Reformation Sunday
October 27, 2024

Sermon

Rocky Supinger
Associate Pastor

Job 38:1–7, 34–41; 42:1–6, 10–17

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In 1997 I applied for a $1000 scholarship from the Westminster Foundation. One thousand dollars is not very much in light of the overall cost of college, all of which I was financing, so I went ahead and applied. All it required me to do was memorize the 107 questions and answers in the Westminster Shorter Catechism. (The Larger Catechism — I know you’re wondering — has 196 questions and answers).

I did it. I sat in a room with a proctor who asked the questions and then listened to me recite the answers.

The scholarship came in the form of a check, written to me personally. I got it at my parents’ house over the summer, and it couldn’t have come at a better time. I was working two jobs to try to pay for nine credit hours I was taking at the University of Colorado, Denver, campus, and when I registered for those classes, I didn’t really know how I was going to pay for them. I was counting on that scholarship, but even with that $1000 and whatever I could make taking tickets at the baseball stadium and making lattes at The Tattered Cover weren’t going to cover it.

I knew a tuition bill was coming that I wouldn’t be able to pay in full. I knew it when I registered for the classes, and I knew it every day of the summer.

Then the scholarship arrived, and it was $1500, not $1000. An enclosed note explained that fewer students than expected had applied for the scholarship, so they gave the ones who did one third more than was promised.

My tuition bill got paid.

Whenever I talk about grace, this story comes to mind.

And the ending of the story about Job is an ending of grace. The Lord “changed Job’s fortune” is how the translation I just read has it. Another way of putting it is that God “restored” Job’s fortunes.

However we put it, it amounts to the same thing: grace. God intervened in a way Job wasn’t seeking and hadn’t earned — it’s not a reward — and restored him to life.

The mythic character of this story really shines through in these last few sentences, doesn’t it?

The greatness of Job that had been so suddenly and disastrously taken away is restored exactly double, so 7000 sheep becomes 14,000; 3000 camels is now 6000; 500 yoke of oxen and female donkeys is now 1000 yoke of oxen and female donkeys.

And Job lived 140 years and saw four generations of his children. Then Job died, old and satisfied. Like one of the patriarchs from Genesis whose lifespans are recorded in fantastical figures — Adam’s 930 years or Noah’s 950 years or Sarah’s 127 years — Job ascends to the pantheon of faith’s heroes who came to the end of long and faithful lives and then slept with their ancestors.

What a long, long way the story has come from the ash heap. Remember that? All the way back to the beginning of the story, when Job sat down on the ash heap with a piece of broken pottery to scratch the sores that had broken out from head to toe, when the only speech he could produce was a curse, a curse of the day he was born?

From the ash heap to old and satisfied. Praise be to God. Amazing grace, how sweet the sound, that saved a wretch like me. I once was lost but now am found. You know.

Sometimes grace comes in a moment — a moment of humility or contrition or some other kind of inspiration — and I suppose sometimes it’s slower in coming. Sometimes grace accrues day-by-day, daughter-by-daughter, generation-by-generation and we can’t even see it until we are old and satisfied.

And even though we may not see it, we can reflect grace for those who will come after us. Job leaves an inheritance to his children. No special grace in that; it’s a perfectly customary thing to do. Only Job includes his daughters in his inheritance, which in biblical times would simply not be done, was in fact expressly prohibited by the Torah unless there was no living male heir.
Job ends his life with seven sons and three daughters (the only fortune of his not doubled), and he leaves an inheritance to them all. Amazing grace.

“I once was blind but now I see.” It must have been hard for Job to see the grace of his restored fortunes. Whenever he looked at one of the ten of his children gathered around his deathbed, did he not also see one of the ten who were lost, who were taken? Is this grace not bound up at the very same time with disaster and loss and heartache? And isn’t it hard at times to disentangle them from each other?

I imagine Job sitting around the feast table with all of the brothers and sisters and acquaintances who came to his house when his personal whirlwind had passed. They come to comfort and to console him, to bring him gifts — money and jewelry. But each word of consolation, each consoling touch of a hand on an elbow, must also, I imagine, inflict a little bit of the wound all over again. Because they haven’t come for nothing. They’ve come for the disaster, the evil that the Lord had brought upon him.

When we look at our life, do we not see that some of the greatest comfort we have known has come in the midst of the greatest losses we have known? I think we do see that, and I think the word of wisdom for us in the story of Job is that we can’t identify God in one of those only, either the comfort or the loss, the good or the bad, the holy or the evil. Job has learned that God is in and above and through and over and under all of it.

I wonder if our experience in worship doesn’t point to that wisdom, whenever we come to take Communion together. I mean, the words we say at this table speak of welcome and grace and feast and bounty and the kingdom of heaven. But those words of institution are also, at the very same time, words of remembrance —of arrest and betrayal, of a body that was broken and of blood that was shed. I wonder if Jesus didn’t institute this sacrament for us, for the church, so that we would always in our worship be enacting the wisdom of Job: that calamity and grace are joined at the hip and that God-our-help-in-ages-past-our-hope-for-years-to-come has not seen fit to separate them.

That’s a lot to contemplate, isn’t it? What could you even say about it? What formulation could you ever give to express that mystery?

The first time Job tried to answer God, he couldn’t speak. You heard God’s demand of Job earlier: “Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth? Surely you know! Can you lift up your voice to the clouds? Can you send forth lightning? Who has put wisdom in the inward parts or given understanding to the mind?”

And Job answered, “What can I answer you? I’ll put my hand over my mouth.”

He had no words before, but he has some now, only they’re not his words. They’re God’s words. Job quotes God back to God, and that is … a revelation.

“You said . . . Who is this darkening counsel without knowledge?”

“You said ... Listen and I will speak; I will question you and you will inform me.”

Job quotes God. That is how his faith gives expression to mystery.

God gives us words for whatever whirlwind we face and the staggering beauty that arrests us and strikes us dumb. The old hymn “There Is a Balm in Gilead” says “If you cannot preach like Peter and you cannot pray like Paul, you can trust the love of Jesus and say he died for all.”
Those words. Those are the words. God’s own words. Use those. It’s what they’re for.

That’s prayer, isn’t it? Jesus’ disciples didn’t know how to pray, what words to use, so they asked him to teach them, and he gave them … words. So now we pray as he taught, “Our Father, who art in heaven …” Likewise these words at the table —those aren’t my words or the church’s words. Jesus gave us those words; they’re words of institution.

We pray them exactly as we received them. Receiving them is an act of faith, but so is repeating them.

Job repeats the words of God. He repeats them, he restates them, he rehashes them, and then he … relents.

That’s the word Job uses to God, the last words we ever hear from Job: “I relent and find comfort on dust and ashes.”

(Other translations sound harsher than this. Instead of “relent,” one says “I despise myself” and “repent” instead of “relent.” It’s a notoriously difficult verse to translate, because the verbs don’t have direct objects, leaving translators to fill in some really big gaps in understanding. I’m persuaded that “relent” is best.)

Job relents from prosecuting his case before God. He hasn’t lost. He certainly hasn’t won. No, he has won; he’s won the appearance of the God he has accused of boring his bones and hurling him into the mud, the God to whom he has cried and who has not answered, the God whom he has called cruel. God has appeared and spoken, and that is Job’s victory.

He doesn’t confess any wrongdoing, but neither does he extract vindication of his integrity. He just relents, drops his case, lets it go, and looks to the business of the rest of his life. Because the thing he’s gained is better than the thing he sought: Instead of a conviction, he has gained understanding. Instead of being proven right, he’s been proven but a part of a larger, more mysterious whole that he can now see for what it is.

Job arrives at the end of his ordeal professing to now understand, but we know what Job knows and we know why he won’t say what he knows.

The knowledge of God changes things, changes us. Maybe there was a very good reason that God forbid the first humans from eating of the tree of the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil. And once they had eaten of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, perhaps there’s a very good reason Adam and Eve hid; maybe what they understood when they ate that fruit changed who God is for them and thus changed them.

The Jewish tradition held that nobody could look on the face of God and survive. Even Moses, on Mount Sinai, sees only the back of God. But Job tells God, “Now my eyes have seen you. Therefore I relent …”

What else can you do once you have seen, truly seen, the truth of this mortal life in all of its chaos and cruelty, all of its beautiful order, but rest your case and take comfort from all the dust and all the ashes that before were a source of pain?

We’re about to take our offering, but we’re offering something extra during our church’s stewardship season, where we’re all considering what we can pledge to this church’s mission and ministry for the coming year.

You should have a purple “pledge” card with your bulletin, so today and for the next two Sundays we’re going to pledge ourselves to something specific that may involve finances or it may not.

Today I’m going to invite us to consider a pledge of relenting. What, in the coming year, can you pledge to drop, to let go of, acknowledging maybe that it’s not that big of a deal or maybe that it’s a much bigger deal than you’ve realized and the way you’ve been getting at it hasn’t been serving you or the people you care about?

What can you pledge to relent from in the weeks and months ahead? I’ll invite us to consider that as we take our offering.

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Sermon © Fourth Presbyterian Church