Proper 7 / 3 Pentecost—25 June 2006
St. Alban’s, Davenport — 8:00 & 10:15
Job 38:1-11,16-18 Ps 107:1-3,23-32 2Cor 5:14-21 Mark 4:35 -5:20
They woke him up and said to him, “Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?” He woke up and rebuked the wind. . . . Then the wind ceased, and there was a dead calm. He said to them, “Why are you afraid? Have you still no faith?”
The Old Testament lesson this morning is from the concluding part of the Book of Job. Job is a marvelous piece of literature, a theological elaboration of an old Semitic folktale, and represents a major step in the growth of Israel’s understanding of their relationship with God. It’s not without its problems, however.
You know the story of Job. Job was a rich and prosperous man, whom God allowed the Adversary to smite with calamity as a test of his faith. (That’s a major problem with the story right up front!) Job lost his riches, he lost his children, he lost his health, and ended up sitting in the ashes scraping his sores, and even his wife spits at him, “Curse God and die!” And along come Job’s three friends to comfort him (with such friends who needs enemies?): Eliphaz the Temanite, Zophar the Naamathite, and of course the shortest man in the Bible, Bildad the Shuhite. Their “comfort” consists primarily in trying to get Job to confess his sin, for such calamity can come only as divine retribution for grievous misdeeds. But Job protests, with complete justification within the context of the story, that he is innocent, and therefore, under the burden of all this suffering, “Why me?”
The very fact that we can raise what we call “the problem of evil”—if there is a good God why do the innocent suffer?—demonstrates the advance in moral consciousness which the Book of Job represents—the recognition that the innocent do suffer. In prior stages of spiritual development, human beings generally assumed that suffering and calamity were punishment for sin, and bad things happened to people because they deserved them. Job in his integrity protests, “I don’t deserve this, and I demand an accounting.” That takes us through the first 37 chapters of Job, up to the part we heard just now. And here in chapter 38 God is saying, “And who are you to demand an accounting from me?” God goes on in this vein for 4 more chapters (the Book of Job is not short!), whereupon Job repents, and is restored to prosperity.
Now as an answer to the question, “Why me?” this is really not very satisfactory, frankly. And in fact God does not really answer Job’s question at all. God simply reveals the divine self, and in doing so invites Job into fellowship with God: the creature with the Creator.
From the dawn of human history we have practiced a sort of “vending machine religion”—in which our relationship with God is transactional. We make deals with God, quid pro quo—“God, you give me this and I’ll do that for you.” We deposit our spiritual coins in the divine vending machine, prayers or good works or whatever, and we push the button, and down the chute is supposed to come the requisitioned item — health, or prosperity, or forgiveness, or peace of mind, or whatever. And you know how we are with a vending machine that takes our money and doesn’t deliver our candy bar! If we do right by God, God has to do right by us. We think. And too bad for any God who doesn’t hold up his end of the deal!
And maybe putting it that way can help us to see how far off the mark this ancient and widespread paradigm for understanding the nature of the relationship between humankind and God is. This transactional model just doesn’t have anything to do with it. If we are looking for justice in this human life, we are likely to be disappointed. Even God didn’t get justice in this life—and still doesn’t. Godliness is still very likely to lead to crucifixion.
These are very serious matters, and I don’t want to seem to be giving trivial or cheap answers. But I think we need to recognize that the response, if not exactly an answer, to “Why me?” is “Why not you?” (Mattie Stepanek, the wonderful young poet who died of muscular dystrophy at the age of thirteen, knew this; we seem to have a harder time understanding.) And to the protest, “If there is a good God, why do the innocent suffer?” the response, again not an answer, “If there isn’t a good God, where do you get your righteous indignation?”
In the Epistle this morning, St. Paul writes: “If anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new! All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ, and has given us the ministry of reconciliation; that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting the message of reconciliation to us.” And Paul goes on to explain that God has taken on all our stuff so we can take on all God’s stuff.
In the Gospel the disciples come whining to Jesus because they think they’re all about to drown. Jesus calms the storm—this is the thematic link back to the first lesson—and then he asks, “Why are you afraid? Have you still no faith?” Not, I think, “Didn’t you believe that I would keep you safe from drowning?” but “Didn’t you have faith that as long as you are with me nothing else really matters?”
We look for answers, but I’m not so sure that God always gives us an answer, not the kind of answer we’re looking for. God is not a divine vending machine but a divine companion and our final lover. What God says is, “I who made you am with you always. Therefore whatever befalls you in this life, nothing can harm you forever; and in the end I shall make all things new.”
© 2006 William S. J. Moorhead
Sunday, June 25, 2006
Sunday, June 11, 2006
Sermon -- 11 June 2006
Trinity Sunday B — 11 June 2006
Trinity, Iowa City -- 8:45 a.m.
RCP: [Isa 6:1-8] Ps 29 Rom 8:12-17 John 3:1-17
For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.
Have I told you the story about the man who came to church just once a year? But not on Christmas or Easter — this man showed up faithfully every, but only on, Trinity Sunday. And the priest finally couldn’t stand it any longer, and asked him, “Why Trinity Sunday?” And he replied, “Because I enjoy listening to you get all tangled up trying to explain the Doctrine of the Holy Trinity!”
Well, I’m not going to try to explain the Doctrine of the Holy Trinity. At least not this year. (Maybe next year!)
I am, however, going to wander around in the general vicinity of the Doctrine of the Holy Trinity, and perhaps we will find a little enlightenment and a little inspiration. For one thing, I do want to dispel the notion that the Trinity is a concept that a bunch of crotchety old bishops thought up in the fourth century.
Digression: (Well, you knew I was going to digress sooner or later, so we may as well get it over with.) Part of the detritus from the recent fuss over The Da Vinci Code and the publication of the Coptic text of the Gospel of Judas has been the idea that what we have come to know as Christianity, including such things as the doctrine of the Trinity, the divinity of Jesus, and the canon of the New Testament, only emerged three hundred years after the ministry of Jesus. This is simply not so. Although it is true that early Christianity was a good bit more diverse than we may like to remember, and sometimes a good bit more bizarre, especially on the fringes, there really was a mainstream pretty much right from the beginning, even though it wasn’t completely homogeneous and not yet too precisely defined. But you see, we Anglicans, having rejected an infallible Pope and for the most part an infallible Bible (at least in the sense of a literally inerrant text), put all our chips on an infallible Early Church. This also turns out to be a bad bet. (If you’re looking for infallible authority, you’re in the wrong quadrant of the galaxy.) We believe and trust in God’s promise that God will see us through to the goal of our journey in the fulfillment of God’s Reign, but that doesn’t mean that we won’t wander off the road from time to time, and at any given moment we may well be in the ditch, and throughout our history our boots have always been a bit muddy. Being in denial about this is one of the reasons why the Church in the current generation is in such an uproar.
But…I…digress.
Although the word “Trinity” does not appear in the New Testament (the Latin trinitas is first used by Tertullian at the end of the second century — but bear in mind that Tertullian was the first Christian theologian to write in Latin), all of the raw data are there, in the experience of Christians as God’s people, saved by Jesus Christ, filled with the Holy Spirit. The development of the doctrine of the Trinity was simply (well, not simply, I guess!) the articulation, over the next four hundred years, of this fundamental experience as a systematic construct. The doctrine of the Trinity is a transcendental argument; that is, it is something to which we do not have direct access, but it represents the necessary conditions of the possibility of the truth of our experience and hope of salvation in Christ. If the doctrine of the Trinity is not true, then our whole Christian self-understanding falls apart. (One can, of course, believe that the Christian understanding of what God has done and pomised in Jesus of Nazareth is all a delusion, and then obviously the doctrine of the Trinity makes no difference. But those are the options.)
One of the pieces of New Testament raw data that goes into the doctrine of the Trinity is found in the Gospel today, in a verse well-known and rightly well-loved: “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.” The words “so loved the world” could take a lifetime of sermons to unpack, but today I suggest we think about the phrase, “gave his only Son.” What can it mean for God to “give his only Son” to reconcile us and bring us to eternal life? And what do we understand by God’s “only Son”? What may come to mind, and I think has come to the minds of some people, is a picture of a human father and his son, and dad says, “Son, I love those folks so much I’d like you to go die on the cross for them.” And some may say, “What a dad!” And others, more troubled, may say, “What kind of a dad…???” I hope we see that this is an indication that we don’t quite have this right yet. So maybe we need to go back again to what we are saying when we say that God “gave his only Son,” exactly what “Son” means in this context, and what this “Son’s” relationship is to God.
There’s a lot that could be said, and maybe should be said, about how we use the word “Son” of Jesus in relation to God, but there’s another service at 11:00 and we need to be out of here. But I think I’ve said before something I think is very important — it’s not my idea, I got it from John Austin Baker, Bishop of Salisbury, in a book I no longer have — given what it takes to keep us from perishing but bring us to eternal life, given that cost. God did not send somebody else instead.
And that’s a first step down the road that leads us in our understanding of God, and of God in Christ, to the doctrine of the Holy Trinity.
© 2006 William S. J. Moorhead
Trinity, Iowa City -- 8:45 a.m.
RCP: [Isa 6:1-8] Ps 29 Rom 8:12-17 John 3:1-17
For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.
Have I told you the story about the man who came to church just once a year? But not on Christmas or Easter — this man showed up faithfully every, but only on, Trinity Sunday. And the priest finally couldn’t stand it any longer, and asked him, “Why Trinity Sunday?” And he replied, “Because I enjoy listening to you get all tangled up trying to explain the Doctrine of the Holy Trinity!”
Well, I’m not going to try to explain the Doctrine of the Holy Trinity. At least not this year. (Maybe next year!)
I am, however, going to wander around in the general vicinity of the Doctrine of the Holy Trinity, and perhaps we will find a little enlightenment and a little inspiration. For one thing, I do want to dispel the notion that the Trinity is a concept that a bunch of crotchety old bishops thought up in the fourth century.
Digression: (Well, you knew I was going to digress sooner or later, so we may as well get it over with.) Part of the detritus from the recent fuss over The Da Vinci Code and the publication of the Coptic text of the Gospel of Judas has been the idea that what we have come to know as Christianity, including such things as the doctrine of the Trinity, the divinity of Jesus, and the canon of the New Testament, only emerged three hundred years after the ministry of Jesus. This is simply not so. Although it is true that early Christianity was a good bit more diverse than we may like to remember, and sometimes a good bit more bizarre, especially on the fringes, there really was a mainstream pretty much right from the beginning, even though it wasn’t completely homogeneous and not yet too precisely defined. But you see, we Anglicans, having rejected an infallible Pope and for the most part an infallible Bible (at least in the sense of a literally inerrant text), put all our chips on an infallible Early Church. This also turns out to be a bad bet. (If you’re looking for infallible authority, you’re in the wrong quadrant of the galaxy.) We believe and trust in God’s promise that God will see us through to the goal of our journey in the fulfillment of God’s Reign, but that doesn’t mean that we won’t wander off the road from time to time, and at any given moment we may well be in the ditch, and throughout our history our boots have always been a bit muddy. Being in denial about this is one of the reasons why the Church in the current generation is in such an uproar.
But…I…digress.
Although the word “Trinity” does not appear in the New Testament (the Latin trinitas is first used by Tertullian at the end of the second century — but bear in mind that Tertullian was the first Christian theologian to write in Latin), all of the raw data are there, in the experience of Christians as God’s people, saved by Jesus Christ, filled with the Holy Spirit. The development of the doctrine of the Trinity was simply (well, not simply, I guess!) the articulation, over the next four hundred years, of this fundamental experience as a systematic construct. The doctrine of the Trinity is a transcendental argument; that is, it is something to which we do not have direct access, but it represents the necessary conditions of the possibility of the truth of our experience and hope of salvation in Christ. If the doctrine of the Trinity is not true, then our whole Christian self-understanding falls apart. (One can, of course, believe that the Christian understanding of what God has done and pomised in Jesus of Nazareth is all a delusion, and then obviously the doctrine of the Trinity makes no difference. But those are the options.)
One of the pieces of New Testament raw data that goes into the doctrine of the Trinity is found in the Gospel today, in a verse well-known and rightly well-loved: “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.” The words “so loved the world” could take a lifetime of sermons to unpack, but today I suggest we think about the phrase, “gave his only Son.” What can it mean for God to “give his only Son” to reconcile us and bring us to eternal life? And what do we understand by God’s “only Son”? What may come to mind, and I think has come to the minds of some people, is a picture of a human father and his son, and dad says, “Son, I love those folks so much I’d like you to go die on the cross for them.” And some may say, “What a dad!” And others, more troubled, may say, “What kind of a dad…???” I hope we see that this is an indication that we don’t quite have this right yet. So maybe we need to go back again to what we are saying when we say that God “gave his only Son,” exactly what “Son” means in this context, and what this “Son’s” relationship is to God.
There’s a lot that could be said, and maybe should be said, about how we use the word “Son” of Jesus in relation to God, but there’s another service at 11:00 and we need to be out of here. But I think I’ve said before something I think is very important — it’s not my idea, I got it from John Austin Baker, Bishop of Salisbury, in a book I no longer have — given what it takes to keep us from perishing but bring us to eternal life, given that cost. God did not send somebody else instead.
And that’s a first step down the road that leads us in our understanding of God, and of God in Christ, to the doctrine of the Holy Trinity.
© 2006 William S. J. Moorhead
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