Scripture: Mark 10:27-37
Several weeks ago when I was concluding a series of three sermons on the book of Jonah, I found that after the third sermon I had some left over thoughts that had come up as I was thinking about Jonah and so three sermons spilled over into three and a half. Maybe you can guess what I’m going to say next, this being the Sunday after I supposedly have finished a series of three sermons on the book of Job. It’s true. I find that I’m not quite done with Job either after three sermons, and I must confess that I sort of knew that would be the case even as I said some words last week about concluding, at least temporarily, our discussion of Job. I guess technically I wasn’t lying, since temporarily could mean until this Sunday, but in any case, I knew last Sunday that after that sermon there would still be some things inside me that I hadn’t gotten to and when they were still there by the middle of the week, I decided I needed at least to begin there this morning.
Some of you may know the name, Bill McKibben. Bill McKibben is an author who I suppose is identified by many as an environmentalist, though his concerns are more wide-ranging than that, and such labels are always more than a little bit misleading. I don’t know Bill McKibben personally, but I suspect he might be just as happy to be called a Christian—he is an active Methodist layman— as to be called an environmentalist, though either term could lead to some misunderstanding. Anyway, Bill McKibben was writing about global warming and population growth back in the 1980’s, before it was quite such a major topic as it is today. I first ran across him, however, about the same time because he had written some things about how we celebrate Christmas that came to my attention as part of materials that come across your desk as a pastor. Over the years, I have continued to encounter his writing, not so much because I have sought it out but more because it appears in journals or other collections I am reading. I have almost always found him beneficial. And so, when I was scouting around doing some reading in connection with the sermons on Job and I came across a piece he had written about Job, it attracted my attention.
It turns out that Bill McKibben had had a conversion experience because of reading the book of Job. Not that he hadn’t been Christian before, but his church experiences, both as a suburban kid growing up and as an adult, had, shall we say, left something to be desired. He reports that he was well on the way to drifting off into confirmed paganism, or at least drifting away from the church for good, when he read a translation of the book of Job he had been given as a gift.
And when he came to the final chapters of Job where God gives the speech we heard parts of last week where God says things like, “Job where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?,,,Have you commanded the morning, or caused the dawn to know its place?”—when McKibben came to that part Job, he was affected by it not as an expression of God’s majesty and human smallness, nor in the way I was trying to express last week as God trying to communicate something to us about God’s inner nature, God’s essence, if you will. What McKibben found in those words was something different still, a clear and powerful statement of a worldview in which human beings are not the center of things.
What we find in the Bible depends a lot on what we bring to it, and that can be a good thing. It is not such a good thing when we already know what we think and we come to the scriptures looking for something that will support what we already think. People do this. Lots of people do this. We tend to think it’s just people we disagree with who have this proof-texting approach to the Bible, but it’s not. People who have opinions I agree with do this, and I hope they find what they’re looking for in the Bible. I have done this. It’s not that it’s necessarily so terrible. It’s just that it seldom gets us very far, and certainly is not likely to produce much in the way of spiritual growth.
It’s a slightly different thing when the questions and the concerns you bring to your reading of the Bible shape the kinds of things you find there. I wasn’t reading Job from an ecological perspective last week so I didn’t find there anything which spoke particularly to environmental concerns. But I was aware that McKibben had read Job with those concerns on his heart and I had found what he had to say about that worth thinking about, so I had that sort of bracketed in my mind and then went back, early this week, to read it more with those kinds of concerns.
I tried to read it that way in a kind of devotional spirit, letting myself try to feel the words. And what I found is that although I probably wouldn’t have understood them in quite this way without McKibben’s help, they did speak to me in this way too. “Have you entered into the springs of the sea?…Have you entered the storehouses of the snow?…Who is it that cut a channel for the rain?…Can you hunt prey for the lion? Do you know when mountain goats give birth or observe the calving of the deer? Is the wild ox willing to serve you? Will it spend the night at your crib?” Words like these did, if approached with a certain kind of sensitivity, offer a worldview very different from the one we are surrounded with most of the time, even in our churches, a worldview that assumes human beings are the measure of everything.
By contrast, we are presented through God’s words in the book of Job with a vision of creation where God’s creation has an integrity of its own apart from its value to human beings, where human beings do not exist as the whole purpose of creation but only as a part of all creation, where God is lovingly involved in the creation of everything, not just human beings, where the wild ox does not serve at the side of a child’s crib, and where the natural world is not there just for us to appreciate, enjoy, marvel at, use, abuse, or use up. The notion that the natural world exists as a kind of support system for human beings, that it’s there to provide a place for human beings to be, an environment that will sustain us and provide for our needs, this notion is so deeply ingrained in us, I think, that it’s often hard to recognize or to imagine that there is any other alternative. But God’s words at the end of Job do point us in that direction, the direction of beginning to see creation as centered around God and in God, rather than around human beings.
That’s one of the leftover thoughts I had from reflecting on Job. It led me to the scripture we did hear this morning about the man who wondered what he needed to do to gain eternal life, or maybe if eternal life is not your concern, maybe we could just hear him asking what he needed to do to get really close to God, and after an exchange about the commandments, Mark reports this: Jesus, looking at him, loved him and said, “You lack one thing; go, sell what you have and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me.” When the man heard this he was shocked and went away grieving, for he had many possessions.”
I often think of this passage when I hear people arguing for taking what the Bible says in a rather rigid, literal manner, because when I hear people arguing for that point of view it never appears to me that they have taken this particular passage literally, so it’s an example to me of how few people really follow through on taking the Bible literally. I don’t blame people for not taking this passage literally. It’s a challenging passage, especially for those of us who recognize ourselves, as the man in the scripture did, as having “many possessions”. For most of us the issue with this passage is not whether we’re going to take it literally, but whether we are going to take it seriously, and if we did, what would that mean.
I’m not going to really go into all of that this morning. The passage deserves a lot more attention than I am going to give it. I just have a few comments for now. It doesn’t help in trying to take the passage seriously, it doesn’t help I think to treat it as a kind of judgmental text about the evils of material possessions and the difficulty of those who have plenty of them getting close to God. Taking the passage seriously is not the same thing as feeling guilty, or feeling like you ought to feel guilty, for having a lot more than you really need to survive. It occurred to me for today, because I think it does nudge us, if we are going to take it seriously at all, it at least nudges us to consider whether we are not caught, all of us, in a culture of “more” where we assume that more is good—higher profits, more production, growing economies—and that we may need to be liberated from this assumption. Spiritually speaking that’s how I read what Jesus was saying to the man in the scripture. He was offering him a deliverance from a worldview in which more is better and in which humans are the center and creation’s gifts are viewed as resources for the human appetite for more. He was offering him instead a different worldview, in which God is at the center, the kind of worldview presented to us in the last chapters of Job. As to what steps we need to take either as individuals or collectively as humans to slow the use and the using up of God’s creation and to gain release from the culture of “more”, I will need to leave that to your reflection and perhaps to some future conversations among us. That we need to move in this direction is a thought the scriptures leave with me on this Labor Day weekend, when many of us are able to rest from our labors. Some of God’s people need a day of rest. Even more, God’s creation needs us to rest from our labors.
One other thought. Another person I was reading in connection with Job said that he was entirely sympathetic to Job’s passionate, persistent questioning, even though it was at bottom a questioning of God. He said all honest believers do the same. But, he said, let our questioning be filled with reverence, for we are dealing here with holy matters. I was grateful for the comment. And I have been thinking that if our questions and our words about God could be filled with more reverence, and if we could approach creation with more of reverence and less of the attitude of what it will provide us with, if we could fill every part of our lives with more reverence, that would be a good thing. That would be a very good thing. Amen.
Jim Bundy
September 3, 2006