Sermon by Pastor Mike Buttonnn
From Out of the Whirlwind
Text: Job 38: 1-11
NRSJob 38:
Then the LORD answered Job out of the whirlwind:
2"Who is this that darkens counsel by words without knowledge?
3Gird up your loins like a man,
I will question you, and you shall declare to me.
4"Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?
Tell me, if you have understanding.
5Who determined its measurements — surely you know!
Or who stretched the line upon it?
6On what were its bases sunk,
or who laid its cornerstone
7when the morning stars sang together
and all the heavenly beings shouted for joy?
8"Or who shut in the sea with doors
when it burst out from the womb? —
9when I made the clouds its garment,
and thick darkness its swaddling band,
10and prescribed bounds for it, and set bars and doors,
11and said, 'Thus far shall you come, and no farther,
and here shall your proud waves be stopped'?
Dear Friends in Christ, may the blessing of the Lord rest and remain upon you now and forever. Amen.
For many years now, the Pope and I have had an understanding: He doesn’t comment on my sermons, and I don’t remark on his pronouncements. It’s worked out well for the both of us. When I run into him at the 7-11 getting an Icee, we can be friendly and chat about the weather. But this past week I read a statement from the Pope that left me, well, breathless. In a pre-recorded video message for a massive outdoor Mass in Ireland, the Bishop of Rome invoked the word mystery to characterize the clergy sex abuse scandal that has boiled through that church for at least the last 30 years. The Pope asked, “How are we to explain the fact that people who regularly received the Lord’s body and confessed their sins in the sacrament of Penance have offended in this way? It remains a mystery.”
What an interesting choice of words! Addressing a country where four state-ordered investigations have uncovered tens of thousands of children abused sexually, physically, and mentally by priests, nuns, and church staff over a period reaching back to the 1940’s, the Pope says, “It’s a mystery.” My first response was, I’m ashamed to say, a cynical one: “How convenient.” Children are raped, minds are tortured, and souls are scarred, but hey, in the end, it’s a mystery. Then, I felt bad, because that’s what I do best, but also because Luther reminds me in the Small Catechism that I should explain my neighbor’s words and actions in the kindest possible way. So on second thought, it occurred to me that maybe the Pope has a point. There is a dark, almost impenetrable denseness to true evil that, I suppose, qualifies it as a mystery of sorts. But you know what’s not a mystery?
Covering up criminality is not a mystery.
Impeding investigation is not a mystery.
Cherry-picking the truth to suit your own ends is not a mystery.
Placing the welfare of an institution over the safety of a child is not a mystery.
Invoking mystery to evade responsibility, that’s not a mystery.
Am I being too hard? Am I being anti-Catholic? Am I discounting the thousands of good priests and bishops who have done untold good in generation after generation? By no means! Could not the same type of malfeasance afflict any institution, including our own church? Exactly! (Exactly!) Every institution, whether it’s a nuclear family, a local government, a world-wide church, or a trans-national corporation, every institution has the capacity to create its own code, its own culture, its own kind of bizarro world where the people who live and work in that institutional bubble become morally blind to the damage they may be doing to others.
Perhaps you’ve been following the trial of Jerry Sandusky, the storied assistant football coach to the legendary Joe Paterno at Penn State. He’s now on trial on 51 counts of child sex abuse. In 1998 – count ‘em, 14 years ago -- a Penn State police officer warned Sandusky to stop showering with boys. In February 2001 graduate assistant coach Mike McQueary walked in on Sandusky in the Penn State locker room shower grinding against a young boy in what he described as “an extremely sexual position.” Before he saw Sandusky, McQueary testified that he heard “skin-on-skin slapping sounds.” McQueary did not stop Sandusky or rescue that boy from his grip, but the next day he did report the incident to Coach Paterno. That report moved up the chain of command until it eventually landed on the desk of former university president Graham Spanier. He conferred with former university vice president Gary Schultz on whether they had a legal obligation to report the 2001 shower incident. They concluded, no, and in one e-mail, agreed that it would be “humane” to Sandusky not to report the incident to the authorities. But did anyone follow up with that boy Sandusky was abusing in the Penn State shower room? Did anyone even bother to find out that kid’s name? No.
But you know what? That’s not a mystery. That’s just what people do when they become enthralled to the institutions they serve. For the past three months Monsignor William Lynn has been on trial in Philadelphia for conspiracy to endanger children by covering up clergy sex abuse. For 12 years Monsignor Lynn served as secretary of the clergy in the Archdiocese of Philadelphia. In that capacity Monsignor Lynn created a secret file of 35 priests involved in sex abuse or diagnosed with a sexual disorder. Lynn’s boss, the late Cardinal Anthony Bevilacqua, eventually ordered that file to be shredded. Copies of the list were eventually discovered, but did Monsignor Lynn ever go to the police with the information he’d uncovered? When he oversaw the transfer of those priests to other parishes, did he make public the potential threat those men posed to the children of that church? No. Now there’s no question that Monsignor Lynn is a good guy. He’s not a child abuser. In the churches he served people loved him and thought very highly of him. Many would cite him as one of the thousands of a good priests to give thanks for, but in the institutional bubble where he lived and served, he couldn’t see, or maybe he just refused to see, the moral chaos into which he had descended.
Am I suggesting that we do away with institutions altogether? If every institution is corruptible, should we then wipe the slate clean of all the religious, political, social, and economic institutions that span this globe? God forbid! I understand how people can come to loathe politics and hate government and turn on the church in utter disgust, but what would happen if all the institutions of law, defense, health, education, commerce, and faith were suddenly dissolved? I shudder to think. We may want to throw our hands up in revulsion and find ourselves a cave in the woods -- believe me, I get that – but humans are social beings. If everybody moved out into the wild to live in caves, pretty soon someone would start a local cave dwellers association. People in the caves across the valley would hear about it and start one of their own. Then before you know it, there would be a national cave dwellers association with a monthly newsletter and a political action committee to advance the interests of cave dwellers everywhere. Am I right? The answer is not to tear down everything and start all over again. The answer is repentance, constant, ongoing repentance, both individual and corporate repentance, what Luther described in the first of his 95 Theses as “the entire life of believers.”
Please don’t mistake repentance for sackcloth and ashes or other histrionic displays of remorse. Remorse accompanies repentance, but repentance really happens when we get called outside ourselves and the institutional bubbles in which we live so that we see ourselves and others through God’s eyes. Not through the distorted lens of our own self-interest, not according to the internal criteria of our social systems, but instead we see ourselves and the world around us through God’s eyes. To effect that kind of repentance, God has to burst our bubbles, as illustrated in this morning’s lesson from Job.
Job, you may recall, had a beef with God. Job had done everything expected of a good, righteous man. Job led a life of true piety and sincere devotion to the Lord, and in return, Job expected God to deliver the blessings he believed were owed him. In his heart of hearts, Job believed that he and God had a deal, and for a long time, Job prospered such that he earned a reputation for unrivaled holiness. But when Job’s blessings were replaced with curses and his prosperity evaporated to leave him in abject misery, Job demanded an answer from God. Why had he not been spared the slings and arrows that afflict other mortals? Why, after all the love, fear, and sacrifice he had paid to God, why was he now on the dung heap of despair?
Job gets his face to face with God, but it doesn’t go exactly the way he expected. Speaking from out of the whirlwind, God answers Job’s question with a question: “Who is this that darkens counsel with words without knowledge?” (Job 38: 2). Paraphrased, God asks Job, “Who do you think you are?” That’s a terrifying question, because we already know the terrifying answer. We think we are the center of the universe. We think we are arbiters of right and wrong, good and evil. We think we know best. Even if we may not think that highly of ourselves, we think we can fashion institutions to which we can give ourselves, heart and soul, as to God Almighty. In question after question, God disabuses Job of his illusions:
4"Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?
Tell me, if you have understanding.
5Who determined its measurements — surely you know!
Or who stretched the line upon it?
6On what were its bases sunk,
or who laid its cornerstone
7when the morning stars sang together
and all the heavenly beings shouted for joy?
8"Or who shut in the sea with doors
when it burst out from the womb? —
9when I made the clouds its garment,
and thick darkness its swaddling band,
10and prescribed bounds for it,
and set bars and doors,
11and said, 'Thus far shall you come, and no farther,
and here shall your proud waves be stopped'?
Job thus begins to see himself through God’s eyes, and at the end of his encounter with the divine humbly confesses: “I had heard of you by the hearing of the ear, but now my eyes see you; therefore I despise myself and repent in dust and ashes” (Job 42: 5-6).
Secularists hate this ending to Job, primarily, I think, because Job’s ending directly challenges the central tenet of secularism: that man is the measure of all things, that we can manage quite nicely without God, that we have the wisdom and understanding to direct the course of life without any appeal to any
authority higher than our own unerring moral compass.
So how’s that’s working for us?
In the Name of the Father, and of the + Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
