What do You Want?

What do you want? And when do you want it?  We want a win, and we want it now.  We want quick fixes and easy solutions.  We want the shiny new gadget that will take us to the moon and back in the blink of an eye.  We want the big red easy button that we can push whenever we want.  And most of life is like the poster on the wall at a photocopy store.  “If you want it fast and cheap, it won’t be good.  If you want it good and cheap it won’t be fast.  If you want it good and fast, it won’t be cheap.”  You choose!

Job and Bartimaeus knew that life wasn’t easy.  They knew what it meant to feel like they were blamed for the situations they found themselves in.  They knew that people disrespected them for the problems that they had, and they knew that there were no easy answers to the challenges that they faced.

Bartimaeus had people tell him to be quiet, to shut up, to stop bothering them.  They didn’t believe he had the right to bother other people, and certainly had no right to pester someone as important as Jesus.

Job had people tell him he deserved the tragedies and illnesses he experienced, he had earned all his troubles and trials.  He should just be quiet and accept his fate quietly, confess to God what he had done wrong, or even curse God so God would put him out of his misery.

Both these men were targeted with bad, arrogant theology that assumed that other people knew what was best for them more than they did themselves.  Other people knew what they should or should not be allowed to do.  Other people put controls on what they should think and how they should act.

Except those other people were wrong!  And not just a little bit wrong either, but spectacularly, arrogantly wrong.  So wrong that Job and Bart ended up with personal encounters with the holy that would forever change their lives.  Wow.

Too often we are the crowd who are focused on what we can get for ourselves, and we ignore the outsiders who also need to hear good news, or see signs of hope for their lives.  Too often we are like Job’s comforters, telling people how to think, what to think and what to do.  We assume we know the answers that will solve everyone else’s lives.  We get focussed on fixing, saving, advising and correcting other people.  We act like we know what they need to make their lives perfect, and we are blind to what they might really want and need.

And sometimes we are Job and Bartimaeus, wrestling with life experiences that hurt, that challenge, that feel like they will never end.  We face tragedy after tragedy and when we turn to the people we think will help, we are left high and dry.  We find ourselves wrestling with depression and mental illness and assume that there is nothing we can do to change it.  We struggle with the temptation to make life into a giant pity party, and to sit in our woes inviting sympathy.  We assume that somehow life is terrible and things never change.  If we are not careful, we can become a permanent victim, cynically seeing the world through pessimistic eyes that allow us to stay stuck in our apathy.  When we are caught in that broken record of negative thinking, it is hard to imagine a different future that might be better than the present.

The holy shows up and disrupts things.  The sacred experiences happen to Bartimaeus and Job despite the bad behavior of their friends and community.  Bartimaeus and Job are the ones who experience first-hand the healing that they so desperately wanted.  Job, after 42 chapters of complaining about how unfair life is and how mean God has been, changes his tune and says to everyone who will listen, “I have had a personal experience with the Holy that is so profound, so amazing and so immense that I am in wonder, and I am humbled.”  He’s like this one you tube video that tried to describe the number of galaxies in the universe. It used the metaphor of filling a swimming pool with cheerios to show how many galaxies there are - you’d need over 300 swimming pools and that’s just for the ones that the Hubble Telescope can see.  There’s even more that we can’t see.  That’s the kind of God experience Job had and of course it was humbling.

Experiences of the holy, whether it is Jesus helping us see the world in new ways, or Job discovering joy after tragedy, are rare and special.  Not everyone experiences them, but when they happen they have a way of showing up unexpectedly, even when we’ve given up hope.  One thing that helps us have that kind of experience is thinking of ourselves as disciples and learners, being humble and asking for God to be in our lives.  Job was a faithful man who regularly studied scripture, listened to the priests, went to temple and prayed to God unceasingly.  Bartimaeus was a Hebrew.  He knew scripture, and he called Jesus the Son of David, recognizing Jesus as a royal person, full of authority and power, with a unique connection of God.  His faith was deep.

Faith is more than a logical experience of the divine, or an easy answer button. We need both a logical and an emotional connection to the holy. On this Reformation Sunday, we remember Martin Luther’s inspired list of problems nailed to the church doors, John Knox’s reforming of the Scottish church, John Wesley’s logical Anglican faith turned upside down by the experience of his “strangely warmed heart”.  We remember liberation theologians challenging power systems, feminist theologians and queer theologians pushing our understanding of God.  And we pray to see our world with fresh new eyes as disciples of Christ.

Thinking Outside the Box

“All Around the Mulberry Bush, the monkey chased the weasel… Pop goes the weasel!” Remember having one of these when you were a kid?  Or maybe giving one of these to a kid?  Out comes the Jack in the box and it always seemed surprising even though we knew what would happen. 

The big draw of this toy was that surprise of the jack in the box jumping out and looking bigger than the box it jumped out of.  How did such a tall clown come out of such a small box? 

The scriptures today talk about God and Jesus as being bigger than we could imagine.  The reading from Job is a classic Jack in the box story, and also reminds me of the cliched advice, “Be careful what you ask for, you might get it!”  Job has been building up a case against God; Job felt like God was a business partner to be bargained with, and his friends didn’t help much.  They believed firmly in karma, that if you do something wrong, you would reap the consequences and if a disaster falls on you, it must be your own fault.

That’s still a common belief in today’s world too.  It’s a nasty form of blaming the victim, and it’s meant to comfort ourselves.  “That won’t happen to me because I do things properly” which can mean anything from vitamins to crystals.  Job was written to challenge that assumption.  It is the original “Why bad things happen to Good People” story, designed to wrestle with that hard question.  Job put together a legal argument as if he was a well-trained lawyer.  God had treated him with injustice by letting Job experience some heart-breaking disasters, a business failure and lastly a devastating physical illness.  And Job set out his case that he did not deserve any of it.  If this was karma, karma got the wrong guy and he could prove it!

He turned the crank on his complaints to God until pop!  Unexpectedly, God came to give Job an answer.  Not a particularly comforting answer, mind you.  God says, “Are you as big as me? As powerful as me?  As creative as me? As smart as me?  Nope!” Not much of an answer, and certainly not a comfort either.

Except that it is a reminder to Job that however Job imagined God, God was bigger than that imagination.  God could not be stuffed into a box until Job turned the crank. 

James and John also thought they had Jesus pegged.  They thought they had figured out what box he belonged in.  The box of political leader and reformer who would start a revolution to depose the Herods and the Pilates of their world. Except that Jesus wouldn’t stay in that box either.  He wasn’t going to become a stereotypical rebel who takes down the local tyrant, only to become the next tyrant.

That’s a real pattern in history.  It happened in France when Louis 16 was deposed and four years later, Napoleon Bonapart was the head of France, living like a King.  The many Roman emperors that killed their predecessor then were assassinated by the next.  Russia was the same, and anyone who read Animal Farm in school will remember that. Even Israel at the time of Jesus would have remembered Herod the Great becoming king by attacking the current king with the help of the Roman army.  Leaders rose and fell, and politics was a dangerous game.  James and John figured that Jesus was going to end up with power and influence, maybe even a throne.  But Jesus wanted something bigger.

Not political leadership but moral, ethical, spiritual and religious leadership.  Leadership that inspires and encourages us to think bigger.  Leadership that thinks outside the box about the big picture, not our big pictures, but God’s big picture.  Leadership that inspires, empowers and includes us in God’s picture.

We humans like to feel we are in control of our small little universes.  Or if we aren’t in control, there’s something wrong and we turn to blame.  We blame ourselves, we blame others, we blame God.  We label others and ourselves as a way of feeling like we control the world, we know how things should be going.  And when, like Job, bad news comes, or someone refuses to stay in their box, we don’t know how to respond. We ask Jesus to be seated in a power position next to him.  We ask God for certainty and control.  We get instead, a command to serve one another and a vision of the universe as vast and diverse.  A command to think outside the box. A command to think beyond our small universes into a vision of community.

Jesus wanted his disciples to be community, not hierarchy.  To be servants to each other.  One of the Moderator’s books we read says, “We thank God for giving us community who live by God’s call, by God’s forgiveness and God’s promise.  We do not complain of what God does not give us, but thank God for God has given us enough, a community of flawed Christians journeying through struggles and need and disillusionement together.”[1]  Like Job, James and John, we struggle in life.  Unlike Job and like James and John, we have community.  And unlike James and John, we know the commitment Jesus made to this new way of thinking about God and community that was so amazingly outside the box.  Together as servants of one another, and supported by God’s amazing power and grace, we can build a vision of community that is heaven on earth, that is outside the box and that keeps surprising us in amazing ways.  God’s vision of our community, our church, is far bigger than we can imagine, so let us be open to the surprise of seeing that vision pop out in unexpected ways.  May it be so. Amen. Vintage Matty Mattel Clown Jack in the Box -1950's - Working! - YouTube

“All Around the Mulberry Bush, the monkey chased the weasel… Pop goes the weasel!” Remember having one of these when you were a kid?  Or maybe giving one of these to a kid?  Out comes the Jack in the box and it always seemed surprising even though we knew what would happen. 

The big draw of this toy was that surprise of the jack in the box jumping out and looking bigger than the box it jumped out of.  How did such a tall clown come out of such a small box? 

The scriptures today talk about God and Jesus as being bigger than we could imagine.  The reading from Job is a classic Jack in the box story, and also reminds me of the cliched advice, “Be careful what you ask for, you might get it!”  Job has been building up a case against God; Job felt like God was a business partner to be bargained with, and his friends didn’t help much.  They believed firmly in karma, that if you do something wrong, you would reap the consequences and if a disaster falls on you, it must be your own fault.

That’s still a common belief in today’s world too.  It’s a nasty form of blaming the victim, and it’s meant to comfort ourselves.  “That won’t happen to me because I do things properly” which can mean anything from vitamins to crystals.  Job was written to challenge that assumption.  It is the original “Why bad things happen to Good People” story, designed to wrestle with that hard question.  Job put together a legal argument as if he was a well-trained lawyer.  God had treated him with injustice by letting Job experience some heart-breaking disasters, a business failure and lastly a devastating physical illness.  And Job set out his case that he did not deserve any of it.  If this was karma, karma got the wrong guy and he could prove it!

He turned the crank on his complaints to God until pop!  Unexpectedly, God came to give Job an answer.  Not a particularly comforting answer, mind you.  God says, “Are you as big as me? As powerful as me?  As creative as me? As smart as me?  Nope!” Not much of an answer, and certainly not a comfort either.

Except that it is a reminder to Job that however Job imagined God, God was bigger than that imagination.  God could not be stuffed into a box until Job turned the crank. 

James and John also thought they had Jesus pegged.  They thought they had figured out what box he belonged in.  The box of political leader and reformer who would start a revolution to depose the Herods and the Pilates of their world. Except that Jesus wouldn’t stay in that box either.  He wasn’t going to become a stereotypical rebel who takes down the local tyrant, only to become the next tyrant.

That’s a real pattern in history.  It happened in France when Louis 16 was deposed and four years later, Napoleon Bonapart was the head of France, living like a King.  The many Roman emperors that killed their predecessor then were assassinated by the next.  Russia was the same, and anyone who read Animal Farm in school will remember that. Even Israel at the time of Jesus would have remembered Herod the Great becoming king by attacking the current king with the help of the Roman army.  Leaders rose and fell, and politics was a dangerous game.  James and John figured that Jesus was going to end up with power and influence, maybe even a throne.  But Jesus wanted something bigger.

Not political leadership but moral, ethical, spiritual and religious leadership.  Leadership that inspires and encourages us to think bigger.  Leadership that thinks outside the box about the big picture, not our big pictures, but God’s big picture.  Leadership that inspires, empowers and includes us in God’s picture.

We humans like to feel we are in control of our small little universes.  Or if we aren’t in control, there’s something wrong and we turn to blame.  We blame ourselves, we blame others, we blame God.  We label others and ourselves as a way of feeling like we control the world, we know how things should be going.  And when, like Job, bad news comes, or someone refuses to stay in their box, we don’t know how to respond. We ask Jesus to be seated in a power position next to him.  We ask God for certainty and control.  We get instead, a command to serve one another and a vision of the universe as vast and diverse.  A command to think outside the box. A command to think beyond our small universes into a vision of community.

Jesus wanted his disciples to be community, not hierarchy.  To be servants to each other.  One of the Moderator’s books we read says, “We thank God for giving us community who live by God’s call, by God’s forgiveness and God’s promise.  We do not complain of what God does not give us, but thank God for God has given us enough, a community of flawed Christians journeying through struggles and need and disillusionment together.”[1]  Like Job, James and John, we struggle in life.  Unlike Job and like James and John, we have community.  And unlike James and John, we know the commitment Jesus made to this new way of thinking about God and community that was so amazingly outside the box.  Together as servants of one another, and supported by God’s amazing power and grace, we can build a vision of community that is heaven on earth, that is outside the box and that keeps surprising us in amazing ways.  God’s vision of our community, our church, is far bigger than we can imagine, so let us be open to the surprise of seeing that vision pop out in unexpected ways.  May it be so. Amen.

---

[1] Paraphrase from p 28, Dietrich Bonhoeffer Life Together: the Classic Exploration of Christian Community Harper & Row, 1954