What can we say come October 21? 22nd after Pentecost

   If you’re continuing a series on Job (we’re to the whirlwind now!), go to the bottom of this blog -- or watch my 15 minute sermon on Job, "Everything Happens for a Reason." We’ll start this blog with the Gospel, then explore Hebrews (not just for preaching it, but what it reveals about ministry).

    Mark 10:35-45. Jesus has clearly altered the plot of his story from striding about amazing people to this beleaguered journey toward Jerusalem to suffer and die. Along the road, he’s explaining this way of sorrows, and how following him similarly puts you in harm’s way, a road of downward mobility, a route toward suffering and death. 

    How dense are the disciples? The sons of Zebedee, acting this time without their pal Peter, sound like those Christians you’ve known who “claim promises” and feel sure God will do their bidding: “We want you to do for us whatever we ask of you.” Did Jesus chuckle? Grimace? Instead of chiding or correcting, Jesus quite typically followed up by asking them to continue. They seek the glory of sitting next to him in his glory. Posturing, jockeying – and don’t think clergy are immune from the allure of dreams of glory, sitting on the right hand of the bishop, sitting just to the left at one of the grand pulpits. Clergy: are you moving on up? Or resentful of those who are?

     Did Zebedee raise his boys with quite proper American-style ambition to succeed? Matthew 20:20 interestingly casts Mrs. Zebedee as the one seeking position for her boys.

    Jesus, continuing themes they’d missed, points out that his glory will involve “drinking the cup I drink,” that is, being arrested, beaten, and crucified. Even on hearing this, and perhaps they even understood a little, they cockily declare “Lord, we are able!” My theology professor at Duke, Bob Cushman, once told me his least favorite hymn was “Are Ye Able” – which similarly boasts “Yeah, the sturdy dreamers answered, to the death we follow thee. Lord, we are able!” But they are not able, and neither are we. God wants availability, not ability. And God’s realm is an upside down kind of glory. There is no hierarchy in God’s kingdom: “Gentiles lord it over others; but it shall not be so among you.” Or rather, there is a hierarchy, and it’s a flattened pancake on the ground of humility. Whoever can go lowest is closest to Jesus.

    James, as fate would have it, was martyred a decade later (Acts 12:2). John apparently lived to old age. Their naïve confusion on the road in Mark 10 was surely replaced by a mature, humble realization that Jesus’ way was the way, and that the world’s path to glory isn’t merely dangerous but a deceptive lie. Frodo understood that the ring had to be destroyed at Mordor, or the power of the ring would destroy him and the shire. When I preach on such themes, I am not optimistic people will be able to hear. Sometimes I settle for incremental gains: maybe somebody is a tad humbler, maybe somebody engages in some hard service for God. But the revolution Jesus envisaged: we have to look to the St. Francises of the world, the Dorothy Days, the Teresas and Thérèses of the world (Avila, Lisieux, Calcutta), maybe an Albert Schweitzer or maybe somebody you know who bought into the Jesus revolution with abandon.

     Our Epistle, Hebrews 5:1-10, is typically Hebrews: dense, profound, mystifying, moving. And obsessed with Melchizedek. I want to grow up to savor Melchizedek – but for now, the yawning gap between me and the early Christians is the way they got totally jazzed about the mention of the obscure king, and I just skate on by.

    The author compares and contrasts earthly priests with Christ as our priest – affording us a hopeful glimpse into both. I think it’s wise, on occasion, to talk about what it is to be a priest, like you, the preacher – not to elicit sympathy or to assert your authority. Every few months, as the context provides an opening, I tell my people that I love them, I think of them when they aren’t around, I worry about them, I pray for them. It’s my job; it’s my calling. 

    Hebrews speaks of the weakness of the priest. Apply for an open pulpit, or ask for a move from your bishop, and tell him/her you’re weak. No, we profess our strengths, our savvy, our work ethic, our robust theology. But I wound up writing a book entitled Weak Enough to Lead after teaching a doctoral class on biblical leadership – and noticing how the Bible simply doesn’t supply snappy formulas for how to be a strong leader. A weak bunch – as they are, and should be, these Bible leaders. Hebrews doesn’t speak of weak priests and then demand they get strong. Their weakness is their strength. 

    And why? They are able to sympathize, and be gentle. When I get hard on my people (in the privacy of my mind, of course), I am forgetting my own foibles and flaws. We are all broken. Rainer Maria Rilke (in his letter to a young poet friend) was right:  “Do not believe that he who seeks to comfort you lives untroubled. His life has much difficulty and sadness. Were it otherwise he would never have been able to find these words.” Knowing this, and even daring to speak of it, might remind the critics and fault-finders that they are a bit off track, and refocus church life on compassion, not fixing people or even the world, but being with one another, not judging but overflowing with mercy.

     Jesus himself wasn’t superman come to earth, he wasn’t a man of steel. He himself was meek, lowly, woundable, wounded. Verse 7 poignantly reminds us of Jesus’ “loud cries and tears.” Gethsemane, yes (and I’d commend watching this scene from Jesus ChristSuperstar, and even better from the at-times weird but provocative film, The Last Temptation of Christ) – and weeping over Jerusalem from the Mt. of Olives, yes. But the text implies more, something regular. Jesus loved deeply. Jesus was one with the heart of God. Whatever broke God’s heart broke Jesus’ heart (in the words of Bob Pierce, founder of World Vision). Those who travelled with Jesus, and asked him to teach them to pray, witnessed his sorrows, his crying out to God in prayer.

    This blog labors toward good preaching. Maybe we should, instead, strive to be clergy who pray, who have tears and cries for our people, for the troubles of the world, for ourselves. I too often am annoyed, angry, frustrated with my people, and the world, and myself – and I am positive that even if I smile and talk sweetness and love, my inner mood bleeds out through my pores, and they feel it. 

    You may be a stalwart in prayer for your people. I for one am humbled when I consider someone like my wife’s grandfather, Charles Stevens – who was known for his all-night prayer vigils and intensity and length of supplications for people, challenges, big decisions. And it’s not that such prayers “work.” We just pray. Jesus, after all, prayed for the cup to pass from him – and the result only superficially contradicts the words of Hebrews 5: “He was heard for his godly fear.” Ah, but he was. God never adored his son more than in Gethsemane, and throughout Good Friday. 

    The diciest moment in Hebrews 5 is this notion that Jesus “learned obedience through what he suffered.” He suffered because he was obedient… and people have heard lots of pablum about God teaching people lessons through smiting them or inflicting harm on them (the whole premise being overturned in Job!). God is in the suffering. God suffers what we suffer. Knowing God is growing into that awareness – not sticking with the calculus of I am suffering, so what is it God is trying to teach me by sending this my way?

    In Weak Enough to Lead, I looked to a fictional priest who sympathizes (in Father Melancholy's Daughter): “The humble, nameless leaders who are office-holders, the steady as you go solid rock at work, those uncreative readers of our holy books may play the steady, reliable role we need when the charismatic leaders are out there doing who knows what. Consider Gail Godwin’s marvelous assessment of Father Gower: ‘He’s not trendy; he doesn’t pose. He’s neither a self-transcendent guru nor one of these fund-raising manager types who have become so sought after lately by our Holy Church. He’s just himself—himself offered daily. He worries about people, he worries about himself. . . . He goes to the hospital carrying the Sacraments in his little black case. He baptizes and marries and buries and listens to people’s fears and confessions and isn’t above sharing some of his own.  He scrubs the corner cross with Ajax. . . . He makes his services beautiful; he reminds you that the whole purpose of the liturgy is to put you in touch with the great rhythms of life. He’s a dedicated man, your father. He’s lonely and bedeviled like the rest of us, but he has time for it all and tries to do it right. He lives by the grace of daily obligation. He’s what the priests in books used to be like, but today he’s a rarity.’ Priests in Old Testament times offered themselves daily, and their services were beautiful. And we can be sure they worried about people. Only an insensitive dolt could have watched the same sorrowful woman bringing her modest sacrifices, weeping in the sanctuary, and not felt her pain. There was a pastoral tenderness in the implementation of ritual as we see in the story of Hannah. Barren and taunted by her husband’s other wife, Hannah prayed repeatedly and with such intensity that Eli surmised she must be drunk. After she explained her plight, he engaged in his regular priestly function by offering her a word of blessing: ‘Go in peace. And may the God of Israel give you what you’ve asked from him’ (1 Sam 1:17).”

     And finally Job. After Job rails against God and his pseudo-friends for so long, while God is entirely silent, the shocker is that God finally speaks in chapter 38. The lectionary only offers us a few verses; the preacher will need to account for God’s entire speech without explicating every detail. The details are stunning, the poetry and imagery eloquent and vivid; Robert Alter's brief comments in The Wisdom Books, and Francis Anderson's Job are both brilliant on these passages.

     God doesn’t supply simple “answers,” or any smooth theological explanations of why bad things happen to good people. God doesn't explain how the moral calculus works or doesn't. God instead takes Job on a tour of creation – and not the pretty places in creation, but the wild, inaccessible, puzzling, explicable places. God doesn’t point to the house cat or the hunting dog who do our bidding, or a caged parrot. God indirectly suggests to Job that God fashioned, not a neat world where everything fits together snugly and all is fair and placid. It’s dangerous out there, it’s amazing out there, and in here too. The speech clearly undercuts a too-small-God theology – or an anthropocentric theology.

     Partly God invites us to hear God’s voice in nature – and not in the pretty sunsets or photogenic hills with grassy meadows nearby. John Muir, after exploring Yosemite, wrote “As long as I live, I’ll hear waterfalls and birds and winds sing. I’ll interpret the rocks, learn the language of flood, storm, and the avalanche. I’ll acquaint myself with the glaciers and wild gardens, and get as near to the heart of the world as I can.”

It's worth noting that it's not just the wildness God points to. There's a lot of birthing going on - startling new life. Job cursed the day of his birth, and feels everything is over. But God shows him new life bursting forth in the wild haunts of animals - and even the ocean is spoken of as being birthed.

    Martin Buber, weighing the speech of God in light of the progress of the entire story, suggested wisely that the book of Job guides us from the view that God is cruel (chapters 1-2) to a retributive God (the friends’ speeches in 4-11), to a hidden God (the one who simply refuses to respond to Job through chapters 3-37), and finally then to a God of revelation, a God who is present, relational. Job doesn’t get answers. But Job does get God. Preachers need to help our people to see that God doesn’t float down rewards or blessings or things. God’s gift is… God. Jesus gave them his body and blood – and invited them to continue receiving him. His nickname, after all, is Emmanuel.

Or, as Anderson puts it, “That God speaks at all is enough for Job. All he needs to know is that everything is still all right between himself and God…. It does not matter much what they talk about. Any topic will do for a satisfying conversation between friends.”

    Robert Frost, in The Masque of Reason, imagines God finally explaining everything to Job – and his thinking is maybe the most on point assessment of Job ever written:

I've had you on my mind a thousand years
To thank you someday for the way you helped me
Establish once for all the principle
There's no connection human can reason out
Between their just deserts and what they get.
Virtue may fail and wickedness succeed.
Twas a great demonstration we put on.
I should have spoken sooner…

Too long I've owed you this apology

For the apparently unmeaning sorrow
You were afflicted with in those old days.
But it was of the essence of the trial
You shouldn't understand it at the time.
It had to seem unmeaning to have meaning.
And it came out all right. I have no doubt
You realise by now the part you played
To stultify the Deuteronomist
And change the tenor of religious thought.
My thanks are to you for releasing me
From moral bondage to the human race.
At first… I had to prosper good and punish evil.

You changed all that. You set me free to reign.

You are the Emancipator of your God,
And as such I promote you to a saint.
************

 Looking toward Advent: My book, Why This Jubilee? Advent Reflections, has much of what I've used as preaching material over the years, and also serves as a good group study for your people.