"Trusting God to Be God" Oct 21, 2012

Job 38: 1-11 & 34-41 Mark 10: 35-45 Among the classic beloved old hymns are: I come to the Garden in prayer when the dew is still on the roses and He walks with me and talks with me and tells me I am his own... Jesus loves me this I know... What a Friend we have in Jesus... Each of which assume this Biblical identity of God being like us, God is not a force, an unseen power, an electric current; God has hands and feet, the heart of a warrior, the compassion of a midwife or nursemaid. To a God like us, we can confess all that troubles us, knowing that God is just, God understands, cares, the dilemma we struggle with is whether God is All Powerful or All Good? For if God is all good and God is all powerful, then why, why is there pain and suffering and evil in the world? Either God is not ALL powerful, so as to allow evil to at times take over. Or God is not ALL good, and while often God blesses us, God also can be quite cruel. This is Job's complaint: Life is not fair, where is God! There are those who have come to believe that God cannot be both at the same time. Some who theorize that God is All Powerful over the stuff that is God's, Creation, Nature, Destiny, but God has also given us Free Will, which created a realm where God is not. Within the areas of our domination and control, we can bring evil upon ourselves, upon one another, upon the world, and even God cannot stop this. Because God is All Powerful over that which God controls, but Free Will enables us to control and abuse and neglect what we control outside of God. Therefore, God is ALL Good and All Powerful except where we have not allowed God in. There are others who speculate that truly God is ALL Powerful, but the definition of Good is not all left to God. We each are able to claim and determine what we desire to be Good, and what may appear Good to some may at the same time inflict suffering upon others. There is a give and take to life, as we contest for who's Good will be revealed in the end. According to these believers God is ALL Powerful, but the definition of what is Good is up to the beholder, and all the elements of the Universe cannot have their Good at the same time. Part of the problem with human understanding is that the foundations of knowledge, our foundations of everything we know, are based in earlier times. For the entire history of humanity up until 350 years ago, we perceived the world not only as Anthropomorphic, but also as Anthropocentric. Anthropomorphic refers to our expectation that all creatures at their most basic are just like us. Where we have feet, fish have a tail; where we have arms birds have wings, but reptiles, fish, birds, mammals all have two eyes, a nose, ears, a heart and brain. We can each know creation through our senses, so also all these living creatures like us, can experience life and know what we feel. All of which is based on a projection of life, even a projection of God, as being like us. Likewise, to describe the universe as Anthropocentric is to believe that all the universe revolves around us. When Copernicus theorized the existence of a Solar System with a sun at the center as a star, and all the planets including our own orbiting around that sun, what he was challenging was not only the placement of planets, whether the earth was the center of the universe or if the sun could be, but Anthropocentrism, and whether we/each of us are the center of our universe. The ramifications of Copernican Theory, not only deal with space travel and the possible existence of life elsewhere, but Copernican Theory challenges all our assumptions about time and space, even whether if we are not the center of the universe, does Creation even need humanity at all? This morning we Baptized two infants, Audrey and Grayson. Suddenly, miraculously a few months ago, the lives of each of these families changed, the center of their universe seemed to shift. Now sleep is determined by these tiniest of humans. It was difficult enough at your weddings to change your last name, your family identity, now rather than being Lauren and Joshua, Ben and Kerrie, you have become Grayson's Mom and Dad, Audrey's Father and Mother, and by extension we have all new identities. Such has been the power of Anthropocentism, and the challenge of Copernican Theory. God's response to Job, names that instead of being the center of our worlds, the center of the universe with our God, we are no more important than mosquitos or gnats. From this vision of Creation, we can imagine God reaching down from heaven to scratch the backs and stroke the ears of God's favorite pets which are not you and me, but Leviathan and Behemoth, Sea monsters like Loch Ness, Moby Dick or the Crocodile. All the questions of God to Job, reframe that rather than our being the center of our universe, we are merely human creatures, mortal and relative, and God is God. While Job has raised his fist at the sky and struggled for answers “WHY?” God has showered upon Job a thousand questions of Who, How, When, What, and Where. Do you know all the circumstances of life? When your child will be born, this is a human question. What will be their identity? What will your identity be? Who will they become? How will we live? When will we die? What happens then? All these are human questions. WHY, that is a question for us to trust God to know, believing God to be ALL powerful and ALL Good. The disciples James and John come to Jesus with a very human question they were not supposed to ask. We know they knew they were not supposed to ask it, because they introduce the question by asking for a guarantee...Will you do whatever we ask? Matthew's Gospel goes even further, and rather than John and James asking the question, he claims it was their mother who asked it for them. The painful irony of the Gospel is that Jesus had just described, now for the 3rd time, that being the Messiah he was going to be arrested and to suffer and to die, and instead of asking How, When, Where or even risking Why, the sons of Zebedee asked the very human question, SO, will you allow us to sit at your right and left ? And even worse, we each of us seem to have the gene of Zebedee DNA in our systems, we seek domination, our desire is to win. Rather than listening and hearing one another, rather than having concern and compassion for the whole of creation, we question how do we get connected to power, how do we get noticed, how do we get to be first. Imagine a woman driving her car during a rainstorm, when suddenly the car is struck by lightning. She returns home and relates the story to her family, and her son responds “Let's go buy a Lottery ticket! They say that you have the same chance of winning the Lottery as being struck by lightning!” We are very human. William Sloan Coffin was one of the great preachers of the 20th Century, Coffin described having been a College student at Yale, with three close friends. On their way back from Thanksgiving break the other three had been driving together, when the one at the wheel had fallen asleep, all three were killed. Coffin related his feelings of anger at the funeral hearing the words from Job: “The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away. Blessed be the name of the Lord.” He was so frustrated, Coffin considered reaching his leg out from the pew to trip the Priest as he walked down the aisle. Just as he was about to do so, a voice inside him asked: Which part of what he said are you angry at? Coffin claimed the second, Who was God to have taken them all away! Then the first part occurred to him, “The Lord giveth,” their lives were not his to control, he was just a man, he could not be God and had to trust God to be God. We can be Baptized in Christ's Baptism. We can serve one another and share in communion. We can forgive one another. But all of this we do, because Christ first did so for us.