I’m grateful that the Book of Job made it into the canon when the Bible was being put together. I’m glad to have a place to turn to that says, “yes, sometimes we suffer horribly. And no, we aren’t always at fault. Sometimes we really don’t ‘deserve’ what happens to us or our loved ones.” But I’m less comfortable with this: Job’s tragedies seem to come about because of a conversation – no, more than that: a bet – between God and Satan.
I’ve been waiting a long time to tell my story.
My story only shows up one time in your three-year cycle of readings.
In my tradition, in Judaism as it is practiced here and now in your time,
my story comes up every single year on the festival of Purim.
But you all have to wait three years to hear from me,
and sometimes you don’t even hear me that often.
Oh, me? I’m Esther. Queen Esther. Sorry. I should have started there.
The way to welcome God is to welcome the most vulnerable in society – specifically, in this illustration, children. Throughout the Gospel, both before and after this episode, we will hear of the other vulnerable ones we are meant to embrace: the sick, the dying, the poor, the socially unacceptable and ritually impure, the outsider, the foreigner, the refugee.
To us, more than 20 centuries later, Peter’s confession is spot-on. It makes perfect sense. But that is only because we know how the story turns out. Back then, however, Peter really had no reason to call Jesus Messiah, or Christ. It’s not a terrible stretch to argue that Jesus has demonstrated that he walks in the lines of the prophets, but he definitely hasn’t done anything that would suggest that he’s the long-awaited Messiah.
We might expect Jesus to promptly consent to heal the woman’s daughter. After all, that’s what he’s been doing for the last 6 chapters – taking care of people in need! But no. Maybe he’s tired from that long walk. Or he’s grumpy from not getting enough to eat. Or he’s still worn out from all of the ministry he’d been doing before he got to Tyre and is frustrated that he still hasn’t had a moment of quiet all to himself. Maybe the disciples wouldn’t stop talking or arguing or singing as they walked all those miles and he has a headache. Or maybe he is, like Alexander in the children’s story, just having a “terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day.” We don’t know why, we just know what: he says to her, “Let the children be fed first, for it is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.”
June 24, 2018 Final Worship of the Academic Year Featuring Handel’s Solomon The German-born composer George Frideric Handel had been resident in London since 1712 and enjoyed great success as a composer of Italian operas. Soon he began to gain recognition as a composer of English church music, stage works, and operas and eventually abandoned […]
Children’s Sunday June 17, 2018 Worship included presentation of certificates to all of the children in our Sunday School and gifts of appreciation for our teacher and nursery workers. Worship was a multi-media and hands-on experience that can’t be duplicated on a website. We hope you’ll come next year on Father’s Day when we […]
It’s a sad fact of life that sometimes people suffer and then die from their sicknesses. Even Jesus’ friend Lazarus died. And just as sometimes people die from physical illness, so too do people sometimes die from mental illness. Just as modern medicine can’t always cure physical disease, so too it can’t always cure diseases of the mind and spirit. So once again I remind us: never once does Jesus condemn those who are beyond healing in this life to an eternal life of suffering, of being beyond God’s reach.
These are interesting stories, but what do they have to do with us? What are we twenty-first century progressive-leaning Christians to make of the sabbath?
It’s Trinity Sunday, so we might as well begin with ancient church father St. Augustine’s unforgettable echo of the insight of earlier Greek theologians. Si comprehendis, non est Deus: if you have understood, then what you have understood is not God.
