Third Pentecost
Mark 4:35-41 Job 38:1-11
The day has been full of petty annoyances. The garbage disposal got stuck, a friend called and displayed their most unpleasant and annoying characteristics, the scale registered four pounds heavier and it's late... Late getting started, slow traffic and then the sky decides to open up. This doctor's appointment is important. Please God, please let there be a parking space close to the building.
He sits holding her hand. The monitor registers a steady blink, blink blinking. The second hands creeps marking the seconds that slide into minutes, the minutes that drift in hours and the hours that slide into a day then two. Everything here is so clinical, so cold. The chair squeaks when he moves. It smells of disinfectant. Please God, please let her be alright. Please let us go back home and be normal again.
How much humiliation does one person have to take? Once again not judged by character but by the color of skin, or the incidence of birth, or the clothes one wears. How long O Lord, how long will this injustice continue?
Common situations. Common prayers. Curious how they all boil down to one very basic, fundamental concern--a question really. A question that's at the heart and soul of life? Pollsters tend to ask, "Do you believe in God?" " 90% percent of the American public says yes. But that's not really the question. God can be many things to many people. For some, God set this world in motion and then said to the creation--see what you can do with it. For some God is a kindly helpless old man, well meaning but out of touch. For some God is a precise accountant, charting goods and bads and parsing out rewards and punishments accordingly. The question is not really "Do you believe in God?" It really is a much more crucial question; a question raised in our lessons today, "Does God care?" If we're honest we'll admit that that concern has passed through our minds and it's not surprising, in moments of trauma or heartache to hear it on the lips, Does God care?
Certainly our friend Job wanted to know that. Our lesson this morning assumes we know poor Job's back story. Job had it all, he was at the top of his game; large loving family, prosperous career, good friends, amazing health; and on top of that he was a deeply spiritual man. He knew the author of all his blessings and he responded with a generous heart and hand. But as is so often true in life, there were reversals. For no apparent reason the cattle died, the harvest shriveled, the children died and Job was left in penury, sitting on an ash heap scratching his boils. The friends he had left came to see him and wondered, "What did you do to deserve this? Surely, back in your youth you must have done something really reprehensible to have God take it out on you like this. Tell us what you did so we can be assured that these terrible things won't happen to us!" But Job wouldn't play that game. He wouldn't make them feel safe by dishonesty. Maybe he wasn't perfect but he'd done nothing terrible enough to deserve this. So Job cries out to God in his anger and his pain, "Why, why is this happening to me...Do you not care? Do you not care?"
The same question the disciples have out there in the boat. They thought it was a pretty silly thing to be doing anyway, crossing the sea in the middle of the night. In a few hours it would have been dawn and they could actually see what was going on. But Jesus had said , "Let's go over to the other side" and he was after all their leader. How ironic that a bunch of experienced fishermen are caught in the midst of a terrifying storm because they listened to the desires of a carpenter. An irony that probably did not escape the disciples as they were being battered about by the wind and waves and watched Jesus peacefully asleep in the bow. They wanted to handle it themselves. What shame to wake him wondering "Do you not care that we are perishing?" Do you not care?
Frederick Buechner , in his book Listening to Your Life tells us this story. "On her deathbed Gertrude Stein is said to have asked, "What is the answer?" Then after a long silence, "What is the question?" Don't start looking in the Bible for the answers it gives. Start by listening for the questions it asks.
Buechner goes on to make the observation, "We are much involved, all of us, with questions about things that matter a good deal today, but will be forgotten by this time tomorrow--the immediate where's and when's and hows that face us daily at home and at work--but at the same time we tend to lose track of the questions about things that really matter--life and death questions about meaning, purpose and value. To lose track of such deep questions as these is to risk losing track of who we really are in our own depths and where we are really going. There is perhaps no stronger reason for reading the Bible than that somewhere among all those India paper pages there awaits for each reader, whoever he/she is, the one question which, though for years they may be pretending not to hear it, is the central question of his/her own life. Here is a few of them;
What is a man profited if he shall gain the whole world and lose his own soul? Mtt 16:26
Am I my brother's keeper? Gen 4:9
If God is for us who can be against us? Rom 8:31
What is truth? Jn 18:38
What does a man gain for all the toil at which he toils under the sun? Eccl 1:3
Who is my neighbor? Lk 10:29
What shall I do to inherit eternal life? Lk10:25"
And so we add--Do you not care that we are perishing?
Like so many of these Biblical questions--they say more about the questioner than the questioned.
All in all--the answer of God to Job and Jesus to the disciples is not a totally satisfactory one. Indeed we have to admit that the response is a little harsh.
Our Old Testament lesson is only a small portion of the 122 verse diatribe that God addresses to Job. God responds to Job's questioning with another question. Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth? Who determined its measurements or who stretched the line upon it? On what were its bases sunk? Who shut in the sea with doors and prescribed bounds for it and set bars and doors and said 'This far shall you come and no further and here shall your proud waves be stopped?" If Job wasn't feeling small already he certainly would be after God's honest confrontation. "Who is this that darkens counsel by words without knowledge?" Who do you think you are you flyspeck on the universe, you gnat in the world. Harsh--really harsh.
But no more so than Jesus questions to the disciples, "Why are you afraid? Have you STILL no faith?" Still no faith. What pathos is carried in those words--still no faith--any chimpanzee should have gotten it by now. Harsh!
Do you not care that we're perishing?
Perhaps the answers come to our pathetic story participants not so much in words but with actions.
Job I have come to address you; I have deigned to respond to you, to acknowledge you, to care for you. This great and awesome God bothers, bothers to converse with a flyspeck. This God who is master of the wind and the waves desires relationship with this mere human. So much does God care that he will not leave Job wondering. So much so that God speaks...even if it is to shout.
Ole and Lena were celebrating their fiftieth anniversary. Lena in a fit of romantic exuberance asks Ole, "Ole do you still love me." Ole looks at her with amazement, "Lena I told you that fifty years ago, if anything changes I'll let you know."
Do you not care that we are perishing? Do you not care?
And he rebuked the wind and the waves and he said to the sea "be still" and the wind ceased and there was a dead calm.
Do you not care that we are perishing? Need we ask?
Amen