Proper 22b: Lament, Longing, and Hope

Proper 22b 2021

Next week:

Next week we will have a liturgy, a special liturgy. My hope is that we will be able to be outside. My hope is that we will get some participation from friends and neighbors outside of the congregation. We’re going to do our part since our plan is to bring Mary Pat‘s brother and his wife who will be with us that weekend.

You may have read in my journal blog about how the word liturgy means the people's work. Next week the main work is intended to be yours. We will have a kind of guided exercise that will give us away to symbolically offer to God our Laments, our Longings, and our Hopes.

Our experiences will be clustered around four parts of our lives that have had a particular focus for us over the last couple of years. We will hold up and offer to God our Lament, Longing, and Hope as we experience it related to four areas of our common life:

1. There has been an explosion of different reactions as we have all been confronted with the pandemic of Covid 19 in our consciousness and lives.
2. Civil Divisiveness: all of us, no matter our political persuasion can look at our country and observe a level of division that has not been present in generations.
3. Again, regardless of political persuasion, it is easy to see the pointed strife between so-called different races and ethnicities.
4. Fourth, the level of change in our lives has been accelerating for decades at an exponential pace. Our experiences of the last few years has made us even more conscious of the uncertainty "change" brings.

In each of these four areas we have experienced a range of emotions. We will be focusing on 3 emotions:

1. Lament: a sadness and a grieving over loss of all kinds. Anger and weariness over the chaos and uncertainty we face. We mourn and lament.
2. Longing: a desire for things to be different, second guessing what might have been, seeking a vision on the horizon of what new life might look like. We long.
3. Hope: because of who we are as followers of Christ, we bring an expectation and desire for something better. We bring a trust in God that what is possible only through divine action is not just possible but will happen. We hope.

Then the burden will be on you to identify and offer your own experiences.

We will offer and put ourselves before God in the passage from Lament and sorrow through suffering on to the wonder of fulfillment.

Something of the Christian proclamation

We will be following as it seems to me the very fullness of our Christian face, the very gospel itself.

What at first seems like the pit of demise, in the end becomes hope fulfilled beyond imagining. God does the work. We give ourselves to God, placing ourselves before the Lord, to be used and transformed into divine hope.

"God, you are always more ready to hear than we are to pray, and to give more than we either desire or deserve"

Job 1-2

For the next four weeks the lectionary provides for us a super highway pass through the book of Job. Today we have the opening of the book and the scene that sets the stage for all that follows. I find myself somewhat surprised to make the following claim:

In this book we can see the same fullness of the Christian gospel that we will discover together next week in our passage from mourning to hope.

The book of Job is a most surprising and unexpected book. It utilizes an image of God that is foreign and really unacceptable to most all of us. We get a glimpse of that in today’s reading.

"There was once a man in the land of Uz whose name was Job. That man was blameless and upright, one who feared God and turned away from evil."

Like so much of this book Job is over the top. His righteousness is over the top. But he reflects what all of us see in ourselves. Somewhere within us is someone trying to be and do the right thing. All of us could be Job.

But then today's reading exposes a scene that is beyond imagining. God is meeting with his executive council, "heavenly beings" it's translated here. And one of those beings by the name Ha-Satan. This is not what later became "Satan - the devil." This is one of God's counselors who is charged with rooting out all the forces that might work against God. In this case he makes a bet with God that if Job's riches and blessings were taken away from him, he would "curse" God, he would betray God.

So God takes him up on the bet and gives Ha-Satan leave to impose all manner of injustices on Job.

We are then exposed to an intense and unbearable series of losses and death inflicted on Job. Job responds with anger, frustration, indignation, and arguing with God. Finally the end of the book culminates with a dramatic reversal, with God responding to Job’s anguish, with an awesome demonstration of God’s supremacy of all creation. God wins in the end.

We hear in this ancient and strange tale, then, a re-telling of the Gospel itself.

1. I believe in one God.
2. If you would follow the Lord you must take up your cross and suffer loss.
3. Out of death, by God's grace, emerges life.

One of the great works of European literature follows the same pattern. In Dante's Divine Comedy the main character finds himself in the midst of life and can't find his way further. He is led from Hell to Purgatory and then to Paradise.

From Lament to Longing to Hope.

Such is the way that God's people have walked from ages past up to the present. Job has traveled there. Jesus traveled there. Dante traveled the path. And in our own day we know that path:

1. We have made a choice to be aligned with God's side.
2. We have suffered loss.
3. We have given ourselves to the hope that God prevails in the end.

Living the path

One of the unchangeable things about our life in these years -- especially in the last few years -- is change itself. We have experienced the loss attached to change. We long for a return to the familiar. We hope for the life that we hear and see in the promise from God.

In the words of our Presiding Bishop, our church is itself changing. The change is inevitable. Like Job we can have a wide range of emotional responses to the change, but change we will. Much of it is out of our control. One of the things we lament is our loss of control. But one of the things that is in our control is what we do with the change.

Bp. Curry is leading is to change with re-forming the church. In a recent message he puts it this way:

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Come and see ...

We are becoming a new and re-formed church, the Episcopal branch of the Jesus Movement -- individuals, small gathered communities and congregations whose way of life is the way of Jesus and his way of love,

• no longer centered on empire and establishment,
• no longer fixated on preserving institutions,
• no longer shoring up white supremacy or anything else that hurts or harms any child of God.

By God's grace ...

In a clear and concise way, Bp. Curry makes that vision seem real and achievable. He identifies 5 ways that go about putting into place that "re-formation."

1. Center on Jesus Christ.
2. Practice the selfless, self-giving way of the cross.
3. Unite around the practice of a rule of life in small gathered communities.
4. Reclaim our Christian identity as a Spirit-driven, counter-cultural, underground movement.
5. Live and bear bold witness to the vision and values of Jesus.

The old is going away — but a new way is being formed.

Closing

As we gather week by week we offer ourselves as partners with God in the re-formation of a Church that is called out to be something new and remarkable. We are called out -- the Greek is "ekklesia" -- to be witnesses to a new thing, to be agents of a new way of being, to be instruments of Grace in a world that too often looks like Job's world.

We lament what has been. We long for a time of peace. We hope for a life that has long-since been promised by a faithful God.

Almighty and everlasting God, you are always more ready to hear than we to pray, and to give more than we either desire or deserve: Pour upon us the abundance of your mercy, forgiving us those things of which our conscience is afraid, and giving us those good things for which we are not worthy to ask, except through the merits and mediation of Jesus Christ our Savior.

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