Restoring Fortunes, a sermon based on Job 42: 1-6, 10-17, preached on September 22, 2024

There are some great videos on the internet of first-time drivers, but in these videos, it’s not the teenage drivers who are being recorded. It’s their nervous parents. Our daughter Lily showed me a video of a mother sitting in the passenger seat of her car. Her daughter was excited to be at the wheel, having just received her learner’s permit, yet her mother was nervous. She was clearly tense, but it was more than that. It might be more accurate to say that this mother presented as someone with generalized anxiety disorder. As her daughter moves towards a stop light, Mom reaches with her left arm to brace herself with the dashboard. Her right hand finds the grab handle above her door. She looked like she was expecting an explosion at any second. This is the way it often is. That’s how I was driving with our 15-year-old daughter, Lily. When Lily first got her learner’s permit, she asked me to ride with her around the neighborhood. I was nervous, but not because of how Lily was driving. Lily drove slowly and cautiously. She made full and complete stops at all stop signs. She looked both ways before moving into intersections. After the wave of anxiety passed through me, I was impressed, and she was proud, so when we made it back to the house after circling the neighborhood, she wanted to park my car in the driveway. That’s a challenge because our driveway snakes around the house. It’s a difficult driveway to back out of or to pull into, yet she was threading the needle. She navigated her way up the driveway, around our house. She pulled up right next to her mother’s car. Slowing down right in front of a brick retaining wall, which marks the raised bed of my garden, she wanted to bring the car to a full and complete stop, so she slammed on the gas. The front two wheels of the car were up on the raised bed of the garden. She yelped, then cried. I asked her to put the car in park and told her to hop out and go inside. I backed the car back off the raised bed of the garden. No real damage was done. I haven’t grown many tomatoes this season, but no real damage was done to the car, and wise parents tell me that it’s just this kind of hardship that all kids need to face as they’re learning to drive. A small mistake that doesn’t hurt anyone is just what every new driver needs as they learn to drive because such real-life suffering teaches a lesson that can’t be learned from the safety of a drivers ed classroom or a driving manual. I can’t teach her everything. Sometimes, she’s got to walk that lonesome valley on her own. This is the fourth sermon in a row based on the book of Job. Today, we read the ending of the book. Four weeks ago, we read the beginning, and what I want you to notice today is how Job changes. I want you to notice that the way Job parents his children changes. If you remember back to the beginning of the book before anything bad happened, Job was working overtime to protect his kids. We read in the first chapter: He would rise early in the morning and offer burnt offerings according to the number of them all; for Job said, “It may be that my children have sinned, and cursed God in their hearts.” This is what Job always did. This is what every parent is tempted to do. I remember one afternoon when Lily was very young. I had read an article about the dangerous content on the internet, and so I called my grandfather and told him that I was thinking about having the internet disconnected from the house to protect little Lily from what all she might find there. He said, “While you’re at it, keep her from getting a library card because there are plenty of dangerous ideas in there as well, and maybe don’t send her to school or let her learn to read. Maybe just wrap her in bubble wrap. That should do it.” Do you get his point? My grandfather, knowing that resilience comes from making mistakes, facing temptation, and suffering, wanted me to help Lily learn to live in the world rather than protect her from it, which is where Job ends up at the end of the book. We just read that Job, had seven sons and three daughters. He named the first Jemimah, the second Keziah, and the third Karen-happuch. Notice that the book of Job names the daughters and not the sons. That’s unusual. Then, here’s something even more unusual. We read: In all the land there were no women so beautiful as Job’s daughters; and their father gave them an inheritance along with their brothers. Now, there are daughters named in the Bible. Sometimes, the Bible tells us the names of the girls, but never do the daughters inherit anything from their fathers. I can think of one other instance in Scripture where it happens. It’s in the book of Numbers, the account of the daughters of Zelophehad. Everyone knows about them, right? With this uncommon practice of preparing his children for his death by providing all his children an inheritance, what is the Bible trying to tell us? What changed in Job? What did he learn from suffering? From suffering, he learned that life doesn’t last forever and that hardship strengthened his relationship with God, so why overprotect them from it? Why not equip them to stand on their own? Will they make mistakes? Of course. Might they squander their inheritance on loose living? Sure. Think about what happened with the Prodigal Son, who squandered his inheritance and returned to the Father valuing his relationship with him. We can pray for them, but think about what happens when they pray on their own from the ash heap. There’s a beautiful story that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. tells about learning to pray. It was late one night in January of 1956. He couldn’t sleep, and so he got out of bed, went to sit at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee by his side. He said that he could feel the darkness of despair creeping towards him. A few weeks earlier, Rosa Parks had refused to move from her seat on a bus in Montgomery, sparking the Montgomery Bus Boycott. King, who had just turned 27 years old, was the leader of that boycott and had received an endless stream of death threats against him and his family ever since. He had reached a point when the forces standing against him seemed impossible to overcome. It was the middle of the night, and he was away from home. Had he been in Atlanta, he would have gone to see his father and would have asked his father to pray for him, but his father was too far away, and it was too late at night to call. King wrote: I was ready to give up… In this state of exhaustion, when my courage had all but gone, I decided to take my problem to God. With my head in my hands, I bowed over the kitchen table and prayed aloud. [It was as though I had never prayed before.] I experienced the presence of the Divine as I had never experienced Him before. It seemed as though I could hear the quiet assurance of an inner voice saying, ‘Stand up for righteousness, stand up for truth, and God will be at your side forever.’ Almost at once my fears were gone. My uncertainty disappeared and I was ready to face anything. My friends, Job is a book of the Bible in which the main character suffers. Suffering has so much to teach us. Suffering taught Dr. King to pray. That dark night of the soul set him free from his fear to stand up for righteousness. Yet his father would have spared him that suffering, just as I would have spared Lily from her first car accident. I want you to know that I asked Lily if I could tell that story about her first car accident. She told me, “You’ve already told everyone, so why not tell it in a sermon?” I’m not a perfect father. I wish I were, but I’m not. I’m not Jesus. Jesus is more than me, and I want our girls to know Him more than I want them to think that I’m perfect, and more than I want to protect them from every hardship that they may face. I want them to know that in the pit of hardship, they will not be alone. No matter how dark the shadow, His light will still shine. No matter how bad the mistake, no matter how deep the shame, His grace is for them. He is more than me, and as much as I want to protect our girls from everything, I won’t always be there, so I want them to have the inheritance of faith. Job gave his daughters an inheritance: an inheritance of gold that would help them, preserve them, and keep them. Yet, our inheritance is even greater than that, for our fist Scripture lessons tells us that our High Priest, is holy, blameless, undefiled, and exalted above the heavens. Unlike the other priests, He has no need for sacrifices, for He died once and for all. We are but humans. He has been made perfect forever. You may not meet Him when the sun is shining and the birds are chirping, and everything is just fine, but not every day will be like that. On those dark and stormy days, look, and you will find Him. The blessing of suffering is that while we are suffering, Jesus, and our need for Him, becomes clear, and Jesus is the most precious inheritance, the greatest fortune. Amen.

He Made His Peace with God, a sermon based on Job 38: 1-7 and 34-41, preached on September 15, 2024

Did you watch the debate last Tuesday? I doubt it would have occurred to me had the presidential debate not been last Tuesday, but because it was, and I was thinking about it on Wednesday morning, I realized that what we’re seeing in our second Scripture lesson is something like God’s counterpoint to Job’s opening statement. Last Sunday, we heard from Job. Having suffered a horrible tragedy, losing his children, watching his home and property go up in a cloud of dust, he bravely voiced his bitter complaint to the Almighty. That was last Sunday’s Scripture lesson. In today’s Scripture lesson, we’ve heard God’s counterpoint, and in every way, God’s counterpoint is overwhelming. Thinking of last Tuesday night, if this were a debate between Job and God, I have little doubt whom would be declared the winner. I can hear the political commentators offering their post-debate analysis as God wraps up His counterpoint. Behind a desk for the evening news, one political commentator might say: I know that Job’s been preparing his argument from the ash heap for days now, but God’s been preparing for this debate since the beginning of time. Then, another might chime in: Job was pretty into his emotions tonight. His words had feeling and passion, and he represents so many of the downtrodden that it’s impossible not to be moved by his words, yet when God speaks, He sounds like James Earl Jones, may he rest in peace, and that gives His argument an authority that rings throughout time and space. Here’s an important difference between the debate last Tuesday night and the debate we’re hearing unfold from the pages of Scripture: God isn’t trying to beat Job in this debate. God isn’t trying to win an election here. God is trying to help Job heal, for at the right time, healing from grief and trauma may mean lifting your eyes up from the misery of your ash heap to appreciate the majesty of God’s creation. We lift up our eyes from our suffering to the hills or the stars, the sunset or the sound of a baby’s laugh, to be moved by the power of God. God’s counterpoint is something like that: The Lord answered Job out of the whirlwind: Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth? Who was it that swaddled the water of creation and set a limit to the sea? Have you commanded the sun to rise? Have the gates of death been revealed to you? Can you comprehend the expanse of the earth, much less the universe? Do you know where snow comes from? Or what about something easier: like do you know where the mountain goats give birth? Or do you know why the ostrich has wings but can’t fly? The purpose of these questions is not just to put Job back in his place, but to help him see that there is more to life and more to God’s creation than his season of tragedy. Now, tragedy can’t be glossed over. God isn’t like the preacher at the funeral who tells everyone not to worry because now another angel has joined the choirs of Heaven. There’s a time for rejoicing in the promise of eternal life, and there’s a time for weeping over what’s been lost, and you can’t gloss over the heartbreak and maintain your mental health. You can’t deny the stark reality, for when we see suffering clearly, our own or the suffering of our neighbor, we can offer real compassion instead of empty platitudes. God isn’t offering Job the empty platitudes that his friends offered. God is better than that. I can imagine God being the first to weep with Job in that ash heap, for when our hearts break, God’s heart breaks as well. God has said nothing to Job until now, for in the ash heap, Job wouldn’t have been ready to hear what God has to say. I had a friend in Tennessee who told me that when he was child, his house burnt to the ground. The house his father built with his own two hands was there one day, and it was an ash heap the next. This friend of mine remembers how his father stood in that ash heap for one day and one night, not moving, not speaking, not eating, just standing, for we all must go down to the dust to acknowledge our hurt. There is no way around it. There is no denying anger or sadness. You can’t bury it nor can you drown it. You can’t go around the valley, you’ve got to go through it, yet after acknowledging our hurt, after sitting in the ashes of our despair, maybe after shouting out to God and voicing the injustice of it all, God lifts our heads to see that the world is bigger than our pain and, in our lives, there is not only sadness but also beauty. The heartbreak of the past need not rule our future, for there is more to life than ashes and despair. We can’t get stuck in the ash heap. I practice meditation a little bit. I’m not becoming a Buddhist or anything. I just downloaded an app on my phone that helps me relax and clear my head. According to an article published by the National Science Foundation, the average person has between 12,000 and 60,000 thoughts per day. 80% are negative, and 95% are repetitive. Sometimes, what we need is to lift the needle from the record player so that the same thoughts stop cycling through our heads. Maybe not everyone in here remembers record players, so let me tell you something about them. Records are how people used to listen to music before all the music was on our phones. You used to have to go to a store to buy music. First, there were record stores. A record was this big, flat plate with grooves on it. If you left your record in a hot car, it became a salad bowl, and if you scratched your record, the needle of your record player might get stuck at a certain point, and it would just repeat the same part of that record again and again and again. Our minds will do the same thing. Our minds will fixate on the same thought again and again and again. We’ll ask ourselves, “Why did he have to die?” again and again and again, or “What should have happened?” again and again and again, and sometimes, the best thing that can happen is for someone to come along and hit the table so that the needle bounces and the record moves on to the next song, for Job’s tragedy is not the only track in the story of God’s great and glorious salvation epic. There is more than his sadness and more than his frustration. Yet once he’s fixated on it, once the needle has found that groove of suffering, those thoughts go through his mind again and again and again on repeat. Therefore, God speaks: Have you commanded the sun to rise? Have the gates of death been revealed to you? Can you comprehend the expanse of the earth, much less the universe? Think about all that there is beyond the thoughts in your head. That’s a good thing to do: to get beyond your temporary suffering to consider the majesty of salvation. That’s why it can be good for grieving people to take a trip to the Grand Canyon. We took our kids there, and one of our daughters stood on the rim of the Grand Canyon and said, “This place has nothing on Kennesaw Mountain.” Most people don’t say that. Most people look down upon the Grand Canyon and think about how many years it’s taken for the river to wear that canyon down. Most people go to the Grand Canyon and think about how ancient our earth really is, how majestic is God’s creation, and how many ups and downs this world has seen. Acknowledge your sorrow but remember there is more to life than your sorrow. Can you get your mind off that groove? Lieutenant Dan couldn’t. Do you remember that guy? I can’t think of a scene in film or TV that makes me think of Job as much as Lieutenant Dan in Forrest Gump. Lieutenant Dan, who lost both his legs in Vietnam, straps himself to the mast of Forrest’s shrimp boat and faces down a hurricane. Do you remember? There’s rain and wind, and Lieutenant Dan is up there in the middle of it. Out of the whirlwind, God spoke, and the next day, having braved the storm, Lieutenant Dan jumps into the water and swims off into a peaceful sea. Then Forrest says, “He made his peace with God.” My friends, I don’t know why bad things happen. I’m not convinced that the Bible ever gives us a good answer to that question, but this I do know: There is more to life than our problems and our pain. God has not only provided us with suffering, but also with joy. Can you find joy? Can you see the joy that God has provided? You see, sometimes we heal from grief and injustice when we stop paying so much attention to the grief and the injustice. You who are downtrodden and heavy laden, look up in wonder at the majesty of creation. Consider with me the grace of God. Remember, not just your suffering, but the suffering of Jesus on our behalf. Remember salvation. Consider, not just the sufferings of this present age, but the promise of Heaven. As the sun is setting, look for the fingerprints of the One who will cause it to rise again. Rember the words of our choir’s anthem: Over my head, there is music. In the night’s deep darkness there is music in the air. I hear it when I’m praying, I hear music in the air. There must be a God somewhere. Indeed, there is. God is here. God is with us. Always and forever. Halleluiah. Amen.

It Could Not Have Been Worse, a sermon based on Psalm 22 and Job 23: 1-9, 16-17 preached on September 8, 2024

Traffic is the worst, isn’t it? Last week, I heard about one family in our church who drove to Indiana for Labor Day weekend. The worst leg of the journey was between Chattanooga and Nashville: bumper to bumper the whole way. It sounded like torture, and some of you drive in traffic like that every day. I can’t imagine. Not to brag, but when I’m riding my bike here to the church, it’s often like riding through a Norman Rockwell painting. Last Tuesday, it was that way. There was a breeze, and birds were chirping. I waved to some neighbors on our street. Then, I rode up Stewart, turned onto Maple, where people were walking their dogs, and parents were pushing strollers to our preschool. It was one of the most idyllic experiences of my life. Only then, I rode my bike through our west parking lot. Around 9:00 AM in our west lot, when parents are dropping their kids off for preschool, it’s like a miniature version of 285. The main parking lot isn’t big enough to handle all the parents dropping off their preschool students, and the cars can’t clog up Kennesaw Avenue, so parents and grandparents circle around our west lot on the other side of the bridge. A lot of cars circle up other there. It’s typically the most aggressive driving that I have to ride my bike through during my morning commute, but last Tuesday, it was worse than usual because blocking the line was a semi with a load of lumber. It was parked, while a forklift unloaded that lumber and tried to carry it through our parking lot and across Kennesaw to a house being renovated. I got off my bike, and when I walked past Suzanne, our assistant preschool director, I heard her say, “It’s always something.” So often it is. Neighbors use our parking lot, and I love that people make good use of our parking lot. It’s a ministry of this church, just providing such a large, open area for people to use. How many teenagers, learners permit in hand, have learned to drive in that great big parking lot? Some have learned to ride their bikes in that lot. On Saturdays, a farmer’s market sets up over there, and they bring their surplus to our food distribution ministry. As a church, it’s good to partner with others who are doing good in this community. When people call and want to use our space, we help. Marietta High School holds their AP exam testing here. In a couple weeks, all the school counselors from Marietta, Cobb, and a couple other school systems will hold a big meeting in Holland Hall. We’ve hosted Rotary, the Sheriff’s Department, the Police Department, we host community choirs and retired teachers’ events: all kinds of stuff, and so I can say with confidence that we would have been more than happy for one of our church’s neighbors to use our west parking lot to unload lumber for their home renovation. I would have asked that they not do it during preschool drop off, or those parents are going to kill you. However, I never had the chance to ask because they never called. Now, I get it, asking for things can be hard. Just talking to people can be hard. I was a shy kid. When I was 8 years old, my mom walked me into the Lawrence Street Rec for basketball practice, pointed out my coach, and told me to go over and introduce myself for my first practice with his team. When she came back to pick me up an hour later, I was standing right where she left me because I was too shy to go and introduce myself. I can still be that shy kid. When I have to have a difficult conversation with someone, it takes me a minute to psych myself up, and then it takes me a minute to recover. After a hard week of too many difficult conversations, I may go to the grocery store like I did last Friday, a little too thin-skinned to deal with one more person. Last Friday, our daughter Lily drove me to the grocery store, where we picked out all kinds of stuff. Sara gave us a list, but the new flavor of Pop-corners, nacho cheese, found their way into our buggy. Plus, Moon Drop grapes are in season. We had to have those, so in the check-out line, when the cashier asked us if we’d found everything that we needed, I said, “We found a lot more than what we needed,” then I waited for her to laugh… or smile… or something. Instead, she said, “I hear that same line at least 60 times a day.” Next time, I’m going to the self-checkout line. It can be hard to talk to people. Sometimes, it’s easier not to. After a week like the one we’ve just had and during a week like the one we’re headed into, we can’t just bottle up all the fear and all the anger. Let’s think about how to let some of it out. We’re in the book of Job again today. It’s the perfect book to read in the days after a school shooting and in the days before the anniversary of 9/11 because here, Job shows us what to do with our shattered expectations and some of our darkest feelings. For the month of September, each sermon will be based on a passage from the book of Job, and last Sunday, Cassie introduced us to Job beautifully by saying that Job stands at the boundary of religion and faith. Another way of saying the same thing is to say that in our second Scripture lesson, Job is stepping away from the routines and trappings of a religious life and into having a soul-bearing relationship with God. That’s the difference between religion, as Cassie was talking about it, and faith. Another way to say it is to say that there’s a difference between going to church, following along with liturgy, singing the hymns on a Sunday morning and learning what it really means to trust in Jesus in the midst of the storm. There’s a difference between wearing a cross, having religious home décor on the wall of your house so you look like a Christian and trusting God with your deepest fears and darkest emotions. Do you know what I’m saying? Religion is a box that we check when we’re filling out paperwork. Faith is a relationship, and relationships must weather disappointment and heartache. Sometimes, there is anger and misunderstanding that must be expressed, so when a reporter asked Ruth Bell Graham, who was married to that great preacher Billy Graham, if she had ever considered divorce, she responded: “Divorce? I never once considered divorce. However, I often considered murder.” What’s the difference between calling yourself a Christian and having a relationship with God? When you have a relationship with God, you open your mouth and let God know what you’re really feeling, even if what you are feeling is ugly, so we read in our second Scripture lesson that Job answered: My complaint is bitter; and God’s hand is heavy despite my groaning. God has made my heart faint; the Almighty has terrified me. If only I could vanish in darkness, and thick darkness would cover my face! For Job, his whole world had fallen apart. His children were dead. His flocks of camels and goats were gone. His home had been destroyed. Things could not have been worse, and in our second Scripture lesson, he lets God know about it. Can you imagine? Friends, the last time I preached on this passage from the book of Job, it was 2021. We were in what was, for me, the darkest days of the pandemic. We were passed the time when we were all leaving our groceries in our cars. We were passed the time of thinking that everyone was going to die. We were in that point of the pandemic when some of us thought we needed to be careful and others of us were wondering if maybe the whole thing was a hoax, which meant that for people like me who were trying to lead organizations of mixed-opinioned individuals, it was the darkest days of the pandemic in 2021 because of the stress. I started having migraine headaches. I wasn’t sleeping a whole lot. This passage from Job was a difficult scripture lesson for me to wrestle with then because, despite Job’s honesty, if you would have asked me how I was doing in those stressful days of 2021, I would have said, “I’m doing fine.” Why? Because it takes a whole lot of faith to be honest when things are going badly. It takes a whole lot of faith in our relationships with God to let God know about our greatest vulnerabilities or our deepest pain, and so we say that the book of Job stands at the edge of religion and faith because in this book, Job trusts God with how he’s really doing. How’s he doing? Awful. Everything has fallen apart. If his boss had walked up to him in this moment, he might have lied. If his grandkids had walked up to him in that moment, he might have put on a brave face. Maybe that’s how we need to be around some people; however, we put on a brave face before God to our own detriment. Many who have reached that dark place in life must wrestle with a lie. They must wrestle with the lie that there’s nothing to be done and nothing to say, that no one wants to hear it, and no one really cares. Doubt that lie. Dismantle that lie with the truth that God will listen, for when we begin to open up about our fears, we live our courage, and when we trust God with our heartache, we live our faith. Our first Scripture lesson, undoubtably one of the most depressing, gut-wrenching psalms we could ever read, Psalm 22: My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Where have you heard those words before? Jesus quotes this psalm while He’s being crucified because life for Jesus wasn’t perfect, yet He was perfect. He was perfectly faithful, and so in His darkest moment, He trusted God enough to reveal to Him His pain. If another school shooting has you broken hearted, or if the state of affairs in our nation and our world keeps you up at night, do not bottle up what you’re feeling. Instead, live your faith. Trust God with what you’re feeling. Let your Father in Heaven know. Trust Him with your hurt and your heartache. Doing so may not make all your problems go away. However, doing so will strengthen your relationship with Him, which will change everything. Amen.