Sunday 6th October – Communion Service led by Tony Alderman
Having Tony two weeks running was a bit like a supermarket BOGOF – something unexpected to enjoy to the full. And Tony started by congratulating Stephen Jones on the 10th Anniversary of his joining us as Director of Music, and for the previous week’s Service where the Aeolian Singers had greatly enhanced the experience.
Tony had been at school with a chap nicknamed “Scratchy from ‘Itchin”, because he couldn’t stop itching. And he talked about what it’s like when you have an itch that just won’t go away. (He did have his own solution).
He’d stood in for Scratchy on his grocery delivery round (cue the Hovis advert with cobbled streets?) and just like the pig swill last week, the smell of the cat food that came when he’d opened the tins for two elderly ladies was seared on his memory.
He also saw it as the sort of challenge that we got, which we couldn’t always solve. And that took us to the Middle East and the first anniversary the Hamas attacks on a kibbutz and a music festival. Each morning we would put on the news and would see more indiscriminate bombing taking place.
It was not so long ago that we were experiencing similar problems in Ireland where bombs were being set off and the politicians, mainly men, didn’t seem to be able to do anything. It took Mo Mowlem, a Female Cabinet Minister, to go into the prisons and meet the Nationalists in particular and talk to them – and that expedited the peace process. With so many children and mothers being killed, we could get a little frustrated with big G, saying, “Can’t you do something about it?”.
The day’s theme was, “When you don’t understand” and Tony’s opening words had been, “When we don’t have all the answers, we can still be faithful. When everything is going wrong, we can still be faithful. When we have no words to express our pain, we can still be faithful. When others let us down, we can still be faithful, because God remains faithful to us”.
The lectionary for the week included a reading from Job, a Book that contained truths without actually being factual – a message in a dramatic form to teach us about God and about ourselves. Disasters and suffering could and did happen to us, even in our modern age.
Job was an honest and upright man, who lost everything, yet refused to blame God, believing that both good and bad came from God’s hand. A dialogue between God and Satan saw God allowing Job to suffer appalling losses. It was the same God who in Mark 10 took a child in his arms and blessed it. There were some things that we were not equipped to understand.
The Book of Job raised all manner of questions and provided an opportunity to explore the place of questioning in the life of faith – from the innocent, wonder-filled questions of childhood to the extraordinary challenging questions raised by both historical and contemporary suffering.
God did not answer all of Job’s questions, but did provide what Job needed most – his presence and the sense of being listened to. And the Christian psychologist, Sarah Savage reminded us that being listened to well was as close to the experience of being loved as to be indistinguishable. Part of listening well was to allow people to articulate their questions even when we couldn’t answer them.
The name Satan in Job literally meant accuser, and in our age, where image and identity were everything, the contemporary ‘accusers’ included social media, and the world of advertising. Accusations that we were not good enough, not beautiful enough, or on trend enough. Sometimes the accuser could be inside us, but the example of Jesus blessing the child reminded us that in the face of accusations, we knew ourselves to be loved without needing to be good enough, clever enough, or even beautiful enough.
Wars, floods, and earthquakes tore lives apart somewhere in this world each day. Our challenge was to trust God more than we could understand.
What did we make of hearing how God agreed that Satan could torture a good man. How many questions did that raise? It was only by looking more deeply into the whole Biblical story that we could even try to understand our awesome God. Job’s challenging story did blow apart the theory that suffering was always a result of our sin.
While Job’s God was immense and distant, for the writer of the letter to the Hebrews, God had come close and shared our suffering, had come from God on high to become Emmanuel, “God with us”. To counter the troubles of our world, the good news of the New Testament was that through Jesus God comes alongside us and shares our suffering in a way that we could not fully understand – because that was the nature of faith. Our challenge, through all that life might bring, was to trust God more and more. That was faith.
Potters Bar United Reformed Church 