From the Ash Heap

Scripture Lessons: Hebrews 1: 1-4, 2: 5-12; and Job 1: 1, 2: 1-10 Sermon Title: From the Ash Heap Preached on 10.7.18 The whole month of September, Sunday after Sunday, I preached from the book of James, and I felt like after all the time we spent with James challenging us to be better Christians, we needed something a little uplifting – some encouragement, but now, here we are in Job. Job is another challenging book, but I’m thankful to be reading it, because if we find ourselves in the ash heap with Job this morning, we find ourselves in a place that we’ve all been before; a place that we all need Job’s help to understand. You know about the ash heap. The ash heap is a place where everything has unraveled, and we’re tempted to give up. To quit. If we find ourselves there, then things haven’t gone how they were supposed to go, and, what’s worse, not only are we broken down and discouraged, if not our spouse, then someone else is always there nearby the ash heap urging us “to curse God and die” as Job’s wife did. You know what I’m talking about, because everyone does. Consider our friend Dansby Swanson. Since the Braves are in the postseason, last Wednesday at all the Marietta City Elementary Schools, students were encouraged to wear their Atlanta Braves hats and t-shirts. Our daughter Lily wore her Dansby Swanson jersey, and all the kids in the school, who like her, chose to wear number 7, they were called out to the front steps of West Side school for a picture. Lily said there must have been 50 of them in all, all wearing their Dansby Swanson shirts. And Dansby’s mother, who works at the West Side school, she came out and when she saw them all she cried, because her son who’s worked so hard to make it to National League playoffs, has injured his left hand and doesn’t get to play. He might be sitting in the dugout later today for the game, but it’s really the ash heap. He doesn’t want to be in the dugout. He wants to be out in the field. It’s surely a big disappointment that he’s going through. I dare say, he’s going to be alright however, because some people – some people like Dansby Swanson - when they find themselves in the ash heap – despite the temptation to allow the injustice to consume them – they persevere. That’s why, as they interview candidates to be our next Associate Pastor, I asked the search committee to ask every candidate as the chair, Hal McClain once asked me, to tell the committee about the worst year of their life. You can tell everything you need to know about a person by hearing how they respond when they find themselves in the ash heap. When you’re in the ash heap, what will you do? And I say that Dansby Swasons is going to be OK, because he’s made it out of the ash heap before. His first season – he was a candidate to win the Rookie of the Year Award, and the Braves moved their stadium here to Marietta, to his hometown and made him the poster boy of their whole advertising campaign, but Swanson ended the season statistically as the worst defensive shortstop in baseball. Can you imagine what that was like? Sure, you can – because you’ve been there too. Everything was supposed to go one way, but the winds shifted, the tide went out, and all at once your boat runs aground and the clear skies became foreboding. To many such a change is interpreted as a tremendous injustice – an unfairness that they never get over, because they weren’t prepared for life to deliver lemons and they don’t know how to make lemonade. I’m reading a book about a mother, who in an attempt to encourage her son to pray, finds out that among his first prayers to God he voiced his greatest prayer request: to receive a bag full of apple flavored lollypops coated in caramel. So, she snuck the lollypops under his pillow that night – which on the one hand seems like a good idea. We want our kids to pray, so why not encourage them by finagling a way for a prayer here and there to be answered? But the problem is that sometimes we pray for lollypops and we end up in the ash heap, because God isn’t like Santa Clause, and we can’t “receive the good at the hand of God, and not receive the bad.” The bad has a lesson for us to learn as well. A life that’s all roses only prepares us to live in the rose garden and not the real world – and it’s important that we all know what to do when it rains on our parade, because at some point we might be driving a trailer full of cows down I 75 South that topples over just before rush hour. What we do in such a situation matters, because the measure of a man is not determined when he’s relaxing on the beach. A woman’s life won’t be defined by what she does at a picnic in the park on a Sunday afternoon but when her world falls apart. What will she do then? That’s when we come to really know what faith is really all about – we don’t know what prayer is until we’ve stood at the door knocking week after week to no answer. Then Lot’s wife comes to our side saying, “Do you still persist in your integrity? Curse God, and die” that’s when we learn something. Job hits rock bottom and he still won’t sin with his lips – that’s what the book is all about. Job facing the true unfairness of human life with faith – but plenty have faced such hardship only to learn that they’ll do anything to get by. That’s what George Will wrote about this week. I’ve been reading George Will a long time. My grandfather used to cut out his columns and send them to me. It started when I was 11 or 12, a thick manila envelope would come in the mail, addressed to me from my grandfather. I’d open it up so excited thinking he was sending me baseball cards or something else that I’d actually want, but instead it’d be packed full of George Will articles. Last Thursday he reminded us readers about Robert Penn Warren’s book, “All the King’s Men.” In this legendary book, the main character says: “Man is conceived in sin and born in corruption and he passeth from the stink of the [diaper] to the stench of the shroud,” Then, when an aide tells Stark that a particular act of securing dirt on a fellow politician is beneath the dignity of a governor, Stark replies that “there ain’t anything worth doing a man can do and keep his dignity.” George Will followed with this: “We should hope, against much current evidence, that this is not true.” We look then to Job – because there is more than one way to deal with desperate times, though this narrow path may not be modeled for us readily. We look then to Job, asking: “Shall we receive the good at the hand of God, and not receive the bad?” or give up abandoning our morals? You don’t need to answer that question – by your actions over the past three years, you already have. I’m a witness to your Job like faithfulness in times of unjust tragedy. Today is the first Sunday of October. Three years ago this week, Dr. Dave Mayo preached his last sermon from this pulpit as the Senior Pastor of this church. Three years ago, this very week, he left his position here to lead about 300 members of our church in a schism, dividing our congregation in two. Three years ago, this very week – the choice you faced was like every other group of people who ever found themselves in the ash heap – would we curse God and die, giving up and closing our doors? That was a real possibility. But instead - you accepted the truth – that the road to the Promised Land is not a simple walk through the desert, but a journey that might lead you to an oasis one day and an ash heap the next – and the only way you won’t make it there is if you quit walking. You lived it out - that if we receive good from God, we must also dare to believe that God also works through the bad – and as I look around this church now – as I see your faces today - I give thanks to God for everything that He has done, for today while so much has fallen away, what remains is life. What’s still here, is joy. What we have is hope – so we move into the future not with malice, but with forgiveness. For today, despite the past - we have an eye to the future and faith in our hearts, believing that while God may sometimes give us more than we think we can handle, the Lord is with us in the ash heap just as the Lord is with us on the mountain top. With such faithful vision as that, we see as Christ saw. For had Christ been without faith, his last words would have been: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me.” But those aren’t his last words. You remember what he said to the one hanging on the cross right next to him? “Today, you will be with me in paradise.” Christ, the innocent one who suffered– Hebrews tells us that he is the “pioneer” of “salvation” made “perfect through sufferings” – even in our suffering, let us follow him to Paradise. Amen.