MAKING HISTORY – THE CONFESSIONS OF AN HISTORIAN
Job 7:1-10

A sermon given by the Rev. Richard H. Taylor
April 25, 2004 / Third Sunday after Easter

Most of you probably know that I am something of an amateur historian, with a few books published, and some kind reviews. I am fascinated by how things got to be the way they are. I get excited when I find a forgotten person speaking ages ago to an issue we consider current and modern.

But history, I must admit, is a very inexact science. Basically what you need to know about history is that usually the winners write history. If my army beats your army, I get the leisure to write about it. If I bomb and burn down your buildings, your records disappear. The only sources the historian as to explain what happened are my records that didn't get bombed or burned. If your houses are bamboo and wood, fast-burning napalm will not only incinerate your houses, it will also turn your villages to ashes, your road maps to dust, and your memory to nothing. The historian only works with what's left.

So when I do history, I have to push aside the common viewpoints, the in-house histories, the self-congratulatory explanations, and look for the muffled and unheard voice. In my next book I plan to raise up Jacob Green, the colonial New Jersey pastor whom I believe played a major role in inventing modern Congregationalism. Most Congregationalists never heard of Jacob Green. So I hope to re-explain the history, and rearrange the landscape. Yet I am not the first person to unearth Green. Mark Noll at Princeton, and the Morris County Historical Society wrote about him before I did, although they hardly note his Congregationalism.

But here is the work of an historian. I get to manufacture – some might say – new heroes. I get to rearrange the players on the stage of time. I might even get away with suggesting the heresy that proud and pompous New England could be changed by – of all things – a person from New Jersey! Can any good thing come out of Nazareth?

But finding Green was easy. I lament the others I can not find: the churches that closed, the illiterate heroes who could not write their stories, the Indian tribes whose culture and languages were destroyed by marauding Europeans, the slaves whose familial connections were obliterated by slave ship and evil trade.

That is perhaps why I get so excited about a book like Job. You ought to read it if you never have. Howard Dean got ridiculed in the Presidential election because he said that his favorite Bible book – Job – was in the New Testament. Some said that's about the typical amount of Bible knowledge you can expect from someone in the UCC. But I am happy that if Governor Dean forgot the index, he at least remembered the book. Better to have read it and to remember it, than to merely know where it is and never get its message.

Job is a book about a person who has become a failure. Now the contention of the book is that God loves and honors Job above all other earthlings. But Job falls into misery: poverty, illness, death of his loved ones. He is berated by maybe well-meaning "friends" who say he must have done something wrong. You know the type of person who says the successful are loved by God, the non-successful are sinners and reprobates? They make God into an historian: who always loves the winners.

But Job is this subversive, anti-historical book in that its main contention is that God loves the broken one, God loves the ill one, God loves the poverty-stricken one, God loves the lonely and mourning one. Indeed God loves the failure.

Now it is true that our modern book of Job has been put into a gold-painted picture-frame. The modern version has Job begin as rich, and in the end get all his riches back – a kind of reward for all his perseverance. Those that want to prove that riches and goodness go together have taken over the book. But read it in its original Hebrew, watch the nuance of language, and you will find that the vocabulary and writing style of the gold frame are not at all like the inner story. Someone tried to capture the book, and added the frame. Perhaps that's why it survived.

But inside this frame is this old picture that lifts up the lowly, that presents Job – this sore-covered, beaten, tragic figure, as the person who can talk directly to God, and even challenge heaven. It is a piece of anti-history that has survived into modern times.

Listen to the cry of Job, "Do not human beings have a hard service on earth? Are not their days like the day of the laborer?" Says Job "Like a slave who longs for the shadow, and like laborers who look for their wages, so I am…" Did the Pharaohs who built the pyramids ever write books about how the slaves in the hot sun prayed to be on the shadowy side, prayed for a cool spray to rise up from the Nile? Did the Southern aristocrats in their columned ante bellum mansions, ever know how the slave longed to be behind the shadow of a tree, where the slave master could not see them stretch, see them doze for a moment, see them briefly imagine freedom?

The slaves of the Nile and the cotton fields did not get to write their stories. So Job writes for them. Anti-history that lifts up the lowly. "Like the slave who longs for the shadow."

Job does not expect his story to last. He expects that "the eye that beholds me will see me no more;… I shall be gone." He expects to be forgotten in ignominy. Yet he challenges his fate. And somehow – even in the land of literature – there is a strange fate of resurrection. There is something about many of the Biblical books that denies history. You find it in Job, you find it in much of the Gospels, a bit in Isaiah. It is this sense of an old book that exalts the lowly, honors the oppressed, calls for food for the hungry. These are not the calls usually written in the Chronicles of the Kings and Queens. And yet they are there. Books loved because they are anti-history. Books loved because they resurrect the poor. Books loved because of the way that they challenge the powers that be.

Perhaps in our Ivy-league New England churches the reason that we have too often forgotten the Bible is that we are winners, shakers, movers, too often victors in the battles for prestige.

But understand what it was like to those first slaves – who illegally learned to read – and then came upon the story of Moses and the Exodus. Here is a book that says that God hears the cry of the slaves. Imagine if that is true!

Job tells us that he is like the laborers that look for their wages. Here is a Bible hero who is like the people in fast-food trying to live on the minimum wage. Here is a Bible hero who is like a seamstress in a sweatshop who is not sure how she will feed her family, much less spend time with them. Here is an asbestos worker, or a chemical worker, who is threatened without health care, and this person has a Bible hero. This person is the one the book of Job says is loved of God. Now tell me – is this the Bible that is loved by all the Bible-belt congress-people in Washington? Or do they look only at the gold-frame and not the inner story?

There is a poem my Marge Piercy entitled Contribution to Our Museum.1 Piercy says she "cannot worship ancestors" that you are likely to find in museums.

"All the tall ruffled ghosts
kept servants who pressed those linen shirts,
who murmur still in the carved and fitted stone
the life that was stolen from them."

"Always in the tidy fiefdoms of history taught
Louis on the guillotine is weighed in chapters
while fifty thousand peasants who starved
are penned in a textual note.
My folks were serfs, miners, factory women.
Their bent shoulders never bore the brocade in
those cases.
They did not embroider the gossip at Versailles.
They were not invited to hunt with the czarina."

Piercy goes on to rave against Mount Vernon, but to show love for the slave quarters. I am with her.

What is this all about? Partly an encouragement to read Job.

But more I want you to question history. But not only the history of textbooks and classrooms. Question the history being made for you by Fox News. Question the history being shoveled at you by talk radio and network anchors. And not the history they give on the occasional holiday when they make time for Lincoln or Vietnam. Question the current history. Whose story are you not hearing? Who has been left out of the conversation? Has someone tried to put a gold-frame around the reality of human misery?

Instead of believing the pabulum of the media, imagine resurrection literature. Imagine stories which say that the hero is the worker, the star is the sick person, the one blessed and loved by God had been maltreated in Iraq, in the Guard, and in the forlorn streets of Silver Lake.

Believe in subversive literature. Look for the inclusive historian. And listen to this advice from Piercy:

"The past leads to us if we force it to.
Otherwise it contains us
in its asylum with no gates.
We make history or it
makes us."

Amen.

1 – Piercy, Marge Contribution to Our Museum, (in Living in the Open, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1976) pp.74-75.