Difference between revisions of "Sermon for November 4th, 2012"
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==Happy Ending?== | ==Happy Ending?== | ||
| + | My favorite author, hands down, is John Steinbeck. It wasn't always that way--in my childhood it was Isaac Asimov and J.R.R. Tolkien. I still like them, but no one stirs my thoughts quite like John Steinbeck. The first time I read him, in high school, I thought I hated him (incidentally, I had that same reaction the first time I read John Calvin in seminary). I read Steinbeck's novel, "The Pearl" when I was about sixteen years old, and at the end of the novel, the main character has lost everything, has been utterly defeated, and there the novel ends. I was pretty ticked off. That's not how a good story is supposed to end. | ||
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| + | Years later, I taught Steinbeck to high school freshmen -- Of Mice and Men, Tortilla Flat, Grapes of Wrath, East of Eden -- and all of them pretty much follow the same pattern: Through the course of the novel, the main characters lose everything, get kicked around by life and the other characters in the novel, and have their hopes and dreams ripped out from underneath them. And that's usually where Steinbeck ends the novel. Usually at the end of the first Steinbeck novel we read together, my freshmen got really angry and thought they had been ripped off, cheated, or tricked somehow. By the second novel, they'd be asking how he ever got to be a bestseller, let alone winning the Nobel prize for literature. | ||
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| + | And then somewhere in the midst of the third novel...they began to understand. | ||
Revision as of 11:50, 3 November 2012
Job 42:1-6, 10-17
1Then Job answered the LORD: 2"I know that you can do all things, and that no purpose of yours can be thwarted. 3'Who is this that hides counsel without knowledge?' Therefore I have uttered what I did not understand, things too wonderful for me, which I did not know. 4'Hear, and I will speak; I will question you, and you declare to me.' 5I had heard of you by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees you; 6therefore I despise myself, and repent in dust and ashes." 10And the LORD restored the fortunes of Job when he had prayed for his friends; and the LORD gave Job twice as much as he had before. 11Then there came to him all his brothers and sisters and all who had known him before, and they ate bread with him in his house; they showed him sympathy and comforted him for all the evil that the LORD had brought upon him; and each of them gave him a piece of money and a gold ring. 12The LORD blessed the latter days of Job more than his beginning; and he had fourteen thousand sheep, six thousand camels, a thousand yoke of oxen, and a thousand donkeys. 13He also had seven sons and three daughters. 14He named the first Jemimah, the second Keziah, and the third Keren-happuch. 15In all the land there were no women so beautiful as Job's daughters; and their father gave them an inheritance along with their brothers. 16After this Job lived one hundred and forty years, and saw his children, and his children's children, four generations. 17And Job died, old and full of days.
Happy Ending?
My favorite author, hands down, is John Steinbeck. It wasn't always that way--in my childhood it was Isaac Asimov and J.R.R. Tolkien. I still like them, but no one stirs my thoughts quite like John Steinbeck. The first time I read him, in high school, I thought I hated him (incidentally, I had that same reaction the first time I read John Calvin in seminary). I read Steinbeck's novel, "The Pearl" when I was about sixteen years old, and at the end of the novel, the main character has lost everything, has been utterly defeated, and there the novel ends. I was pretty ticked off. That's not how a good story is supposed to end.
Years later, I taught Steinbeck to high school freshmen -- Of Mice and Men, Tortilla Flat, Grapes of Wrath, East of Eden -- and all of them pretty much follow the same pattern: Through the course of the novel, the main characters lose everything, get kicked around by life and the other characters in the novel, and have their hopes and dreams ripped out from underneath them. And that's usually where Steinbeck ends the novel. Usually at the end of the first Steinbeck novel we read together, my freshmen got really angry and thought they had been ripped off, cheated, or tricked somehow. By the second novel, they'd be asking how he ever got to be a bestseller, let alone winning the Nobel prize for literature.
And then somewhere in the midst of the third novel...they began to understand.
