"Out of the Whirlwind"
Twenty-Second Sunday After Pentecost
Job 38:1–7, 34–41
October 20, 2024
Burnt Hills United Methodist Church
Video from Livestream (starts at 40:30)
Robert Alter's Translation of Job 38:1–7, 34–41
And the LORD answered Job from the whirlwind and He said:
Who is this who darkens counsel
in words without knowledge?
Gird your loins like a man,
that I may ask you, and you can inform Me.
Where were you when I founded earth?
Tell, if you know understanding.
Who fixed its measures, do you know,
In what were its sockets sunk,
or who laid its cornerstone,
when the morning stars sang together,
and all the sons of God shouted for joy?
Can you lift your voice to the cloud,
that the water-spate cover you?
Can you send lightning bolts on their way,
and they will say to you, “Here we are!”?
Who placed in the hidden parts wisdom,
or who gave the mind understanding?
Who counted the skies in wisdom,
and the jars of the heavens who tilted,
when the dust melts to a mass,
and the clods cling fast together?
Can you hunt prey for the lion,
fill the king of beast’s appetite,
when it crouches in its den,
lies in ambush in the covert?
Who readies the raven’s prey
when its young cry out to God
and stray deprived of food?
The word of God, for us, the people of God.
Thanks be to God.
The word of God, for us, the people of God.
Thanks be to God.
The word of God, for us, the people of God.
Do you ever stop and wonder what, exactly that means?
I’m serious. It’s a refrain that’s uttered across and in churches that have seemingly nothing else in common.
Conservative churches.
Progressive churches.
High church worship.
Low church worship.
Mainline churches.
Evangelical churches.
It’s just one of those Christian-ese, call and response type things that we all just seem to know and recite by rote, like this:
The Lord be with you
[And also with you]
See?
It’s just kind of sort of the thing you say. Well, we just finished reading the scripture and we need something to signal that we’re moving on to something else. How about The word of God for us, the people of God?
Thanks be to God.
And yet, though repetition might strip it of its meaning and numb us to its power, this liturgical epithet for our scriptural witness publicly proclaimed signifies a deeper theological truth about what we believe these words convey.
The word of God for us, the people of God.
These words are set apart.
These words are exceptional.
These words are, somehow, different—strange and odd even.
They’re holy.
I daresay, these words are queer.
There is, after all, a queerness that’s embedded in the very concept of holiness itself. From a Hebraic sense, the word that we often translate as “holy” or “sanctified”—qadosh, conveniently enough, transliterated as also starting with the letter Q—means set apart and exceptional and different.
Our God is a holy God because God is set apart.
We are a holy people because we are a set apart people.
Isn’t that what queerness connotes?
Something that’s not quite normal?
Something that transcends and transgresses expectations? The expectations of, so-called, polite society?
Something that shocks and alarms? Something that jolts and awakens? Something that surprises?
Something that makes you stop, dead in your tracks, and confronts you with the truth.
The truth that the way things are, are not the way things have to be.
When was the last time we allowed ourselves to be surprised by the strangeness of the words contained within our scriptural witness? When was the last time we stopped and paid attention to the oddities its prose and poetry convey?
So today, because it’s both the day we celebrate the second anniversary of our community’s decision to align ourselves with the Love that knows no man-made bounds or labels—the day we chose to become a Reconciling Congregation—and the day we gift our children with Bibles of their very own, perhaps it’s appropriate to explore what, precisely, the Bible and the words contained therein mean to us, as a people of God.
And I want to make one thing crystal clear. Because there are those who seek to use this question as a wedge that weakens our collective witness in the world. I am a Reconciling United Methodist because of the Bible, not in spite of it.
If there’s one thing you’ve probably figured out about me through my preaching so far, I hope it’s that I really love the scriptural witness of our faith. I really love the Bible. But, I’ll be the first to admit, that love did not come easy.
So many of my ministry colleagues, myself included, have some sort of story from early on in their journeys, usually right before they entered seminary. It goes something like this.
Someone in their home church, someone who means well and loves them very dearly, no doubt, pulls them aside one Sunday and gives them a warning: be careful not to go there and lose your Jesus—be careful that all that book learning doesn’t rob you of your faith.
And look, I get it. Those kinds of long, dark nights of the soul are an occupational hazard for those who engage in theological education and pursue the practice of ministry—OSHA should really get on that.
And yeah, even post-seminary, I have no problem assenting to our United Methodist doctrinal heritage, which states that “The Holy Scriptures containeth all things necessary to salvation”.
And yet.
I find that the less I know about the context of the words contained within our scriptures, the less in love I am with them.
The less I know about the world that my ancestors in the faith were living in—the people who first received and cultivated these words—the less in love I am with them.
And, conversely, the more I learn and study and, yes, critically examine these words, I fall even more in love with them, and, by extension, my faith.
Before I went to seminary, I couldn’t stand the letters of Paul. I found them to be misogynistic and homophobic and I wondered why on earth the Church decided to sanctify the writings of some guy who never even knew Jesus during his ministry.
It took my New Testament professor, Dr. Carla Works, a feminist Pauline scholar, to awaken me to the deeply radical and egalitarian message that Paul was preaching. It took learning about the culture and practices of the first century churches to put those letters into context and find the salvific message they proclaimed—that unity in Christ does not mean uniformity. That the diversity of the body of Christ strengthens it, not weakens it. That everyone who darkens the doors of this Church and any other church and gathers is no better or worse than anyone else—that no one is more deserving of loving and being loved than anyone else and that everyone,
Rich and poor
Gay and straight
Black and white and Brown
Native and newcomer
Under and over and unemployed
Young and old
Trans and cis and everyone in between and beyond the binary,
Everyone is a part of this family, and family means no one gets left behind.
I wasn’t here when this community decided to join the Reconciling Ministries Network. I can’t speak to what was said or not said during those holy conversations and deliberations you endured as a congregation.
But, though I’ve been here only a few short months, I’ve been here long enough to know that everyone who’s sitting in these pews and watching us on the livestream is a person of deep faith. That this is a community with a heart that is open to the movement of the Holy Spirit and hearts on fire for making the love of Jesus palpably real and known here in our own bedroom community and beyond.
I know, deep down in my bones, that we are not a Reconciling community in spite of our faith. We are not a Reconciling community in spite of the word of God, but because of it.
If we cared simply about LGBTQ equality and justice on a merely secular level, we could scratch that itch elsewhere.
But we know that it goes deeper than that.
We have chosen to stay and struggle and question and study and wrestle with the word of God because we know that’s what it means to be a people of faith.
That’s what it means to be the people of God.
As in, literally. That’s what it means to be the people of God.
That’s the name that God blesses Jacob with after they wrestled all night—Yisrael, Wrestles with God—and that is the blessing we have inherited.
It would be so easy to discard the Bible—to cut out verses we don’t like or that make us cringe.
And, I’ll be honest, the passage we read earlier is one of those passages. Heck, the whole book of Job is one with which I deeply struggle.
Job, a righteous and pious man who has had everything taken away from him at God’s hand. Job, who’s life has been reduced to nothing but a mess of boil-covered flesh sitting on a heap of ashes because of a divine bet. Job, who’s spent chapter after chapter in his agonizing state going back and forth with his friends about the nature of God’s justice and why this could have possibly ever happened to him.
And what does God do when God finally shows up in the poetic narrative? Does God own up to what God did? Does God heal Job and relieve his suffering? What words of comfort does that which is pure, unadulterated love offer?
Who the heck are you to question me and my actions? Did you hang the stars in the sky?
That’s supposed to be comforting?
That’s supposed to be the answer to some of the most haunting and existential questions with which we can grapple?
It would be so easy to walk away from that wrestling ring.
It would be so easy to look at the whirlwind of words and stories conveyed in these pages and cast them aside as relics of a bygone age.
But that won’t rob these words of their great power. I don’t have to tell you about the unspeakable horrors that some who have gone before us and exist around us justify through these words.
It would be so easy to walk away, but that won’t heal the hurt and that won’t bring back the lives that were taken by the hands of those who believed they were sanctified because of these words.
As a people of God, we remain in the struggle because we know that’s the path to healing. We choose to remain in the struggle because that’s what will lead to restoration. We refuse to abandon because we will not give up our inheritance for a pot of beans.
Because here’s the thing. There are no easy passages in this book. There are no easy stories contained therein. Every word of every verse of every chapter of every book of this collection of texts we’ve received from our ancestors in the faith is worth struggling with. It containeth all things necessary for salvation—every word in it is, ultimately, a good word—but if we take them only at their surface level, we miss out on the blessing that comes after the wrestling.
But here’s the good news. We never wrestle with the word of God alone. We have been given the greatest gift of all—we have been given the gift of each other. God has given us the greatest tag team partners anyone could ever ask for in this wrestling match we call our lives of faith. God has given you to me and me to you and all of us to each other.
Because, though none of us is perfect, we are more perfect together than we are apart.
And so, we’ll endure the whirlwind together until its blessing is unveiled to us. We’ll stay in the ring with the word of God, face to face, and wrestle all night, refusing to let go until God gives us the blessing we are owed.
Because that’s what it means to be the people of God.
May the one who began a good work be faithful to complete it in us.
The work continues.
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