Sermon Sunday 7 October, 2018 Pentecost 20 World Communion Sunday

Readings:  Job 1:1, 2:1-10    Mark 10: 13- 6

Let us pray:  As we hear the word of God for us in our hearts, may we find understanding, challenge and assurance as we seek to be the people of Jesus Christ in this place.  Amen. 

One of the highlights of our trip to Victoria (apart from see our daughter) was sharing a house for the weekend with three other couples, two of whom I hadn’t seen for 30- 40 years and the others who we had never met.  We got on really well and there were some very good conversations.  But the one that stands in my mind is the one with the guy I’d never met, a farmer from the central North Island, who asked me a question that is not uncommon when people find out I am a Christian and minister I guess – ‘How can you believe in a God that allows children to starve and wars to decimate entire communities?’ And it continued – ‘How can you believe in a church that allowed my ex-wife to annul our marriage as if it had never been and effectively negated our three beautiful children?’

As you can imagine we had a long and wide-ranging conversation and I hope he is in some way able to reimagine his understanding of God and church.

And then this last week, back in Dunedin we had lunch with an old friend who was a pastor in a New Life Church and who told her story of trying to break down the barriers of white middle class conservative exclusivity only to be faced with the uncompromising wrath of the indignant self-righteous.

Yet I went to a service in the Fairfield Uniting Church in Melbourne where I was told with some delight by the 80 something ex Baptist minister service leader that their Minister didn’t make Sunday service one time because she was in jail – arrested for protesting against the mining of coal in Queensland.  Active in a number of social justice issues, they hang a pride flag alongside a First Nations flag on the outside of their church, and speak actively into refugee treatment, climate concerns etc.  They are not a big church but they are alive and active.

While away I also had time to focus on the world around – to ponder the ‘Me too’ movement and how it had given hope to those who have had no real voice before. Yet against that hope, sits the image of 11 serious faced white men in suits lined up facing or should we say intimidating (but saying not a word to) Christine Ford who was testifying to the actions her abuser, potential Supreme Court Judge Kavanagh.

I saw the huge numbers of homeless on the streets of Melbourne – beds being made on pavements and in doorways, in front of shops where people bought yet another unneeded piece of something and a few feet (yet a world away) from the Merc or Bentley passing by.

I saw a man at Victoria Market sitting on the pavement muttering to himself about the humanity that was passing him by and how he couldn’t understand half of them and then two young boys, with their father watchfully standing back, approach him with some food and drink.  This rambling man stood, talked with the boys, gave thanks, smiled and walked away a bit taller.

All this reminds me that we quite often make a real hash of taking God’s message of love and hope for all people into our world – whether that world be within the church or facing out into community.  We are quite capable of taking a singular experience and allowing it to colour perceptions, understandings, judgements in an unthinking way.  To see the homeless on the street and fill in the details of their failed lives without talking with them, to use our prejudices to treat people as liars and faceless non-entities, to allow our understanding of God to be manipulated to suit our church doctrine.

It reminds me that we who have things pretty much under control, for whom life is reasonably ok are not so well equipped to deal with the horror that is life for some and tend to shy away.  

It makes sense that those who see the horrors of the world and the double standards of the church might have trouble believing that there is a God, or at least a God they would want to be in relationship with.

It is entirely appropriate for the reading for today to be from Job.  Job, the most upright of men, faultless in his living, persistent in his integrity and, as it happens, quite successful in his living – stripped of all that he knows and loves, reduced to a suffering horror, equipped only by his trust in God.

There are so many ways we could engage with this reading – but today let us follow this train of thought.

Job was not perfect – much as we would like him to be – no-one gets it all right before God.  Yet we hear that his faith was strong and his trust in God deep rooted.  And that gives us the clue that his life belonged to God in a way that Satan was envious of.  But he did not have all the answers, was not complete in his understanding of the way of God.  Neither, I suspect, did he see life as a place of intense pain and suffering, a daily horror. He was about to find out – and in the end his relationship with God was deeply intensified and greatly expanded.  His life was again to become a good life but I bet his ministry was the richer and way more effective for the experience in the reality of the wider world.

We would not wish the story of Job on anyone but it does point us in the direction of ways in which we can be better at being the word of God made known in this world.  It begs the question of where we might be living in a bubble of content or behind the closed doors of self-righteousness.  Are there times or places where we mould the ways of God to our satisfaction, our comfort ignoring the fact that we know we are hurting and excluding and judging? Are we aware of a sense of incompleteness in our living out of the grace and love of Jesus but never quite enough to make us take that step into vulnerable encounter?  Are we living as a church, as a people, that enables others to see God in us and believe in a God of love, not one of hate and hypocrisy.

Our hope – I present to you the children on the streets of Melbourne who came to the discontented, rambling down and out - with offerings of not just food but of respect and valuing and love.  We take our hope from them.  For Jesus said:

"Let the little children come to me; do not stop them; for it is to such as these that the kingdom of God belongs.
Truly I tell you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child will never enter it."
And he took them up in his arms, laid his hands on them, and blessed them.  Amen

Margaret Garland