COMMUNITY CHURCH OF THE MONTEREY PENINSULA
P. O. BOX 222811
CARMEL CA 93922
(831) 624-8595
www.ccmp.org
Rev. Paul Wrightman, Pastor
Independent and United Church of Christ
August 16, 2020
Dear Friends,
Bible Study is officially a go! If you would like to join us on Wednesday evening from 6-7, just let me know and I’ll send you a Zoom link. paulccmp@yahoo.com
As soon as I email this worship service to you, I’ll be emailing you Heidi’s wonderful virtual flower arrangement for Sunday – and beyond.
Also, you’ll be receiving an email from George Brehmer concerning our up-coming congregational meeting. We won’t be able to meet in person, but can still vote by email and slow mail.
Take Good Care and always remember that Jesus IS Emmanuel – God WITH us!
Paul
WORSHIP SERVICE FOR AUGUST 16, 2020
INTRODUCTORY READING Ann Weems, Contemporary
Hurting, they came to him,
Healed, they followed him.
Grateful, they gave to him what they had and what they were.
Blessed, they became a blessing
and went out to all the world in his name.
Those who are hurt
and healed
grateful
and blessed
still move among us
in his name.
SUGGESTED MUSIC Sweet Hour of Prayer SE Samonte You Tube
OPENING PRAYER Daniel J. McGill, Contemporary
May the pain of our loss
--Increase the fire of our love
May the pain of our guilt
--Ignite the flame of mercy in us
May the pain of our mistakes
--Light for us the path to wisdom
May the pain of our hatreds
--Awaken us to compassion
May the pain of our limitations
--Enkindle in us understanding
May the pain of our regrets
--Shine forth in forgiveness.
SCRIPTURE READING: Job 1:13-19, NRSV
One day when his sons and daughters were eating and drinking wine in the eldest brother’s house, a messenger came to Job and said, “The oxen were plowing and the donkeys were feeding beside them, and the Sabeans fell on them and carried them off, and killed the servants with the edge of the sword; I alone have escaped to tell you.” While he was still speaking, another came and said, “The fire of God fell from heaven and burned up the sheep and the servants, and consumed them; I alone have escaped to tell you.” While he was still speaking, another came and said, “The Chaldeans formed three columns, made a raid on the camels and carried them off, and killed the servants with the edge of the sword; I alone have escaped to tell you.” While he was still speaking, another came and said, “Your sons and daughters were eating and drinking wine in their eldest brother’s house, and suddenly a great wind came across the desert, struck the four corners of the house, and it fell on the young people, and they are dead; I alone have escaped to tell you.”
SERMON: THE PROBLEM OF SUFFERING AND EVIL
CANNOT BE SOLVED THROUGH REASON
Rev. Paul Wrightman
(The underlinings simply indicate what I would emphasize if delivered orally.)
Rachel Naomi Remen, M.D., shares the following in her book My Grandfather’s Blessings. She writes:
“Another colleague, a psychologist, told me this story. In the eighties, when she lived and practiced in New York City, she had decided to attend a two-day professional workshop on twenty or so short films of one of Carl Jung’s last pupils, the great Jungian dream analyst, Marie-Louise von Franz.
Between the showing of these films, a distinguished panel consisting of the heads of two major Jungian training centers and Carl Jung’s own grandson responded to written questions from the audience sent up to the stage on cards.
One of these cards told the story of a horrific recurring dream, in which the dreamer was stripped of all human dignity and worth through Nazi atrocities. A member of the panel read the dream out loud.
As she listened, my colleague began to formulate a dream interpretation in her head, in anticipation of the panel’s response. It was really a ‘no-brainer,’ she thought, as her mind busily offered her symbolic explanations for the torture and atrocities described in the dream.
But this was not how the panel responded at all. When the reading of the dream was complete, Jung’s grandson looked out over the large audience. ‘Would you all please rise?’ he asked. ‘We will stand together in a moment of silence in response to this dream.’ The audience stood for a minute, my colleague impatiently waiting for the discussion she was certain would follow. But when they sat again, the panel went on to the next question.
My colleague simply did not understand this at all, and a few days later she asked one of her teachers, himself a Jungian analyst, about it.
‘Ah, [Marianne]’ he had said, “There is in life a suffering so unspeakable, a vulnerability so extreme that it goes far beyond words, beyond explanations, and even beyond healing. In the face of such suffering all we can do is bear witness so no one need suffer alone.’”
The first thing that needs to be said about the problem of suffering and evil is that there has never been and never will be an adequate answer to this problem.
The only suitable response to the problem of suffering and evil lies in the ineffable realm of mystery. A real mystery cannot be solved; it can only be lived.
Our Scripture reading reports a series of unrelenting tragedies that befell Job. On the same day Job loses his oxen, donkeys, sheep, camels, servants, sons, and daughters. Finally, he loses his health, and is covered with boils from head to foot.
At first, the three friends who come to visit Job in his time of misery are spot on when it comes to caring for Job.
We are told: “When Job’s three friends, Eliphaz the Temanite, Bildad the Shuhite, and Zophar the Naamathite heard about all the troubles that had come upon him, they set out from their homes and met together by agreement to go and sympathize with him and comfort him. When they saw him from a distance, they could hardly recognize him; they began to weep aloud, and they tore their robes and sprinkled dust on their heads. Then they sat on the ground with him for seven days and seven nights. No one said a word to him, because they saw how great his suffering was” (Job 2:11-13).
At first, Job’s friends are veritable models of good pastoral care: they share their distress at his distress by weeping, then they simply sit with Job in silence, offering no cheap explanations as to why these terrible things have happened to him.
After seven days of shared silence with his friends, Job breaks the silence by cursing the day of his birth (see Job, chapter 3).
In terms of good pastoral care, Job’s cursing the day of his birth is a breakthrough of sorts. It is usually a positive development when someone in the midst of great suffering breaks their silence and begins the healing process of lamentation, begins the healing process of naming their losses, and summons the courage to express their darkest feelings.
The appropriate response of all bystanders, of course, is focused attention and engaged listening, to continue the process of suffering with their friend.
As soon as Job curses the day of his birth, however, Job’s friends blow it, and blow it big time. Offended by the theological unseemliness of Job’s saying out loud that he wishes he were dead, Job’s friends begin arguing with him, offering reason after reason – at least twenty chapters worth of reasons – why Job is wrong and should retract his words.
In the course of their arguing with Job, Job’s friends, at least implicitly, claim to speak for God. They slip into this by unthinkingly mouthing the shallow theological platitudes prevalent in their time.
God takes offense at this, and by the end of the book Job is asking God to have mercy on his friends for offering theological answers for a situation in which no theological answers were to be had.
The book of Job stands as the Bible’s definitive statement that there simply are no rational answers to the problem of suffering and evil.
While making it absolutely clear that no rational answers to the problem of suffering and evil will be forthcoming from God, the book of Job also tells us that God does respond to suffering and evil, but in a relational, in contrast to rational, way.
From the nadir of his incredible suffering, resigned to what he assumes will be his imminent death, Job nevertheless makes one of the supreme affirmations of faith in the entire Bible. Caught-up in a vision of God’s withness that transcends even death, midway into the book that bears his name Job breaks forth into a song of celebration, coming seemingly out of nowhere. He makes the shocking and shockingly contradictory affirmation:
“For I know that my redeemer lives, and that at the last he will stand upon the earth; and after my flesh has been destroyed, then in my flesh I shall see God” (Job 19:25-26).
There is no rationality, no reasonableness, here.
What we have is one of the most transcendent statements in all of the world’s inspired literature of the absolute primacy of the God-person relationship.
In other words, God seems to be much more into being with than in explaining why.
By the end of the book of Job, the theological answers to the problem of suffering and evil of Job’s friends have been discredited.
God’s response to Job takes the form of a relentless series of unanswerable questions:
“Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation? Tell me, if you understand. Who marked off its dimensions? Surely you know! Who stretched a measuring line across it? On what were its footings set, or who laid its cornerstone – while the morning stars sang together and all the angels shouted for joy?” (Job 38:4-6).
God goes on like this for a full four chapters, sweeping up Job in a tidal wave which celebrates multiple aspects of God’s good creation.
The feeling we get by the end of God’s speeches is that Job still has not received a rational answer to the problem of suffering and evil, even from God. Or perhaps I should say especially from God, because God seems intent on circumventing rationality in a tsunami of relationality.
It becomes clear in God’s speeches that God is intensely with each and every thing, with each and every being that God has created.
Earlier in the book, Job has petitioned God to bring God to trial. He demands that God answer for all the suffering and evil in the world.
By the end of the book, however, Job seems to be satisfied with the fact that God is with him, with Job, in a relationship that transcends logical explanation, that transcends even words. By the end of the book Job makes one of the most awesomely relational affirmations in the entire Bible. He says to God:
“My ears had heard of you, but now my eyes have seen you” (Job 42:5).
The implication is that all theological knowledge of God is knowledge which is at best one step removed, second-hand knowledge about someone.
After being caught-up in a veritable whirlwind of God’s relentless questioning and intimate sharing, Job’s language concerning God changes from language about God, to direct encounter with God.
Midway in the book, Job had uttered the remarkable affirmation of faith: “Then in my flesh I shall see God” (Job 19:26). The tense and the hope there are future: “I shall see God. . .”
By the end of the book, Job still uses the language of seeing, but now the seeing is past perfect, something that has already happened, and will continue to happen: “But now my eyes have seen you. . .” (Job 42:5).
One of the basic principles of Jewish and Christian biblical interpretation has long been that the experience of a biblical character can become our experience as well.
Thus, for example, when Jacob is wrestling with God and makes the impossibly bold statement to God, “I will not let you go until you bless me!” (see Genesis 32:26), we are invited to make Jacob’s statement our own. We are invited to challenge God in the same way that Jacob challenged God.
Closer to home, the book of Job gives us permission, as it were, to express our feelings to God of wanting to put God on trial for all the suffering and evil present in the world.
But – following the pattern of Job – Job invites us not to stop there, but to allow ourselves to get caught up in the incredible relational affirmation that someday, even after death, we shall see God-our-redeemer.
Even more, Job invites us to allow ourselves to get so swept-up in the whirlwind of God’s unstoppable creativity that we come to see that God is irrevocably with us as God is irrevocably with everything and everyone.
Job personally introduces us, as it were, to simultaneously the most hidden and the most exalted of all God’s names: Emmanuel, God-with-us.
And the distance is infinite from theological knowledge about this name – a Hebrew name for God meaning “God-with-us” – and actual personal encounter with the God behind the name, the God whose irrepressible withness fills this name with meaning, and makes the name come alive.
In other words, Job invites us to move from second-hand theological knowledge to first-hand personal encounter.
In making this jump from abstract knowledge to personal experience, we still don’t get the rational answer or explanation to the problem of suffering and evil that we were looking for.
We don’t get and will never get this (except, perhaps, in heaven).
But we do get something infinitely greater: we get to get swept-up in a relationship-with-God that transcends suffering, evil, and even death itself, and that will suddenly bring us to that ultimate state of healing where “[God] will wipe every tear from [our] eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away” (Revelation 21:4).
We don’t get and will never get a rational answer or explanation to the problem of suffering and evil, but we do get to get so caught-up in the mystery of God’s own being that we are carried to that ultimate state of healing where
“The wolf will live with the lamb, the leopard will lie down with the goat, the calf and the lion and the yearling together; and a little child will lead them. The cow will feed with the bear, their young will lie down together, and the lion will eat straw like the ox. They will neither harm nor destroy on all my holy mountain, for the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea”
(Isaiah 11:6-7,9).
Until then, the best we can offer to another suffering human being is solidarity with their suffering.
Like the Good Samaritan in Jesus’ parable of that name, when possible, we can share in bearing the burden of suffering humanity and suffering creation.
When the burden of suffering is immense, way too big for us to even begin to comprehend – like the participants in the Jungian workshop mentioned at the beginning of this sermon – we can embrace a respectful and relational silence, a silence which acknowledges our solidarity with those in the concentration camps, a silence which expresses our intense yearning for God to somehow bring good out of evil.
Amen.
REFLECTION QUESTIONS
What was the best rational explanation of the reason for suffering and evil that you’ve heard? Was it adequate?
How has being caught-up in a personal relationship with God reframed your attitude toward suffering and evil?
CLOSING PRAYER Lesslie Newbigin, Contemporary
Give me, Lord, a stout heart to bear my own burdens,
a tender heart to bear the burdens of others,
and a believing heart to lay all my burdens on you,
for you care for us.
Amen.
SUGGESTED MUSIC Bridge Over Troubled Water Peter Hollens You Tube
BENEDICTION
Patiently and persistently, God loves.
Relentlessly and unconditionally, God loves.
Now and forever, God loves.
AMEN.