George R. Sumner
Sermon for 21st Sunday after Pentecost, Year B, Proper 24 – 10/17/2021
Job 38:1-7, (34-41)
Psalm 104:1-9, 25, 37c
Hebrews 5:1-10
Mark 10:35-45
All human societies have rites of initiation, things you have to go through to qualify for something or other- boot camp, HR intro, spring training, frosh week. You can surely think of examples in your life. For most of us clergy, at least of my vintage, this included something called CPE, clinical pastoral education. It meant long hours in a nursing home or a prison or a psych ward or somewhere similar, including on call weekends with a beeper if someone should die. And then, in small groups, it meant processing what you had experienced, and submitting yourself to critique about how your own family of origin, affected how you see things. A little self-awareness is a good thing in a priest. It having been the 70’s, I happened to have landed in TA CPE. Enough with the acronyms! Transactional analysis claimed that the way we interact follows certain scripts- my child talking to your parent, your adult talking to my child- An A and a P and C lodged inside us all. I chafed at all this at the time, as I reckoned that the dramatic personae, and the plot lines in us were way more varied than those. But this much I grant, that there is a side of humans which can be analysed dramatically- think of the highly influential Erving Goffmann, and his famous book ‘presentations of the self.’ Who are the characters, and what is the plot line, according to which we enact our lives?
In this spirit, I want to consider our readings this morning. I rarely take all three on, since there is usually way more in one for a sermon length meditation. But let’s consider them by plot and actor. Since they are God’s Word, we should not be surprised that they show us models of our own interactions with one another as Church, and each and all of us with God. So let’s begin. In the Old Testament, our reading from the book of Job comes at the conclusion of the story. Job the righteous professes faith, but he also complains, and not a little, but chapter after chapter. When his friends tell him to hush up, he will have none of it. He challenges God to show up and answer his list of what’s been unfair in his life, and the world. Let us call this the Script of believing complaint. We aren’t denying God, but we are demanding a reckoning. Our reading is the uh oh moment- He has indeed shown up, and he is God after all. The gist of the retort is ‘who do you think you are?” and ‘where were you?” In other words, God does listen and answer, but don’t expect him to accept your soliloquy on face value. Job is reduced to sackcloth and ashes. But of course it you read on, something equally surprising happens. Job is rebuked and then he is blessed. As a human he is meant for dialogue with God, who can take some hard words, and come back with some of his own! What if this is the model for real prayer? What if this is what it looks like to take God as God seriously, and yet to believe he invites debate, and to be ready to be called to account, and blessed for it? It is a more rough and tumble version of praying than we usually have.
Equally honest, and equally challenging, is the Gospel reading. It has to do not with your private prayers, but with the gathered, the Church, and how they present themselves to one another. Let us call it the Script of contention. And that is not meant in an altogether bad way. We strive, long, reach- we want to sit in the seats close to Jesus. But even at our best, even in our most religious moments, our egos manage to insinuate. The human is humble, though 5% of his heart says, ‘humble I am indeed.’ We are in the language of the New Testament, believers and yet no less gentiles, the unreconstructed. This is the essence of the Ash Wednesday anti-liturgy isn’t it? This is who we are, a mix of aspiration and contention, and over against this the Gospel is loving challenge, gracious checkmate, a salutary humbling. The Script is I am with you Lord- (under your breath) more than they are, if you really understand me- (in the Lord’s voice) it shall not be so among you, in the same tones he used for Peter. To be the Church is to be in a school of honesty, humility, bracing reminder.
They are both hard enough, and surprising enough. But then comes the Epistle, from the fifth chapter of the letter to the Hebrews. The passage begins by reminding us of all the ways we may describe Jesus as God’s very Son. He carries the weak. He is miraculously both priest and sacrifice in the holy Temple of God. As such, he is as mysterious and unique as Melchizedek, who helped Abraham in the book of Genesis. But how is these things? By his suffering, by undergoing weakness with us. He is all these things by crying out, alone, rejected by his father. Eternal as God, he learns perfection by what he suffers- how can he be both at once? What kind of Script is this? The script of changing places, of role reversal. The faithful suffers. The divinely strong is weak. The all wise sheds tears. The son cries out for his father. A startling drama this, unsettling as it does what we might have assumed the word ‘God’ means.
But there is one more thing to say. This script, the script of divine love , takes places in the heart of God. These are not our lines, but God’s. Some else is doing the talking, albeit on our behalf and to our good. The main character is the final act isn’t us. This is a script overheard, lines borrowed perhaps. But even that is not enough to say. For this dialogue in the heart of God on behalf of his world does take place in a human life, that of Jesus. And it is uttered in our midst. And the job of the Church is to make sure that the Script reverberates down history. The incarnation is the making of this script to be ours, the atonement the yes to its internal sacrifice on our behalf, the resurrection its power to grasp us and reshape us, in spite of ourselves.
Church is not CPE, and it has a lot more to say than TA. But it does offer those enduring scripts that make sense of our experience. It holds a mirror up to us as creatures of God, as it invites us to that honest complaint for which we receive both a retort and a blessing. That is called prayer. And we are invited into a real-life family, only in this case the one used by God to reshape us, called Church. It holds a mirror up to our contradictions and conflicts, inside and between us. We are contentious, and it shows us the contrast with the Gospel. But even that is not all. Best of all, it allows us to overhear the most surprising script of all. And because it is a script between Jesus man and God, enacted in our broken world, we can repeat its words on our tongues, we the understudies, as if it were our own, which is what the bible calls ‘grace.’ Amen.
