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 30, 2020
Dear Friends,
A few days ago Russel Wolter was placed on hospice care. Karen called to tell me that it looks like he won’t make it through the day (Saturday). I’m deeply saddened by this news. At times like this I need to remind myself that when Russel meets his Maker it will be Alzheimer’s that is dead, not Russel. Russel will be back in his prime, bringing a whole new level of joy and laughter to God’s kingdom.
As soon as I email this worship service to you, I’ll be sending Heidi’s beautiful altar flower arrangement for tomorrow.
Bible study is back. We’ve just started the Gospel of Luke via Zoom. If you would like to participate, be sure to let me know and I’ll send you a link. We meet on Wednesday evening from 6-7. paulccmp@yahoo.com
Our Board of Governors put a lot of work into planning for Community Church’s “official” reopening on Sunday, September 13th. But given the increase in Covid19 cases in the county, indoor church services are back on hold. Since we can’t do an in-person service, we’ve decided to offer a third option in terms of worship. Beginning on September 13th at 1:00, we’ll be offering a worship option via Zoom. It will follow the format of what you’ve been receiving by email or regular mail, but will be live, at least in a virtual way.
The best thing about Zoom is that it makes it possible for people to see and hear each other. To enable you to see and hear someone besides me (!), after the sermon we will spend some time discussing the reflection questions connected with it.
The best way to access Zoom is with a computer with a webcam. Zoom can also be accessed by smartphone. Please let me know if you would like a link for Sunday worship on September 13th. I’ll be emailing the link to you on Saturday afternoon. All you need to do is click on the blue access code immediately above the light blue Zoom logo just before 1:00 and you’re in! If you like the email or regular mail format that you’ve been receiving the past several months, you can still receive that in addition to the Zoom service. Just let me know.
The materials for tomorrow’s virtual congregational meeting will be emailed to you tomorrow afternoon. If you don’t do email, they’ll be mailed to you on Tuesday.
For a while last week, it looked like several families connected to CCMP were in real danger of losing their houses due to the local fires. I’m happy to report that there were no losses, and that everyone is safely back at home. So far we’ve been able to dodge both the virus and the fires. We have a lot to be thankful for.
Take Very Good Care and always remember that Jesus IS Emmanuel – God WITH Us. Paul
WORSHIP SERVICE FOR AUGUST 30, 2020
INTRODUCTORY READING/PRAYER Catherine J. Foote, Contemporary
(I chose this because I can imagine Job praying something like this.)
God, I just want to talk to you, I just want to open my soul to you. I don’t want to try to say it right. I don’t want to meet someone else’s expectations of what I should say or what I should believe. I just want to talk to you.
I sit sometimes in a deep well. I can’t get out. I’m so tired of the struggle. I ache. I want to stop time. But time moves on and takes me with it.
God, I’m too tired to hold on, and I don’t know any way out. This aching human part of me, what do I do with this? God, you have abandoned me. I cannot pretend that I feel you here. I cannot pretend that I’m OK. All I can do is hold on and hope this feeling will pass. All I can do is trust that it will stop and when I pass through, you will be there on the other side.
Amen.
SUGGESTED MUSIC (There isn’t any church music that I could find that works with Job. So I’ve turned to evocative music from The Lord of the Rings, which Tolkien himself claims is a work of Christian fiction. I can imagine Job hearing something like this at the end of his journey. By the way, this is my first encounter with the singer Peter Hollens, and I think he is a great find.)
Into the West – The Lord of the Rings – Peter Hollens You Tube
OPENING PRAYER Catherine J. Foote, Contemporary
When I come to the end of my prayers,
I find that there are prayers I still need.
A prayer for the courage to speak the truth.
Another prayer for the pain.
A prayer for the sadness.
A prayer for fears.
A prayer for the anger that sometimes smolders
and sometimes burns.
A prayer for justice and for grace.
A prayer for strength to keep telling my story.
A prayer for wisdom.
Another prayer for love.
Amen.
SCRIPTURE READING Job 19:1-27, NRSV
Then Job answered [his friends]:
‘How long will you torment me,
and break me in pieces with words?
These ten times you have cast reproach upon me;
are you not ashamed to wrong me?
And even if it is true that I have erred,
my error remains with me.
If indeed you magnify yourselves against me,
and make my humiliation an argument against me,
know then that God has put me in the wrong,
and closed his net around me.
Even when I cry out, “Violence!” I am not answered;
I call aloud, but there is no justice.
He has walled up my way so that I cannot pass,
and he has set darkness upon my paths.
He has stripped my glory from me,
and taken the crown from my head.
He breaks me down on every side, and I am gone,
he has uprooted my hope like a tree.
He has kindled his wrath against me,
and counts me as his adversary.
His troops come on together;
they have thrown up siege-works against me,
and encamp around my tent.
‘He has put my family far from me,
and my acquaintances are wholly estranged from me.
My relatives and close friends have failed me;
the guests in my house have forgotten me;
my serving-girls count me as a stranger;
I have become an alien in their eyes.
I call to my servant, but he gives me no answer;
I must myself plead with him.
My breath is repulsive to my wife;
I am loathsome to my own family.
Even young children despise me;
when I rise, they talk against me.
All my intimate friends abhor me,
and those whom I loved have turned against me.
My bones cling to my skin and to my flesh,
and I have escaped by the skin of my teeth.
Have pity on me, have pity on me, O you my friends,
for the hand of God has touched me!
Why do you, like God, pursue me,
never satisfied with my flesh?
O that my words were written down!
O that they were inscribed in a book!
O that with an iron pen and with lead
they were engraved on a rock forever!
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,
whom I shall see on my side,
and my eyes shall behold, and not another.
My heart faints within me!
SERMON: GOD-THE-SUBVERTER Rev. Paul Wrightman
(The underlinings simply indicate what I would emphasize if delivered orally.)
We continue our sermon series on the most important texts in the Bible from Genesis through Revelation.
Today’s text, from the book of Job, is not so much a conversation as it is a shouting match. And shouting “match” is actually a misnomer, since all the shouting is done by one person, Job. Job yells at his friends, his family, and, finally, at God.
And at the fierce, fiery center of his screaming at God, God’s Spirit manages to sneak into Job’s rage and resentment and to subvert it from within.
But before we take a closer look at today’s text, let’s review a bit.
Several weeks ago we saw how God gives the prophet Elijah a “dressing-down,” for his violence in slaughtering the 450 priests of a rival god, Baal. This was violence which Elijah had the cheek to project onto God, then give God the credit for.
We saw how God brought Elijah to Mt. Sinai and there demonstrated to him that God was not to be found in the violence of a mountain-shattering wind; not to be found in the violence of a disintegrating fire. Instead, God was to be found in the peace and creative possibility of God’s own “still, small, voice.”
In short, we saw God patiently at work subverting Elijah’s violence from within.
Then, several weeks ago – smack in the middle of the overwhelmingly violent history of the kings of Israel – again, violence that was claimed by these violent kings themselves to have been inspired by no one less than God – we were treated to a “minority report,” a “minority report” snuck into the text by God’s Spirit.
In this minority report we are given God’s personal vision of a “battle” in which no weapons are raised, and which concludes with the enemy army being treated to a feast within the citadel of their foes, then being sent merrily on their way back home.
We saw how, sadly, because of our human addiction to violence, this delightful story was never able to take place within history itself, but was snuck into the biblical text as an act of subversion by God, revealing to us the deepest desire of God’s own heart and mind, which is for peace, not war; life, not death.
These, and other provocative “minority reports” scattered throughout the pages of the Hebrew Scriptures reveal to us a God who is trying to subvert the violent story-line often attributed to God. These minority reports show us a God who would like to sabotage the revenge, the conquest, and the violence which is projected by violent human beings onto God’s nature, and then celebrated as part of God’s will.
Today we see yet another example of God’s subversive practices at work. We’re seeing this so often that I’m beginning to think that the great unacknowledged name of God throughout the Hebrew Scriptures is God-the-Subverter.
Most of us know the story of Job, how God allows an innocent person to undergo the extreme loss of family, reputation, wealth, and health.
The overarching concern of the biblical book of Job is to narrate the confrontation between the traditional and conventional understanding which maintained that loss of wealth and health were direct punishments by God in retribution for sins committed, and the radically “new” theological vision of Job which maintained that God does not indulge in such childish and immature behavior.
Just like many of us when we were caught up in the process of moving from an earlier, more primitive stage in our own development to a later, more mature stage, Job is stuck in the middle, caught between two incompatible ways of looking at the meaning of life.
Today’s text gives us a profound glimpse into Job’s stuckness.
Job’s friends – all subscribers to the view that Job must have done something terribly wrong to have been meted out such a terrible punishment by God – have been arguing with him for weeks, trying to get him to admit his guilt. Their circular, catch 22, reasoning goes: “Job has lost everything; therefore it follows that Job must be guilty.”
Job stubbornly maintains his innocence, an innocence which is, by the way, eventually upheld by God.
At the point of today’s Scripture reading, Job finally loses his patience and starts yelling.
His first outburst is aimed at his friends: “How long,” he screams at them, “will you torment me, and break me in pieces with words?”
Then Job directs his anger at his family.
Finally, Job turns his anger on God.
It is not easy to be the person in whom a major shift of worldviews is taking place!
So after having it out with his friends and his family, Job has it out with his God.
Echoing our own feelings at times, Job pronounces judgment against his maker: . . “God has put me in the wrong, and closed his net around me. Even when I cry out, ‘Violence!’ I am not answered; I call aloud, but there is no justice. He has walled up my way so that I cannot pass, and he has set darkness upon my paths. . . He breaks me down on every side, and I am gone, he has uprooted my hope like a tree.”
Job goes on and on raging against God for the loss of his family, his friends, and his health.
Perfectly stuck between his old belief-system that God is the direct cause of everything, including all his misfortunes, but not yet able to make the leap to a God of unconditional goodness and love, Job can do nothing but scream.
Instinctively he knows that the safest person to scream at is God.
Haven’t we all been there with Job at one point or another in our own lives? Everything seems to be falling apart, we have sustained more losses than we can bear, there is no relief in sight – so we take it out on God.
And the good news is that God wants to be the person we take it out on!
Part of God’s often-repeated promise that God will be with us means precisely that God will be with us in bad times as well as good, with us at our worst as well as at our best, with us when all other options are gone and there is no one else to turn to or yell at.
God wants to be with each of us that much!
God wants to be with each of us that much so that God can begin the process of subverting our misery from within. Just when we’re so down-and-out that we feel like we can absolutely take no more, God-the-Subverter shows up on our doorstep, knocks on the door of our heart, and sabotages our pain, our depression, our rage, and our resentment.
God usually does this not by simply taking it away, but most often by being with us, and in the reality of being with, giving us a powerful intimation that in spite of the pain, the depression, the rage, and the resentment that we may be feeling, these negative realities are never God’s last word to us. God’s final word is always life and wholeness, sometimes, to be sure, life and wholeness as a still, small voice whispering to us from the very depths of our pain and sorrow.
We get a breathtaking glimpse of this happening to Job toward the end of today’s text.
Job reaches a crescendo of hate-filled fury against God. Referring to the multitude and magnitude of the accusations he has just aimed at God, he screams at the top of his lungs “O that my words were written down! O that they were inscribed in a book! O that with an iron pen and with lead they were engraved on a rock forever!”
And now happens one of the most amazing things in all of human experience and all of world literature: Immediately after Job has yelled his loudest; immediately after we have yelled our loudest, made our vilest, most hate-filled accusations against God – instead of being responded to in kind, instead of being reviled and rejected in turn – we find ourselves accepted and respected just as we are.
We find ourselves saying with conviction words which we had never even thought before, much less believed.
God’s “still, small voice” has snuck into our consciousness, subverted our anger, and transformed it into bold conviction. We find ourselves saying along with Job:
“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, whom I shall see for myself, and whom my eyes will behold. My heart is filled with longing!” AMEN.
REFLECTION QUESTIONS
Have you ever gotten angry with God and let God have it? Describe the experience. Did you end up at the same place that you started? If not, what was different?
We don’t usually think of “God-as-Subverter!” What do you think God needs to subvert, even in Scripture?
CLOSING PRAYER Howard Thurman, 1900-1981
My ego is like a fortress.
I have built its walls stone by stone
To hold out the invasion of the love of God.
But I have stayed here long enough.
There is light over the barriers. O my God –
The darkness of my house forgive
And overtake my soul.
I relax the barriers.
I abandon all that I think I am,
All that I hope to be,
All that I believe I possess.
I let go of the past,
I withdraw my grasping hand from the future,
And in the great silence of this moment,
I alertly rest my soul.
Amen.
SUGGESTED MUSIC Voces8 – May It Be (Enya/Lord of the Rings) You Tube
(This is a wonderful blessing/benediction song. Don’t sweat the elvish dialect of Middle Earth – most of it is in English!)
BENEDICTION
Patiently and persistently, God loves.
Relentlessly and unconditionally, God loves.
Now and forever, God loves. AMEN