A Fresh Perspective

I was sitting in my office working on this sermon with my door open, which is my policy. Jim and Betty show up as part of the team taking down all the Advent symbols and decorations. Jim yanked down my Christmas wreath on the door and said jokingly, or maybe not, “Christmas is over, get used to it.” I suppose nothing is as over as Christmas when it is over. We sing on Christmas "Oh little town of Bethlehem / How still we see thee lie" but we don't have any songs for what happens next in Matthew’s Gospel. It's not still anymore. Matthew couples together the visit of the magi with King Herod’s wrath. In Matthew’s portrayal of the gospel’s beginnings, the joyful news heralded by the angel is now replaced by the loud weeping of the parents whose babies are killed in the wake of King Herod's rage. Matthew's Christmas pageant ends not with tinsel covered angels proclaiming peace on earth and goodwill toward all, nor with magi bringing gifts from afar, but with...

Until we face some something that challenges our beliefs and assumptions, we tend to accept and believe what we have been taught, what was handed down to us in the process of being socialized into society by family, friends, peers, teachers, and the people we admire and are drawn to in our culture. Job believed what most everyone else believed in his culture, namely, that God was responsible for the good and bad that happened to people on earth. So after the first series of catastrophes where he loses family and fortune he says, “Naked I came from my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return there; the Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord.” When Job is afflicted with painful soars all over his body and when his wife questions his loyalty to a God who would do this to him, he says, “Shall we receive the good at the hand of God, and not receive the bad?” He is still locked in to this view of God. When Job’s friends first hear of his troubles the tex...