• Job 38:1-7, (34-41)
• Psalm 104
• Isaiah 53:4-12
• Psalm 91
• Hebrews 5:1-10
• Mark 10:35-45

Year B Proper 24 (29) RCL

Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth…
Yet it was the will of the LORD to crush him with pain…
To sit at my right hand or at my left is not mine to grant, but it is for those for whom it has been prepared…

I lost my day job this week. It’s been kind of disorienting, really… not for all the usual reasons, though. It was, for a number of reasons, time to move on, I think. And I wrestled, for a few hours, with what to do and what to think and what to feel. But when I got in touch with Brodie, upon arriving home, his first words to me were, “You don’t sound as upset as I imagined.”

So many doors had opened up for me in the earliest moments…

Reverend Mother always says when the Lord closes a door, somewhere he opens a window… so says Maria in The Sound of Music. Does God get that involved?

There’s a video out there, showing the number of galaxies in deep space, a small arc of sky “no bigger than a grain of sand held at arm’s length”. As the video unfolds, there are billions of stars, galaxies… events of light never seen by any man. And one becomes painfully aware of how lowly we are as humans, not on the “food chain” but on any chain: whole portions of the universe live lives without any concern for us, our jobs, our religious debates, our theologies or our eucharists.

It’s easy to see that in such a universe, there might be a lot of things going on that are way more important than one more unemployed human being on planet earth…

Yet, we don’t need to go far in our tradition to hear that item such and so was planned by God, or that it will be as “God wills it”. We pray for new jobs, we find God closing doors and opening windows…

The scripture is filled with such images. OUr Iconography often includes an image of the hand of God (Or sometimes a tiny image of Jesus, himself) coming in from the upper corner of an image indicating divine blessing on an action or scene.

Job’s argument with God brings us to three chapters of God’s claims to have to do everything. The Prophecy and the Gospel present us with images of God doing specific things, preparing specific places for specific people… The Hindus have Ganesha – that often appears as an elephant-headed image – referred to as the remover of obstacles. The Celts have Ogma, the Opener of Every Gate.

Is God that involved? Does God open doors and close windows?

This is not the same thing, to be sure, as knowing why something happened. These are three different sets of questions:

1) Does God do everything? (EG: Did God make me loose my job?)
2) Why does God do something in particular? (EG: Why did God cause me to loose my job?)
3) Is a given event part of the plan for salvation? (I believe the answer here is always yes.)