Tuesday, August 9, 2005
First reading: Job 38:1-11
Gospel: Matthew 8:23-27
The Rev. Melinda A. Quivik
Assistant professor of Practical Theology-Christian Assembly


What if, each Sunday morning in our churches, we announced the Confession of Sin with the hard and uncompromising questions God asks Job? God begins by warning Job to steel himself - "Gird up your loins." In other words, "buck up." You might remember Annie Dillard saying we all ought to wear crash helmets for worship, because God's power means the world is changing.

God tells Job to get ready because God is going to question him like a stern parent or a prison warden - or a terrorist interrogator. God says to Job, "I will question you and you will answer me." The question? Here it is: "Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?" This is admittedly a rhetorical question; "I am in charge here, not you!" God certainly has the credentials, reminding Job, "I determined the measurements; I drew the lines; I dug the footings; I set the cornerstone; I contained the sea - that great, roiling symbol of ultimate chaos; and finally, I dressed the heavens with singing stars and clouds and darkness."

God's holy word puts us in our place. "Just who do you think you are?" In the end, Job's answer is repentance. Job can only express humility and faith - faith in God's righteousness and mystery. Job knows he is not the author of his misery. He cannot understand why God has given him so much pain. And he remains faithful - he is a figure we need to hold in our minds. Given God's power and our indebtedness, we too must quake with Job and turn to each other in faith, with hearts full of compassion. Can any of us wall in the fury of the sea? Who among us knows how to measure God's grace - whether it has limits or where those limits might be?

That is, at least in part, what this assembly has set before it. Two big questions among so many: By what shall our worship be guided in the coming generations, and who among the Baptized is truly fully welcome at the table - to serve at the table, to administer the Sacraments? God's Word answers us, first in John. And here is a sort of hidden promise; God doesn't speak to Job because Job never falters, or because he interprets the Bible in a certain way, or because he has corrupt doctrine. None of those issues is in this story.

What is here is that the Lord speaks to Job in the midst of his helplessness, out of the whirlwind. What is that whirlwind? Well, it's Job's pain for one thing. He's lost his family, his livelihood and his health. But the storm, the insanity-producing situation, is also made up of Job's so-called friends, who, although they have come to comfort him, end up blaming for his condition. "It must be his fault," they say. They mean to correct him so that he can be made acceptable to God. Do we do that with one another? If so, hear the Word of the Lord.
"Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?" "Who are you to presume to know my design?" God doesn't speak to uphold the position of Job's critics; God speaks to Job - to the one who is suffering - to reassure him and to resurrect him.

In Matthew this commanding God is not the powerhouse of Job's story, but somebody sleeping in a storm. The boat was being swamped by the waves. This is not the God who speaks down from the place of chaos, but one whose strength is present in the storm.

I once visited Prague on seminary trip after the Iron Curtain came down. We were there to explore how Christians had fared behind the wall. For 50 years the church where we worshiped in downtown Prague had been closed to the people of God, and instead had been used to store weapons and ammunition, filled with the machinery of death. When the wall fell, that congregation reclaimed that sanctuary and cleaned it up and cleared it out, and they placed on the pew racks the fragile hymn books that fell apart when you opened the covers. And proudly the people pointed out to us that at the front of the altar table there was a carved relief of a ship - the church as a boat, that, despite the battering, did not sink.

The church - the old women in their head scarves and the young women and the men and the little boys and the children had all returned to their beloved gathering place. After worship we met with the church council and some folks in the congregation to learn about the new struggles of a church suddenly freed to be the Gospel. One man said the church found itself to be a source for crucial stability in a culture of extremes. On the one hand were the critics - the cynics - all those who had been so beaten down by totalitarianism. They had no hope; everything was darkness. On the other hand were the optimists - all those whose spirits had been so lifted by the ending of oppression that they believed everything was goodness and light. He held his arms out like this, and he asked us, "What is holding these disparate people together? It is the body of the crucified and risen Christ - the outstretched and wounded arms of Jesus. The compassion," he said, "of Christ Jesus pulls us toward each other; there is no other strength."

And so, we concluded, we are the Body of Christ holding these people together. We have a great responsibility to be the love of Christ to everyone.

How is this body - this ELCA - being called today to hold the extremes together? For we, too, are called to die for each other - to be the outstretched, wounded, crucified and constantly rising-up body of the One who so loved the world. How can we die for each other for the sake of the life of the world? And further, what can you and I give up into God's care in order to live for each other? And for those who cannot now bring themselves to be in relationship with our Lord. Just as the amazed church in the boat in Matthew's story asked, "What sort of man is this?" they invite us to ask, "What sort of body are we? How is the Body of Christ strengthened and revealed through us?"

Are we afraid of the waves? Why? We proclaim what we know. The One who lives in our midst in every joy and every trouble commands all things, and there is nothing to fear. The waters that burst from the womb of chaos in the beginning of time, corralled by our Creator, are still the waters that make a home for the Church. In the boat, off the boat, through the waters of Baptism. By God's Word we proclaim with Job, "I know that my Redeemer lives!"

We live by Jesus' promise. "I have marked you with the cross of Christ forever. You are my baptized children - all of you, always - all of you!"