God is with you in your storms, with the world in all our storms, and will bring you peace. Not answers. But real peace.

Pr. Joseph G. Crippen
The Fourth Sunday after Pentecost, Lect. 12 B
Texts: Job 38:1-11; Mark 4:35-41

Beloved in Christ, grace to you, and peace in the name of the Father, and of the + Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen

“Don’t you care that we’re perishing?”

That’s the disciples’ desperate cry to Jesus. Raging wind and rain, water filling their boat: even these experienced fishermen were terrified. But their Master slept on a cushion in the back of the boat. Didn’t he even care?

“Don’t you care that I’m perishing?” Job cried out. He’d lost all his possessions, all his children were dead, he was covered in sores. Job denied that he deserved all this, and desperately wondered where God was.

“Don’t you care that I’m perishing, God?” is your cry when the waters of depression and anxiety wash over your boat and you’re going under.

“Don’t you care that we’re perishing, God?” is the cry of people of color in this country who are forced to live under different rules than those of white people, suffering daily hardships in a system we’ve built that helps some of us while crushing others. It’s the cry of people we blithely call “aliens” who are beloved children of God looking for a better life among us and who are often treated as less than human.

“Don’t you care that I’m perishing, God?” is your cry when someone you love has died and you can’t make any sense out of it.

“Don’t you care that we’re perishing, God?” is the cry of so many who share our grief at how we’ve destroyed our environment and damaged the creation, longing for God to step in and fix what we’ve done, since we won’t get together as humans and do it ourselves.

“Don’t you care that I’m perishing, God?” is your cry, and the cry of millions like you who struggle with fears of the future, or a diagnosis of illness, or a loss of livelihood, or daily oppression, or loneliness, or addiction, or broken relationships, the cry of all God’s children who feel overwhelmed in the whirlwinds and storms of life.

But today God almost sounds annoyed at the question.

God says to Job, “who are you to challenge me? Were you there when I made the creation?” We heard the beginning of a magnificent four-chapter-long speech where God delineates in rich detail the breadth and beauty of the creation. But it feels a little like God’s irritated to have to answer puny old Job.

Jesus, God-with-us, does still the storm, yes. But God also seems a bit annoyed here. “Why were you afraid? Don’t you trust me yet?” Never mind that the disciples haven’t had much time with Jesus at this point to learn to trust. Is God’s Son irritated that they woke him up and made him do his God-stuff?

But look deeper.

Many have tried to tell us for centuries that God’s answer to Job is to give everything back. He gets a new family, is restored to wealth and health. But that’s nonsense, and we know it. A new family, no matter how much love that brings, cannot replace the tragic loss of the first family. That can’t be the point of the book of Job.

Job proves that by admitting he asked what he didn’t understand, and by accepting God’s answer before any restoration happens. Job does this for one simple reason: God answered. “I had heard of you by the hearing of the ear,” Job says after God’s speech, “but now my eye sees you.”

What Job needed, Job got: God showed up. Job admits he can’t understand the complexity of the creation or the Creator. But in his grief and suffering, he just wanted to know if God cared enough to answer. The actual answer wasn’t as important. The Answerer was.

Like Job, the disciples got relief of their terror and danger; the storm ended.

But, like Job, the important thing isn’t the ending of the storm. It’s Jesus’ questions that help them find Job’s peace.

“Why are you so afraid? And why is it hard to trust me?” The disciples will face those questions the rest of their lives. Including on the worst night of their lives, that terrible Thursday through Friday, where the storm broke over Jesus and swept him away in terrifying death and they were drowning in confusion and grief.

Why are you afraid? What makes it hard for you to trust? In the end, Job finds his trust and sets aside his fears. Eventually, so do the disciples.

Today, God still answers “Don’t you care?” by asking about our fear and our struggles to trust.

It still might not seem like a great answer. But neither do the attempts of others to answer for God.

Job’s friends piously tell Job that he must have deserved this, and he needs to man up and admit it. That’s the pattern we fall into ourselves when we’re with someone crying out to God, “Don’t you care that I’m perishing?” Somehow, rather than just being with and loving those who suffer, we look for pat answers to where God is in human suffering. But that just piles more grief and pain on those who suffer.

God’s answer to Job today makes it clear there’s no easy answer to understand the Creator of the universe. But God’s answer to the universe in Jesus the Christ tells us the real answer we need to let go of our fears and learn to trust: God enters into the heart of the storm with us.

God on the cross took all human suffering into God’s own heart.

Even after the resurrection, the disciples didn’t get all the answers to what God is doing when bad things happen. But that weekend they did get the answer to their first question, “Don’t you care that we’re perishing?” God says, yes, I do. More than anything in the universe. I will perish with you and bring you into a new life that cannot be drowned or crushed or broken, even if you actually die.

And after the resurrection, Mary Magdalene, Peter, and the rest (with a lot of help from the Holy Spirit) learned to set aside their fears, learned they could trust God with their lives.

But here’s the hard part.

At this point you might expect me to explain what God will do about your pain or the world’s pain. You’d like answers. But I can’t give you them. Glib, simple answers just don’t exist for human suffering. What easy answers are there to cancer? To racism? To mental anguish? To devastating loss? To loneliness? To tragedy?

But I do trust this, with all my heart: God is with you in whatever storm, whatever suffering you are facing. God is with the world in all its suffering, with all who are oppressed, all who are beaten down, all who deal with tragedy and pain. God cares, and God shows up in the storm and brings peace and stillness. Abundant life.

I trust this because I’ve seen it. I’ve experienced it. I can show you countless ways the Scripture witnesses to it, countless believers who were able to set aside their fears and learn to trust God.

Trust this: God cares and is with you. With all of us. With the world. Even if you think the boat’s about to sink. Nothing, nothing can separate you – or the whole creation – from God’s love in Christ Jesus.

In the name of Jesus.  Amen

Do not lose heart: you are embraced in God’s clothing of love which removes all shame, and you are God’s beloved, no matter what.

Pr. Joseph G. Crippen
The Second Sunday after Pentecost, Lect. 10 B
Texts: Genesis 3:8-15; 2 Corinthians 4:13 – 5:1

“Who told you that you were naked?”

It’s a ridiculous question. As Sunday School children for centuries have accurately and insistently pointed out, these two obviously knew they were naked. They didn’t have clothes on. Who needed to tell them that?

That means God’s asking something different. God’s asking, “Who told you that you should be ashamed of yourselves?” You’re hiding from me, embarrassed to see me; you’ve never done that before.

Our Hebrew forebears had amazing insight into our truth as human beings before God. This whole story is as true for us as it was for the first to tell it.

The Hebrews spoke of the creation in several ways, to show the full truth of God revealed to them.

Genesis 1 tells of a powerful God declaring a creation into existence, an explosion from chaos and nothingness into gradually increasing order and beauty, planets and stars formed, then life on planets.

But these people told a second truth of God’s creation in the next chapters: God is intimate with this creation, too, they said, building relationships, on hands and knees making plants and creatures. This God, named I Am Who I Am, a name that, when spoken in Hebrew, sounds like breathing, breathed life and love into the creation personally. And the two people in this story don’t have proper names, because they stand for all people. The man is called adam – soil, dirt – and the woman is called chavah – life. Our forebears tell this story because it’s your story, and my story, the story of all children made by God’s hands out of dirt and life.

And there’s a tremendous problem in this intimate story of God we heard today. Your problem. My problem. The problem of all humans, the Hebrews believed.

Who told you that you were naked? God asks. Who told you to be ashamed?

Human creatures, whom God declared “good” when they were made, learned to be ashamed of who they are, and taught each other to be ashamed.

But God’s Word isn’t about shaming. For centuries we’ve piled shame onto our reading of Scripture, piled it on to others, piled it on ourselves. We created a teaching called original sin that’s simply not found in the Bible and taught ourselves and each other that we can only approach God out of our shame, our utter wretchedness.

But these Hebrews onto whose faith we are grafted in Christ saw it differently, and so did Christ Jesus, by the way: God’s view of you and me, born of adam and chavah, dirt and life, is that you are beloved. I am beloved. All God’s creatures are beloved.

It’s not a question of right and wrong.

God’s Word is clear: God cares about right and wrong. About justice and ending oppression. About the sins you and I do that we know, and the sins you and I do that we are unaware of, including our implicit biases and prejudices that shape our lives and our culture, and the ways we participate in systems that crush others. God’s Word calls you and me to God’s way of righteousness and justice, the way of love of God and love of neighbor.

God’s Word is also clear about God’s unconditional love for all of us, for you, when you fail to live as God calls you, the forgiveness that flows from God’s love, leads to the cross, and bursts out in the resurrection life the Spirit pours into you. A life that brings God’s justice and peace to the world in you and in me.

But living as Christ, following God’s way has nothing to do with shame. There’s no place for shame in the love of God we know in Christ, the love of God the Scriptures proclaim.

It’s clear in this story from the way the Hebrews ended it.

In this second creation account, God goes looking in the garden, still seeking intimacy and relationship. God finds them when they hide, and is sad when they’re ashamed of who they are.

And in the end of this story, not in today’s reading, God does an amazing thing. While God would prefer that they didn’t have the knowledge that made them ashamed of being who God made them to be, God realizes that it’s going to take time for them to re-learn they are beloved, created good. So God gives them clothes.

God clothes them so they don’t have to hide, don’t have to be embarrassed. God gives them ways to cope with their unnecessary shame, until they can let go of it.

And God clothes you, too.

God would rather you weren’t ashamed of yourself, that you saw yourself as the beloved one God sees in you. But the Hebrews say that God knows it may take most of your life to unlearn what you need to. So God gives you ways to cope with whatever shame you feel.

God tells you repeatedly in Scripture that you are beloved. God offers unconditional forgiveness when you sin, when you are not Christ, and dies for you – not because you are a shameful pile of refuse but because God loves you.

On the cross, God’s Son hung naked in front of a city of thousands, and wasn’t ashamed of himself or of you. Out of love for the whole universe, for you, for all, Jesus allowed himself to be unclothed in the most public and humiliating way and to be killed. To finally convince the world, to convince me, to convince you, how much God loves you, loves me, loves the world.

Who told you that you were naked? God says they’re a liar.

So even when you hide from God, God still looks for you and invites you to be found. To let go of any shame or self-dislike and rejoice that you are God’s beloved child born of dirt and life.

And God clothes you with love that will never be ashamed of you, so even while you still struggle with shame, you are covered in your belovedness. So clothed in God’s love, the Spirit can heal the world through you, and me, and all God’s children. So, as Paul says today, grace extends to more and more people, and eventually to all.

So do not lose heart, Paul says. You are clothed in God’s love now and always, so that even you might one day believe how beloved you are.

In the name of Jesus.  Amen