Veteran s Day: Job 19:23-17a & 2 Thessalonians 2:1-5, 13-17, delivered at Claremont UCC 11/10/13 The Rev. Eileen Gebbie JOB

Transcription

1 JOB 1. Scripture tells us that Job was a blameless man. a. He was also an affluent man with land, animals, and children. 2. Then we hear that God and a satan are in conversation. a. Not The Satan in the Christian pitchfork and tail imagination but a bad energy, being or force 3. God makes a deal with this satan: even when he loses everything, God bets that Job will remain faithful. 4. The satan destroys all that Job has, leaving him childless, without assets, and riddled with disease. 5. What follows, through lament and conversations with three friends, is a true testing of theological waters. a. Primarily, the issue of justice and suffering: where is God in relation to the two? b. Is our suffering our own fault, a punishment from God, c. or is it totally unwarranted, and unjust? 6. Job insists on his innocence. a. He knows that he was ever-faithful, that he did nothing wrong, b. and yet here he suffers, with no sign of God s grace. 7. In this chapter 19, a. Job is crying out in some of the Bible s most beautiful poetry: Look, I scream Outrage! and I am not answered, I shout and there is no justice. (God) shattered me on all sides I am gone. My dear ones withdrew, my friends forgot me. Mercy, have mercy on me, my companions, for God s hand has blighted me. 8. And in today s section, Job is wishing that the testimony he is giving a. the testimony he is giving in the court of creation, could be written and remembered. b. Not just etched in stone but those etchings darkened with iron. 9. Job is grieved at his losses, angered by his friends, and calling God to task. a. Yet he still loves this God against whom he now rails, 10. God the redeemer will speak on Job s behalf at this trial of his life. a. Stripped of even his flesh, the essence of Job will be joined with God. b. Vindication from and by holiness will be his, he says. 11. Why God, why are you letting this happen to me?

2 a. When God, when, will you attest to my innocence? b. It will be inscribed on walls for all to know and to remember. c. For despite when I am enduring I know you are and always will be at my side. THESSALONIANS 12. The piece from Thessalonians is also about divine presence. a. As I shared with the Bible study class on Monday, b. early Christianity was intensely focused on Jesus second coming. 13. For them it was immanent any moment now! a. This letter is pensive in that way: be ready and not alarmed! b. Remember what you have been taught by word or by letter. VETERANS 14. This Veterans Day or Remembrance Day weekend a. is a time of questioning suffering and remembering truths, too. 15. A story came across the UCC wires last week about a Vietnam vet named Peter Cook. a. Challenged by his return to civilian life, b. Cook found a UCC church in his Massachusetts community, the link missing in his life. 16. Cook and his congregation are now launching a new ministry of welcome and outreach to veterans: a. financial planning, educational assistance, job help, b. substance abuse and domestic violence counseling, c. care of those with PTSD and moral injury. d. If it is a new term to you, moral injury, and I m quoting here, results from having to make difficult moral choices under extreme conditions, experiencing morally anguishing events or duties, witnessing immoral acts, or behaving in ways that profoundly challenge moral conscience and identity and the values that support them. Moral injury is found in feelings of survivor guilt, grief, shame, remorse, anger, despair, mistrust, and betrayal by authorities. In its most severe forms, it can destroy moral identity and the will to live. The struggle of combat veterans to return to civilian life can be even more difficult than serving in war and last a lifetime.

3 JOB & VETERANS 17. Combat veterans can have a lot in common with Job. 18. Before I say more on that, though, I think it is important for you to know where I speak from a. when I make such a statement. 19. I am not a veteran. a. One of my grandfathers served in the British merchant marines in the first World War, b. the other in the US Army in the second World War, specifically the Philippines, and then the Korean War. c. My grand-cousin also saw combat in the second world war, d. while my grandmother was a civilian employee on a base stateside at the same time. e. Two of my aunties served as psychiatric nurses in a VA hospital for many years. 20. My experience of military service, then, is at a distant, a. yet close enough that I know it has rippled through my life b. and that of my family in very concrete ways. c. I also make a point of staying up to date d. on current research on and initiatives for veterans of war. 21. So that is where I am coming from when I say, again, a. that veterans can have a lot in common with Job. 22. First, physical devastation. a. How many of us have heard about the rise in amputations and traumatic brain injury due to IEDs? b. Advanced medical technology allows those who once would have died c. to live on with significant impairments. d. Job s sores on vets can look like artificial limbs, impaired cognition, and insomnia. 23. Second, strained relationships. a. As Job sat on his heap, his friends came to explain how his suffering was all his fault. 24. Few of us know what to say when encountering another s pain. a. Our response can be to either minimize it to protect ourselves b. or find words to make it sound like we understand. c. Both can lead to causing more pain. 25. I think this might be even more common around the pain of war because war so charged. a. Support of the wars may cause us to say, You should be proud of your sacrifice, b. when the friend is really quite angry about it. c. Opposition to the wars could lead to something like, d. You never should have been there in the first place,

4 e. which somehow diminishes the reality that the vet WAS there. f. Or maybe even worse, Sometimes I would forgot we were at war, an insult beyond compare. 26. Third, loss of home. a. Job lost his home and his children, but his wife survived. b. She survived long enough to tell him to abandon his foolish faith, and then she was gone, too. 27. A colleague told me a couple of years ago a. that the contemporary speed of return from front line to front door made for real cognitive dissonance: b. Only 24 hours to transition from MREs to McDonald s was emotionally baffling. c. This can create a genuine and long-term strain on families as they work to be as one again. 28. Where Job s wife said, curse God and die, a. a military spouse might say, curse this nation and get well. 29. Finally, isolation. a. In the end, Job s crummy friends abandoned him. Veterans may experience the same. 30. But even if vets outwardly have a circle of family and friends, a. parts of her or him may remain profoundly alone. b. They have endured moments that few can understand, tolerate to hear, or even know to ask about. 31. My grand cousin, an active family man with a loving wife, children, and church, a. wasn t able to share stories from his service in WW2 until he was in his late 80s. b. And only then because a local professor c. created an intentional space for him and other vets to write and share their memories WRITING AND MEMORY 32. Job cries out how he wishes that he could write out his story for all to see and to know and to never forget. a. Paul reminds the early community in Thessalonia b. to remember what they had heard and read about God. 33. I am guessing that there are a lot of veterans who wish they could forget. 34. But I think that the rest of us cannot. a. Those of us who have not gone to war, whether we have supported armed conflict or not, b. dare not forget what our fellow citizens, our fellow children of God, have endured.

5 35. We dare not be as Job s three friends a. and heap our projections and rationalizations on their heads then walk away. 36. To do so is to perpetuate injuries and fail to take responsibility for our role in their pain: a. either by asking them to fight, failing to make the fighting stop, b. or forgetting the fight was even at hand. GOOD NEWS 37. The good news for veterans today veterans of all sides of war a. and for the civilians injured and displaced by war is also the same as Job: 38. Their your redeemer DOES live. a. Nowhere in the Bible does God give as much time and presence as God does to Job. b. God DOES speak on your behalf. c. Stripped down to your essence, you are joined utterly with the divine, d. redeemed from the captivity of pain and loss and horror, whole again with creative love. 39. As for the rest of us, a. let s keep loving to tell the story of that love, as boldly and gently as need be. b. We must keep walking with our veterans as Jesus walks with us. AMEN