Molly Haws
Sermon from Sunday, 10/15/06
Oh, that I knew where I might find him, that I might come even to his dwelling! I would lay my case before him, and fill my mouth with arguments. I would learn what he would answer me, and understand what he would say to me. … If I go forward, he is not there; or backward, I cannot perceive him; on the left he hides, and I cannot behold him; I turn to the right, but I cannot see him.In 6 weeks it’ll be Advent: the beginning of a new church year. We’re coming to the end of this liturgical year, and at the end of the liturgical year, we get the Book of Job.
The Book of Job is chaos. Chaos theory says we cannot predict outcomes; we cannot control external circumstance; and we will certainly never know all the permutations of the ramifications of our actions. Only God knows these things; we are not around long enough nor do we have the omniscience to see the fractal patterns undulating and unfolding. So God says to Job, “Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?...Have you commanded the morning since your days began, and c
ause the dawn to know its place?” (38:4, 12).
When we arrive at the end of Job’s story, what we are left with is the fundamental truth that the only thing, the only thing, over which we have any control at all is our own choices. We are free to choose. Our choices are important, they matter, not because we have any ability to affect external circumstances, but because it is by our choices that we define who we are.
What we discover along with Job is that we are not defined by our circumstances, be they good or ill. We are defined by the choices we make within those circumstances. Job, in the end, is defined by the choice he makes, over and over again, to seek God (19:23-27, 28:20-28, 30:20, 31:35-37). Job seeks God relentlessly, with tenacity and defiance and fury and pain. He seeks God with everything that he is. In the end, no persecutor, no circumstance, no calamity, no friend, no satan, nothing and no one is able to make Job do anything, or refrain from anything. He is free.
Job experienced passion. He chose to remain himself, to be affected at the deepest level, rather than trade away the definition of himself that he had forged from a lifetime of choices. Job remained vulnerable. He chose to continue to be affected, to be passionately hurt, angry, indignant, confused, desperate. Job chose to live as himself: a righteous man: one who seeks God without ceasing, not despite circumstance, not ignoring circumstance, but in the midst of circumstance.
Circumstance has loomed particularly large for me in the last few weeks: There is work to be done and I’m going to get right on it. As soon as I get back from El Salvador. No, wait, just let me get on the other side of Dymphna. Those are a couple of great big whopping circumstances, and I know you know what I’m talking about, because you’ve all had these times in your life, whether or not you went to El Salvador or are working on Dymphna, and it should not have surprised me when I told Tommy I had a hankering to talk about Job and I’d like to preach sometime while Job is in the lectionary, that he promptly offered me Dymphna Sunday.
So 2 weeks ago I’m sitting in the hotel’s Mexican restaurant in San Salvador with a margarita and my journal, feeling very, very vulnerable to circumstance, and I find myself writing these words:
“Here in El Salvador, our job—our mission—is to be affected as deeply as possible. It is a difficult mission. It is difficult because it is counter to every single bit of our identities as citizens of the USA. We are not a passive people. We are not accustomed to going forth with the intention of being acted upon. Yet that is what God calls us to do, in this time, and in this place.
Hear. Receive. Become passionate. Be acted upon. Choose.”
Wednesday night—or maybe it was Thursday, I don’t know anymore—Betsy Eddy saw me dressed in black, ripping gaff tape off a big roll and frantically taping down every cable in sight, and asked me, “Does this take you back to your college days in theatre?” I looked up and stopped for a moment. “Trust me,” I said, “this does not even remotely resemble anything I’ve ever done before.”
When I describe Dymphna to the uninitiated, I always end up saying, “It’s its own little miracle.” And it is. This thing we do here is the purest incarnation of the theatrical urge I’ve ever encountered. From the unvarnished motive of bringing in money, to the unanticipated moments of amazing grace when the perfect thing no one even thought of just happens in performance, Dymphna is what theatre is trying to be.
The rush of doing live theatre is a house full of humans who are there—who have paid money—for the express purpose of being acted upon. It’s intentional passion. In rehearsal, we are acted upon by the text. In performance, we are acted upon by the audience, who is there in order to be acted upon by us. Theatre is an exercise in incarnation. Intentional, passionate, incarnation.
And as such, it is a reflection of God’s choice to be acted upon, to become incarnate, to be affected at the deepest level, by us. God chooses passion. God chooses incarnation in the person of a Jewish boy in a Middle Eastern country that is occupied by a foreign empire, conceived outside of wedlock and born to a family of laborers, subject to all the social and political and natural and historical circumstances of place and time. Jesus didn’t even get the same caveat God gave for Job: God did not “spare his life.” Jesus was affected at the deepest possible level. Jesus was as vulnerable as it is possible to be. Jesus experienced passion so profoundly that it actually killed him.
Jesus reveals to us the truth that the power of pure passion is such that it cannot stay dead. The power of pure passion is to choose to be affected at the deepest level of who we are, while remaining who we are. The author of the epistle to the Hebrews tells us, “we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who in every respect has been tested as we are, yet without sin.” Paul Tillich tells us that sin is separation. Jesus lived in the midst of circumstance and remained who he was. He was affected by circumstance, while never being changed by it: never separated—from us, from God, from himself.
Jesus’ passion—like Job’s—is a function of who he is. Truly himself and truly alive. Pure passion cannot be destroyed. Death cannot curtail and comprehend life anymore than darkness can envelope and extinguish light. Jesus’ death did not end his life. He lives. He lives within and among us. Here. Now. Whenever we gather, 2 or 3 or 40 or 90. He lives and invites us into life, into passion. And the way I know this is that I am not sitting in my living room right now saying or writing or thinking these words in isolation, for myself alone. The way I know Jesus is alive and inviting us into life and passion is that we are all here right this minute.
It’s not a command performance. It’s an invitation that comes to us with all the longing—and passion—of a lover yearning for the beloved: “Jesus, looking at him, loved him and said, ‘You lack one thing; go, sell what you own, and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me.’" Become vulnerable. Allow yourself to be affected at the deepest level. Choose passion.
Like Job, we are free to choose. We can escape some of the effects of circumstance—we can avoid being affected at the deepest level—if we are willing to be other than who we are. If we are willing to separate. We can trade away part of our selves, pieces of our souls, in order to become a person who is not affected, who is not hurt by the brokenness in the world around us, who is not vulnerable to our fellow human creatures. We can refuse passion. We can, if we so choose, do as Job’s wife advised: we can refuse to be who we are; we can turn away; we can “curse God, and die.” We have that choice. We have that choice because that is the way God created us. We can choose: passion and life—or inviolability and death. Life. Or death. We are free.
Choose.
Love,
Molly
More than 50 people gathered at The Bishop’s Ranch for our annual Parish Weekend, God’s Voice, Our Stories, based on Tommy’s May 14 sermon.
