as those that believe in Karma today. Karma is the belief of a cause and effect world. That you can offer good into the universe and more good will come from it, and the same goes for bad. Whether you believe it is the universe or God that inevitably produces the good or bad result doesn’t really matter. The point is that Karma sees an absolute connection with your goodness and badness and whether or not goodness and badness will befall you. Job’s friends believed in Karma.

For some reason, at this point in the story, this is all Job’s friends worldviews can comprehend. There is no room for anything else. You’re either bad or good. So while they are saying it in this first cycle of speeches yet, the foundation is laid for where this conversation is going to end up.

Job offers his response. Basically, shut the heck up. What do you know? I’d rather silence than listen to this dribble. You aren’t helping. You don’t know what you are talking about. You are not in my shoes.

My eyes have seen all this, my ears have heard and understood it. What you know, I also know; I am not inferior to you. But I desire to speak to the Almighty and to argue my case with God. You, however, smear me with lies; you are worthless physicians, all of you! If only you would be altogether silent! For you, that would be wisdom. Hear now my argument; listen to the plea of my lips.
Job 13:1-6

So we move into the second cycle of speeches and some days have probably gone by, maybe weeks or months, and the friends start to think that Job must have done something wrong. They now stop even the little consolation that they were offering him and start making broad accusations against him.

“Would a wise man answer with empty notions or fill his belly with the hot east wind? Would he argue with useless words, with speeches that have no value? But you even undermine piety and hinder devotion to God. Your sin prompts your mouth; you adopt the tongue of the crafty. Your own mouth condemns you, not mine; your own lips testify against you.
Job 15:2-6

So as the conversation progresses, the friends are starting to get a little frustrated. Now he is for sure full of some kind of sin. Only sin would cause someone to call God out like he Job is doing. So you start to get defensive and hurl accusations back. Like whoa buddy, watch your mouth, do you even know what you are talking about. You’re letting this sin over take your words and it’s going to get you in even more trouble. Our God doesn’t want you talking like this to him. Keep quiet and seek your own life for what you’ve done wrong.

The first cycle of speeches at least had numerous lines of praise to God and calls to repentance. This second cycle is a bit different. Those lines of praise and repentance are absent. The three friends spend their time trying to convince Job that he is numbered in and among the wicked. Great friends they are aren’t they?

The third cycle gets even worse. Now we have Eliphaz, who does most of the talking start directly accusing Job of very specific sins.

You demanded security from your brothers for no reason; you stripped men of their clothing, leaving them naked. You gave no water to the weary and you withheld food from the hungry, though you were a powerful man, owning land– an honored man, living on it. And you sent widows away empty-handed and broke the strength of the fatherless.
Job 22:6-9

At this point in the story its just getting ridiculous. As the reader we know he is innocent, but we get a peek into the hearts of Job’s friends here. Job just starts taking a beating and starts getting accused of every sin in the book. This is the next logical step of where his friends have to take the conversation. See, when we see the world in black and white, and when we see God as a follower of formula’s, and when we think we know what those formulas are, we are unable to see things working any other way. Bad things are happening, therefore you must be bad. That’s the bottom line. This type of thinking isn’t just around in Job’s day. Our world, our Christian faith is saturated in this.

When we make assumptions, we are giving over to our own desires to control. We have answers for everything. If you want happiness, then you just follow these seven easy steps. If you want to have a good relationship with your son, then just do these three things daily. Everything has been reduced to a formula, and the worst part is that we assume the formula works and we start applying it to our own lives. We don’t know what to do when something goes wrong, because we have to have answers. Now we have formula’s for ridiculous things. There are workshops everywhere for how to become a millionaire. There are hundreds of techniques to remove baldness or to make your penis grow an inch bigger.

Let me give you a few modern day examples of these types.

Obviously it’s easy to pick on these guys, but this is the same type of consolation that Job’s friends offered him (of course with these guys there is a lot of financial gain involved and they don’t really sound like they are consoling). But this is underlying a lot of our consolation efforts. I think for us in this room, the intentions are pure, I just think we are misguided many times because we make unnecessary links in our heads about why things happen. In fact we do this without really knowing it. We feel so uncomfortable when our theologies don’t work out in real life that we try to force fit stories into our theology. We can’t just do that though, even though we might not know any other way.

Let me tell you a story about a king. This king was a rich king that had all the money in the world. Everything was at his beck and call. He always found himself unsatisfied in every pursuit though. Every time he purchased anything he found that he didn’t want it after he had it. He had a wife, but they were on a rough patch and the relationship was dwindling and turning into more of a formality than anything that a marriage should be. One day this king is sitting in his room, and a parlormaid walks in. This girl is beautiful. She looks flawless. She walks in with just enough confidence and at the same time with humility. She brings him food and he pushes the food aside and starts talking to her. He flirts a little, making some jokes about the servants and the type of food that they bring him. She laughs and they keep getting closer and closer. Eventually, after a few hours, they are right next to each other, drinking and laughing together when he leans in and kisses her. If this was a movie, the kissing would get more passionate and of course we are at church, and this is PG, so the screen would fade to black.

The next scene we see them in bed together after just have making love. The king looks into her eyes and says that he has never been happy until this moment. He says that he doesn’t know what he has to do, but whatever it is, he will make it work so they can be together for the rest of his life. They kiss again, her thinking that it’s impossible. They are talking again and he seems more serious. Whatever I need to do to make this happen, I am going to do it. We will start with you having to bring me every meal, breakfast, lunch dinner and all my tea. Then we will see how it goes from there. The parlormaid felt the same way towards the king, she was also in love with him. So she agreed. They agree that it will be difficult, the have to hide this love affair from the other servants, his wife and the entire kingdom, but they both agree that they won’t let that stop them. They embrace, grab hands and and stare into each others eyes as the screen goes black and text scrolls on and says “and they lived happily ever after.”

So how does a story like this make us feel?

It sort of eats away at us doesn’t it? I think it’s crucial to be honest about our feelings. Deep down we want justice here and now. We want to know that people who do something wrong, at the very least aren’t happy. Our theology tells us that people can’t be happy and be sinning, they can’t be happy and be wrong, or at least they can’t be happy for ever. So instead of changing our theology to realize that rain falls on just and unjust and that the wicked prosper with just as much, we get stubborn and try to re-write the story. We kick the person out. We tell ourselves the King deserved it. We accuse the person. We say things are there that aren’t really there, or we add things to the story that aren’t really there. We want the wife to stomp in and go insane and kill everyone in sight. Or we want him to realize his failure and stop seeing the girl and ask for forgiveness. But the story doesn’t leave us with that. How do we befriend someone like this? Do we constantly bombard this king with cliche lines about the fate of the wicked? Do we tell him over and over again to repent? If we do, why are we doing that? Is it only because of the fate that we think is going to befall on him? If that is the case, are we not just asking him to repent so he doesn’t get in trouble? It’s a complicated place to be in. We don’t really know what to do with a bad story ending happily. Just like we don’t know what to do with a good story that ends horrible. You know those movies, that are great and uplifting, then everyone dies and the movie is over. You know how you feel inside. It just isn’t right. So we want to rewrite the story. This is what Job’s friends were trying to do to Job, re-write the story for him and tell him what he did wrong. This is sort of what we want to do for this king, we want to rewrite the ending so it fits with how we think the world should be.

The same types of friends existed around Jesus time. In John 9 we are told a story of a blind man that Jesus and his disciples were passing and instantly they ask him a question about the man.

“Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?”

Here we go again isn’t it? Who cares that the man is blind, who cares that this man has probably spent his entire life suffering with blindness, let’s get all theological on him and figure out why it happened. There obviously was lots of discussion as to why this guy was blind before hand and they seemed to have narrowed it down to a few options. We do it with everyone don’t we? Why do all of the Natives surrounding us live in such dire poverty? Oh, it’s because they are lazy and they don’t really care. Why is the United Church falling apart? It must be because they legalized gay marriage in their denomination. Why did that woman lose her baby? Well it must be because she left her husband. The connections go on and we link everything with everyone. We have reasons why everything happens everywhere all the time. Unfortunately we don’t come to these conclusions because they are always true. I’m not discrediting the fact that there are certainly consequences and rewards for our actions, but let’s just not pretend that every action produces the desired results.

Jesus answers with

“Neither this man nor his parents sinned,” said Jesus, “but this happened so that the work of God might be displayed in his life.”

Now Jesus doesn’t seem to say or debunk the fact that there is no way in the world that this man is blind because of sin in his life or someone else’s. I think it’s safe to assume, that it could be a possibility that this is why he is blind. Jesus simply gives them an answer that says that this isn’t the necessarily the case. This is our problem with living in black and white all the time. It might be black, but it might not be, and we really have no idea in most cases what colour it is. The answer cannot be to pick one of the answers and stick to it fervently. We have to somewhat live in the uncomfortable middle ground of not knowing. Unfortunately, this is super uncomfortable and we don’t want to be there, but I’m afraid in many cases this is our only option. As Richard Rohr puts it…

“What I believe is that the character, the very heart, of biblical faith is not to reach resolution and not to gain closure, but to live without resolution . . . and to be okay with that.”
- Richard Rohr

Read all of John 9

This chapter is kind of like a parallel to the book Job. Just look at the Pharisees. They can’t understand how God works outside of their box. The guys a sinner, there is no way God would have healed him. They eventually kick out the very guy who was healed. That is just the logical progression of such beliefs. If you think in black and white about people and circumstances. If God only works one way in their heads, then everything opposite of that way is sinful, or anti-God. This is the problem with putting God “in a box” as we Christians love to put it. I like to say we make formula’s for how God works. Unfortunately, both are not true. The Pharisees are going nuts in this chapter. They are going to the greatest lengths to rewrite the reality of this man’s healing. So much so they kick him to the street and call everyone a liar, they bring in the guys parents, they basically run an entire court case. They just can’t believe that their God would work this way.

Jesus at this point debunk this myth and teach us a different way to approach life.

Jesus said, “For judgment I have come into this world, so that the blind will see and those who see will become blind.“ Some Pharisees who were with him heard him say this and asked, “What? Are we blind too?”Jesus said, “If you were blind, you would not be guilty of sin; but now that you claim you can see, your guilt remains.

Jesus tends to flip everything on its head in everything he’s saying. First he says from this story that both of the regularly presuppositions as to why someone would be blind is wrong, then he faces into the entire attitude between those who can’t imagine God working outside of their formulas. He says, hey listen you people that think you have God figured out. You people that think you SEE everything and know how everything works. I came to help people that can’t see anything see, and I came to make all those that think they see things not be able to see anything at all. So by the end of this story. All those that had put God in boxes. To make huge statements about how God can and cannot work. Those that think they know who sinned and what they did and are convinced that God wouldn’t work in this way are blinded by their own need to explain and know everything. They are made blind because they can only see inside their box, and God is nowhere near it.

I live like this often. I buy into this type of retribution theology all the time. I assume that because I am doing the right thing, making the right decisions, that good things will end up happening. However, this just isn’t reality. The problem is, it is nicer and neater to believe in this, so instead of just accepting the mystery and the way things are, we try to force fit life into our theology. We are good at that. But it’s just not true. In fact, Jesus seems to think that that kind of thinking leads to blindness, not more understanding.

The answer is not and cannot be to concoct more formula’s and try to understand why God does things and then when we figure it out put the rest of life into them. It won’t work. We will be tempted to do it. Especially when it seems to obvious to us.

What are some of the formula’s for God and the way life works that we have made up?

We could look through the parables and see how Jesus constantly smashes every preconceived idea of every formula that the religious people had. They thought they were going to be freed from Roman oppression. They thought God cared if they were picking up sticks on the sabbath. They thought it was wrong to eat meat sacrificed to idols. They thought the strong would inherit the kingdom of heaven. They thought Jesus didn’t care about kids. Or that it was ok to exchange money in the temple. Or that their messiah would not die. Or that purity would save you. Or that you could be rich and still enter the kingdom of heaven. Jesus never stopped showing people that he was unlike anything that they could comprehend. However, we seem to have missed this today. For some reason we think we have learned everything there is to know. We think that there are no categories left to break down in our minds. We think that the Bible tells us everything we need to know about what is right and wrong. There is no room in our formula’s for God to show us anything differently.

The only response, the response Jesus leaves us with no choice but to have, is that of blindness. Blindness is a symbol for humility. It’s the understanding that we don’t create the restraints of God by our understandings of him or his scriptures. We can’t fit him into our boxes. He can do what he pleases. As soon as we start to say God only does this, or God will only act like this, we’ve successfully pulled a Pharisee. This takes great humility. It takes honesty with our weakness and understanding the grace of God.

This inevitably puts us all on the same page. Its puts us on the same street. In the old paradigm of formulas and karma, we start to tell people where they are off. We act like Job’s friends saying that this is what good people look like, this is what bad people look like. This is what happens to good people, this is what happens to bad people. It puts us on different streets, in different neighbourhoods. We think that our street is the only street that God is on. What humility does is teach us that we all might be in different houses, understanding God from our perspective, but from where God is, we are all on the same street. We are all neighbours. Let’s pray this together.

God, forgive us for our formulas
Forgive us for thinking we know how it works
Forgive us for thinking we can see clearly
Have mercy on us, as our understanding is small

We are blind
We are unable to see everything you are doing
We are unaware of how you are at work
We are unsatisfied with not knowing

So give us eyes to see
Give us ears to hear
Show me where you have given grace
So I may extend the same grace to others

Show me who my neighbours are
Show me where you are at work
Break my formulas
Show me grace instead

Amen.

Last week Joe shaped his message dissecting the phrase “there is probably no God, so stop worrying and enjoy your life.” He dissected the quote a little bit and helped us see what was wrong with this statement, and what was right with it. Now here is why I think teaching in team is one of the best things we can do. If I was to go through the same statement, I would have done it a completely different way. I see things differently than Joe and it can be helpful sometimes to look at things from two different perspectives. So this morning I want to go through the same quote, from the point of view of the Atheist, and talk about the quote from their point of view. What would cause them to write something like this? Who exactly are the people that are paying money to get this message into the world? Is it a good message or a harmful one? How long have people believed in this message? What do we do with people who hold such a message?

“There is probably no God”

I am greatly interested in this statement. I think it actually one of my favourite statements of any atheist. The world probably adds doubt into the mix of the statement. Any true atheist, must admit, that they can’t prove to you logically that there is in fact without any doubt certainly no God. They have to make room for chance. This is where I think the Christian can learn from the atheist. Christians have this ability to have unmoved certainty in things, things that we are unable to have that kind of certainty in. For as certain as they are that God absolutely does exist no matter what, the atheist is certain in the opposite. However, both sides have to agree, that neither of them can know 100% for sure. If we are being honest with ourselves, the best we can ever say is that “there probably is a God.” Our proofs of intelligent design, experience and our stories are easily matched by their proofs of evolution, experience and their stories.

The whole bus campaign actually started from a comedian named Ariane Sherine and she was walking home from work one day and saw a bus ad. The bus ad said “When the son of man comes will he find faith on the earth?” Luke 18:8, and pointed to jesussaid.org. So she went to the site and instantly clicked on the part about God’s wrath against sin and read that all non-christians were going to burn in hell for all eternity. She didn’t think that was very cheery. She eventually wrote a blog post which over time turned into their own campaign. It was never intended to be hostile, but simply an honest statement of what an atheists believe. The idea of the word probably actually arose because she remembered the Carlsberg beer company, and their slogan is “probably the best lager in the world” and since she knew that she couldn’t say for sure that God existed, that adding the world probably would be a perfect fit.

In the firm beliefs, there has to be room for doubt. The same is true for us. We need to make room for doubt in our Christian faith. Doubt means you are not standing still. It means you are asking questions and being stretched. The Bible shows example after example of doubters who God lives and communes with closely. Look at Thomas, Job, David, Jacob or Jonah, they all doubt and God used their doubt to accomplish great things. Doubt is crucial to growing as a Christian and in your faith.

“Whether your faith is that there is a God or that there is not a God, if you don’t have any doubts you are either kidding yourself or asleep. Doubts are the ants in the pants of faith. They keep it awake and moving.”
-Frederick Buechner

“The only appropriate attitude for man to have about the ‘big questions’ is not the arrogant certitude that is the hallmark of religion, but doubt. Doubt is humble. And that’s what man needs to be, considering human history is just a litany of getting shit dead wrong!”
- Bill Maher Religulous

We typically run from doubt. We mock it. We tell people to keep their doubts to themselves and deal with it internally. We are afraid of where our doubts might lead, so we become naive instead and stay numb, unchanging. This of course is the complete opposite of how we’ve seen it exampled before. Jesus embraced the doubters. God challenges them back. The only people who mock doubt are those who are insecure in their own beliefs. Doubt proves that you are being stretched. It shows that you are truly engaged in what you believe. Leech I think puts it beautifully this way.

“The essential difference between orthodox Christianity and the various heretical systems is that orthodoxy is rooted in paradox. Heretics, as Irenaeus saw, reject paradox in favour of a false clarity and precision. But true faith can only grown and mature if it includes the elements of paradox and creative doubt. Hence the insistence of orthodoxy that God cannot be known by the mind, but is known in the obscurity of faith, in the way of ignorance, in the darkness. Such doubt is not he enemy of faith but an essential element within it. For faith in God does not bring the false peace of answered questions and resolved paradoxes. Rather, it can be seen as a process of ‘unceasing interrogation.’…The spirit enters into our lives and puts disturbing questions. Without such creative doubt, religion becomes hard and cruel, degenerating into the spurious security which breeds intolerance and persecution. Without doubt, there is loss of inner reality and of inspirational power to religious language. The whole of spiritual life must suffer form, and be seriously harmed by, the repression of doubt.”
– Kenneth Leech

I think it’s crucial for a community like ours to have a strong theology of doubt. Doubt needs to be allowed. We need to journey alongside of those that are doubting and embrace it. It keeps us honest. So the athiest here can teach us something about this idea of doubt. It isn’t something that we have to be afraid of. If an atheist can make room for doubt in their beliefs then we can make room for it in ours without making it weaker.

We already read through most of this chapter last week with Joe, so let’s just point out one part here and take a look at it when he faced into opposition to his strongly held religious belief in Acts 17.

Paul then stood up in the meeting of the Areopagus and said: “Men of Athens! I see that in every way you are very religious. For as I walked around and looked carefully at your objects of worship, I even found an altar with this inscription: To an Unknown God. Now what you worship as something unknown I am going to proclaim to you. “The God who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth and does not live in temples built by hands. And he is not served by human hands, as if he needed anything, because he himself gives all men life and breath and everything else. From one man he made every nation of men, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he determined the times set for them and the exact places where they should live. God did this so that men would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from each one of us. ‘For in him we live and move and have our being.’ As some of your own poets have said, ‘We are his offspring.’ “Therefore since we are God’s offspring, we should not think that the divine being is like gold or silver or stone-an image made by man’s design and skill. In the past God overlooked such ignorance, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent. For he has set a day when he will judge the world with justice by the man he has appointed. He has given proof of this to all men by raising him from the dead.”

Paul, without any reservation walked into the midst of some deep discussions about the meaning of life. Athens was unlike anything we have experience in out culture. The best example I could give you to explain it would be online forums. People with all sorts of differing beliefs would dialogue all day long about everything and anything. Athens was seen as an intellectual giant, priding themselves with great philosophers like Plato and Aristotle. When Paul walks into Athens, he engages their debates and their people with an understanding, with an education and even embraces their misgivings and what he deems and misunderstandings about God. He points them out, he uses them as analogy and he engages them where they are at. It says that he studied the idols and objects carefully. He isn’t kidding around, he truly wants to know these people he will be dialoguing with.

So let’s imagine for a moment that we are in Athens, and that we walk into the room and here is is what we hear. Here is an audio clip from one of the public service announcements that Ariane Sherine gives.

“We live in a beautiful, fascinating, complex world and we’re all trying to make sense of it the best we can. There are 6.7 billion of us living on this planet belonging to hundreds of different belief systems. Most of us want to live peacefully, yet we also want to think that are own personal beliefs are the right ones. And if we are right, whatever we believe, that means millions or possibly billions people must be wrong. As a world full of individuals, we are never going to think the same way. What we can do is accept that we hold many different beliefs and focus instead on what unites us as human beings because we are truly similar in so many ways. We all want to feel loved, and to give love freely. We all want to love long, enjoyable lives, free from fear and pain. We’re all muddling through life the best way we know how. What’s important are not the beliefs we hold, but that we are free to hold them and that we always express them peacefully.”
- Ariane Sherine

What do you like about this clip? What don’t you like? Does it make you uncomfortable that you have such similar beliefs to an atheist? Are you able to engage this belief without judging or condemning them like Paul did?

Paul engages the atheist, the Stoics and the Epicureans on a level that they understand. He isn’t afraid to use their imagery. He isn’t afraid to show them where he believes they are right. He adds his little bit to the conversation. He engages them on a level of where they are at, instead of bashing them over their heads with a bunch of useless cliches about where they are going to go when they die and about Jesus being the only way.

Epicureans would have been a major group of thinkers that existed in Athens and this time, they are one of the two groups that is pointed out in Acts who Paul would have engaged in. They believed that rather than resort to the internal motions of the mind and the cogitations of experts in the field of science, medicine and theology, to instead advocate a practical, common sense reading of the world. They believed in the five senses being the only thing that could lead us to truth. They believed that there could very well be gods but they were indifferent to what happened here on earth. In their belief, everything is determined by a fateful creation of compounds and atoms and that it is not moving in a direction that has been previously willed or planned by the gods. This means that death to them is just another ancient myth that torments the ignorant.

Sound familiar? This belief and way of looking at the world is still very prevalent. The bus ads that we were reading are coming from this point of view. Why would you worry when you can’t control it? Why would you worry when there is no one out there to please, disappoint or satisfy? This belief existed thousands of years ago and in many ways is a reaction to the constant sacrificing and attempts to please the “gods” through history. There were thousands of gods, and all of them were assumed to have different expectations. You didn’t want to piss off the gods, so you lived your life in a way to make them happy. You thanked them with sacrifices when they blessed you and you petitioned with sacrifices when they cursed you. It was a never ending battle of trying to please them and make sure they keep happy. An Epicurean in Paul’s time would have said the same thing or something along the lines of “even if there is a god, he doesn’t care about you and can’t affect you, so stop worrying and enjoy your life.”

I e-mailed someone from Sarnia that I have been corresponding with over the past year about God non-God and other religious topics. He goes by the name Sarnia Skeptic.  He says some harsh things online about religion and really calls people on their crap.  I wanted to get this guys perspective on the bus ads, and the underlying message of it and what he thought they meant.   I wanted to do this because I think there is a lot of validity in what he would say and also there is a lot we can learn from him.  So here is some quotes from an e-mail he sent me about this topic.

1.) Many people are brought up with the threat of eternal punishment/damnation – and it has proven psychological effects on children (and adults). “Stop worrying” would be in response to that.

2.) As there is no afterlife, many “believers” feel that life is meaningless and feel that people who accept that there is ‘nothing more’ than this life must be distraught, the “enjoy your life” is an encouragement to make the best of your only chance at this.

3.) Associating a positive message with “there probably is no god” is re-affirming to those who have questioned their faith.

4.) Simply making the statement (advertising as they have), gives support to those who do not believe in a god and have felt isolated (or unaware that others shared that non-belief).

5.) “probably” was necessary to be intellectually honest. Unlike most believers, most non-believers would be willing to accept the existence of a god with the presentation of real evidence to support such. (Oddly, honesty is one of the commandments, right? Just not practiced often?)

6.) To prove how easily offended “believers” are – simply putting up a contrary advertisement (that is hardly inflammatory) has irked a great number.

7.) To spark discussion. Many people avoid the conversation and religion is given a level of respect that it is certainly not due.

The “enjoy your life” provided us with an opportunity to explain that what we have is awesome enough without supposing an afterlife or an intervening/caring god.

9) It is possible to be good without god, millions of people are good without any gods – billions are good without YOUR god. Our world, our existence and our opportunity to ever live is beautiful and awesome enough. Knowledge is empowering, awe-inspiring and liberating. False knowledge is harmful to society as it creates false boundaries and groups – each with their own (false) claim to Truth (capital T).

If I’m going to be honest. This bus ad is mostly a correct and honest critique of Christian culture. It rips apart all sorts of the culture we’ve been taught and live with. Just look at this.

God probably. Atheists have an easier time with the honesty of uncertainty than Christians do. We talked about this already, but its crucial that we allow doubt and honesty to be part of our expression as Christians. God probably does exist is much better than God exists no matter what you say and I’m not even interested in what you have to say.

Stop worrying. Christians have for a long time used fear tactics and played on people’s worry to control them, this should have been the case, so what should be the appropriate christian response? Jesus commands not to worry. Worrying is not a Christian response to anything. It is a tactic to bring control. This is a great line.

Enjoy your life. Christians have been so focused on the eternal, the afterlife and heaven/hell that we are no longer interested in the present. If we are honest about the language in scripture than we know that the Kingdom of God, salvation and eternal life are mostly present realities. Enjoy them now. Enjoy your life.

The Sarnia Skeptic makes no hesitation to point these out. We need to learn to embrace the conversation and perspective from the skeptic to better seek truth. In a small sentence, just look at how much we can learn about our own failures and misgivings. On top of that, we build a relationship with the people we disagree with, learn from them and come out learning to love rather than to win.

From our stories that we know of God in the Bible, God has a way of journey with people where they are at. He doesn’t force the right beliefs on them. In fact he entertains a lot people’s misunderstandings and wrong views of him while they figure it out. Here is one of my favourite examples of God doing this.

Now Naaman was commander of the army of the king of Aram. He was a great man in the sight of his master and highly regarded, because through him the LORD had given victory to Aram. He was a valiant soldier, but he had leprosy.

Now bands from Aram had gone out and had taken captive a young girl from Israel, and she served Naaman’s wife. She said to her mistress, “If only my master would see the prophet who is in Samaria! He would cure him of his leprosy.”

Naaman went to his master and told him what the girl from Israel had said. “By all means, go,” the king of Aram replied. “I will send a letter to the king of Israel.” So Naaman left, taking with him ten talents of silver, six thousand shekels of gold and ten sets of clothing. The letter that he took to the king of Israel read: “With this letter I am sending my servant Naaman to you so that you may cure him of his leprosy.”

As soon as the king of Israel read the letter, he tore his robes and said, “Am I God? Can I kill and bring back to life? Why does this fellow send someone to me to be cured of his leprosy? See how he is trying to pick a quarrel with me!”

This is an intense story. Normally we would read this story to our kids in Sunday school to show them the faith of the Naaman and how awesome God is. But really there is a few things in this story I want to point out to you.

1. Naaman was a man you wouldn’t want at your church. He took captive a young Jewish girl, and when the Hebrew Scriptures say young, they mean real young. This isn’t a lovely situation with rose petals. Naaman’s culture was greatly opposed to Israel and their way of doing things. Aram’s God was Raman. Raman was the thunderer God, he eventually turned into Zeus. The king of Aram’s name was Ben-Hadad, Ben means son, Hadad is another translation of Raman. So the king of this country was named the Son of Raman, or the Son of God. Israel has a different God, kings name is Jehoram, and their God’s name is Yahweh. So we have two neighbouring countries, each with their own king and each with their own God. Raman can’t cure leprosy. So the kidnapped young girl, who has obviously heard the stories of slaves being set free and their God coming to their rescue, speaks out of her natural understanding of what she knew God to be. Why wouldn’t he just go to the prophet and he will be cured? It only seems obvious.

2. So here we have the Israel King and he kind of freaks out a little bit, he tears his cloths and has a little mental breakdown. Yet for some reason, the King of Aram, seems to have a bit more faith in the God of Israel than their own king does. Does this sound familiar? This is what we have been talking about all along. God changes things up big time here. The Israel king is full of doubt and frustration and the King of Aram, who serves an entirely different God, seems to have better faith than him. So the people we normally see as the unfaithful atheists in our god have true faith and the people who are supposed to have true faith are completely freaking out. The story is flipping. God seems to have plans for those that don’t even believe in him.

When Elisha the man of God heard that the king of Israel had torn his robes, he sent him this message: “Why have you torn your robes? Have the man come to me and he will know that there is a prophet in Israel.” So Naaman went with his horses and chariots and stopped at the door of Elisha’s house. Elisha sent a messenger to say to him, “Go, wash yourself seven times in the Jordan, and your flesh will be restored and you will be cleansed.”

But Naaman went away angry and said, “I thought that he would surely come out to me and stand and call on the name of the LORD his God, wave his hand over the spot and cure me of my leprosy. Are not Abana and Pharpar, the rivers of Damascus, better than any of the waters of Israel? Couldn’t I wash in them and be cleansed?” So he turned and went off in a rage.

Naaman’s servants went to him and said, “My father, if the prophet had told you to do some great thing, would you not have done it? How much more, then, when he tells you, ‘Wash and be cleansed’!” So he went down and dipped himself in the Jordan seven times, as the man of God had told him, and his flesh was restored and became clean like that of a young boy.

3. A small point to make here. Horses and chariots are modern day equivalents of armed guards and tanks. So imagine what is really happening here. A general of an army comes walking up to this little house in the middle of a field and he brings all his defense weapons with him. This huge powerful army and his chariots, and this small little prophet. Not only this, Elisha doesn’t even come out to talk to him, he just sends a message to him. This guy is important and Elisha just sends a servant to go tell him to do something, a ridiculous request at this. Naaman is mad. He doesn’t get a proper welcome, he doesn’t get a proper ritual. He wants something that matches the person he is.

Then Naaman and all his attendants went back to the man of God. He stood before him and said, “Now I know that there is no God in all the world except in Israel. Please accept now a gift from your servant.”

The prophet answered, “As surely as the LORD lives, whom I serve, I will not accept a thing.” And even though Naaman urged him, he refused.

“If you will not,” said Naaman, “please let me, your servant, be given as much earth as a pair of mules can carry, for your servant will never again make burnt offerings and sacrifices to any other god but the LORD. But may the LORD forgive your servant for this one thing: When my master enters the temple of Rimmon to bow down and he is leaning on my arm and I bow there also—when I bow down in the temple of Rimmon, may the LORD forgive your servant for this.”
“Go in peace,” Elisha said.

4. Alright this is the point I want to focus on. So Naaman comes back and actually stands before him and he makes a huge statement. “Now I know that there is no God in all the world except in Israel.” In the ancient near east at this time they believed in localized deities. There would be a god for each area, like God of Aram, Egypt, Israel etc. When you went to a region, you would ask, “who is the God of this country?”, and then you would offer up the proper sacrifices and be on your way. Everybody in the world thought this way. This is the dominant way of understanding things. Then Israel comes out of nowhere, for the first time ever, Israel starts saying that there is only one God and he is God over all the areas and everybody.

So when Naaman says, “now I know,” this is a moment of major spiritual enlightenment. People outside of Israel do not think this way. Now we know that you can worship God anywhere and anytime (ie read the women at the well). The women at the well thinks God is in one place or another. Jesus just says yes, God is in both places, God of all people. Namaan has this moment where he realized, that God is the God of everything. We could almost call this a moment of conversion in understanding God and the world.

Here is the key line. “please let me, your servant, be given as much earth as a pair of mules can carry.”  It seems like an odd part of the story. Why in the world would he ask for dirt? It seems nonsensical? It was believed that the soil of a particular land was connected with the deity of a particular area. So if you were in a particular place, the soil there was connected with their God. So Naaman wants to leave now and here is what he’s expecting. He’s going to take the dirt home with him, lay it all out on the ground and when he wants to pray to the LORD he will go and stand on that dirt. So he just finishes saying that there is no God in all the world, and then he asks for dirt because he thinks that that God can only be worshiped if he stands on some dirt. It seems like he doesn’t really get it at all here. He doesn’t get that he doesn’t need to bring dirt with him because God is God of all the land, not just Israel’s.

And then he has the nerve to say “But may the LORD forgive your servant for this one thing: When my master enters the temple of Rimmon to bow down and he is leaning on my arm and I bow there also—when I bow down in the temple of Rimmon, may the LORD forgive your servant for this.” WHAT? How the world can he go back to work, serving unreal gods, and actually bow down to other gods or the king? This is the crazy world he is going back to. Now what does Elisha say? Does he ring off some cliches about standing for something or falling for anything? Does he show him a scenario about possibly dying tonight and masking sure he was true to his convictions? Does he tell him to quit his job that would obviously cause him to stumble? Nothing, Elisha doesn’t say anything about him compromising or not having a spine. He doesn’t even tell him to stay with others that share his belief. Instead Elisha responds with “Go in Peace.”

Did Elisha respond well? How would we have responded?

The Christian faith makes room for doubt. It makes room for the complicated spots in life that we all face into every single day. We are constantly interacting with people that serve different gods and with people that believe in no gods. This is not something to be afraid of. It’s not something to ignore or to postpone. The reality is, that you are on a journey and that they are on a journey and that is OK. God is OK with that. Your belief in God demands that you make room for relationships with people who are unlike you. There is something to learn in your relationships with them. The doubt that they may bring into the relationship is good. It isn’t something God shy’s away from.

These things that we normally run away from; doubt, uncertainty, compromise….maybe they are the things that God is waiting for us to run directly into? Maybe God uses these things and they are actually an important part of our journey. Understanding where the atheist comes from and grasping their perspective, is an important part of that journey. It’s about embracing the other. This is something we are going to do at the end of this month when Joe actually brings in a friend of his who is a confessed atheist. Our goal will not be to convert him, but to learn from him. To embrace his doubt. To understand his questions and his stories. Not to give him answers but to push ourselves to see if we can see it through his eyes. His experiences are just as much proof as our own.

This will be sketchy. There is plenty of warnings out there already for you as you enter into a world full of people who believe nothing of what you do. Yet God seems to be calling us deeper into it; recognizing their struggle as valid and wanting to teach us more about his Kingdom and himself through them. We must learn to be taught from people that are different, from people that we disagree with and by those that are opposed to us. So we enter into a crazy world, a world where we compromise our morals and what we know what is right. So as you enter into this week, into your relationships with those who are nothing like you, I leave you with the same words as Elisha left Naaman, “go in peace.”

We are spending a month in Jeremiah 29.  Joe gave some background information on the chapter and helped us understand what exile was, where Israel found itself and how they were oppressed by the Babylonians.  Israel was taken into exile in 587 BC.  They were pulled away from the land where they were born and the land that was promised to them.  They were forced a few hundred miles away from their homes to a very strange land where everything worked and functioned very differently.  The essential meaning of exile is that we are were we don’t want to be.  As Eugene Peterson puts it, it is an experience of dislocation, everything is out of joint and nothing really works the way it is supposed to.  Exile is a common but unwelcome thing that humans have been experiencing for thousands of years, and even to this day.  It would be very common to what our ancestors did to the natives that were on this land when we showed up.  We eventually forced them into our schools, used whatever land we wanted and forced them to play by our rules.  Even right now, in Darfur, millions of people have been displaced from their homes because of internal unrest and they are left in exile unable to go back home to everything that they have ever known or cared about.

However, I find exile to be difficult to talk about.  I have never known exile, and I don’t think anyone here has really known it either.  So while we can try all we want to make personal parallels about how Israel’s exile out of the promise land signifies our individual examples of overcoming hardship, it is very difficult to understand what is going on in a passage like this.  For years I’ve heard this passage in Jeremiah be used to provide hope for getting something that we want.  “I know the plans I have for you….plans to prosper you.”  This was most people’s life verse even.  This is why I’m hesitant to read a passage like this like it has anything to do with us at all.  As if we are somehow in exile and are waiting for God to free us.

We’ve done a lot of talking about the oppressed.  We spoke about it in the summer about where some of the Psalms come from.  This morning though, I want to try and understand this passage from a different point of view.  What does a passage like this look like from the point of view of the oppressors.  I don’t just mean how would Babylon like a text like this.  I mean how would Israel be reading a text like this if they used to be the oppressor and are now being oppressed.  Because if we are truly going to interact with this text we need to see where we are in the text.  We are not in exile, therefore this text probably isn’t for us in that regard.  The idea of the Lord having plans to prosper us is not language to tell a wealthy nation to keep up the good work and it’s only going to get better.  It’s written to encourage those who have nothing, with no foreseeable future and nothing to care about.  It’s written to remind those who are not prospering and who are being harmed and who have no future that this is only a temporary reality.  To hijack this text into our own lives is to force a improper hermeneutic on the text that will only serve to bloat our heads and make us more ignorant.  So Joe spent a lot of time from the point of view of the oppressed last week and how they would have felt and what exile meant and how we are like them.  This week though, I want to spend our time look at this passage from the point of view as the one who was once oppressed.  Israel used to be a nation that oppressed the people around them.  Now, they are being oppressed.  Jeremiah is written to former oppressors, not innocent bystanders.

So this is what we need to do in scriptures like this.  Without acknowledging our role as the oppressor in today’s day and understanding the circumstances of those being oppressed we will never change.  So before we jump into this passage.  I ask you.

Question: How are we the oppressor?  What are the circumstances of those we oppress?  Who are we oppressing?

I think it would be difficult to look at this passage from the point of view of the Babylonians and how they were oppressing Israel.  I do think though, that if we do some hunting, we can see how Israel was once an oppressive nation and how this is a command to an oppressive nation who finds themselves in a different situation.

Rob Bell in his book Jesus Wants to Save Christians helps us understand the heart of the oppressed and the oppressors and how this happened.  So the next section on Israel is largely attributed to him and how he explains it.

He likes to explain it in the following four stages.  Egypt>Sinai>Jerusalem>Babylon

We know the story of Israel and how there story basically started in slavery.  We know that eventually God heard their cry and freed them from slavery and brought them into the promised land.  So this is the first two steps; Egypt to Sinai.  God needed a nation that could enact his will in the world.  He wanted a nation that would represent his desires and wishes.  Israel, especially under King David, started to become this nation.  Over a few generations eventually Solomon comes into power and the nation of Israel begins to get a more global reputation for how great of a nation they are.

So they have this reputation and there is this story about a queen named Sheba who comes from far away to ask questions and find about what makes this nation so great.  Here is her verdict.

Praise be to the Lord your God, who has delighted in you and placed you on the throne of Israel. Because of the Lord’s eternal love for Israel, he has made you king, to maintain justice and righteousness.

We know that Solomon had a lot of possessions.  This is one of the things that Solomon is known for.  His massive amounts of gold and cattle and wives…it was all seen as being attributed to God blessing them. Sheba is praising God because she gets it.  She understands that the reason they have all this great stuff and seems to be blessed and everything is going their way is for a purpose.  That purpose is to maintain justice and righteousness.  So finally everyone and everything is in place.  They are in Jerusalem, the promised land and they are happy and content and they are blessed.  So we’ve gone from Egypt>Sinai>Jerusalem.  There was certain expectations, like Sheba mentions, for a city in this type of position.  They were supposed to bless and take care of those in need or as Sheba puts it to maintain justice and righteousness.  So did this happen?  What did Solomon do with everything he had?

Here is the account of the forced labor King Solomon conscripted to build the Lord’s temple…

What? How does this make any sense?  Is this the same nation that was once oppressed  and were forced to be slaved?  Are they now becoming oppressors?  Those who were freed from Egypt, are now in the midst of creating their own Egypt.  In the same breath of finding out that there is forced labour we also find out that these forced slaves were forced to build Hazor, Gezer and Megiddo.  These were military fortresses.  Why would anyone need such large military fortresses?  Well because he had a lot of stuff, and you have to protect all your stuff when you have it.  Israel has now become a nation that is about preserving what they have with their land and possessions instead of a nation that is bent on giving away and blessing those around them.  They did not do what they were supposed to and they did not do what Queen Sheba expected the would do with it all.  Then even further down we hear that he acquired fourteen hundred chariots and twelve thousands horses.  Aren’t these the exact same tools that were used to drive Israel out of Egypt in the first place?  Now they are stockpiling all the same things that once oppressed them?  Then we find out that Solomon is importing horses and chariots from some countries and then selling them to others.  Now we have Israel becoming an arms dealer.  In other words, he’s making money of the violence towards the cities around him.  Is that maintaining justice and righteousness?  Is that hearing the cry of the oppressed?

Then we find out that Solomon had over seven hundred wives and over three hundred concubines.  And the women played a part in leading Solomon away from being fully devoted to God.  Of course Israel was warned against this kind of activity.  Don’t acquire a great number of wives, don’t acquire a great number of horses…or else you’ll probably go astray for what God has in store for you.

So this leaves God stuck.  The nation that is supposed to represent him and be his hands and feet in the world, now look nothing different than anyone else.  They look like anti-God.  They have become who God saved them from at the beginning.  God though is a God who hears the cry of the oppressed, and those that suffer.  He is looking for people who care about the things that he cares about and he blesses so that justice and righteousness can be upheld.  Unfortunately at the height of their blessing, Israel misinterpreted everything as entitlement and favoritism.  In the biblical story there is a word for when you have been giving all sorts of blessing and wealth and influence, but completely forget why you were given it in the first place.

It’s called Exile.

Exile is when you forget who you are; its when you forget your story.  It isn’t just about getting kicked out of a location but it is about of state of your soul.  It’s about when you find yourself as a stranger to the purposes of God.  Out of this exile comes the prophets, and comes Jeremiah which is where we are spending our time this month.  So now, with all this in mind, and what lead up to this, let’s read Jeremiah together.

Jeremiah 29:4-14

This is what the Lord Almighty, the God of Israel, says to all those I carried into exile from Jerusalem to Babylon:

“Build houses and settle down; plant gardens and eat what they produce.

Marry and have sons and daughters; find wives for your sons and give your daughters in marriage, so that they too may have sons and daughters. Increase in number there; do not decrease.

Also, seek the peace and prosperity of the city to which I have carried you into exile. Pray to the Lord for it, because if it prospers, you too will prosper.”

Yes, this is what the Lord Almighty, the God of Israel, says: “Do not let the prophets and diviners among you deceive you. Do not listen to the dreams you encourage them to have.

They are prophesying lies to you in my name. I have not sent them,” declares the Lord.

This is what the Lord says: “When seventy years are completed for Babylon, I will come to you and fulfill my gracious promise to bring you back to this place.

For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the Lord, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.

Then you will call upon me and come and pray to me, and I will listen to you.

You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart.

I will be found by you,” declares the Lord, “and will bring you back from captivity. I will gather you from all the nations and places where I have banished you,” declares the Lord, “and will bring you back to the place from which I carried you into exile.”

This isn’t just words to an oppressed group of people.  These are words to an oppressed group of people that are used to the benefits, lifestyle and wealth of being the oppressors.  They are used to easy money, cheap labour and exorbitant amount of amassed wealth.  They were upset because they didn’t get what they thought they deserved.  They were spoiled and now they were ungrateful.  So Jeremiah comes onto the scene, and is not really bringing words of hope right away.  It is more like words of work.  He’s basically saying “listen, you’ve had it pretty easy over the last little while, and even when it is easy you didn’t even live close to how you were supposed to live.  Instead of using what you had got for the benefit of others you used it to oppress even more.  So now, why don’t you just sit tight for a little bit and reevaluate what you are really doing here.  Israel’s entire identity became wrapped up in the idea of a promised land and what it was and that it was for them.  The idea of planting gardens and building homes in a land that isn’t theirs and that they don’t care about is ludicrous.

Israel was obviously not in a good spot, and they were unhappy and lived in unrest.  Many of them longed for a restoration of the power that was once there.  There was plenty of revolting movements found in this area during this time and many of them refused to live in exile as a way of life.  They were used to the political and national power that they had and they enjoyed it.  The only way they knew how to revolt was to live violently against the powers over them.  However, Jeremiah had something different in mind.  He tells them to build homes and plant gardens.  This is not what they would have been expecting.

One of the hardest decisions in buying my house was the idea of permanence that came along with it.  There is something about settling that is uneasy with me.  I want to be able to get up and go.  I want to know that there is always something else, something more out there that I have an opportunity to jump at if things get to bad here.  This was what Jeremiah was telling them to do though.  In the midst of the worst circumstances possible, they were to build homes.  This means to expect a long hall.  This means to get more permanent.  This isn’t a camping trip.  This is not the kind of information that they wanted to hear.  They would much rather be camping, because camping is temporary and they wanted out of there.  So you would not build a house and basically live in the hope that they were going to be freed again one day soon.  Building a house meant sitting tight and becoming more permanent.

Just like exile is deeper than simply where you are, so is building a house.  There is a lot of imagery that goes along with building a house.  Building a house is something you do to participate in the culture you are living in.  You build a house and organize your family in such a way that benefits and approves of the culture that you are building a house in.  This is about a household, not just a building.  Here we have Jeremiah telling Israelites who lived and enjoyed their lives off all the wealth and great things that they had and now they are living in an unknown land, unhappy, stripped of all they had and they are supposed to build a household?

Another thing that I have a difficult time doing is gardening.  Gardening in many ways for me is a waste of time.  I expect other to do it for me.  I want to go to the store and get what I want and come home.  Of course, because I choose to live this way, there are a lot of problems that come with that lifestyle.  I am not in touch with the nature around me and I am out of sync with the seasons.  I can eat Strawberry’s in January.  I don’t have to toil over my food at all.  Jeremiah though is telling Israel to not expect it to be done for them.  Do it yourself.  Grow your own food, do the hard work and be a meaningful contributor to your own sustenance.  You are not a parasite so stop living like one.  Planting gardens goes back to Genesis 1 and it is one of the first commands that humans were given.  This is Jeremiah telling them not to just be happy and provide food for themselves but to live like they should be living.  Be the human that you were called to be even when you are in a situation you don’t like being in.  You can still do what you should be doing.

See Israel’s identity was wrapped up into their land.  They took pride in it.  They went to great lengths to protect it and they boasted about it.  When they were stripped of it they almost refused to stop living.  Who were they without their land?  This message of Jeremiah tells them to suck it up and starting being who they were called to be even without the land that they were promised.  He was telling them that their identity did not rest on where they were, but who they were. He reminds them that all land is God’s land not just the promised land and they can still be the people of God even in the midst of oppression.  They were willing to compromise anything to keep their land.  They had traded the dream of being God’s hands and feet to the world for the smaller idea of controlling their own slice of the planet.

So Jeremiah was telling them to get back to the basics, back to the things that make them human.  He wants them to focus on the things that bring renewal to the present, not just sit around and depend on a promise that isn’t coming for a long time.

This also means that what Jeremiah is asking them to do is to live similiarily the people that are oppressing them.  This is what Babylonians were doing, they were building houses, starting families and planting gardens.  Now Jeremiah is saying that they should look like them.  I have a feeling though that he wasn’t telling the Israelites to do these things so that they will become like Babylon but instead he was telling them to do these things so they will realize that they are no different.  They were once oppressed, they were once the oppressors and now they are oppressed again and this isn’t a good way to live for anyone.  We are all the same, oppressors and oppressed.  So since we are the same; live like them.  Breath the same air as them, raise families along side of them.  Jeremiah is offering very radical advice here because he is trying to bring a realization and understanding to the Israelites.

Pedagogy of the Oppressed By Paulo Freire is a popular book that helps give us some understanding into this.  He would say that for the poor to be free, they must understand their situation and lift themselves above their oppressor without becoming the oppressor themselves.  For the oppressor to be free he must understand that he has become the oppressor and try to let the oppressed become free.  In both cases, the oppressed and the oppressor can not be free without understanding the damage they have done to one another.  Simply put, they are becoming aware of the other and moving towards a life of interdependence, in recognition that they actually need one another to be free.

Last time they lifted themselves above their oppressors they became the new oppressors, but this time Jeremiah is telling them to do it in a different way.  God wasn’t going to come in on a white horse and lead them out and move waters and destroy the enemy.  Rather he wants them to live alongside of their oppressors so that they can truly be free.  Freedom is no longer in getting to a certain promised land, but freedom is found in the interdependence of one another.  They need to understand the damage that they had done to each other.  So that when they did rise away from the oppression, they would not just continue the cycle all over again.

As people like Jean Vanier and Paulo Freire have argued, we go to the poor, not only to assist them in finding their own liberation, but also so that they can help us to be liberated.  He does not want Israel to just simply repeat the cycle.  They must embrace their exile as part of their identity now rather than long for a return to power.  Power corrupts and creates a never ending cycle of oppressed and oppressor.

Egypt – Sinai – Jerusalem – Babylon.  This is the cycle.  Israel now finds themselves back in Egypt and Jeremiah is trying to explain to them that the only way to break the cycle is to not start it up again.

Many obviously did not like this message of Jeremiah, especially anyone who was in charge.  It sort of sounds like giving up.  It certainly doesn’t motivate anyone to rise up and fight against the power and attempt to free Israel.  Jeremiah was persistent though, saying this was what God was saying and that they need to give it up, that Babylon was here to stay and they needed to deal with it. As a result Jeremiah was attacked by his own brothers, beaten and put into the stocks by a priest and false prophet, imprisoned by the king, threatened with death, thrown into a cistern by Judah’s officials, and opposed by a false prophet.  He was not a source of good news.

Turns out we know now that Jeremiah was right.  Israel was never (and still isn’t) truly freed from oppression.  They always were in battle with someone fighting over something and oppressing them.  So Jeremiah’s advice would have been good.  Get over it.  Plant Gardens.  Build Houses.  This is home now.  Get used to it.  The people you are living with, you are always going to be living with them.  It’s really not that bad.  They are just like you anyway.  Oppressing.  Oppressed.  Oppressing.  Oppressed.  So I’m going to figure something else out.  But in the meantime…just sit tight and get comfortable and try to be the humans I created you to be here.

Here is an example of someone who tried to do what Jeremiah was telling Israel to do.

Mike Pfotenhauer is a man who started a backpack company called Osprey.  You have probably heard of them because they make great backpacks.  If you are serious into hiking, mountain climbing, then you would most likely be using an Osprey backpack.  Eventually they got pretty good that they moved to Colorado and bought an old factory outside a Najavo Native reserve.  They did their best to hire almost all local people for their workforce from the reserve.  They even got profiled in Fortune Magazine for being one of America’s best companies.  They keep growing bigger an bigger.  They were one of the first companies to start integrating recyclable materials into their packs and they kept innovating and coming up with new ideas.

The hard part is that other companies started coming in and offering backpacks for really cheap because they were making stuff cheaper overseas and the competition started getting really tough to actually sell backpacks so they had to start making layoffs and it was hard to keep up.  So eventually they made the decision to shift some of their production overseas to Vietnam.  Now we all know about overseas production and the types of conditions that the workers go through a lot of times just so we can get low prices on all of our stupid stuff we buy.  They have to work very long hours, under harsh conditions and for very little pay.  So Mike and his wife decide that if they are going to do this, they want to do it right.  So they move overseas so that they can be with the people who will be building their product.  They packed up their family, and moved to Vietnam so that they themselves could experience first hand the conditions in which they were asking people to work.

Where the average wage in Vietnam is $40, they pay an average of $80 a month.  Where the average work week is 63 hours, Osprey’s average is 48 hours.  Osprey pays time and half for overtime and double time for holidays.  This is all going on where their top boss is working alongside of them in the same community and living in the same conditions.  Mike was unwilling to exploit people just to increase his bottom line and keep his business in tact.  Mike chose to understand and be with the people he would typically be oppressing.  Not only that, he chose to pick up everything he knew and was comfortable with and built a house and planted gardens in and amongst them.

I know an older man who I was speaking with over the last month or so, and he has some very strong views on the world and the people around him.  He was talking about Toronto and how lately it is just so full of “Indians.”  He went on and on about how they are just everywhere now and they are taking over the country and getting into positions of power.  He also told me at another point that the number one problem in the world is Muslims.  After all they are reproducing at 8 kids per couple on average and there is so many of them and the Koran says to kill the infidel and they are immigrating over here to take over our country.  He was so up in arms and irritated about these people who were coming to oppress us.

I guess he didn’t remember the time when he was in the same shoes has them, immigrating over to Canada to start a family here, build houses and plant gardens over here.  Somehow he has taken his own journey of being oppressed and wanting a better life and coming here and then turning into the oppressor of people who were in the exact same shoes.  He actually believes the lies of needing to fight against these so called infidels so we can hold onto our freedom.

Question: What can we do to change our lifestyles so that we can better understand the oppressed? What is a modern way that we can plant gardens and build houses? How do we live in and amongst the people we are oppressing?

The point of building houses and planting gardens is not just because you are going to sit around and wait until power is restored to you.  It isn’t just so you are comfortable in the long wait until the wrongs are made right again.  The point is that you are now living in and amongst the people who are oppressing you.  You are like them.  You are one of them.  You are human just like them.  You used to oppress just like they did.  Now it’s time for you to see your own similarities.  You are the same as them.  As oppressors, we need to live in and amongst the people we are oppressing.  Of course, we don’t want to do that.  For starters we don’t think we are oppressing them.  We don’t want to live anything like them.  The reason we are oppressing them is because there is something valuable to be gained by oppressing them.  Whether it be pride, jeans, backpacks, meat or oil.  So how do we as Christians truly live in and amongst the people that we are oppressing?

Just like the story with Mike and Osprey, the only way to change the awful system is if the oppressor lives with and among the oppressed and the oppressed live with and among the oppressor.  If they were looking simply to restore power to their nation then they would never see that the people they were desiring power over are the same as them; humans in need of a Saviour.  We must live with them to discover true power (left handed power?).  Israel can no longer be the hands and feet of God is they are lording power over the people they are there to serve.  Only through sacrificial service and giving up the power that they think is rightfully theirs will God’s wishes come true for humanity.  The only place you have to be a human is where you are right now, at theStory, in Sarnia, right here and right now.  So be who God has called you to be; and be those people to your oppressors and to the people you are oppressing.