Scripture: Psalm 14:1-7; Job 38:4-5; Ecclesiastes 3:1-2; Matthew 7:3-5; Matthew 11:28-30 Series: 2021
Part 2 of ‘The Wager’ series moves from Pascal’s wager to the wager in Job, anchored in Psalm 14’s claim that the fool says there is no God. Finishing his sailboat story (he crashed the boat and was paddled home), the preacher pivots to those caught in an endless loop of blameless shipwrecks and suffering. Where Pascal’s wager has us bet on God, Job’s wager has God bet on us. Engaging the problem of evil honestly rather than burying our heads in the sand, the sermon argues suffering cannot be answered by simple argument or the wide road of God-talk that ignores pain; instead Jesus calls us to stand with sufferers, take up his easy yoke, and rely on the Holy Spirit and the church. The conclusion proclaims grace: God bet everything by sending his Son, drawing us closer to the cross when we stand with the hurting, and inviting us to be fools for Christ rather than for the world as Advent approaches.
Illustrations: sailboat-crash-lake-lbj, bob-dylan-gotta-serve-somebody, freshman-dorm-room-debate, book-of-job-wager, gutierrez-job-commentary, spiritual-preach-like-peter
November 14
The Wager. (Part 2)
Fools say in their hearts, There is no God. They are corrupt and do evil things; not one of them does anything good. The Lord looks down from heaven on humans to see if anyone is wise, to see if anyone seeks God, but all of them have turned bad. Everyone is corrupt. No one does good— not even one person! Are they dumb, all these evildoers, devouring my people like they are eating bread but never calling on the Lord? Count on it: they will be in utter panic because God is with the righteous generation. You evildoers may humiliate the plans of those who suffer, but the Lord is their refuge. Let Israel’s salvation come out of Zion! When the Lord changes his people’s circumstances for the better, Jacob will rejoice; Israel will celebrate! Psalms 14: CEB
Last week. I told the story about taking a sailboat out on Lake LBJ for the first time in 20 years, I was by myself on a new boat. I didn’t know the rigging. I didn’t know any of it. I didn’t remember the word rigging from prior small boat experiences. I didn’t finish the story last week. I talked about how I was out on the water and i had to make a choice. The point of the illustration is that we are already out on the water in the life of faith concerning the existence of God. We are embarked, And no choice is a choice about God. No choice is a choice about following God. It’s like Bob Dylan said, you gotta serve somebody. It may be the devil, it may be by the Lord, but you gotta serve somebody. Well, I need to finish the story. I didn’t magically appear back on land. I didn’t have a divine moment of inspiration. I dropped the sail and crashed into a dock a few hundred yards down the cove. I crashed, I did not know what I was doing. I did not make the proper decisions. And there were consequences for that. I called to Dominic to bring a paddle and we slowly, painstakingly, humiliatingly, meandered the boat back to our dock. Praise God, I didn’t break the boat, I didn’t break another dock, I didn’t break myself, I didn’t break Dominic. I walked away, unscathed, a little humiliated, but okay. Some of us, though, go through periods of our life, where it feels like we’re getting into a shipwreck every single day and we’re not the pilot and it’s not our fault. And we’re on this boat and it keeps on crashing into shore. And it’s exhausting. Some of you may not be in this place right now. I Promise you, someone you love is, whether or not they’ve told you, someone is in a position where they are feeling like they’re stuck in a never ending wreck. The words of Ecclesiastes can be guiding: to everything there is a season. A Time to be born, a time to die, et cetera. But How can I believe in God in those times when it seems like God is so far away? How can I believe? It seems like those around me, who don’t believe or barely believe, are receiving more blessings than me.
Series Intro
My friends, we are finishing our series on The Wager, looking at the existence of God, how we respond to God in this world. Last week, we talked about Pascal’s wager and the possibility of God’s existence and investing our lives in God’s existence by doing the things of God and how the greatest reminder of that is in the people whom we love, especially those saints who have gone before, who taught us how to love, to care, to give, to offer ourselves. This week, we’re taking another step deeper. Our scripture comes from Psalm 14, which is an interesting text, quoted a few times in the New Testament. Fools say in their hearts, There is no God. They are corrupt and do evil things; not one of them does anything good. but all of them have turned bad. Everyone is corrupt. No one does good— not even one person!
The fool doesn’t believe in God and fills their life with self-love, seeking that most of all. Now the idea of the existence of God, the question of the existence of God, can seem like a simple intellectual exercise. It can seem like the kind of debate you have in freshmen dorm rooms, not the kind of debate you have when you have one kid in college and two on the way and are having challenges in your marriage. I mean, the reason why people aren’t in church today rarely has to do with apologetics. It rarely has to do with someone coming to a point in their life where they cease believing in God. Most often, it has to do with a negative experience at church, a negative experience around Christians. Or maybe God starts to seem unnecessary. Many of us here are blessed to be in positions where we can make those judgements on cool and calm waters. But there are some times when we are stuck in the endless loop of shipwrecks, and there are some people who feel stuck in that place.
Job
The book of Job, in the old Testament, contains what seems like an endless loop of shipwrecks. It also starts with a wager. The wager is between God and shatan, the accuser, The connection between the Shatan, or Satan, of Job and the Satan or Beelzebub of the New Testament is tenuous at best. Attempts to develop cosmologies of good and evil in the Bible most often look a lot more like Manichaeism. That is, they look like dualistic faiths where good and bad have equal power and position. That’s not the Christian faith. That’s not the Jewish faith. Evil does not have equal standing next to God. In the book of Job, Job is a righteous man with a family and cattle and land. Job has a nice hill country estate that is all paid off. Shatan says to God, the reason why Job believes is because you’ve blessed him with this wonderful land and family. God says that that is not the case. And so Shatan basically says, prove it. This is the wager. A series of trials take place in Job’s life. The people he loves die of disease. He loses all his property, his home. There was a title dispute so even though it was all paid off, turns out he never actually owned and he is in the street. And then he becomes diseased and sick.
All of this takes place really early in the book. Most of the book of Job contains a series of dialogues between Job and his three friends: Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar. And then a fourth friend, Elihu, who’s younger and comes in later. Finally, there is the revelation of God in the whirlwind Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundations? Tell me if you know. Who set its measurements? Surely you know. Who stretched a measuring tape on it?
Gustavo Gutierrez, a Peruvian theologian, wrote a commentary of Job where he connects the book of Job to Pascal’s wager. Gutierrez writes, “Pascal issues his shrewd and subtle wager to unbelievers. The wager in Job thrusts with a beautiful radicality into the world of nonpersons…Pascal confronts the winners of history, Job seeks out it’s losers.” What does the existence of God matter to the losers of the world? What does the existence of God matter to those who are now suffering? Not just those who are suffering far away in other places in the world, but those who are suffering here and now. Those in our church, those in our community who are hurting, who are in pain. The wager in Job is different from Pascal’s wager. For Pascal, we are the ones who make the bet. In Job, God makes the bet on us. In Pascal, we hold the keys. We are the ones who choose. We are the ones on the boat. In Job, God is the one who pilots us out of the wreck in the coast.
Suffering and the Problem of Evil
How do we deal with suffering in this world? Theologians and philosophers have called this the problem of evil: why would a good God create a world that contains evil? If you get to a point in life where you have a mature faith, you must have confronted this question. Why? Why suffering? Why pain? Why grief? The question is not stupid. Our faith is not to bury our heads in the sand about the question. Jesus never avoids questions. Jesus redirects questions. Jesus turns the wrong question into the right one. The fool says in his heart, ‘there is no God.’ The fool lives his life as if there is no God. The fool treats the people around him as if they are non persons. The fool sees himself as a winner in history. The fool prays in the street corners. The fool gives thanks to God that they are not like the sinners. The fool only sees the speck in their neighbor’s eyes and never the log in their own. The fool ignores the consequences of their actions. The fool thinks justice and righteousness are overused terms or virtue signaling. The reality of suffering in this world, of those wrecks that go on and on, cannot be answered with a succinct and simple argument. Like I said, Job is a series of dialogues between job and his friends. His friends were saying he needs to change. They tell him it must be something he did. Job says no. Job isn’t passive about his suffering. Job is angry with God, job cries out for his suffering. Job cries out for the suffering of those around him. Job cries out for justice. Near the end of the book, God appears from the whirlwind, and speaks to Job with a number of words that come down to the reality that all of creation is a gift from God. It is all gift. It is all free. It is all offered to you. To talk of God with those who are suffering. It is just flatly not easy. There are a lot of missteps you can take. It is easier, it’s a much wider road to avoid such talk or to talk over it. It’s a much wider road to talk about God’s plan instead of the reality of suffering. It’s a much wider road to look to the future and ignore the present or the past. It is much easier to blame the victim instead of to stand with them. But following Jesus does not take us on the wide road. Jesus calls us to lay down our burdens at his feet, to pick up his yoke. His yoke is easy when we let go of the desires of the world. It is hard when we do not.
Conclusion
And so we’re left, my brothers and sisters, with this wager of God. Can we follow Jesus? Can we stand with those who are suffering? Can we hear their cries? Can we bandage their wounds? Can we seek justice in our lives? One thing is that we cannot do it alone. We need the Holy Spirit. We need each other. We need to stand with others while they are suffering. Someone in your life is in this endless loop of ship wrecks. Are you willing to board their ship? Even when you know it’s going to crash. Are you willing to be patient, even when you know you will get burned. Again, on your own, it is impossible. That is why God offers us the church. We don’t have to be Holy like Job. Like the old spiritual says
If you cannot preach like Peter, if you cannot pray like Paul, you can tell the love of Jesus, who died to save us all.
We have Jesus and Jesus gives us each other. We have each other. The people in this church are not just friends for the good times, friends for all times. God sent his son to be with us, to be friends with us, to offer a way that we can be friends with God. And we can truly be friends with each other because we realize our friendship in Christ is not based on an exchange of goods and services, but purely on the gift of grace. God’s love for us is based purely on grace. May you realize that God exists, that God is here for you, in blessings and in suffering. May you also realize that God, the father, offered Christ, the son, for us all. That in suffering and pain and grief, we are not distant from God. In many ways, we are closer. We are closer to Jesus. The early church saw Job as a forerunner of Jesus in his sufferings. We are closer to the cross when we stand with those who are hurting.
God bet everything on us by sending his only beloved son. God bet everything on you. You are loved in good times and in hard times. You are loved when you are up and when you’re down. You are loved. You are forgiven. And you can share mercy in this world. You can stand with those who are suffering. You don’t have to be a fool for the world. You can be a fool for Christ. God bet everything on you. As we prepare for Advent, may you receive Gods mercy and may you respond with your life.
Let us pray. Heavenly Father, you believe in us even when we do not deserve it. Help us to not be afraid of your love for those who are suffering. Help us to stand with those who are hurting in our lives and to live lives of hope in you. In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.