Pentecost 4B
Resumption of In-Person Worship at Faith
Texts: Job 38:1-11; Mark 4:35-41
Sermon by Rev. Robert Klonowski
June 20, 2021
New Life
In December of 1980, my wife Deb and I had been married for only three months, and I was in my second year of seminary study, when Deb’s friend Linda Anderson was murdered. Some of you who’ve lived in this area for a very long time might even remember it, since Linda and her children lived right here in Park Forest, and it was all over the news back then. It was a murder/suicide committed by Linda’s ex-husband.
Deb was devastated. It was just a year earlier she had moved to Chicago to be married, and Linda was the best friend she’d made here. The horror of it all was overwhelming: what would happen to the kids?
And in the middle of this I was taking seminary classes. Theology: classes on the nature and the work of God. It was hard for me to sit still for it: If God was indeed all-powerful, and God is indeed a loving God, how is it that horror like this could happen? Where was that all-powerful and caring God in an event like this, and now in the life of my young wife?
In my classes I asked pointed questions, provocative questions about God and the problem of evil. They were questions so obviously desperate that one of my professors, Dr. Philip Hefner, one day called me into his office. “Are you all right?” he asked me. “What’s going on with you?” I remember that as one of the kindest things anybody’s ever done for me. I poured out my questions, my pain, my soul. Where was this God of ours?
The first lesson this morning is from the book of Job. Do you know the story of Job? Job is a righteous man who loves God and is blessed with wealth, a comfortable life, and many children. Then, capricious, malicious tragedy strikes him – like the sudden, sweeping onset of a pandemic – and Job is left penniless and hungry, miserable and naked, his children are all killed, and he is afflicted with debilitating disease. Today Job lives on in the English language primarily through the expression “the patience of Job,” but that’s an incredible misnomer. A just God would never treat a faithful man so harshly, Job cries out. Patience in suffering is impossible, and the Creator should not take his creatures so lightly, to come against them with such force.
After some 37 chapters of the impatience of Job, here in chapter 38 God has finally got fed up with it all, and God speaks. Out of the whirlwind of Job’s tragedy, God asks who is this Job, who darkens counsel by words without knowledge? And where were you, when the foundations of the earth were laid? I am the God who shut in the threatening sea, who has prescribed bounds for the flooding tide of what endangers my creation. I am the God who has spoken to the storm that imperils my people, saying, “Thus far shall you come, and no farther, and here shall your crashing waves be stopped!”
The pandemic has been awful. I have lost people I loved, and I know that you have, too. We have lost members of this Faith community, and even as we celebrate the opportunity to gather again, we mourn them today. We have been living under threat for so long. I will never forget sending my wife off to the medical center in the early days of the pandemic, to care for people with Covid. I will never forget fearful phone calls with those of you who caught the disease and struggled through it. I will never forget this church building deserted, and worrying whether our Faith community would even make it through this. I will never forget the disruption: people I love out of work; people figuring out how to care for aging family members; the disruption of our schools. This has been awful.
But back in my twenties, when our lives were touched by murderous tragedy during my seminary years … I learned some things about God and tragedy. And in 38 years of serving as a pastor, sharing your lives so often when we are touched by sin and evil and caprice and loss, I have learned some things with you about God and tragedy. Our brother Job, if he’s listening when God responds in chapter 38, he learns some things about God and the tragedy that has befallen him. Let me tell you about some of the things that we are taught by God’s Word about all this, and some of the things I have learned.
One: there are things in this world that are not of God. Some of them are moral evils: sin, brokenness, corruption. But some of them are capricious tragedy: disease, disaster, suffering, death. God’s intention for us is life: after all, it is God who has brought us into existence at all. But there are things in this world that are not of God.
Two: when our lives are touched by things that are not of God, that is when God chooses to share our lives with us. It is the unique claim of Christianity: this is a God who does not stay heavenly and apart, but takes flesh and dwells among us: even -especially! – in times of trial.
It is the claim of Christianity, and it is my claim, that God has been with us in pandemic. At times when our hearts were breaking, the heart of God was itself broken, with us. When we have suffered, our God chooses to suffer with us – that is why the central image of Christianity is the cross.
And – and! – when we instituted shelter-in-place and mask restrictions and the like, that was God with us; that was God at work. It’s important for us to see what a blessing these things were; as my wife points out to me, they worked. Yes, 600,000 are dead in our country alone, but because of what we did, millions have lived. They worked. God be praised.
And when our society and the scientific community bent to the work of fighting the pandemic, that was God with us. Vaccines developed in record time – that is a blessing from God. The vaccines work. God be praised.
When my wife and millions of other medical workers risked themselves to care for others, that was God at work.
When the homeless guests from our Faith shelter and their workers figured out how to keep high-risk people safe, that was God at work. It was a blooming miracle, is what it is.
Every gesture of care and work to continue to be community through this thing – and I know you have experienced many, many of those yourself – those have been God at work.
Every Zoom Bible study and Confirmation class and Sunday School session and video worship production, learning and proclaiming the Word of God!, was evidence of God present among us. It is God-with-us who has brought us to this point this morning, together for worship for the first time in 15 months. It is God-with-us who prescribed bounds for the threatening storm, who set bars and doors, who said to the pandemic, “Thus far you shall come, and no farther, and here shall your waves be stopped.”
And that brings us to the last of our Christian learnings about God and the nature of evil. Three: the central image of Christian faith is indeed the cross, but the story does not end with the cross, does it? The message of the cross is that God will take the worst of what this world has to offer, and make of it something holy and meaningful and good. We call that resurrection. You have known it in your life, for if there’s one thing *you* have learned about God and the problem of evil, it is that every time your life has been touched by evil and tragedy, God has been with you, *and* God has brought you to a place where you can know new life. Resurrection. New life. Where is God, in tragedy, in pandemic? God is on our side. This worship service alone is a sign to you about where is God in all this.
God-with-us. The God of rescue. The God of resurrection. This is the God who has brought to you, and brought to this Faith community, new life.