I Love So Much as it Grows Dark

A sermon preached on 10/21/2018
​by Rev. Robin Bartlett
at the First Church in Sterling, MA

Please pray with me in the words of this poem entitled Dios by Cesar Vallejo
 
I feel God travel with me,
when the sun sets and on the sea,
together we walk as it grows dark.
We are all together but walk like orphans.
 
But I feel God and he gives color
to my life. He is kind and sad,
like those who attend the sick and dying;
He whispers like a lover in distress.
His heart must hurt for his creation.
 
Oh, my God, though I have just come to you,
I love so much as it grows dark,
and in the balance within the heart,
I weigh and weep for frail Creation.
 
And you, what do you weep for … you who love
with your immense and whirling heart?
 
I consecrate you, God, because you love so much;
because you never smile; because your heart
must ache as Time continues.


Amen.

Glennon Doyle says that the world is both beautiful and brutal all that the same time. She calls it “brutiful.” I love so much as it grows dark, the poet says. On this day when the October trees are showing us what the beauty of letting go looks like, we sit also with great suffering. 

There are people here still recovering from cancer treatments and heart problems, and broken hearts. There are people sitting among us who are worried where their next meal will come from, or if they will ever stave off this loneliness. We are joined today by the family of Josh Byrne who tragically lost his life on his honeymoon last week in Costa Rica in a flash flood. We grieve at the loss of life and livelihood by hurricane victims in the Florida panhandle. 

On this day that we affirm beautiful Knox Leclair’s status as beloved by God and marvel at the miracle of his life, our heart is also at the Kennedy Krieger Institute in Baltimore with our 19 month old Charlie, paralyzed from the neck down since July 5th from a terrifying disease. We celebrate the beautiful wedding of “our kids”, Lilly Harper to Kevin Pelland yesterday, and we mourn on the one year anniversary of Shelly Kennedy Leonard’s death. I watched the absolute joy on your faces last week as you introduced me to your dogs and cats and guinea pigs; as Pumpkin the bird cat-called me during my sermon. And I saw the tears that rolled down your cheeks as you lit candles for your beloved pets now gone.

Creation gives so much to us, and takes so much from us. 

What do you weep for…you who love with your immense and whirling heart?

Our scripture this morning is from one of the most theologically troubling and stunningly written books of the Bible, the book of Job. It’s a story about trying to love God amid the growing darkness of one man's greatest suffering.

Job is a wealthy man living in UZ with a large family. In the text, he is called “blameless” and “upright.” In other words, he does all the “right and good” things. He goes to work, he pays his tithe at church, he always tips the waiters generously at restaurants even if the service was slow, he never flips people off on route 2 when he’s stuck in traffic, he comes home to his adoring family and gives them his full presence, never scrolling through his iPhone when he should be paying attention to the loud and joyful conversation at the dinner table. He is good to his mama, and mows her lawn once a week. He says his prayers at night, giving thanks to God for all of it. 

Satan shows up to talk to God about Job. Satan says “this guy Job can’t really be all that good.” Satan and God get into a debate because God strongly disagrees. Job really IS this good and pure, God says. Satan tells God that the only reason Job is so sinless and such a great, upstanding person is because God has blessed him so abundantly with all of the good things—-a great family, a prosperous job, a nice house, stock options, and a good community around him. Satan says that if he’s allowed to relentlessly punish Job, Job will eventually turn and curse God. God disagrees, and for some reason, takes Satan up on this bet. He says to Satan, “OK, you can punish Job relentlessly…just don’t kill him.”

In the course of one day, Job receives four messages, each bearing separate news that his livestock, servants, and ten children have all died due to marauding invaders or natural catastrophes. Job tears his clothes and shaves his head in mourning, but he still blesses God in his prayers. 

I love so much as it grows dark. 

Satan appears in heaven again, and God grants him another chance to test Job. This time, Job is afflicted with horrible skin sores. His wife encourages him to curse God and to give up and die, but Job refuses, struggling to accept his circumstances. 

I feel God travel with me, when the sun sets and on the sea,
together we walk as it grows dark. We are all together but walk like orphans.

Job has friends that come and visit, which is a good thing for friends to do, but the visit soon turns sour. After sitting with Job in silence for seven days while he mourns, they start bombarding him with long explanations for why these terrible things have happened to him.

Eliphaz tells Job that God must be punishing him for something terrible he has done. Bildad and Zophar agree saying that Job must have committed evil, that his dead children brought this upon themselves, and worse, that he probably deserves greater punishment than what he even received.

They say things like, “everything happens for a reason.” “God doesn’t give us anything we can’t handle.” “Maybe God just needed one more angel.”

Thankfully, Job calls them out. He’s like nope nope nope. First of all, we have done nothing wrong. And second of all, I don’t worship some kind of sadistic God like that. He calls his friends “worthless physicians” who “whitewash their advice with lies.” He refuses to curse God.

Though he believes his friends to be full of it, he continues to lament that bad things can happen to good people. He laments the injustice that allows wicked people to prosper while someone like him who has spent his life loving and serving the Lord could be cursed so terribly. 

Out of the whirlwind, God finally speaks, asking a list of rhetorical questions, which is where we enter the story from our scripture today in chapter 38.

God asks Job:
Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?
    Tell me, if you have understanding.
Who determined its measurements—surely you know!
    Or who stretched the line upon it?
On what were its bases sunk,
    or who laid its cornerstone
when the morning stars sang together
    and all the heavenly beings shouted for joy? 
Who has the wisdom to number the clouds?
    Or who can tilt the waterskins of the heavens,
when the dust runs into a mass
    and the clods cling together?

In each instance, God announces that the elements of creation have been positioned exactly as intended. Maybe that’s cold comfort to some, but it is relieving to me.

For those of us who attended Andy’s Eat Pray Learn on Wednesday night, where we talked about Darwin, Creation and God (a small subject for an hour long presentation on a Wednesday night), we left with more Job-like questions than answers. If the elements of creation have been positioned exactly as intended by a loving and all powerful God, why is natural selection all so brutal? Why, over the course of evolution, have 99.3% of species been eradicated from the earth? Why do natural disasters steal so many lives? Why do we suffer? Why would God create beings capable of killing the planet and each other?

Does your heart hurt for your creation, God?

The most relieving and beautiful concept that Andy said to us that night was the thing evolution teaches us: human beings are not the center of the universe. While some of our scriptures certainly suggest otherwise, this is the beautiful and relieving thing God is saying to Job, too. 

The universe has order, and its not ordered around you. God assures us that the world contains a certain sense of wisdom that we will never understand. Job’s fear was that the disorder in his own life implied that creation had run amuck or worse yet, that God had abandoned his just rule over the world. But Job 38 is a simple assurance that there is a method to the madness. God doesn’t promise that chaos and disorder won’t break out, only that creation is not greater than its creator. (W. Dennis Tucker)

There’s something terrifying and relieving about being a teeny tiny speck on God’s vast and ordered universe. There’s something profoundly relieving to know that its not all about me because I’m not at the center of it. 

But I feel God and he gives color
to my life. He is kind and sad,
like those who attend the sick and dying;
He whispers like a lover in distress.
His heart must hurt for his creation.

I asked blessed, broken-hearted mama Becky Conway if I could share some of her writing about baby Charlotte with you again today and she said yes. She has been asking me questions about God. Why God would steal from her girl. She has been crying out like Job, and I told her that raging to God is a form of faithful prayer we should all participate in far more often. So please hear this as a prayer. She writes:

“I hate to go back to this being “unfair”, my dad always said “life isn’t fair”. i’ve never understood that saying more than I do now. why is it bad things happen to good people? I could ask a million “why” questions but i’ll spare you that novel….

…I think about our “old life” often. if i’m being honest with you it makes me angry. how come we have the greatest surprise of our life, we nurture and care for her and love her more than anything in this world. we do everything “right”, and things like this happen.

….For now I will focus on my purpose. being the best mom i can be and being an advocate for her and others. i want to teach everyone that people with “disabilities” are not different. to allow others to see through appearances that make people look at you or question what is wrong. one day I hope for this world to look past the things that make us who we are in a judgmental way and to just accept each other.”

I said this to Becky, but I want to also say this to all of you, as well:

If I believed that God would steal from Charlie to punish or to teach a lesson, or for some other purpose, I’d be an atheist. God is Love, period. God doesn’t offer protection to those who call God’s name as our psalmist suggests, but is present to us, especially in our deepest suffering. God walks with us in the dark. God’s immense and whirling heart aches when our hearts ache.

God shows up in every prayer others pray for you, in the hands of the nurses and doctors who care for you, in your mama heart that leads you to work for acceptance of difference. God is in your family, who is  strong at the broken places; God is there in all of the people willing you to survive with everything they have. You can see God every time you look into the beautiful eyes and still shining smile of your child. I love you. I am with you. I will not leave.

That’s what God says to us out of the whirlwind of this brutiful, ordered universe we are not the center of: “I love you. I am with you. I will not leave.” God tilts the waterskins of heaven, giving us what we thirst for when we cry out God’s name. And God promises us this: Love wins in the end. If love hasn’t won yet, it’s not the end.

Sung:
I see trees of green, red roses too
I see them bloom for me and you
And I think to myself what a wonderful world

I see skies of blue and clouds of white
The bright blessed day, the dark sacred night
And I think to myself what a wonderful world

The colors of the rainbow so pretty in the sky
Are also on the faces of people going by
I see friends shaking hands saying how do you do
They're really saying I love you

I hear babies crying, I watch them grow
They'll learn much more than I'll never know
And I think to myself what a wonderful world
Yes I think to myself what a wonderful world

Amen

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