Text: Job 23:1-9, 16-17
Theme: “They Left Out A Verse!”
20th Sunday
after Pentecost
October 11, 2015
FIRST PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH
Denton, Texas
Rev. Paul R. Dunklau
+In
the Name of Jesus+
Then Job replied:
2
“Even today my complaint is bitter;
his hand[a]
is heavy in spite of[b] my groaning.
3
If only I knew where to find him;
if only I could go to his dwelling!
4
I would state my case before him
and fill my mouth with arguments.
5
I would find out what he would answer
me,
and consider what he would say to me.
6
Would he vigorously oppose me?
No, he would not press charges against
me.
7
There the upright can establish their
innocence before him,
and there I would be delivered forever
from my judge.
8
“But if I go to the east, he is not
there;
if I go to the west, I do not find him.
9
When he is at work in the north, I do
not see him;
when he turns to the south, I catch no
glimpse of him.
16
God has made my heart faint;
the Almighty has terrified me.
17
Yet I am not silenced by the darkness,
by the thick darkness that covers my
face.
Following our time in God’s house this morning, the members,
friends, and supporters of First Presbyterian have opportunity to gather for
the stewardship lunch in Erwin Hall.
We’ll take a look at the resources we’ve been blessed with and take an
educated glance at the future and the opportunities that are on the horizon.
Stewardship is what stewards do. The word “steward” itself is as rich and
substantive, linguistically, as some of the tasty stews we will sample for
lunch.
A steward, essentially, was a manager of the house according
to the New Testament Greek parlance.
He/she was in charge of the resources of the home or the business, and
he/she determined how those resources were allocated and spent. And yes, this included budgets and budgeting,
debits and credits, planning and visioning.
Stewardship, in short, is this:
what you do with what you got!
What we got – or “what we have”, to be grammatically and
linguistically correct – the church, historically, has divided into those three
“T” words: time, talent, and
treasure. Did you know that the birthday
of this church is May 2nd?
Did you know that the year of birth was 1878? For over one hundred thirty seven years,
stewardship has happened here! FPC has been a hub for stewardship. People have
invested their time, talent, and treasure for the cause of Jesus Christ, and
First Presbyterian Church of Denton has been part of that conversation and
investment.
Last week, I began a four part series on the Old Testament
book or Job. We were introduced to the
main character, Job, in last week’s sermon, and this week we’ll dig a bit
deeper into what happened with him.
To use a stewardship analogy, Job was a man who had vast
amounts of talent and treasure. He was a
rich man in terms of what he owned and also in terms of human
relationships. He had a wonderful
family: seven sons and three
daughters. They were a happy family;
they met regularly for family dinners.
By all accounts, he was a blessed and fortunate man. The almighty God described Job as
“blameless”, “upright”, “a man who fears God”, and “shuns evil.” God said:
“There is no one on earth like him.”
But then Job lost nearly all that he had. In the twinkling of an eye, as they say, his
wealth, his servants, and his children were gone. They were no more.
As I’ve grown older and – please God! – a little wiser, I’ve
learned that life isn’t so much about mergers and acquisitions; it’s about loss
– and how loss is handled. I like what
the coach said in the movie, Any Given
Sunday:: “When you get older, things
get taken away from you.”
I’ve experienced loss
in my life, and so have you. But I’ve
never experienced loss on a scale that Job did.
Never has there been a man who had so much that was reduced, so quickly,
to having so little. If the losses we
experience are small and spaced out over time, then, okay, we can probably
handle them with the spirit, mind, and body that we’ve been given. But if like Job the losses are massive and
come quickly, what then? “Here’s that
rainy day they told me about, and I laughed at the thought that it might turn
out this way. Funny how love becomes a
cold, rainy day. Funny, that rainy day
is here.”
Here’s what happened with Job: needless to say, he didn’t sing an old
classic tune; he fell to the ground – not because he slipped and fell but
because he desired to worship God. Here
was his prayer: “Naked I came from my
mother’s womb, and naked I will depart.
The Lord gave and the Lord has taken away; may the name of the Lord be
praised.” “In all of this,” the
Scripture reports, “Job did not sin by charging God with wrongdoing.”
If a sermon from a pulpit were basically aimed at behavioral
modification – a.k.a. getting people to behave differently, this would be the
take off point. I can almost hear it now:
“God wants you to be like Job.
When life beats you into submission, don’t shake your finger at God as
if it’s God’s fault. Praise God
instead.” The minister then flashes a
“Pepsodent” smile at you. (Sorry. I
can’t do that; I have braces on. You’ll
have to wait!) At any rate, do you have
problems with that sort of thinking? I
do. Tell you what: if I were sitting where you are and if I
heard that coming from the pulpit, that minister would lose ALL credibility
with me. He or she might be a fine guy
or gal, but, man alive, we’ve heard enough of this sort of mish-mash,
tish-tosh, and gobbledygook coming from pulpits.
A wise prof told me that 90% of Christian sermons could be
summed up in one sentence: “May I
suggest that you be better people?” Behavior modification. Call
me weird; call me an odd duck, or whatever; it’s okay with me. I’m one of those goofballs who is curious
about the other 10% of those sermons.
What do they say, if anything, over and above and beyond the suggestion
to be a better person? I’m interested in
seeing whether they may – please God! – have some gospel, some good news, in
them!
What has God done?
What is God doing that I CANNOT DO FOR MYSELF? Ask those sorts of questions and you’re
really onto something!
When Moses came traipsing down Mt. Sinai, he wasn’t carrying
tablets of stone that had on them the “Ten Suggestions”. They were the Ten Commandments. And after all these thousands of years since
then, the chief purpose of those commandments has not changed. Their job is not to make us better
people. “Through the Law,” declares the
Bible, “we become conscious of our sin.”
The Ten Commandments show us that we’ve not kept them. And again, from the Scriptures, “If you keep
the whole law perfectly but stumble just once, you’re guilty of it all.” The law kills; the Spirit gives life! Here’s what it really comes to. Here’s what is at stake: are you going to be a Law person or a Gospel
person?
We’ve got a case study right here in the book of Job. The Law of God, in all its lethal efficiency,
was doing a number on him. The man was
hanging on for dear life! Besides his
wife and three friends (all of which that gave him dubious and questionable
advice [read the book; you’ll know]), everything else was gone. His own physical health was up for grabs; he
was afflicted with painful sores. There
was no narcotic, no prescription pain-killers, no IV drip with a pump for him. He was a pitiful, incomprehensible
demoralized, and dying mess. But
why? What had he done?
No answers were forthcoming.
God must have been on vacation – relaxing down in Cancun at an
all-inclusive resort, lollygagging in Belize or some such place. From Job’s standpoint, God was AWOL.
Last Sunday, we learned that one of the big questions
emerging from the book of Job is “Why do bad things happen to good
people?” Today’s emergent question is
this: “What happens when every shred of
evidence seems to tell you that God is gone or that God doesn’t even exist at
all?” Job truly prefigured Jesus Christ
on His cross when the Savior said: “My
God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
Job was dangling on that ledge between hell and higher
ground. He had one thing left, one
thing: his voice. He declares:
“I am not silenced by the darkness.”
My friends, his voice still shouts down through the centuries
to us this day. Maybe you hear your own
voice in his:
If only I knew where to find him;
if only I could go to his dwelling!
I would state my case before him
and fill my mouth with arguments.
I would find out what he would answer
me,
and consider what he would say to me.
Would he vigorously oppose me?
No, he would not press charges against me.
Do you want more? Try
on Job 23:8-9:
“But if I go to the east, he is not
there;
if I go to the west, I do not find him.
When he is at work in the north, I do
not see him;
when he turns to the south, I catch no
glimpse of him.
And now, in conclusion, we encounter what I feel is one of
the greatest mistakes the lectionary people have ever made. They left out a verse.
Job 23:10 is not part of the lectionary today. They just plum left it out, snipped it right
out of the text. Without this one verse,
I could argue that Job is a book about crying out to God in the darkness, over
and over again, and hearing nothing in reply.
Folks, I’m holding out for more than that; I’m holding on for verse
ten. The lectionary people left it out. But I’m a little bit of a rebel; I’m NOT
going to leave it out.
For verse after verse, Job has voiced his testimony. He shares his experiences that include failed
attempts at finding God. But then, like
a diamond in the rough, comes verse ten, the verse the lectionary committee
omitted. Shame on them!
It reads: “But he
(God) knows the way that I take; when has tested me, I will come forth as
gold.” For a blessed split-second, there
is no more talk from Job’s mouth about what Job had done, was doing, or was
planning to do. In one short and
precious verse, we get to the heart of the matter. We get what God has done and is doing. God knows the way I take. After HE has tested me, I will come forth as
gold!
Years and years later, late on a Thursday evening, Jesus of
Nazareth knelt to the ground as Job did.
Out from His mouth came a prayer.
He asked God that the “cup” be taken from Him. So intense was His anguish that His tears
were as drops of blood. Through His
tears, He had one more thing to say:
“Nevertheless, not my will but Thine be done.”
Today, as people of faith, as stewards of the manifold gifts
of God, we have an added gift, the gift the lectionary people left out. No matter what we experience now, no matter
what the future holds, we have Job 23:10 in our arsenal: “God knows the way that we take. After He has tested us, we shall come forth
as gold.”
Amen.
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