Pentecost 25/Lectionary 32 November 10, 2013
Luther Memorial Church Seattle, WA
The Rev. Julie Guengerich Hutson
Job 19: 23-27a + Psalm 17: 1-9 + 2 Thess 2: 1-5, 13-17 +
Luke 20: 27-38
May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O Lord, our rock and our redeemer. Amen.
This morning I want to talk a little bit about Job and about the resurrection. One has nothing to do with the other. It’s curious why the lectionary even pairs them together, these two readings, the first from the book of Job and the Gospel reading from Luke today.
Let’s start with Job. This story of Job is one of the oldest books of the Hebrew Bible and was written a couple of hundred years before Satan came to be understood in Judaism as the evil one…the devil….the one opposing God. At the time Job was written, Satan, or as they would have called him ha Satan, was a respected member of the heavenly beings, or of God’s advisors, if you will. Ha Satan’s job was to be the Accuser – his job was to bring people to trial when God told him to.
So, in Chapter 2 of Job, God calls together all of the heavenly beings and asks what they’ve been up to. Ha Satan says he’s just been walking about on the earth and God says “Did you see Job? Isn’t he awesome? He’s one of the most faithful people out there.” And ha Satan responds “Well duh. He’s got everything a person could want. Health and wealth and a loving family. But if he had trials and struggles I’ll bet he wouldn’t be so faithful.”
So the story goes that God said “Fine. We’ll see. Ha Satan, you do whatever you want to him and see what happens.”
Then the story gets ugly. Job loses everything. His animals are stolen, his servants are killed, his sheep are struck by lightning and his children are killed when the roof caves in on them as they sit at the dinner table.
And Job grieved and mourned, but he did not curse God.
So ha Satan caused sores to cover Job’s body. And Job just suffers in faithful silence. Three of his closest friends come and sit with him and before long they begin to accuse him as well. He must have done something terrible for God to punish him in this way. And Job unleashes his fury on his friends and cries aloud for mercy.
Which brings us to today’s verses. The writer of the story of Job uses a bit of irony and puts these words in Job’s mouth: “Oh that my words were written down! O that they were inscribed in a book! “ And look! Here they are! And in the midst of all of this unimaginable tragedy and loss… Job makes a stunning declaration. A declaration that rings in our ears.
I know that my Redeemer lives.
I know that my Redeemer lives.
(Choir sings I Know that My Redeemer lives here)
Job never lost faith in God, although all of the evidence pointed to God’s capricious abandonment.
We again lose something in translation in this story. What Job said was I know that my “Ganesh” lives. Ganesh is the Hebrew word Job used and it means “defense attorney”. Somehow singing I know that my defense attorney lives just doesn’t have the same ring to it.
In the Old Testament, God was the Ganesh, the defender, the defense attorney. And although ha Satan, the Accuser, was putting Job’s faith on trial, Job knew that God would be his defender.
We usually hear the choir sing this beautiful anthem on the Sunday following Easter Sunday. When we hear these words or when we sing the hymn “I Know that My Redeemer Lives” we are, of course, speaking of Jesus and the resurrection. So it is hard not to place this construct on the words from Job. But Job had no knowledge of or sense of Jesus. Yet Job knew that his redeemer, his Ganesh, his defender, had not abandoned him.
Too often we hear stories that remind us of Job’s story. Stories of people who have endured hardship upon hardship, tragedy upon tragedy. And we wonder how it is that they do not, as Jobs’ wife suggested he do, curse God and die from it all.
Today’s Gospel story contains an equally tragic sub-plot and whenever I read this passage from Luke, what jumps out at me is not the point of the story at all. In this story the Sadducees are trying to make a point by trying to trap Jesus in a ridiculous argument about the resurrection of the body. So they try to trick him by concocting a scenario about a woman whose husband dies, so she marries his brother, which would be the custom in those days, and then THAT brother dies too, and the next brother dies…until this poor woman has married all seven of these brothers. And to top it off….she also dies childless, which in those days meant that her life produced nothing of meaning.
Now, the theological point of this story has to do with resurrection. And Jesus basically says “Don’t worry about it. Live this life.”
But I am so stuck thinking about the life of this poor hypothetical woman! She marries seven brothers….can you imagine it and seven times her husband dies. And who is there to comfort her?
What might her response have been to such tremendous hardship in life?
What is ours?
What we endure may not look exactly like Job’s losses or like the losses this woman in the Sadducee’s story endured. But they are our losses. They are our struggles. When we encounter something difficult or unexpected or tragic. When we feel insecure, insufficient, or unprepared. What is our cry?
Can we, like Job, fall on our faces in the dirt and mutter praise to God anyway? Can we, like the woman in the Sadducee’s story, try again to bear a child with yet one more brother?
Do we believe that God is our Ganesh? That God is our Defense Attorney? Can we, in the darkest of days, claim with certainty that we know that our Redeemer lives?
I’m here to say that on some days those words are likely going to get stuck in our throats. We might not have the same sort of ability to utter them as Job, the most faithful person on earth, had. And sisters and brothers, that is when we need the community of faith….the communion of saints, living and dead, to stand with us and stand for us and help us find our voices of praise. Everywhere we turn people are saying that the church is in danger of becoming extinct. The church is not relevant, they say. I will give them this….the church is changing, only in that it is re-forming. But in the dark nights, in the tragic times, when all seems lost….the church is that place where people come. It is that place they look for visible reminders of God’s presence in the world. Where they touch their hands to water and eat bread and drink wine. Where they hear the stories of God’s faithfulness told over and over again. Where they sing their faith. This is the place, the community of faith, the body of Christ, this is the place where we come when life becomes too hard for words and we depend on others to say the words for us, until we can utter them ourselves. I know that my Redeemer lives.
Thanks be to God. Amen.