Sermon for Proper 27

Deacon Rebekah Hays Estera

Proper 27, Year C

Sermon

Sometimes when I stand behind the altar during Eucharist, I become very aware

of the thin membrane between this sacred space and the outside world. I love

when that membrane is easily passed through, when I watch a passerby’s

attention be caught by the sound or the smells or something more ethereal, and

they stop and look in through the doors and sometimes pass through.

Yesterday was one of those times when I was very aware of the thin separation

between this little world inside and the greater world outside. Yesterday when

the church was packed, I would look between faces puffy red with grief inside,

and a woman being pulled along by her dog outside, a car parked to let someone

out. A bicycle navigated traffic.

How could so much grief exist here and the world go on outside.

And I wondered how Job felt.

In our Hebrew scripture today, we read just a bit of the account of Job. Job was a

righteous man who got caught up in a celestial battle of egos. His life was

destroyed as a result. He lost everything – his children, his flocks, and more.

He tore his clothes and sat in ash. And yet the world kept going on around Job.

I wonder if Job felt isolated.

I wonder if we know a bit of that feeling today.

2

It is easy to look around at the world and think it is falling apart. People are facing

hunger here and man-made famine abroad. People of Color are being kidnapped

and disappeared. Queer and trans people wonder about the stability of family

structures and the safety of simply existing. It is easy to wonder, as Thessalonians

explores, if the day of destruction is here.

And in all of this, we are expected to continue getting on with life.

At one point in his grief, Job’s wife becomes so frustrated that she tells him to

“curse God and die.”

Get over it. Your grief is too much for me. Your God is not there.

And yet, Job refuses.

Again and again. His wife and his friends tell Job to be done with it. And he

refuses.

Now, don’t get me wrong. Job complains. A LOT.

But in that, Job never turns his back on God. Job continues to worship through the

worst of it. Job believes he will eventually see God.

I think this calls us to a few things.

Your grief is valid. Sit with it. Welcome it like an old friend. Your grief is a

manifestation of intense love. Love for those in your life and love for the world,

filled with God’s unique creation, all around you. Your grief is a testament to the

depts of your connection with God’s creation.

3

We are called to continually worship. In and despite and maybe even because of

his grief, Job continued to praise God.

Sometimes when our little worlds are so broken or when the greater world

around us is falling apart, all we can do is turn to God.

Something that Common Prayer offers us is the words when we do not have any.

In our brokenness and grief, we do not have to find the right words to talk to God.

Those words have already been given to us. And it can be a gift to rest into those

words.

And if those words have already been given to us, then we can also take comfort

in knowing that we are not alone. I wonder if Job felt isolated. But we don’t have

to because we know that in our long lineage of saints and sinners, others before

have felt as deeply as we feel now. We hold fast to tradition, as Thessalonians

tells us.

Job is a poetry book and it does fall into somewhat of a binary. Job’s life was

good. Then it was not. Finally, it was restored. Even when Job was given new

children and new flocks, I cannot imagine that his grief was erased. That

experience had to stay with him.

In our Gospel, Jesus invites us into a third way.

A group of Sadducees — who don’t even believe in resurrection — try to trap

Jesus in technical hypo-theticals.

Jesus refuses the premise entirely.

And Jesus cites Exodus 3:6 — a text the Sadducees actually accept — to argue

resurrection not through metaphysics but through covenantal present tense:

4

I AM the God of Abraham.

Not “I was.”

Jesus is grounding resurrection in who God is — not in what we can predict or

control.

Rather than a binary answer, Jesus invites us to imagine a world that is

completely different.

In the complex griefs of our world, we tend to want to simplify things with

binaries.

This or that. Right or wrong. Litmus tests of ideological purity. We cast ideas and

real people aside when they do not measure up perfectly to one side of that false

binary.

Many of us voted this past week. Often the discourse around elections is binary.

But elections, like activism, like community building, like so many other facets of

life, like grief itself, are not marriages. They are bus routes. We pick the route to

get us closer to where we want to be. And then we adjust again. We adjust to life

after grief; we adjust our activism to the next right step.

And Jesus suggests that just maybe we can imagine something outside of our

system entirely. That we can dream with God to usher in a new reality.

In a little bit, I’ll get to stand behind the altar again. I’ll look at the elements and

I’ll look at your faces. And I’ll look at the world outside. And I’ll wonder about the

world outside. What is going on in their lives. Are they just getting on with the day

despite their own pains?

There is this moment when I hold the chalice up and I see myself reflected back in

it. In this cup that represents both a memorial of Christ’s death and a foretaste of

the Heavenly kin-dom. And I am reminded that in all our grief and all our hopes,

Christ is right there with us.

In this moment, when wine is more than just wine, I’ll be reminded to dream with

God for a world that is so much more than grief and destruction, and simple

binaries. Amen.