Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Foreign.
[00:00:08] Speaker B: Welcome to the Collective Table where we celebrate the intersections of Jesus, justice and joy.
This podcast is brought to you by Oceanside Sanctuary Church.
Each week we bring our listeners a recording of our weekly Sunday teaching at Oceanside Sanctuary, which ties Scripture into the larger conversations happening in our community, congregation and even the podcast.
So we're glad you're here and thanks for listening as we move into our adult teaching time this morning. We are so excited to welcome Navy Chaplain Mark as our preacher this morning. But before Yay.
But before he comes up this morning, I would invite you to hear our scripture, which comes from Job 23, verses 8 through 10.
It says, if I go forward, he is not there or backward.
I cannot perceive him.
On the left he hides and I cannot behold him.
I turn to the right, but I cannot see him.
But he knows the way that I take.
When he has tested me, I shall come out like gold.
This is the word of God for us, the people of God.
[00:01:37] Speaker A: Good morning.
I was asked in the midst of our series on the spiritual disciplines, the practices that shaped the church, to preach on the story of Job on Mother's Day.
I want you to know this is not my design.
If you want to brush up on the details of Job, we'll get into that in a minute.
And I'd rather jump into the heart of the story.
The dilemma in Job is not about whether or not enough grief can undo a person's belief in God.
Because when we moderns talk to one another and say, do you believe in God?
What we really mean is, do you believe that something like God exists?
And in the ancient world, there was nobody flirting with atheism.
It was a matter of which God and how many and how you believed in them.
And it's in this context that Satan, having this debate with God, believes that he can change Job's posture towards God, that he can twist his spirit and disfigure it.
Job's posture towards God is that God is fair and that he's trustworthy.
And Satan sees this as a lucky guy's luxury.
I feel that way when I watch the health and wealth preachers on tv.
It must be easy for them.
Job has had it good, happy in marriage, happy in fatherhood, robust in health, flourishing in his finances.
So Job's faith was bought. Bought by God's handouts. He if you're to ask Satan.
And Satan boasts that if he cranks the misfortune lever up high enough that he can get Job to take a different posture towards God.
He can. If he stacks up enough Miseries get Job to curse God, not just to walk away. That wouldn't be good enough. He can get Job to slam the door on his way out and. And never look back.
And Job's an interesting character.
And the thing that I find most interesting about Job, particularly after he loses his wife, his kids, his property, and his health, is that he doesn't want all of this to be reversed.
That's not his complaint.
He's not wanting the damages to be undone.
He just wants a conversation.
He's a true champion of the early philosophers.
He just wants an answer.
He's not demanding that God give him his family back.
And Job has these three friends. I don't know if you could call them friends.
Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophor for you, that are into Bible trivia.
And they are convinced that Job must have some unseen scandal in his private life to deserve all of these losses.
And Job needs God to show up and shut them up.
Because part of Job's vindication is that he needs to be proven right in front of a community that believes he must deserve this.
He needs God to announce truthfully that the scales of justice are not balanced for Job, that the cosmic machinery of fairness has gotten unplugged, that it's out of whack, that this is a dark night of God's absence. And Job is just met with a punishing silence.
On your worst days, as you recall them, do you remember that silence?
And maybe you're like me. I was raised in a traditional evangelical church in which, really, the only way we were trained to read passages like this is to read them as a historical story.
That there was an individual named Job and he lost everything because Satan got in a gamble with God. And Job, oddly enough, speaks in these long, poetic Shakespearean monologues, and all of his friends speak in these long, poetic Shakespearean monologues.
And that God, after waiting far too long, physically spoke audible words that could be heard and understood by Job and his audience.
That's the way I was trained to read it, that way.
We believe that Job was a story of a very old tragedy.
And I'll admit there are a few smart people out there.
I find them in the Russian and Greek Orthodox Church.
And they believe that all of these stories of God talking with people, Adam and Eve and Noah and Moses and Job, it's a reflection of how intimate the connection was between God and creation at a certain point in history, that this is an exaggeration. This isn't folklore.
This isn't, like imaginative Mythologizing about God speaking with people. We just don't remember as modern people what it was like when creation was so close to God that we could spoke and be heard and God could speak and be heard and it was clear as words.
It's an interesting idea.
And some of the people that forward that idea are not dumb, theologically ignorant folks.
The idea that the ability to hear actual vowels and consonants of God was the way that things once were when society was not so loud and life was not so busy and we had the ability to be radically tuned in listeners, it's not a foolish idea, but I don't buy it.
And I've tried to, I've tried for years to believe that God spoke to Moses in a way that could have been recorded and replayed. I'm a child of the 80s, so recorded on an audio cassette and replayed on an audio cassette that the actual physical words thundering from Sinai were vowels and consonants and sentences.
And maybe I'm just too modern, maybe the current spirit of the age has made me a narrow minded person, but I don't buy it. Partly because there are still a lot of people who are claiming that God is talking to them.
And some of these people deserve our compassion. And I don't say this to mock them.
They suffer from mental illness.
You run into these people that they hear God speaking to them.
But most of the people who hear God speaking to them as I've run into them, use that as a way to manipulate and control and dominate people.
You know, the Holy Spirit told me to tell you that you need to stop raising these questions in church and that you are sowing discord.
Oh, the Holy Spirit told you.
How convenient.
But there are sane, credible, theologically curious people.
Many of them have formal spiritual vows and they spend a lot of their time in monasteries. It is their day job and their night job to listen to God.
And one of the few theological beliefs that I have that has survived three decades is that if God was going to send direct telegrams to anyone, words and sentences, it would be first children.
It would secondly be people who are persecuted for doing what is right.
And in a close third, it would be the people who are the professional listeners, those who have taken vows to go off to hidden places and pray. If anyone is getting telegrams, it's those people.
But when those people talk to us about what prayer is like for them, they don't speak about God talking about in this everyday way of conversation.
And I take those people seriously, that the language of God is a Bit more elusive than that.
That they aren't hearing, Larry, you need to get up in dental floss.
That it is a speech that is felt more than it is heard.
And it's not just Christians.
If you listen to the contemplatives of other traditions, the Buddhists and the Sufis and the folks that we used to call Hindu, because that's easier than calling them Advaita Vedanta folk, they all have reached this kind of agreement.
It's weird that a Catholic priest like Richard Rohr and all these Zen Japanese monks and these medieval mystics, they've all kind of come to a lot of agreements that I don't think can be a coincidence, because it has been all of their experience.
That the religious journey is about quieting yourself and training and being still.
And that after years of that, you begin to realize something.
That God or Allah or the Buddha nature or the ultimate or whatever language you choose is not hiding from us.
It is not playing peekaboo.
But it is our minds who are too busy. It's our egos that are too large, particularly in our discomfort with letting go of all of our efforts to control the present moment, to make it the way we want it to be.
That if we can train in just being quiet with the present, that we'll realize that we need to take off our shoes.
For the ground we are standing on is holy.
And the bush before us is burning, and the desert we were walking through has manna.
And the wind at the mouth of the cave is the answer we've been asking for all along.
And that the sacred reality that is holding us is always reaching towards us, separated by a very thin veil.
And that veil is made of the noise.
It's odd they could all agree on that.
But what does that have to do with Job?
I think that in the context of Job, what we might need to do if you want to return and read it again, is that God was never avoiding Job.
The story has a more elegant insight because chapter after chapter after chapter is Job going back and forth with Eliphaz, Bildad and Zophor in this very Shakespearean way.
Cliff's notes. Just to forward you to the last tracts.
If you read Job and you get to the place where Job, excuse me, God apparently steps onto the stage and you read God's long and winding response to Job, you have to admit that God really doesn't have a very good counter argument.
I mean, if this were a debate, Job wins the debate against God.
If that's how you're Reading the text, because what God does is reveal these various snapshots of creation.
Have you ever watched, like the Planted Earth documentary?
I picture God just doing this without a TV screen.
He shows Job the bottom of unseen oceans, the tippy top of mountains.
He gives Job this kind of psychedelic panoramic view of everything from the rainforest to the Arctic.
And to a man who has buried his entire family.
That's a really weird answer to a person who's lost everything.
Giving them this tour of the world's ecology is a very peculiar way to meet a person's suffering.
I mean, if you were to take God's answer to Job and you were forced to boil it down into a single sentence, I'll try to do it here.
Job's God's answer to Job is that my unknowability is all around you, and it precedes you and it will outlast you. And it is in places that you have never seen. And I am a nameless whirlwind that is holding all of this created order together.
But is that the answer that you would want as to why bad things happen to good people?
Would that satisfy you if you were Job?
Because in the story that answer pays the tab.
Job kneels before the grandeur of God's response.
He has no follow up.
And if we're reading Job as a literal exchange of words and phrases, I find it just to be a very unsatisfying escape of the real things that happen to real people in this world.
I just don't think that this story is about this one guy this one time who had bitterly annoying friends, and that he finally got this verbal speech from God after losing his spouse and his children and his fortune and his health.
I think something way more profound is going on in this book.
I agree with a Peruvian priest who died this last year, Gustavo Gutierrez, who said that Job is not one person.
Job is everyone.
Job is everyone who has suffered unfairly and sat with God silence long enough.
And this story is brilliant because it includes all of the friends and neighbors who will decide not to sit with that silence because they can't bear the emotional burden of our reality. And who can blame them?
I've been gone from the country for five weeks, but I have been watching the news.
The good people get screwed and scoundrels get promoted and children get kidnapped and starvation swallows entire communities and assassins murder saints. And the whole time God watches with no audible answer as to why.
And some people just can't live with the tension of that. And I get it they have to solve this problem of evil puzzle with bad ideas and generalizations. Maybe you grew up with some of them in church.
That everything has to happen for a reason.
That these things are tests, that we're being refined by tragedy in some way.
And the jobs of this world will just not let those people have the last word.
He believes that God is better than that.
That God is morally superior to the people's God, who believes that everything is actually fair. We just can't see it.
Job just can't let them have the last word.
And what Job finds is that God's silence will reveal something beyond words, beyond moral arguments, beyond anything that would satisfy a philosopher who's seeking a justification as to why babies are born sick and some of them don't get well, why kind people get shot in the street.
I think that Job is a kind of a parable play about that silence that holds this world, which is fair and beautiful in many places, but also holds terrors and lynchings and sweatshops and maximum security prisoners, prisons that some people get sent to for no reason at all.
I think that Job the story is about an old dance, the oldest dance in religion, between mystical experience and misery.
And in that dance, some people have gone off into the desert.
The people who have buried their children, the people who have dealt with medical ailments which will have no cure in this lifetime.
Some people have gone down into the desert and come back to us with the word.
That if you go into the desert long enough and you sit there with it, that you run into something out there and it's not a verbal answer to verbal questions, you will catch a glimpse of a silent, still majesty that the poets can only allude to.
I buy that reading of Job.
And I buy that reading of Job. Because our religious history, not just Christian religious history, the religions of the world are filled with people of great humility, modesty and sacrificial kindness who have come out of famine and torture and imprisonment. I'm thinking of the Nelson Mandelas here.
And I don't think that it can just be a coincidence that so many of these people found out what they needed to find out amidst their dark nights of the soul, persevering through the wounds of life, not seeking noise to cover over the pain, not seeking comfort to dodge it, but just being with it and not letting God off the hook.
Until the silence, the silence which they had experienced as God's absence gets changed and transformed into something. And what was the absence they begin to then see is actually the Presence.
If that doesn't make sense to you, it barely makes sense to me.
I'm just telling you what they've told us, that we can make a friend with the quiet, and we'll learn that the quiet is a word beyond words.
I mean, if you were God taking Israel out of Egypt and you were to have to take them after centuries of slavery to some other place, I would take them to a spa.
I would at least take them to therapy.
And I think it's been lost on us how peculiar it is that God takes them into the desert.
It almost appears like an injustice stacked upon a cruelty.
And when Ezekiel is being pursued by his persecutors, he sends Ezekiel out to a cave.
And the oddest story of all is that the Son of God has to do spiritual disciplines at all.
Wouldn't you think that Jesus would just come out of the box ready to go?
Why does the Son of God have to be true?
And yet Jesus seems to think that he has to do something to be ready before he is fit to make his grand announcement.
And he must go into the desert for 40 days and repeat that pattern. That is an old part of Israel's story that he cannot exempt himself from.
And. And that the desert trains him and the silence transforms him before he can offer his people a new word.
My second New Testament professor was a person that I didn't really appreciate fully at the time.
I was in evangelical Texas, where having a wife and kids is almost a prerequisite for being a minister in addition to being a man.
And he was unmarried and didn't have kids.
You can imagine the rumors that created.
And he had made vows of celibacy, and we reminded him that he wasn't Catholic, and he wore all black and didn't seem to own a car.
And we asked him once in class how he prays, and he said, I don't say anything.
And we said, what verse do you have to justify that answer? Because that's a kind of a challenge, you know, in evangelical culture, you. You have to know the chapter and verse of why you bought a Honda Civic or whatever.
And I still remember the moment in class where he said, Habakkuk 2:20.
For the Lord is in his holy temple. Let all of the nations hush and be silent before him.
And the student said, that's not a verse about prayer.
How do you interpret it that way?
And he paused and said, I haven't died yet, so I don't know what it's going to be like when we all gather together.
But I believe that what Habakkuk is hinting at is that when the clock ticks down and death has its last word and the great communion of saints looks into the face of whatever the ultimate is, we will be quiet.
And I'm just practicing for that.
And we didn't have a rebuttal to that.
And he was asked in a preaching conference, in a conference center filled with hundreds of people, how do you think we should train seminarians for the next century? This was 1999.
What do you think we should do for the next generation of ministers to meet the challenges they will face? And he said, I believe we should send them into to the desert and we should make them be in silence for 40 days and 40 nights, because until we do things like that, they will not be able to hear a word other than their own.
And we all said, we're not really going to do that.
But when the unusual tragedies came to West Texas, and when the college students returning from Christmas drove over the railing of a bridge and drowned to their deaths, and the university looked at a stacked roster of experienced ministers to choose one to go to the family and tell them the worst news on the worst day of their life, they always chose him because he was trained in the school of silence and not cheap answers.
And I believe that what he was really trying to train us for back then is not just to do hard things or trying to be edgy. I believe that what he saw as a middle aged man was that if we really wanted to be ministers in the United states in the 21st century, that there was going to be tougher times ahead, tougher times that would require us to get used to the desert.
He wasn't trying to make things hard for us, he was trying to prepare us.
He was training us to assume that the hardest times in our lives were in the future and not in the past.
I don't know about you, but I want to study those crossbearers and I want to learn from the fruits of their discipline.
Because I believe the toughest times in my life are not in the past, they are in the future.
I don't believe I've gone through my darkest nights thus far.
I've been through a divorce.
I lost a job I really loved.
I went through a decade of substance abuse and that wasn't easy.
But I haven't buried my parents yet, and I have not yet lost a close friend.
And I've never had to deal with any prolonged medical suffering.
But I bet that I will if my life is a normal one.
My dark nights are in front of me, and I will have to learn from some of you.
Because when those days come, I want to have already built something.
I already want to have a place in my life that is ready for that.
Because when the storms come down and the floods come up, it's too late to build your home.
You want to have that in place before the dark night commences.
You want to be trained like a teacher who goes off into the desert to hear his father.
And I'm struck by all of the people in our church pews who have smelled death and darkness and have come back resurrected. And I am struck by how many of those people, when you ask them what kept them up, what kept them afloat, they'll tell you contemplative prayer or silent meditation or something like the quiet meeting circles that the Quakers do.
You know, when the Quakers get together, they sit together in an hour of silence.
That's their sermon.
Maybe you would have preferred that this morning, but their fruit is actually what I'm trying to sell in this Fruit of the Disciplines series.
I believe that the worship and the arts and the study of scripture and several other disciplines that have really nourished the church are necessary.
But let's not ignore the power of quiet, the silence that comes to us.
Because a lot of people leave the church in a community where they're always being told, God told me this, and then God told me that. And they go into prayer with the expectation of hearing an audible word, and they feel mocked and disappointed and discouraged by the quiet.
And I think that a lot of those people that left the church are sincere, and we would have kept them if we were more fluent in the language of hearing quiet as the language of God.
That endurance and friendship with silence is the heart of what Jesus faces in the desert and in all of the quiet and hidden places in his public ministry where he escapes off to pray, to eat the food that the disciples cannot see.
And that when it is time for Jesus to walk to the cross, the strength that upholds him, that keeps him on his feet from the hung jury to Gethsemane, is that secret hidden house within himself, built upon the language of God, which is a hushed presence.
And the church has produced many jobs in its day, and they have influenced how I read this story and why I don't think this book is about this one guy this one time, a long time ago, who got the raw deal after a wager made between Satan and God.
I think the Book of Job is about Every person who has been thrown into the dark night of the desert, who has shown that God's power is made perfect in weakness after holding the silence of God until that thing that was experienced as a darkness is transformed into a lamp light.
I'll close with this as I invite the band up.
One of the oldest witnesses, one of the oldest messages of the church is that of all the metaphors, we choose that some people experience God as a rock.
A thing that is felt, that doesn't speak, that is not into dialogue and chit chat, a rock.
And I believe that if you have wandered in the darkness, and if we are to wander in the darkness together, that we'll find that in the midst of the silence that Christ our rock, will address us as a hushed presence which is still healing our world.
And if you sit long enough with your suffering, and if you wait with patience and you make this practice a part of your life, you might not get all the answers that you want as to why undeserving people in this life so often get a raw deal on this side of the veil. I don't have any answers as to why.
But the wounded healers of this world, those who bear some of the resurrection life to us, the living and the breathing, they have shown us that the dawn which rises after the longest night is a warmth born in the human heart and the eyes of the world cannot see it.
And if you found yourself these days with troubled sleep, if you find yourself leaving the news really worried about how this will turn out, if you find yourself like Job, asking questions and not having answers, your questions might be a gift to us.
The silence might be an invitation.
And in the quiet, if we persevere, we might hear the one who has come from his dark night, who bears the wounds from his desert, who bears words beyond words when he tells us, take comfort, I have overcome the world.
Amen.
[00:38:58] Speaker B: Thank you for joining us for this Sunday teaching, no matter when or where you're tuning in.
To learn more about our community or to support the work we do, visit us at oceansidesanctuary. Org. We hope to see you again soon.
