AU United Methodist Community

Rev. Mark Schaefer
Kay Spiritual Life Center
February 5, 2006
Job 21:1-16; Romans 8:31-39

Job 21:1-16
Then Job answered:
‘Listen carefully to my words,
and let this be your consolation.
Bear with me, and I will speak;
then after I have spoken, mock on.
As for me, is my complaint addressed to mortals?
Why should I not be impatient?
Look at me, and be appalled,
and lay your hand upon your mouth.
When I think of it I am dismayed,
and shuddering seizes my flesh.
Why do the wicked live on,
reach old age, and grow mighty in power?
Their children are established in their presence,
and their offspring before their eyes.
Their houses are safe from fear,
and no rod of God is upon them.
Their bull breeds without fail;
their cow calves and never miscarries.
They send out their little ones like a flock,
and their children dance around.
They sing to the tambourine and the lyre,
and rejoice to the sound of the pipe.
They spend their days in prosperity,
and in peace they go down to Sheol.
They say to God, “Leave us alone!
We do not desire to know your ways.
What is the Almighty, that we should serve him?
And what profit do we get if we pray to him?”
Is not their prosperity indeed their own achievement?
The plans of the wicked are repugnant to me.

Romans 8:31-39
What then are we to say about these things? If God is for us, who is against us? He who did not withhold his own Son, but gave him up for all of us, will he not with him also give us everything else? Who will bring any charge against God’s elect? It is God who justifies. Who is to condemn? It is Christ Jesus, who died, yes, who was raised, who is at the right hand of God, who indeed intercedes for us. Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Will hardship, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? As it is written,
‘For your sake we are being killed all day long;
we are accounted as sheep to be slaughtered.’
No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.

Tonight we read two examples of some of the great questioning that goes on in the Bible. There is perhaps no greater example then what goes on in Job’s story, where Job is afflicted with punishment he does not deserve and cannot interpret the world around him. And he asks the question that has been asked for thousands of years: Why is do the wicked prosper and live on to old age? Why do their flocks flourish when they go around thinking they do not need God? And yet no punishment comes upon them. Why do the innocent suffer? Why is God silent? Why do we have to live in a world of brokenness and fear? Why all these things?

It is an essential part of faith to question. The title of this sermon is “Faith Questions” because it deals with questions of faith. But the title is also a statement in and of itself: Faith questions. A mature faith is not afraid to ask questions, is not afraid to hold up its own precepts to the light of reason, to the light of spiritual reflection and to reflect upon the deeper meanings therein. And so now in the pursuit of a healthy and mature faith, we explore some of the questions that have been submitted.

Q: My sister, a devout Christian, has gone through several traumatic events that have caused her to go through deep depression. Despite counseling and anti-depressants, she has suicidal thoughts. Why would God allow her to be so depressed that she’s contemplating suicide? How can this be a part of God’s will and how can good come out of it?

This again is the main question isn’t it? We look around and see things that are unfair and wonder how God allows them to happen. Why? There are two ways of thinking about God. We can think about God’s sovereignty- God is king, God is Lord and ruler of the universe. If we think along those lines we get to a place where, of necessity, things that happen must happen because God wants them to. And we struggle to figure out why God wanted this to happen, why he wanted this person to be suffering. We also need to remember something else about God. God is a God of grace and love. Part of that love is setting us free, of making us free to make choices. And part of that is we live in a world that is not always governed by God’s directive. But as much as our choices affect us and often by the random nature of the cosmos itself. In that circumstance it becomes more important for us to figure out how we’re going to respond to the situation. That is, we don’t always have the ability to figure out why something is happening. God’s ways are mysterious. []

In Job’s case, he actually confronts God and is never given an answer. God asks, “Where were you when I created the foundations of the earth?” That is, you lack the capacity to understand. And I don’t know if we always have the capacity to understand. Some years ago we would have answered this question with, “She must have committed some sin we don’t know about.” But I don’t believe it’s that way at all. I believe that the innocent do suffer through no fault of their own. Our job as Christians is when we can’t find the meaning that we figure out what we’re going to do about it. And in this case, we’re going to give this person all the love and support she needs and figure out what we can do to help. And that may involve our counseling, our care, our compassion, our medicines, our learning. There are so many ways we can respond to help those who are in need. That we can let them know though our own love that through us God is present, that God is still with them, even when we are unable to discern the answer.

So the short answer- I don’t always know why God allows us to suffer, but perhaps these mysteries become our opportunities to respond. Our options to respond in love to help another in her time of need.

Q: Why is Jesus’ humanity often underplayed in the church?

Well that depends on what church you go to. And depends on where your church is and what it needs. I think we all go through times when we need Jesus to be more than human to us. When we need that resurrected Christ the one who defeaeted death- the one who appeared to The Twelve, who will usher in the Kingdom of God and the reign of peace. We sometimes need to know that we are in league with the one who defeated death itself.

And there are times when we need to be in solidarity with one who suffered, the way we suffer. There are times we need to know that our sufferings are shared by God- he wasn’t play-acting, he suffered with us. The church confesses that church is truly god and truly man- that means that our experience with Christ fills every need that we have. That means that Christ was once immanent and personal and limited and vulnerable and at the same time eternal, invincible, immortal. We need both Jesuses. In churches if we are emphasizing one, it is because that is the one who speaks more to that congregation. And I would say to you, go to another house of worship. The Christ the Victor that you find in one church that’s feeling good about itself and then you go to another church in a poor neighborhood where its people are suffering and in need of social justice and the Christ you find there will be Jesus of Nazareth with his human suffering, as a way to encourage us to solidarity with those who are similarly suffering.

It’s a pendulum that swings back in forth, both in the life of the church broadly and in our individual lives.

Q: Why is there such a great emphasis on Revelation and the fear of going to hell? What is the purpose of keeping the congregation in fear to the point that they see a need of converting others for the sheer sake of “saving them”?

You can get people to do anything you want if you scare them badly enough. That unfortunately is a truth the church has discovered as well as the world. I would like to think that there are people who are well-meaning in trying to avoid hell fire and trying to help others to do the same. But I think what happens is that they kind of miss the point. Jesus came and lived his life and died and was raised again so that we could be free of fear. The whole message of the Gospel is that God loves us and that God has acted decisively in our lives for our salvation and that our response is simply to accept this with joy and thanksgiving and to live out a life worthy of that free gift. It is a free gift!

But sometimes I think we’re not comfortable with free gifts, we don’t trust them. Whether it comes to us as internet spam or telemarketing, we’re inclined to think it’s too good to be true. And I think God’s grace is a lot like that for us, so we assume that it has much more to do with what we have to do to avoid punishment rather than to embrace life.

It’s interesting that the Book of Revelation is used so much for this purpose, because if you actually read the Book of Revelation, you’ll find that it’s a book of hope. It’s written to a group of people who were being persecuted, who were oppressed on all sides by Roman powers of idolatry and civil society that were suffocating their Christian faith.

And Saint John of Patmos writes and says, “Be patient. Wait. Endure for God is coming. He will deliver us when his promises are fulfilled. God’s word is good.”

So what we see then is that the Book of Revelation is not written to people who are outside the church. Saint John is not trying to convert anyone with a message of their own destruction. He was trying to remind the faithful to stay firm in their faith, that the words and deeds of God are true. God is coming.

Certainly there’s a lot of fantastic and fiery imagery. But a lot of it can be understood if you know something about apocalyptic literature or simply by examining other books of the Bible. Last year we had a Bible study on Revelation and went through it line by line and examined all of those symbols. And when you do that you realize this is a book of hope, this is a book that promises God is coming. What’s interesting about this book is that it tells the believers to do nothing. It doesn’t say to go out and convert them all before they all go to hell, rather it says, just sit tight. So it’s interesting how this book is used and presented. Those of us who are using our Christian faith as fire insurance–rather than as a gospel of hope–are doing so because of our own fears and insecurities. We want to know that we’ve made it, we want to know that we’re safe. And for some reason we have a hard time trusting God when God says, “You are.” We want to make sure that we’re in, and sometimes that requires us to put other people out. And when we get in that mode we end up with a religion that looks a lot scarier than the one that Christ came and suffered and died to share with us.

Q: How does the Christian Church recognize the “prophet” Mohammed? Is he a prophet?

The short answer is ‘no’. That’s only because the church has sort of closed the book of prophecy at least in the official sense. And we largely consider Saint John the Baptist to be the last prophet. This means officially we have no position we award to Muhammed. That does not mean that Christians cannot look at Islam, look at what Mohammad had to say and find meaning in it. In fact some of the more interesting studies we can do are to look at interfaith texts and look at the values that are expressed there. Some may be surprised to know that Muslims believe in the Virgin Birth, that they believe a lot in Jesus and in Mary- that they believe a lot in what we consider to be Orthodox Christianity. They also believe in some different things- that Jesus’ crucifixion was merely the appearance of a crucifixion. We of course, believe otherwise.

But it doesn’t mean we have to award someone status of prophet to find truth there. We all have our prophets in many ways. To weeks ago we celebrated the birth of a great modern American prophet- Martin Luther King, Jr. We have been blessed to have prophets throughout our history. What the church chooses to call them is a separate issue. We can find meaning and learn from what other people have to say, we can incorporate what they say into our own reflections.

Q: How can we help people through faith and what does the Bible tell us about this?

We help people through faith not simply by our act of believing or by praying for people, though that’s important. We do that here every Sunday and at our healing service. Faith is holistic. Faith in the biblical perspective and in the Wesleyan tradition is something that is lived, not just professed. God sows the seeds of our faith through a grace that invites us into a relationship with him. God then gives us the grace and the faith to accept that he has saved us. This we refer to as our justification, our being reconciled with God. But then we believe that God gives us faith that makes us grow to be more holy, sanctifying us- enabling us to do acts of piety, worship, devotion, but also social justice and compassion and charity and mercy.

So the short answer is that our faith is to help other people. That if lived out properly, our faith will reach out to others in compassion and love, will advocate for justice and challenges oppressive systems that are holding people down. It will lift up people in need and reach out with a message of grace. That’s what in means to help people through faith.

Now how to help people through their own individual faith? I think sometimes that if our faith is lived right and if we truly believe in the message that God is for us (and therefore who can be against us?) that we would live our lives so fearlessly, loving each other so extravagantly that, that couldn’t help but change the world. If we were truly to live lives of faith, lives of trust, trusting in God wholly even that individual example could be transformative and make a difference in somebody’s life.

Q: Why do Christians need Jesus to have died and risen in order to be considered as a savior and worth worshipping? Isn’t the point of Christianity more about God than about Jesus?

Here we get into that Trinity thing, that’s always a fun place to go. Christians believe that when they encounter Christ they encounter God. Now the mechanics of this are somewhat complex, because we recognize that Jesus the Son of God is distinct from the Father and the Spirit and yet we proclaim that they are all one. This is the textbook definition of a mystery. At least a theological mystery.

That is, we do not simply believe that Jesus was some extraordinary person who should be admired for what he did. We believe that God was in Christ reconciling God’s self to the world, that God lived our life, died our death, and was raised to our resurrection. Now how, we don’t know. That is where the mystery comes in.

That is what we are really looking at is Christians trying to reconcile two things that we have always believed. One, that God is one, that’s something we got from our Jewish forebears. The other is that when we encounter Christ, we encounter God in some way. How, we’re not sure.

Our doctrine of the incarnation is something we developed trying to explain what it was that people experienced. That the early church experienced in the risen Christ the presence of God. The early church didn’t know how this worked out. But they still called Jesus the son of God. We continue that process of reflection. We do worship Christ and because it is only appropriate to worship God, we have to conclude that God and Christ are more connected then simply teacher and disciple. And so it is a mystery but is it also a fundamental part of our Christian faith. That’s what makes us Christians- is our belief in Jesus as savior and messiah. We believe that because God was acting through Jesus, he was accomplishing our salvation.

Now there are all kinds of dissenting voices in the tradition, I’ll grant you that. The Unitarians, who are now a separate religion, used to be a denomination in Christianity and at various times there were pockets of Christians who had a much more separatist view on Jesus and God. Jesus to them was more of a creature–like us–than a divine incarnation or offspring. But it’s safe to say, that apart from a few theologians who you have to read in seminary, that not a lot of people have this relationship worked out to an exact science.

But what we do know we get from the early church: God was in Christ, reconciling himself to the world. The manner of that we can leave to be a mystery, and celebrate what it is we do profess.

Q: Jews often state their main reason for not believing in Jesus is that the world hasn’t become a better place, as it should have been if the savior had been here. Why is there a need for there to be a savior in the first place?

Anyone who doubts the strength of that Jewish objection hasn’t looked around lately. The Jewish objection to Jesus as the Messiah is: “Look at the world!” Now, Christians have to be honest about one thing: the world is not yet redeemed. We have to be honest about something else: any messiah worth his salt, would redeem the entire world. What happened is that the church often spiritualized things that didn’t take place in the material reality fast enough. And so you have a lot of people for whom Jesus is only and thoroughly a spiritual savior, saving you and me individually and spiritually for a spiritual afterlife.

The only problem with that is that’s not what we were promised. We were promised peace on earth. We were promised God dwelling with us here. We were promised the Resurrection of the Dead. We were promised the restoration of all that is broken. That is what we were promised. So, are we just wrong? Or, do we have to acknowledge, as the church has as of old, that for us to believe in Jesus, is to believe in him as the Christ-in-his-becoming. We believe that Jesus’ saving work was begun on that first Easter, but is still in the process of being completed. We are expecting Jesus to return, we are expecting Christ to bring peace, to raise the dead to new life, to restore all that is broken. These are things we are still expecting. We have faith that it was Jesus of Nazareth who inaugurated this and will bring it to conclusion.

The main difference between us and the Jews is: we think we know who the guy is. We are both waiting for something, but we believe that we have seen the beginning of the end, in effect. We have seen in Jesus Christ a salvation that was grander than any mere political salvation, grander even than an individualized spiritualized salvation, but the salvation of the entire universe. And if we are honest about our faith, we have to admit we’re still waiting for that.

What it means, though, is that in the meantime, in regard to our interfaith relations, we might be able to let this issue go for the time being. St. Paul himself wrote that “a hardening had come upon the heart of a part of Israel until the full number of the Gentiles was brought in.” It sounds like what he’s saying is “Dont’ worry–the Israelites aren’t going to believe because God isn’t letting them believe, until all the world is brought into this relationship with God.” That goes back to an ancient Jewish idea that if even one person in all Israel would repent, the messiah would come immediately. This idea that we are in the middle of these great parentheses, in this waiting in between the Empty Tomb and the Second Coming.

Our faith in Jesus is no less true and no less assured merely because we are still waiting, but it does require that we wait with some honesty. That we are waiting for these things we have been promised and that we expect Christ will bring them upon his return.

[For more discussion of this issue, I invite you to read a paper I wrote on this very topic: Christology and Jewish-Christian Dialogue]