The Fourth Sunday After Easter (May 2, 2021)

May the words of my mouth and the meditations of my heart be alway acceptable in thy sight, O Lord, our strength and our Redeemer. Amen.

Every good endowment and ever perfect gift is from above, no coming down from the Father of lights with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change. Of his own will he brought us forth by the word of truth that we should be a kind of first fruits of his creatures.

If there’s anything we could learn from the last year or so, it’s that the world is chaotic. We might think this is unique to our time but, in reality, it’s true all the time. The winds of chance seem to blow us to and fro and we seem to have little control over what happens next. In many ways, the universe can feel very arbitrary.

The thing about chaos is that it breeds chaos. One of my favorite films is called Chaos Theory starring Ryan Reynolds. The main character is a motivational speaker who is organized up to the very minute of his day. His well-meaning wife tries to do him a favor by changing the clock to give him an extra 5 minutes. The problem is that she sets the clock back instead of ahead. The rest of the film is his life rapidly falling apart simply because of the mistake she made. But once things begin collapsing, it’s not just the external that begins to fall apart but the internal as the lead character begins to trend towards self-destruction. When his rather rigid bearings are undone, there is no stability. Without stability, he has no anchor.

Perhaps one of the major takeaways of the film is that building one’s life solely on organization and rigid scheduling is not the sure foundation that self-help books about time management and Marie Kondo Netflix series about organizing your life make it out to be. This is why collect for the Fourth Sunday after Easter is honestly one of my favorite collects: “O Almighty God, who alone canst order the unruly wills and affections of sinful men; Grant unto thy people, that they may love the thing which thou commands, and desire that which thou dost promise; that so, among the sundry and manifold changes of the world, our hearts may surely there be fixed where true joys are to be found; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.”

We ask for God to rightly order our disordered desires by giving us a love of his commandments and a desire for what he has promised. With an orientation directed towards our proper end as revealed to us by God, we can stand strong in spite of the manifold changes we encounter in life because our hearts are fixed on what is stable: the wellspring of all true joys, Jesus Christ.

In our lessons this morning, these themes implicit in the Collect are treated in a variety of ways.

In the Old Testament reading, we see a negative example: what it looks when we fail to love God’s commands and let him reorder our desires, and therefore cannot stand in light of the changes of the world.

In our Epistle lesson, the author gives us a reason to trust in God and explains what it looks like for us to do.

Finally, in our Gospel lesson, we see that the Holy Spirit’s role in the ordering of our loves.

The book of Job is a thought experiment. At the beginning of the book, Satan makes a wager with God that Job, a heretofore righteous man, will curse God. So, God allows the Devil to bring misfortune to Job, destroying his property, wealth, and even his children. Even more, God allows his opponent to afflict Job with all kinds of horrible conditions so long as Job remains alive. The book then shifts from the cosmic wager going on between God and Satan to focus on Job’s experience. In the wake of all this destruction, three of his friends come and sit with him for seven days, mourning his losses and conditions.

At the end of the seven days, they confront Job about why they think he’s suffering. To understand the book, we have to understand the worldview Job and his friends share. They are all operating from a view that can be characterized as retribution theology, which is kind of like the concept of karma: if you do good, you receive good material benefits; if you do bad, you receive bad material consequences.

Of course, based on experience, you’ve probably seen this view is demonstrably false. There are people who take care of their bodies, eat healthy, work out, etc. who get cancer and die young while people who eat McDonald’s every day, smoke and drink voraciously live into old age. Maybe you’ve seen a hard worker be passed over for the big promotion for someone who was willing to get their hands dirty in the office politics game. The list goes on; but it’s clear retribution theology is overly-simplistic, it doesn’t actually account for how the world works. This is the point the author of Job is trying to make. Using retribution theology, Job’s friends try to argue that he’s done something wrong. Some grievous sin is the reason that he’s been afflicted.

Job’s position also engages the presuppositions of retribution theology but with a twist: bad things happen to bad people, Job thinks, but Job isn’t bad. He does everything by the book. So, the problem is not a wrong he’s committed. Rather, the problem is that God has made a mistake in treating him the way he has. In our lesson this morning, Job is in the midst of replying to his friends. Instead of sympathizing and consoling him and interrogating God’s justice, Job feels the friends have cannibalized him by their criticism: “Why are you not satisfied with my flesh?" Job then laments that his words haven’t been written in a book or chiseled in a rock so that they would remain as a permanent record of the cosmic injustice occurring in his case. So Job makes a rather bold statement: “For I know my Redeemer lives.” This is often misquoted as if it shows Job’s great faith. In context, however, it is an act of defiance. It is a claim that God has made a mistake, there’s been an accounting error in heaven. But somewhere, in his zeal to be proved right, Job is certain that a there must be a Redeemer out there who will somehow bail him out, a third party who will vindicate Job before God.

Of course, like we said, we know retribution theology and karma don’t explain the universe. We know good people who die too young or endure seemingly undue hardship. We also know many wicked who live long lives of luxury. God will judge in a final sense, of course. But our time on earth is not so mechanistic. Job’s theology can’t adequately account for the “sundry and manifold changes of the world” and his posture is accusatory at God and adjusts his aim from living based on how God has shown us to live to justifying himself.

If Job shows us a bad example, James affords us a better understanding. He begins with the starting point that every good thing we have is a gift from God, our Creator. The gifts we receive from God are because of his goodness, not because we deserve them. Creature-hood by definition means that we are contingent, derivative beings. We owe everything to our Creator because our very fact of existence is through him. The good things we have, existence being one of them, are all reflections of God’s nature. In that divine nature, there is “no variation or shadow due to change.” This is linked to a doctrine called the impassibility of God.

The hymn “Great is Thy Faithfulness” defines impassibility beautifully:

“Great is Thy faithfulness,” O God my Father,

There is no shadow of turning with Thee;

Thou changes not,

Thy compassions, they fail not

As Thou has been Thou forever wilt be.

God doesn’t change. He doesn’t experience pleasure or pain because of creatures. This is how we know he’s good: if he were to be otherwise, he’d cease to be God. In the creation of his Church, “he brought us forth by the word of truth” to be the “first fruits of his creatures.”

The word of truth, according to James, is the Gospel. In the Gospel, we are re-created, making us the first fruits of his creatures.

The life in the Church anticipates the eventual New Heavens and New Earth. Because we participate in the new creation, James calls us to a new way of living.

Where Job is quick to speak and pass rash judgment, even against God, James tells us the opposite: be quick to hear, slow to speak, and slow to anger. Anger is, of course, one of the seven deadly sins which prevent us from growing in righteousness. As Gregory the Great says, “[Anger] deprives one of righteousness…because when one’s mind is not at peace, one’s critical faculty is impaired and one judges to be right whatever one’s anger suggests. We avoid anger through patience.”

So we are called to put away all those things which impede righteousness and bring death: all the rank growth of wickedness. Instead, we receive, with meekness, the implanted word, the Gospel which leads to salvation. First, we find purgation and then, in the reception of salvation, we’re called to live in a worthy manner.

But living in a worthy manner based on our own power and volition is impossible. This is where the Gospel Lesson comes in: Christ, ascending to heaven, sends to us, His Church, the Holy Ghost, whom he calls the Counselor. This title is fitting because of the work the Spirit does for us: He convicts us of sin, functioning as a diagnostic for the Christian life to help us more clearly see what is amiss.

The Spirit convinces of righteousness. He is the agent who implants that word of life which is able to save our souls. Romans 8:13, “if you live according to the flesh you will die, but if by the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the body you will live.” The Spirit also has a role in God’s judgment because he helps judge the ruler of the world, Satan.

Further, the Spirit leads the Church into all truth, something we believe is an abiding reality. This is why we listen to the “faith delivered unto the saints” through undivided Church. It’s why we use the canon of Scripture, recite the Creeds, and use the liturgical forms that we do.

Finally, the Spirit’s work culminates in the glorification of the Son. In all of the Spirit’s work with us, he points us to the crucified Lord.

Life by the Spirit is a sign, contra Job, that our Redeemer, who is Christ, lives. We don’t need to insist on self-justification by appealing to some unknown figure. Rather, we can boldly acknowledge our inadequacy at the foot of the cross. Our collect, then, is very much about how the Holy Spirit works in us: He is the one who orders our wills and affections, sets aright our disordered desires, and infuses in us a love for what is true, beautiful, and good. By living in the Spirit, our hearts become fixed on the source of all goodness and joys: God, and enables us to weather storms and changes of this life. This is especially true for us now when things are so chaotic for so many and the future seems so mutable and uncertain, we place our faith, hope, and love in tHe who will be the same yesterday, today, and tomorrow.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.