October 4 –
Eighteenth after Pentecost (World Communion Sunday)
Lectionary
Lectionary readings from Vanderbilt Divinity Library online
(http://divinity.library.vanderbilt.edu/lectionary/BPentecost/bProper22.htm)
Job’s
first affliction; faith intact.
Prove
me, try me, test my heart.
God
gave the world to humans, not angels.
Question
of divorce; Jesus blesses children.
Spark
Bring
in a book or library cart with books, plays, and other forms of literature that
have struggled with and reflected on the Book of Job. Be sure to include Jewish
resources. Encourage the congregation to borrow them.
With Children
Ask
the children: Have you ever complained or whined about anything? (And be honest yourself, relating a time when
you have complained or whined.) Sometimes we complain about things that are
not serious. But what do we do when serious, difficult, hard things happen to
us? (Listen to the children’s answers.)
There
was a man, the Bible tells us, called Job, and terrible things happened to him.
He was told he should say bad things about God, but he wouldn’t do that. Later
he was told by his friends that the bad stuff that had happened to him was his
fault, but he didn’t believe that. Job knew that sometimes bad things happen.
Things that are sad. Things that are hard.
We
can surely cry to God about hard things. And also we remember the end of the
story, when God reassures Job that bad things do not happen because we deserve
them. God loves us and cries when we cry.
(Note: The person/people telling the
children’s story and delivering the sermon need to be sure there is integrity
between the two.)
Sermon Starter
This
is a difficult text. It may even be that some congregants, after hearing this
text, wonder why they got out of bed and came to church this Sunday! The
preaching call is not to minimize the difficulty. It is a story about the
testing of a “blameless and upright” man, and it certainly feels unfair! It is important
to note in any preaching on this text that the term “Satan” means “the
adversary” and that as the text itself makes clear, this figure was a “heavenly
being,” one of God’s heavenly court. This is not a figure in red with horns,
but a kind of legal process adversary.
The
overall context of the Book of Job deals with a question that has resonated
down through the eons to our own times: Why do bad things happen to good
people? People have always struggled with the presence of human or natural evil
in the world, and one of the ways people have dealt with it is to talk of the
God of creation and of good, and another god of evil. This text is rejecting
such dualistic thinking. It may disturb us to think of God as implicated in (or
encouraging) the suffering of Job, but this way of articulating a problem was
true to an earlier era that was trying to proclaim that God is the God of all
creation.
There
is the reality of human evil and sinfulness, but there is also the question of
natural evil, a question we really don’t deal with.
Hymns
VU
272 “Open your ears, O faithful
people”
MV 78 “God
weeps”
MV 65 “When
we are tested”
VU
216 “Sing praise to God, who
reigns above”
VU 686 “God
of grace and God of glory”
VU 366 “like
a child”
MV 194 Bread
of life, feed my soul