St. Paul’s United Methodist Church
Job 42:1-6, 10-17
Rev. Tyler Amundson
October 25, 2015
God As A Blessing
This last week was a big week for science fiction film fans. We saw the release of the new Star
Wars Trailer and we experienced a little Back to the Future phenomenon. If you are not a Back to
the Future fan, then you need to know that back in the 80’s the movie sensation Back to the
Future 2 transported viewers to October 21, 2015, which was this week. In the future we were
supposed to have flying cars, hover boards, computerized glasses and the Cubs would win the
World Series. This date actually coming to pass got a lot of people thinking about just how much
progress we have made, and surprisingly only one of those things I listed have come true. I will
give you a hint--the Cubbies didn't win, so Pastor Marianne and others are still looking for that
future.
This year has also marked the 150th celebration of St. Paul’s ministry in Helena. Over this year,
from Easter to Easter, our Jubilee Committee has been asking the question how we might
celebrate our past as United Methodists in Helena, and look to how we will work with God to
bring a brighter future. Many on our team have worked hard and continue to work on how we
can take this point in our history as a place to jump off with enough spirit to jump 150 more years
through ministry.
A few weeks back I was on a hike up Mt. Helena taking some time do some personal reflection.
During my hike I would catch myself from time to time watching our church building as I
climbed the face and then again when I got to the top. Throughout it all I pondered the ways in
which St. Paul’s would change and grow with Helena throughout the years. As I hiked trails and
walked through trees that had changed dramatically, even during the short history of European
Americans in Helena, it struck me how we are a part of something much bigger. We are a part of
a universe from the smallest molecule, atom or quark to the biggest solar system, galaxy and
universe. Others of us have had similar experiences as we hike the mountains and experience the
beauty of the amazing place in which we live.
This same day was one of the fall days with heavy winds we have all experienced this year, and I
found myself pondering where God was in all of this. How was God working with all of us to
make the world a better place? Was God in the wind, the Hebrew word “ruach?” “Ruach” is a
word that sounds itself like the strong wind.
This week and last week we have been in a mini-sermon-series on the book of Job. Job is an
obscure little book in the Hebrew Bible; our Old Testament that is one of the few books of the
bible taught in modern day secular college philosophy courses. It is a set of scripture passages
that many preachers struggle to preach on, and I am no exclusion to this. Preachers struggle with
it because it brings questions to whom and what God is in our lives. Fundamentally, Job asks the
question, “Is God for us or against us?”
Here is a short synopsis of Job to get us to the later chapters where we will focus our sermon
series:
Job is relatively well-to-do gentleman in the time in which he lives. He has a large family, lots of
livestock, and can more than provide for the needs of everyone under his care. Job is also
incredibly faithful to God, praying and offering his life to God. At the beginning of Job we learn
that Satan goes to God and says, “Job is a nice guy, very devout to you, but I bet if you take away
his physical comforts and blessings he will turn away from you.” For the writers of Job, Satan is
not the embodied character we think of with horns and a pitchfork. In the Hebrew Scriptures
Satan is best described as a trickster or adversary, not the embodiment of all evil as we often hear
about Satan. God’s response is rather cryptic, and then Satan goes away.
Then things start to happen to Job, bad things. He loses his family, his livestock, his livelihood,
his health, and through it all he holds on to hope that God is still with him. Then after all that his
friends come over and instead of comfort they say things like, “It was God’s will. God is testing
you. You must have upset God.”
Today we join Job who is letting go of his hope in God and is nearing the point of letting God go.
Suddenly he encounters the presence of God in a whirlwind and by the end his faith is restored in
God, and Job also gains back his livelihood and health. In this first part of our scripture Job is
relinquishing to God in the whirlwind and is seemingly impressed with the vastness and
complexity of God.
Job 42:1-6Common English Bible (CEB)
42 Job answered the Lord:
2
I know you can do anything;
no plan of yours can be opposed successfully.
3
You said, “Who is this darkening counsel without knowledge?”
I have indeed spoken about things I didn’t understand,
wonders beyond my comprehension.
4
You said, “Listen and I will speak;
I will question you and you will inform me.”
5
My ears had heard about you,
but now my eyes have seen you.
6
Therefore, I relent and find comfort
on dust and ashes.
Job, like many of us, gets caught up in seeing the beauty and possibility of the creator in the
whirlwind of nature. It is in nature that we often begin to see beyond ourselves when we
experience the vastness and complexity of our universe. I have heard many openly state, “I find
God more on the mountaintop than in church.” Job is essentially saying this same thing, but is
seemingly left unsatisfied. Unsatisfied that he has been unable to question God, to get answers to
the question, “Why have bad things happened to me, and to my family?” He ends this passage by
relenting to comfort on “dust and ashes.” This passage is supposed to be as comforting as it
sounds; it is not the place most of us want to be. Job never gets to use his language and words to
ask his questions of God or to gain some understanding of how to overcome his adversity.
Last year a group of people from our church and from the community came together to form a
group called Challenge Helena. Our primary purpose is to highlight issues of poverty that
systematically need to be challenged in our communities, and to record a 20-minute sermon (or as
others know them as TED talks) from an engaging speaker on the subject, and then provide a
challenge the community can follow up on directly. The hope is that there is an immediate
impact in our community through the challenge, and that we can provide resources for people in
our community to share the message of change through the video we create. We have primarily
funded this work by the Yellowstone Conference Peace with Justice grants and by St. Paul’s.
This past week at the Staggering Ox, 60 plus people gathered to learn about our third Challenge
Helena focus, “ACEs.”
The Challenge Helena event and an upcoming event on November 6th at 6 pm to focus on ACEs
grew out of our 150th Jubilee Committee asking, “How do we recognize the past and build for the
future?” We looked to our past and were astounded by the ways in which our support of the
Deaconess Children’s Home, a place for cast-off children, had become the flourishing children’s
support agency known as Intermountain. Intermountain’s significant focus is to improve the lives
of children facing not only adversity from mental illness, but also to help provide children with
resiliency to overcome their challenges. Knowing we had been their partners in tackling
challenges in the past, we asked them how we could help change the conversation in 2015 about
what impacts children now. They said “ACEs,” and invited us to partner with their educational
offshoot, Childwise.
ACEs are not cards and they are not 10 fighter pilots standing side by side. ACE stands for
Adverse Childhood Experience. A significant study was conducted over a decade with more than
17,000 participants that looked at what childhood traumas had significant impact on adult mental
health and physical health. The study found a score of 10 ACEs resulted in serious health and
personal challenges and could even result in early death.
Here are the 10 ACEs:
http://www.npr.org/assets/img/2015/02/20/aces-1_custom.jpg
The challenge of ACEs for Montanans is that our children, more than any of the other 50 states,
experience four or more ACEs. Four or more is a tipping point in the study for many of the more
severe consequences of experiencing adversity in childhood, including early death (which is seen
partially in our high teen suicide rates in Montana).
Schylar Canfield-Baber was featured on the front page of the Independent Record on Thursday
morning. Schylar, one of our speakers at Challenge Helena Thursday night recently gave a talk to
our youth group. He will be speaking at our ACEs event here at St. Paul’s on Nov. 6th at 6 pm
called “Design a Child’s Destiny,” during the Art Walk. Schylar identifies himself as having 10
ACEs and says, “If there were 11 ACEs, I would have 11.”
Schylar was a child in the foster care system for 10 years and bounced between 11 homes. When
you hear Schylar’s story there are two haunting parts: first, he speaks about his life for those 10
years being one in which his personal belongings resided in a plastic trash bag. Schylar had no
permanent home or place to just be himself. Second, he announces a reality in which he really
just wanted a place of belonging--a family in which he could place his trust and hope that he
could be an equal member. Schylar cites experiences of being left behind when families went on
vacation or being forced to do chores when others got to be together.1
I share this brief part of Schylar’s story to demonstrate how like Job, Schylar lost it all. Schylar
shares openly that there were points he struggled to find any hope at all. If it weren’t for people
stepping into his life to let him know he mattered, then he may have given up hope.
The last part of Job is the second part of our reading and it suggests an interesting understanding
of God.
Job 42:10-17Common English Bible (CEB)
10 Then the Lord changed Job’s fortune when he prayed for his friends, and the Lord doubled all
Job’s earlier possessions. 11 All his brothers, sisters, and acquaintances came to him and ate food
with him in his house. They comforted and consoled him concerning all the disaster the Lord had
brought on him, and each one gave him a qesitah and a gold ring. 12 Then the Lord blessed Job’s
latter days more than his former ones. He had fourteen thousand sheep, six thousand camels, one
thousand yoke of oxen, and one thousand female donkeys. 13 He also had seven sons and three
daughters. 14 He named one Jemimah, a second Keziah, and the third Keren-happuch. 15 No
women in all the land were as beautiful as Job’s daughters; and their father gave an inheritance to
them along with their brothers. 16 After this, Job lived 140 years and saw four generations of his
children. 17 Then Job died, old and satisfied.
At first read it seems that after Job relinquishes to seeing God in the whirlwind, he suddenly
receives his immense wealth and happiness back and is happy the rest of his life. It seems that the
book of Job is simply about the fact that if we are loyal to God we get back immense wealth and
things to comfort us on this earth. I can’t stand this type of theology because I have met people
who have been devout people connected to God all their life, who do not ever achieve immense
wealth.
One commentary I read stated that many scholars believe this section may have been added later,
to give a theology that God gives to those who are obedient. When the real ending should have
been that Job left in awe of God in the whirlwind, but still with questions about why the loss had
happened. For in reality even if we experienced the loss of Job and gained back all these things,
we would never forget the pain or loss of our first family.2 We would continue to remember the
things we had lost and that pain could be crippling to us.
Job’s challenge to us in the modern day is that life is full of adversity and finding hope in
adversity is incredibly challenging. The Christian message follows what I have heard from all the
speakers on ACEs, “adversity is not destiny.” Jesus himself taught this to his disciples and to the
people who surrounded him. God is not just in the whirlwind, but God is next to you in your
1
http://helenair.com/news/showing-compassion-how-to-mitigate-the-effects-of-childhoodtrauma/article_8ac9e137-0dc9-507e-a081-0f4d963cfc9e.html
2
http://www.workingpreacher.org/preaching.aspx?commentary_id=2672
adversity to struggle through it with you. God loves you and nothing that has happened to you or
that you have done can keep you from that love. Your adversity will not become your future;
God goes back and makes a new future possible.
Schylar’s story is telling about what made the difference for him and it should be no surprise to us
as people of the Christian message. People offering stable relationships and letting Schylar know
he mattered was what changed his future. Schylar’s adversity is still there, but with these
relationships he found the stability to follow the spirit of his life to be himself despite his
adversity.
People mattered, people made the difference. I would like to share a short video clip with you of
how people can make the difference in changing childhood adversity, and all adversity.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=75gsCJaXTnQ&feature=youtu.be
We are the ones who change the story of ACEs, by being there for our children and those
marginalized in our community. We can all learn a lot from the ACE study so I encourage us all
to go to challengehelena.org and childwise.org to learn more. ACEs is a language of
understanding we can share with our community as we continue to share a message of hope to
transform our community for good.
As we go back to our St. Paul’s future, and we look at all we have done in the life of our church
we need to remember that God’s Spirit, “ruach” has called us to help people throughout our
history. For us as individuals, we are again called by the Spirit of love to know God is with us
and supporting each of us. God gives us hope that we can change our story even through our
adversity. The ending of Job sounds too perfect, but I do like the idea that we can help someone
who is facing adversity change his or her story. If we look back to Job’s ending, it was the people
that came into his life that helped give him hope for the future. God was present in the “ruach”
wind around Job and, in turn, we can be reminded of God’s love in the beauty of Montana.
Hopefully that beauty will inspire us to share that love with those who need it most. ACEs is
simply a common language we can use to help understand this adversity in our children and
perhaps by learning it we can partner with our loving God to change the future all over again.