The Twentieth Sunday After Pentecost - October 18, 2009

"Where Were You...?"

The Rev. Stephen Elkins-Williams

Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth? (From our first reading)

That question of God to Job should stop us in our tracks. It should break through our self-centered lives, our worries, and our preoccupations and awaken us with the bracing light of reality.

“Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?” The eye-opening mystery that confronts us in that question is our relative insignificance in the face of the eternal, transcendent, creating God, from whom comes all time, all space, all being, all life. How small are we, and our fears and our concerns and our accomplishments, in the face of God!

“Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?” The literal answer is nowhere; there was no “where” to be! Even after the formation of our small planet amidst millions of others, it was millions of years before human beings existed at all and thousands of years before you and I came along for our brief turn. Where we will be 200 years from now, i.e., a few seconds from now in the life span of creation? No one will even remember our names, much less what we spent so much time obsessing about and being preoccupied with and worrying about.

That is a humbling reality, but not necessarily a disheartening one. In fact it is a liberating one! We can accept who we are and not continue the frustration of convincing ourselves that we are something more. We are not God, not the source of all that is, not the one in charge of the universe, not perfect, not everlasting.

The Good News, of course, is that God is. God is the one upon whom all things depend. God is the one from whom all blessings flow. God is the one who saves us. God is not only the one who laid the foundation of the earth, from whom stems all that is, who is beyond our imagination; but God is also the one who speaks to us, who addresses this humbling, liberating question to Job and to us, who by so doing, engages us and loves us and gives us an experience of himself.

Although in the breadth and scope and duration of all creation, we are like a drop in the ocean, we are important because God chooses to make us so. “When I consider your heavens,” the Psalmist says to God, “the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars you have set in their courses, what is man that you should be aware of him? …You have made him but little lower than the angels” (Psalm 8:4-6), made us, in fact, in the image and likeness of God. God indeed, not only created us as children of God, but sent us his Son, Jesus, to live with us, to teach us, to save us from the permanent consequences of sin and death. Through Jesus we have learned that even the hairs of our heads are numbered, that he came to bring us abundant life, that he is with us always, even to the end of the age.

In today’s Gospel reading, Jesus teaches us even more. He tells us that to be first, to live fully, to fulfill completely our true identity and mission, we should be last of all and servant of all. We should realize our smallness in the face of God but also the value God places on us by casting us in the divine image and loving us, and we should return that love and emulate that love by loving others made in God’s image. For the small amount of time that we inhabit this earth, we are to make the most of our opportunities to serve God and others, to take our place among the manifold works of God, to let our lives reflect God’s glory.

For the past four weeks, in our liturgical creation cycle, we have been trying to refocus on God as the center and source of the universe and to re-center our lives on that dynamic, life-giving, relational God. We have been acknowledging that we are stewards, not owners or masters, of the earth and of all that God has given us. We have been asking God’s forgiveness for all the ways that we have not lived out that identity and joyful responsibility, and we have been asking God’s help that we might better understand and respond to God’s grace and favor and call.

That response should permeate all that we do. It should guide us in setting aside time for God in worship and prayer. It should help us love and forgive and tend to, especially our families and friends, whom we know only too well, but also our enemies, who vex and perplex us. It should charge us to take care of our bodies and our minds and to take any steps necessary to deal with the slavery of addiction. It should inspire us to be faithful to our marriages or lifelong unions and to take most seriously our commitment for better or worse. It should encourage us to volunteer our time and our energy in serving others, especially in ways that stretch and challenge us.

Our response to God’s grace and favor and call should urge us to share what resources we have, as few as they sometimes seem, especially with those in need and to give back to God from all our blessings by pledging significantly of our income through our local congregation. It should impel us to respect the dignity of every human being and to work for racial and economic justice for all. It should drive us to long for peace among all people and to encourage our leaders to work for peaceful reconciliation. It should lead us to wonder and awe at all of God’s creation and to care for the environment of our earth, which affects all of God’s children, present and future.

“Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?” That question should stop us in our tracks. It should break through our self-centered lives, our worries, and our preoccupations and awaken us with the bracing light of reality. It should help us see who God is and who God lovingly invites us to be.

Job 38:1-17, 34-41; Mark 10:35-45