fourth Sunday in Pentecost
Notes
Transcript
Put in place
Put in place
Once at Seminary we had a symposium where a scholar from Yale came and gave a wonderful hour long presentation on the beauty of being forgetful. At the end when the Q&A time came a first year sem student stood up and holding his BoC sought to correct the scholar on a quotation he made earlier in the presentation.
It was at this moment that everyone else in the room hid- except for Dr. Kolb- the general editor of the BoC. Kolb- who looks like the Keebler Elf politely, and gently, corrected the young man and we all relaxed.
A similar thing happens in our passages today - in Job and in Mark 4.
God corrects His people in the midst of their struggle.
Today’s lesson is- in short- God is God, and we are not. This is good news.
God the Savage
God the Savage
Now- there are some who wish to make God terrible. These ascribe all calamity and harm to the will of God and call it His mercy. They say any harm done to man is at the hand of God and that he is correcting you.
Now this is grounded in good intentions. The Lord can use terrible things to bring us to repentance, as He does of Israel in the deportation to Babylon. OR - THE CROSS OF CHRIST.
Sometimes however, evil is evil. Sin has blemished our world to the point that 2 problems exist:
1.Our perspective is tarnished.
Jack and Paul like to use binoculars, often times they have them backwards. They still use them but they are all wonky!
2. We work with flawed materials.
Bridge between Memphis & Arkansas 900 foot steel beam. 48 years old, last inspected in September! The additional 84 minutes added to now bypass the bridge cost about $2.4 million a day.
Without Christ there is a deeply broken world that is in need of more than repair. St. Cyril of Jerusalem puts it plainly by saying:
Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers 2.7: S. Cyril of Jerusalem, S. Gregory Nazianzen (Lecture XII)
The wounds of man’s nature pass our healing. - Cyril
Those who make the claim that all bad things are actually mercy have skewed the goodness of God. Sometimes evil exists. Sometimes bad things happen. Call them that. The death of a loved one is the sting of sin. Death is fundamentally bad. It is not the end of suffering- it is the final blow of sin.
No matter how we dress it up with titles of homecomings or celebrations of life- death stinks. Every graveside I have done involves tears and gut wrenching loss.
Dress for action like a man; I will question you, and you make it known to me.
In Job 38:3 God is exhorting Job to literally ‘gird his loins’. - get ready because the pain of the world is coming UNLESS the Lord stops it.
In His reflections on Job 38 and God’s desire to STOP pain Luther comments:
Luther’s Works, Volume 42 Fourteen Consolations
Therefore, in no other area has divine mercy been more concerned about comforting faint hearts than in the matter of this evil
To say the Lord only wants to bring repentance by suffering is flat wrong and turns him into a tyrant. This peers into the hidden God. We must always readily attribute comfort to God. Our suffering is not God’s kindness - it is the evidence of our fallen world - which we have helped perpetuate.
Or do you presume on the riches of his kindness and forbearance and patience, not knowing that God’s kindness is meant to lead you to repentance?
Yes, God is capable of harm and hurt but to make Him only wrath is to lose perspective. Perhaps there is a different way of viewing God. Not God the inflicter but God the sleeper.
God the sleeper
God the sleeper
At funerals we usually end up quoting ps 121.3
He will not let your foot be moved; he who keeps you will not slumber.
Yet Jesus - God in flesh is asleep.
But he was in the stern, asleep on the cushion. And they woke him and said to him, “Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?”
So perhaps rather than being a savage - God is less… involved. He’s more apathetic to our plight than involved in it.
This is less satisfying as well. Like God just set the world in motion like a two year old with a top and then walked away.
How do we resolve this?
God resolves it by being in the midst of the chaos. He hasn’t set the world in motion and walked away. He set the world in motion and stepped into it!
God the Savior
God the Savior
To see God as an active participant in the woes of your life is to hold fast that your life will not just be wiped out.
Paul tells his little church in Corinth that their hope is not in vain:
For he says, “In a favorable time I listened to you, and in a day of salvation I have helped you.” Behold, now is the favorable time; behold, now is the day of salvation.
It matters that in fact, Christ did calm the storm, Job DID have his fortunes restored, Israel WAS returned from Babylon, and CHRIST DID RISE FROM THE GRAVE.
This is the role of the Psalms. To help us grapple with the reality of suffering as Paul says:
but as servants of God we commend ourselves in every way: by great endurance, in afflictions, hardships, calamities, beatings, imprisonments, riots, labors, sleepless nights, hunger;
YET - as the Psalmist reminded us -
Our help is in the name of the Lord, who made heaven and earth.
Where does this leave us? It leaves us with 3 S’s
God is not Sadistic
God is not asleep
God is your Savior
More importantly - this should confront an idea of Dualism, of our lives as pieces in a game of Good VS. Evil, God vs. Satan - our wills pitted against the foe of darkness.
Instead, we live in the untold riches of eternal glory not yet unveiled. This is how Paul tells us to live, in the tension that Christ has saved us, is saving us and will save us.
2 Corinthians 6:8–10 (ESV)
We are treated as impostors, and yet are true; as unknown, and yet well known; as dying, and behold, we live; as punished, and yet not killed; as sorrowful, yet always rejoicing; as poor, yet making many rich; as having nothing, yet possessing everything.
The profound lesson from the Psalms, Paul, Job, from this short passage in Mark is that suffering unfolds and yet, in each case the victim makes their complaint to the omnipotent God. This is an act of faithfulness.
Jack and often Paul will come into our bedroom EARLY in the morning and beg for waffles . Jack this week came in and was BEGGING for waffles with Nat. Too often I either end up trying to sleep through it or worse - telling them to be quiet.
See, in our sufferings of life I think our temptation is to actually be the asleep or worse vindictive ones. God is ever present, ever active. We are the ones who walk away or quit caring.
That is not how our God operates- so neither should we.
This is a call for us to not see the world or our community as against us or, for us to be apathetic towards them but instead to be active, engaged participants in God’s faithfulness to His world.
The grace, the good news, is that God commands even the wind and the sea. Jesus is God. As such, God is faithful and merciful to you. His Salvation is now. His favor is upon you now, and always.