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 We thank Charles Chapman (editing Northwood Hills URC Magazine) for editing Liz
Shaw’s recent sermons to give these shortened synopses, the condensed “highlights” breaking out the main meanings of her sermons, in a form that can be quickly read.
You’re welcome to come along to services to hear new, original and complete sermons - see What’s On? diary for details of services. You may contact Liz Shaw by email.
Hannah – The birth of hope - I Samuel Ch1 Vs 4-20
Liz Shaw took us through the moving story of Hannah. Hannah wants a male child. She lives in a patriarchal society that makes this an explicit demand if she is to be respected and valued at all.
She has suffered years of powerlessness because she cannot conceive, but she is able to hold onto the deep assumption that God is concerned about her. Hannah asks God to remember her
and in return she makes a promise to actively acknowledge that her child is from God by dedicating him to God’s service. God grants her the child, and Hannah keeps her promise. She who
was powerless was given power and then gave all of it back to God. From this story we learn that are children are not our own – they are on loan from God. And it follows that our parents lent us
out to God as well. So we really are all God’s children – there are no exceptions, there are no exclusions in God’s world. It is the perfect message in our relationship of partnership with our
Creator. Hannah’s connection with God transforms her.
Liz stressed that there is an important message here for all faith communities that are concerned
that all their history and achievements are about to come tumbling down. It is only our connection with God that will transform us, and we can only become connected through being a prayerful God
– conscious, faith – sharing community who actively work in the world for God’s justice. May we all have Hannah’s courage, strength, sensitivity and faithfulness in our own relationship with God.
“The Book of Job” - 1
Liz Shaw set the scene in the first of three reflections on the book of Job by showing how through
the medium of drama we become caught up in the greatest of human struggles: to face the world’s evil and pain honestly and still believe in good. Job was the greatest among a very
prosperous people. His devotion to God was genuine and complete, and from him God’s blessing radiated on all his family and possessions. Job’s piety was matched by outstanding wealth and he
was ever vigilant in devout observance to keep it so. But, challenged by Satan, God decides to test whether people continue to believe when their prosperity is taken away from them. God wants
to know whether people believe in God as a sort of insurance policy, or out of self-interest, or love him only for what they can get out of him. So Job, acting as the prototype of the pious man, is
subjected to testing by Satan on God’s behalf. While Job has often been seen as the problem of suffering it is not actually suffering that is the problem… it is God. Without a belief in a personal
God human suffering is simply something that coexists with the human condition. The critical question in Job is “what kind of God is it that allows the innocent to suffer and indeed seems to
even cause that suffering?” Job is testing accepted and traditional modes of theology and showing its shortcomings. When we are truly bereaved, expressions like “God has a bigger plan”, fall flat.
These are some questions raised by Job which are shared by atheists, agnostics and believers alike…
- What part does chance play in our lives?
- How can we find meaning to a life in which one person gets a life of prosperity without having deserved it and another gets a life of suffering that is equally unmerited?
- Why is there so much injustice?
And then these are specific questions for us as believers:
- Why has God made the world as it is?
- Why has God included so much misery and evil in a creation which according to Genesis is called “Good” or even “Very Good”?
- How does God deal with the world and human beings?
- How can people believe in God while the world is overflowing with meaninglessness and suffering?
- And above all what does all of this require of us and our human behaviour
These are questions that take us right into the heart of the nature of God.
“The continuing story of Job” - 2
Liz Shaw showed that things have been going from bad to desperate for Job. And into this
whirlpool of despair enter Job’s friends. We could say they are prime examples of how not to do things. Job’s friends have mistakenly and arrogantly assumed that the way they see things has to
be the way God sees them. They’ve put theology above compassion. Job doesn’t just begin to reject the principle that underlies their argument; he also begins to present the friends with his
own, different, view of the world. They argue from tradition and perceived reality about God and then apply this to the relationship between God’s punishment and sin. “You are being punished
here for you must have sinned.” Job rejects this logic. He doesn’t deny that he has made mistakes, but denies categorically that his suffering is a result of his behaviour. Job’s arguments are based
on his life and his experiences. And his experience tells him that if he accepts their way God is anything but his loving Father. Job wants his day in court so as to plead his case before God… But
God is not there. Job is left alone in the darkness of the unknown. Liz, citing a little known aspect of Mother Teresa’s’ life – her deep, deep feeling that “there is no God in me” – suggested that
both the presence and the absence of God is common place in the spiritual journey of many, if not at all, of us.
God is a mystery beyond our understanding and that can often feel like God’s absence. Job has spent his life convinced of God’s presence and now he knows God only by God’s absence. Liz
suggested that in a strange sort of way both Job and Mother Teresa discovered an odd sort of freedom in the darkness and maybe the Christian life presents no greater challenge than finding
our way forward with integrity and responsibility in the dark. If we take Job seriously, then we have to question the comforting belief that all suffering can be redeemed. And we must not
assume that there are any glib and easy answers to the question of undeserved suffering but rather acknowledge that a willingness to wrestle with God in the face of our lived human
experience is actually the supreme test of faith probably far deeper than a passive acceptance of whatever happens as God’s will, or a careful theological rationalization of why things are.
“A farewell to Job” - 3 - “I had heard of you by the hearing of the ear, but now my eyes see you”
Liz Shaw looked at two of the questions Job raises, the interpretation of scripture, and the question of suffering. A central theme of Job is the radical questioning of conventional wisdom.
The friends are the voice of orthodox theology – they demonstrate the danger of quoting the Bible literally and then insisting that what they read is God’s will for all people, for all time. The Bible is
not there to be simply read and believed; it is there to be interpreted, but our interpretations can never be neutral, unbiased or value free. We bring with us our preconceptions, our upbringing and
our life experiences. Job was looking for a new way of seeing God, and that brings him right into the centre of the life of faith today. Our concepts, images, language, knowledge and beliefs are all
profoundly shaped by the cultures in which we live. We live in a vastly different world and the earlier traditional ways of seeing the Bible don’t work for us any more. With the help of Marcus
Borg, Liz shared with us something of this progressive Christianity and noted three key elements:
- It sees the Bible as a human product not a divine product. This is not to deny the reality of God, or the reality that the Bible was divinely inspired.
- The Bible is not to be interpreted literally, factually, and absolutely.
- Seeing the Bible this way does not deny its status as Christian sacred scripture. Scripture is sacred not because of its origin but because of its status and function. As sacred scripture,
the Bible is, along with Jesus, the foundation of understanding and identity. It is also a way that the Spirit of God continues to speak to us today.
Liz suggested that maybe one of the most important things that Job does for us today is to urge all of us to hold our theologies humbly and to remember that new times require new and reformed
theological expression from a God who transcends all speech and all time. Job trusts his own experience of God and in the midst of his dark night he holds fast to God. If you ask people today
what it is that makes belief in a loving God difficult, most will probably reply that it is all the suffering in the world. Throughout our struggle with Job we have been asking, “why does God let
suffering happen?” Liz then suggested that we have actually been asking the wrong question. The only question that can be truly helpful is “where is God in all of this?” It is by asking this question
that we begin to look for the God who suffers with us, and we find him right there with Jesus, experiencing it all, suffering it all on the Cross.
Copyright for views expressed in these sermons remains with Liz Shaw.
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