Proper 27 Year C 2025: Job 19:23-27a

Growing up, my brother and I fed our love of watching baseball from the nationally broadcast local networks. We got WGN out of Chicago and TBS out of Atlanta. Of course, we couldn’t make it easy on our parents and choose the same team to follow - I chose the north side Cubs and my brother the Atlanta Braves. And I’ve loved baseball as long as I can remember. Not just the game itself - and, for the record, I love the pitch clock, hate the ghost runner, love the universal DH, and hate regular season interleague play - but I love baseball culture as well. There’s just a different kind of vibe for an everyday sport. I’ve heard it said that baseball is the game you go to when you want to have a conversation with the person you’re with. Major League Baseball’s regular season lasts 162 games, and one of my favorite sayings about the season is, “everyone’s going to win 54 and lose 54, it’s what you do with the last 54 that counts.”

I listen to a baseball podcast that wraps up every season with a playing of “The Green Fields of the Mind”. This poignant piece, written by former commissioner of Major League Baseball Bart Giamatti, explores life through baseball, recounting the heartbreaking end of the Boston Red Sox’s 1977 season. In that last game, that 162nd game of 1977, a rain delay meant the Yankees got to watch the Red Sox from home, hoping for a loss not just because they’re the Yankees and the Red Sox, but because a Sox loss gave the Yankees the division title. If the Sox had won, the Yankees, who won the 1977 World Series, wouldn’t have even made the postseason. After the Sox lost, the Yankees were reminded, in Giamatti’s words, “of how slight and fragile are the circumstances that exalt one group over another.”

Interpreters of the book of Job try to make sense out of that lived experience of which Commissioner Giamatti speaks. The central theme of the book of Job is the possibility of disinterested righteousness. That is, does Job love the Lord merely because he is healthy and economically comfortable? Would he still love the Lord were he not those things? That is another question baseball can answer with the Pittsburgh Pirates, who still have fans after years of being betrayed by ownership. But in all seriousness, that is a question which those of us who are economically comfortable, who are healthy, have to ask of ourselves: does our theology depend upon our own personal understanding of the world?

The answer I arrive at is “no”. My understanding of God cannot depend upon my own limited view of the world, of time, and of where we are going. Based on who I think God is, who I experience God to be, it goes to reason that God sees the world differently, God sees time differently than I do. But I didn’t just stumble or theologize my way into my conclusion. It was my own work at practical theology surrounding the sudden death of my brother twelve years ago. It was more than heartbreaking. That feels like an understatement. The rug was pulled out from under me. My entire future changed in one phone call. And my prayers for a miracle, for my perfectly healthy brother, because he was perfectly healthy except for that one small spot in his brain, seemed to fall on deaf ears. I was at a theological fork in the road. The conclusion I came to was that if my theology up to that day and point depended upon things in my life going by and large pretty well, what would that say about what I believed about God? What about everyone for whom things weren’t going well for the previous 25 years? Did I believe in a God who permitted bad things to happen to people who weren’t me, but as soon as something bad touched me, that was the dealbreaker? Did I believe in a God who was like that?

The book of Job consists of a frame narrative, in prose, enclosing a poetic debate. This combination is found also in some other wisdom texts in both Aramaic and Egyptian. Alternately, three dramatic episodes take place, each introduced by brief comments. Thus the hero is afflicted, complains, and is rebuked by three friends, and after a young enthusiast takes up the task of demonstrating Job’s folly, God rebukes Job but restores him.

The story in prose on either side of the poetry is formulaic in some ways: the pious man endures unimaginable suffering, yet does not sin, and is rewarded. On its own, readers are presented with a universe where those who are pious are rewarded for their righteous behavior, even when suffering seems to come out of nowhere. It encourages a kind of blind obedience. The poetic material interrupts that carefully constructed world, daring to ask questions and wrestle with a universe that does not make sense. In this universe, Job’s friends opine on the reasons for and the nature of suffering, until Job finally gets an audience with God.

Today’s text from Job is about halfway through the book. If the text sounds familiar, you might have heard it in the opening anthems at an Episcopal funeral: “As for me, I know that my Redeemer lives and that at the last he will stand upon the earth. After my awaking, he will raise me up and in my body I shall see God. I myself shall see, and my eyes behold him who is my friend and not a stranger.” There is a question here about who the Redeemer is that Job sees. Is it God? Or is it one who will take Job’s side against the God by whom Job feels abandoned? In both Numbers and Deuteronomy, the redeemer is an avenger who would vindicate by punishing the guilty who, in Job’s experience here, is Godself. God uses the same word to refer to himself in Exodus, as Israel’s redeemer. It’s a complex Hebrew idea. But it is also a complex idea in English, if we choose “redeemer” as our translation. We use “redeem” in several wide ranging ways, from something as simple as turning in a coupon to a concept as complex as our salvation.

If this redeemer of whom Job speaks and God are one and the same, then Job isn’t waiting for a teammate to advocate for him against God, but is instead waiting for God’s true self to shine through. The God who he knows is justice and mercy and who will stand at the last day, victorious. That although we are frail, that our fragile circumstances in this life may be unexplainable and as changeable as the winds, our God is our vindicator. God is our hope. 

The message from Job is not that material goods or our health are indicators of our righteousness. Nor is the absence of them a test or punishment. The message is that we don’t love God, we don’t follow God’s commandments, so that we might receive a reward in this life. Nor do we follow God as a get-out-of-hell-free card. We love God because God is God. Because loving God is the right thing to do. Because God loves us so much that we have the gift of constant grace and salvation. We have the gift of seeing glimpses of God’s love in the world through Jesus Christ and through each one of us, who are made in the image of God.

Living together, being in community with one another, is like baseball in that, again in Commissioner Giamatti’s words, “It breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart.” And there is the knowledge, the awareness we all eventually come to understand, that one day we and those we love will not be on this earth any more. That “there comes a time when every summer will have something of autumn about it”. And we can choose how to treat those autumn-y summers, as a gift of another summer, as wistful about summers past, or as some of both, as how I like to think Job ended up since the end of Job’s story does not undo the suffering he endured. Giamatti ends his piece with “I need to think something lasts forever, and it might as well be that state of being that is a game; it might as well be that, in a green field, in the sun.” We are blessed with the knowledge that something does last forever, and it is something so much more than a game. It is that abiding love of God that surrounds and resides in each one of us. Amen.