Proper 22B sermon

After much blood, sweat and tears, and much thanks to the Blanchards for keeping me supplied with coffee after my pot malfunction in the late hours of Saturday night, here's this week's sermon.

18th Sunday after Pentecost—Proper 22B
October 4, 2009
Once there was couple who was on their way to get married. While en route, they have a fatal car accident and both are killed. When they get to heaven, the couple asks St. Peter if they can still get married . Peter says to them, “I don’t know. This is the first time we’ve ever had that request. Let me go find out…” and he leaves . The couple sit for three months and begin to wonder if they really should get married in heaven, what with eternity hanging over their heads. “What if it doesn’t work out?” they wonder. “Will we be stuck together forever?” St. Peter finally returns, looking somewhat bedgraggled. “Yes,” he informs them, “You can get married in heaven.” “Great,” says the couple, “but what if things don’t work out?” Could we also get a divorce in heaven?” St. Peter turns red in the face and throws his clip-board onto the ground. The couple looks alarmed as St. Peter says to them, “It took me three months to find a priest up here! Do you have any idea how long it’s going to take for me to find a lawyer?!”
I’ve spent an untold number of hours this week agonizing over our readings for today, and there’s just no easy way around any of them. In the gospel, we have Jesus being questioned about divorce by first the Pharisees and then his disciples. But it helps if we look at the whole picture rather than just what Jesus has to say about divorce. First, note that Jesus does not instigate this discussion on divorce. The Pharisees bring the question to him in yet another attempt to trap him. There were two different schools of thought about divorce at the time: one said that only sexual misconduct was grounds for divorce while the other maintained that anything the man deemed offensive (such as burning his dinner) could be grounds for divorce. By bringing this question to Jesus, the Pharisees were trying to force Jesus to choose a side. But as usual, Jesus refuses to play their game, turning the question back to them: “What did Moses command you?” Jesus then tells them that divorce is even an issue because of their hardness of heart and that God’s intention was for all to be in communion with God and each other. Jesus is speaking in broader terms, beyond the institution of marriage, and talking about the Kingdom of God and how we try to make up rules for who’s in and who’s out, but in reality, God wants everyone and everything to be in communion with God. The Kingdom of God will not be limited by our hardness of heart.
But then, there’s another glimpse of Jesus’s teachings about the Kingdom of God in our gospel reading for today. Later, when Jesus and the disciples are in a house, some people bring their children to him to bless, and the disciples try to turn the children away, and Jesus’ rebukes the disciples and tells them to let the children come to him, “for it is to such as these that the kingdom of God belongs.” Again, we see Jesus placing himself between the most vulnerable, the powerless ones and the disciples’ hardness of heart. And he is also lifting up certain characteristics before the disciples for their emulation in their pursuit of the kingdom of God. Children are unselfconscious, receptive, and content to be dependent upon others’ care and bounty.
And then there’s Job. What on earth do we do with Job? I will confess to you that the entire book of Job makes me very uncomfortable. There’s Job, who’s minding his own business, doing what is right and then this heavenly poker match between God and the satan (or the heavenly prosecuter), with the stakes being Job and all that he has and is. And then there’s Mrs. Job, who often gets a bad rap, but who is equally affected by it all as her husband. Finally, after they have lost all their children, all their livestock, practically everything, she tells Job, “Just end it already—curse God and die and end our suffering and pain and loss” and Job responds to her, “You speak as any foolish woman would speak. Shall we receive the good at the hand of God, and not receive the bad?” And that’s really where it gets me. I’m all for being thankful for God for our blessings, and it is an essential part of our spiritual lives—remembering that God is God and we are not and acknowledging all the good things that we have from God and making our offering as a grateful response. But I have a really hard time attributing the bad things that happen to me and in the world to God. I cannot reconcile my understanding of God as the giver of all good gifts, who wants to be in relationship with us, with Job’s statement that we need to take both the good and the bad from God.
I’ve been reading a book by the Episcopal priest, Robert Capon called Health, Money, and Love and why we don’t enjoy them. It’s an interesting book , and in it, Capon talks about how happiness and happen have the same root word, and how we often make a mistake in thinking that happiness is something that has to befall us or happen to us. He even talks about how life is like a Divine Crapshoot, with God being the honest casino owner who” lets the unloaded dice roll the way they want …lets the cards in the blackjack shoe lie in any unstacked order the shuffle determines…lets the roulette wheel turn at its own pleasure. And then—precisely and only because he is a master of the odds-- gets the exact result he wants without interfering with the freedom of anything.” Life happens, Capon seems to say, and God lets it.
Now, whether or not you agree with Capon’s image of God and our existence (and honestly, I’m not sure where I stand on it), each of us, at one time or another, has experienced a sense of powerlessness. We have all encountered at least one thing in our lives that is ultimately beyond our control, whether that is another person, such as a spouse or a child or a parent or whether it is circumstances themselves. Children experience their own powerlessness on a daily basis, and this fact, I believe is at the heart of what Jesus was getting at when he spoke of how they will inherit the Kingdom of God. What is key in our participation of the Kingdom of God is not so much fretting about why we are suffering but instead focusing on how we are suffering. Does our suffering inspire us to open our hearts and feel compassion for the plight of others, or does it cause us to harden our hearts?
Now, even though I am not convinced I accept Capon’s image of God, I do like how he later elaborates on this idea and I think it gets to the heart of what we believe about the kingdom of God and how we attempt to live in God’s kingdom in the here and now. He writes, “ …Happiness lies in our ability to accept everything that happens and then either enjoy it gratefully or reconcile it patiently. We may not be able to control all of the things that happen outside us, or even very many of the things that happen inside us; but since we are in control of both our gratitude and our patience, there is always and in every circumstance a path open to the happiness that God already has over everything. Such happiness is not cheap, of course: it cost even God some terrible hours on the cross. But it is available…”
Even in our darkest moments, in moments of our most intense pain and suffering and evil, God’s grace and mercy, God’s forgiveness and abundance is available to us. And it is the message of the cross and the way into the Kingdom of God. It is about recognizing that life happens, we will suffer, and it is how we suffer that makes all the difference. Do we accept that we are powerless and let go of our desire to control, accepting the good with grateful hearts and bearing with the bad in patience? Or do we allow our hearts to be hardened by what we experience and close ourselves off from the very purpose of our existence which is to be in communion with God and with each other?