Job 38:1-7, 34-41
This is now our third week hearing a passage from the Book of Job, so it's probably a good time to take a step back and review what happened to bring us to this incredible moment in chapter 37 when God responds to Job. When we first met Job, he was a faithful and righteous servant of God who also happened to have been blessed with land, wealth, good health, and a large family. After God gave the satan permission to test Job’s faith, Job lost everything: first his livestock, then his servants, then in one fell swoop, all ten of his children. When those losses didn’t shake Job’s faith, the satan took away his good health, causing Job to be covered with oozing, itching sores all over his body. At first, it looked like Job was going to persist in his faithfulness and integrity: “Shall we receive the good at the hand of God and not receive the bad?” he asked.
Still, Job was not immune to grief. He took a piece of broken pottery with which to scratch his sores and he sat upon a heap of ashes, where he received visits from three friends, each of whom wanted to offer Job some theological advice.
One commentator suggests that the book of Job establishes a theological triangle. In one corner we have the belief that God is good. In another corner is the belief that Job is righteous. In the third corner is the belief that God rewards the righteous and punishes the wicked. The problem is, these three beliefs cannot coexist; only two of them can be true at a time, and so the characters in the book of Job must choose. (1)
So, which two corners of the triangle did the friends choose? Well, they sincerely believe that God is good and that God rewards the righteous and punishes the wicked, so they reject the idea that Job is righteous. Like the politician who plays the role of strict moralist in public while engaging in distinctly immoral behavior in private, Job’s friends believe that Job must be covering up some secret that only God knows and that secret is the reason for Job’s suffering.
As we heard in last week’s passage, Job totally and completely rejects that argument. So which two points of the triangle does he affirm? Well, he knows he is righteous and he too believes that God rewards the righteous and punishes the wicked, so what Job rejects is the belief that God is good. God has let Job down in a huge way. In his suffering, Job has discovered a whole new side of God and there is nothing good about it in Job’s eyes. Some would say that Job almost commits blasphemy in the accusations he hurls at God; one scholar goes so far as to say that “by any meaning of the word blaspheme, Job blasphemes time and time again.” (2)
“God destroys both the righteous and the wicked,” Job declares, and God “mocks the calamity of the innocent.” He even insists that “the earth has been handed over to the wicked.” (Job 9:22-24). In spite of his blasphemy Job still wants nothing more than for God to show up and give Job an explanation. Job must harbor at least a sliver of hope that there is still a plausible explanation for everything that’s happened -- some explanation that will restore all three sides of that theological triangle. Job wants to hear that explanation...and he wants to hear it from God. Job is as desperate and determined as the husband standing outside the house of the man with whom his wife committed adultery, demanding that the man show his face and account for his actions.
Ever heard the expression “be careful what you wish for...”? Well, it could have been Job who coined that phrase because after all of Job’s raging and debating with his friends, after all his demands for God to offer an explanation, God finally shows up. And God proceeds, not to restore the corners of that triangle, but to throw the triangle out of play as easily as a grown man tossing a frisbee across a lawn.
“Who is this that darkens counsel by words without knowledge?” God thunders from the midst of a whirlwind. “Gird up your loins like a man...”
Now I know the language might seem a little outdated here, so let me make it very clear: God is calling Job out. That phrase: “gird up your loins like a man”? -- well, back when men wore long robes, you had to tuck your robe into your belt in order to engage in any physical activity. God is telling Job to “man up” and get ready for a fight. “You want a piece of me?” God is saying. “Then you’ve got it.”
And then God gets down to business, not fighting Job with jabs and left hooks, but with words. “I will question you,” God thunders, “And you shall declare to me.” Actually, Job isn’t going to declare much of anything, probably because, as any rational human being would be when God’s voice comes crashing around you from out of a whirlwind, Job was terrified.
Certainly it must have been terrifying, heart-stopping, panic-inducing, yes, to hear God’s voice as Job, but don’t you also think Job was relieved? I mean, he had been waiting a long time for God to offer him some explanation of his suffering and finally it looks like God has come to do just that. But when God speaks again -- and this speech continues way beyond what we heard today; it is nearly four chapters long -- God doesn’t say much of anything about Job at all, and certainly nothing that addresses Job’s suffering. Instead, God wants to talk about creation and to ask Job some rhetorical questions:
“Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?”
“Who determined its measurements...or who stretched the line upon it?...who laid its cornerstone?"
“Who has put wisdom in the inward parts or given understanding to the mind? Who has the wisdom to number the clouds? Who can tilt the waterskins of the heavens?”
As if to be sure no one misses God’s point, and least of all Job, those “who” questions alternate with “can you” questions:
“Can you lift up your voice to the clouds, so that a flood of waters may cover you?”
“Can you send forth lightnings?”
“Can you hunt the prey for the lion or satisfy the appetite of the young lions?”
Of course, the answers to these questions are clear: The “who” is none other than God, the creator of heaven and earth. And as far as whether Job can do any of those things, clearly the answer is “no.”
So, Job gets his wish: God shows up. But what are we to make of this speech that makes God seem, if we’re really honest, like a blustering, bragging bully?
Well, first of all, it seems obvious that God is making a point: Job and his friends don’t know what they are talking about when they try to explain why Job is suffering, any more than they can fathom or explain the complexities of creation. And God also wants Job to understand something else: much as his suffering has consumed him lately, the world simply isn’t all about Job. “Who, who, who...” God keeps asking. And the answer is not Job, it is never Job, the answer is God. And yes, it is the same God Job has worshipped and obeyed his whole life long, but as Job now learns, God is not who Job thought God was, not completely anyway.
When God shows up and responds to Job and his friends, God completely shatters any boxes -- or triangles -- they may have constructed to contain God. In his speech to Job, God shows that the human mind’s ability to understand Godis severely limited. There is simply no three-sided or four-sided or any-sided figure complex enough to explain or contain the God who created this entire universe out of what was once “a formless void” and who continues, every day, to sustain it (Genesis 1:2). And God makes clear to Job that although human beings enjoy a special relationship with God, we simply are not the center of the universe, nor are we the only creatures over which God feels a Maker’s rightful sense of pride and joy.
In this speech God strikes a final blow at Job: having lost everything but his firm belief in who God is, God ensures that Job now loses even that. But the most important thing in the book of Job is what happens in chapter 38: God shows up. God responds. And when this happens, when God enters the conversation, God restores Job’s relationship with God. That relationship does not return to what it was before Job’s suffering -- when something so life-altering happens as happened to Job there can never be a return to how things were before. Instead, their relationship is transformed. From this point on it will never be the same as before, but it will be no less real and significant to Job.
This week the New York Times ran a story about a military program called Operation Proper Exit. This program has taken two groups of wounded veterans of the Iraq war back to Iraq in the hope that returning them to the place they left either unconscious or in agonizing pain might help them achieve some degree of closure. Most of the returning veterans were amazed at the differences between the Iraq of today and the one they left years ago at the height of the fighting -- they were struck at the quiet, since there were no longer constant sounds of mortal shells exploding; they were also amazed that the most recently assigned regiment has so far not lost one soldier to the war. During their visit, a Command Major said to the veterans, “This is the new Iraq, and what you did here is part of that.” (3)
Obviously, returning to a more peaceful Iraq isn’t going to change the veterans’ memories of their time there, nor is it going to restore their lost limbs or instantly heal their psychological wounds. But it gives them new information about a place that deeply affected their lives. It gives them new experiences with that place beyond the violence and suffering that had been their most vivid memories. So far, studies have shown that Operation Proper Exit is helping the veterans who participate. Some report that their night terrors stopped completely; others that they finally felt free from the guilt they carried home. Returning to Iraq transformed their relationship with a place that will always be a part of them.
When God shows up to argue with Job, God clearly makes the point that human suffering is just one part of the complex and mysterious world God created. But the very fact that God shows up reveals to Job -- and to us -- that we human beings matter enough to God that God will show up, even one on one, even if it is to argue, even if it is to put us in our place and make sure we understand that God is God and we are not, that God’s ways are not our ways and cannot be explained by our logic.
Job doesn’t get an explanation from God. In fact, when God finally finishes his speech about creation, Job probably has more questions than answers. But he knows that God cares enough to make that speech to him, to be with him, to show up. The God who created the universe from nothing speaks to Job! And that act changes and restores Job’s relationship to God. His suffering is not taken away or explained, but still there is a change and that relationship which had seemed dead suddenly receives new life. All because God shows up.
There is a haiku by the sixteenth century Japanese poet Masahide which, I believe, perfectly expresses what happens to Job when his suffering causes him to question everything he thought he understood about God and then when God speaks directly to him, restoring their relationship and offering Job a new vision of God. I will end with Masahide’s words.
Barn’s burnt down
now
I can see the moon.
Endnotes:
1. Rolf Jacobsen, in the Working Preacher “Sermon Brainwave” podcast for June 21, 2009. http://www.workingpreacher.org/brainwave.aspx?podcast_id=71
2. John C. Holbert in the Working Preacher lectionary commentary for June 21, 2009, http://www.workingpreacher.org/preaching.aspx?lect_date=6/21/2009&tab=1.
3. Nordland, Rod, “Wounded Soldiers Return to Iraq, Seeking Solace,” The New York Times. Thursday, Oct. 15, section A1. The article can be found online here.
Thursday, October 22, 2009
Thursday, October 15, 2009
Unforgiveness
"Perhaps...there is a gap in all of us that remains essentially unbridgeable, a part of us that we cannot mend because it is a feature of our mortality to be without some degree of reconciliation. To be unforgiving almost seems inevitable, even natural, within a part of us."
~Kenneth Briggs, The Power of Forgiveness
"Forgiveness is a gift and if you don't have it don't pretend that you do."
~Thomas Moore, The Power of Forgiveness
For the last two weeks, we have gathered after worship to discuss forgiveness, both its elusive nature and its scientifically-documented effects on human health and well-being. This Sunday we are going to talk about unforgiveness. Clearly forgiveness is not a natural instinct for human beings; rather, we are quick to take offense and then seek revenge or hold a grudge. But are there offenses that actually justify our being unforgiving? Are there ways in which holding onto a sense of betrayal and resentment is actually a good, protective instinct? Does the Bible ever depict the gracious God we worship as unforgiving?
These are difficult questions with no easy answers, but I guarantee they will make for a fascinating discussion that will challenge and maybe even deepen your faith. Join us on Sunday in the sanctuary right after worship until 12noon.
See you in church!
~Kenneth Briggs, The Power of Forgiveness
"Forgiveness is a gift and if you don't have it don't pretend that you do."
~Thomas Moore, The Power of Forgiveness
For the last two weeks, we have gathered after worship to discuss forgiveness, both its elusive nature and its scientifically-documented effects on human health and well-being. This Sunday we are going to talk about unforgiveness. Clearly forgiveness is not a natural instinct for human beings; rather, we are quick to take offense and then seek revenge or hold a grudge. But are there offenses that actually justify our being unforgiving? Are there ways in which holding onto a sense of betrayal and resentment is actually a good, protective instinct? Does the Bible ever depict the gracious God we worship as unforgiving?
These are difficult questions with no easy answers, but I guarantee they will make for a fascinating discussion that will challenge and maybe even deepen your faith. Join us on Sunday in the sanctuary right after worship until 12noon.
See you in church!
The Presence of God's Absence (sermon, Oct. 11, 2009)
Job 23:1-9, 16-17
Throughout the Bible runs a common theme: God is with us. In Jesus Christ, who was God incarnate, we have the ultimate proof that God loves us and that God desires to be with us. We know this because God became human and walked among us, experiencing all the realities of life on earth. Because of the incarnation we may take comfort in God’s presence and know that God’s love is the most dependable aspect of our existence. In many ways we might think of this as a primarily New Testament theme, since the NT is devoted to the story of the incarnation. But it turns out the foundations for the theme God is with us were laid in the Old Testmant. Just listen to this portion of Psalm 139:
In the New Testament, apart from the gospels, which are devoted to the revelation of God on earth in human form, we read in Paul’s letter to the Romans, that nothing, “neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.” (Romans 8:38-39)
God is with us, in all things, in every circumstance. This belief is at the core of Christian theology.
What happens then, when the only thing we can discern about God is not presence, but absence? Well, those are the moments when we can be grateful the the Book of Job is also in the Bible.
Job presents the antithesis to those lines in Psalm 139 when he declares, “If I go forward, he is not there; or backward, I cannot perceive him; on the left he hides, and I cannot behold him; I turn to the right, but I cannot see him. God has made my heart faint; the Almighty has terrified me; If only I could vanish in darkness, and thick darkness would cover my face!” (Job 23:16-17)
When we left Job last week back in chapter 2, he was still an inspiration to us: “Shall we receive the good at the hand of God and not receive the bad?” he asked in the face of unimaginable grief and hardship. But now Job seems, not patient and resigned, but angry and frustrated. In one translation of chapter 23 verse 1, Job describes himself as “bitter”; in another translation as “rebellious.” Either way, this is not the Job we met in the early chapters of the book. What has happened to bring Job to this place?
What has happened between chapter 2 and 23 is that Job has had several visits from men who claim to be his friends. For twenty-five chapters, three of Job’s friends each get three chances to convince Job that the suffering he is experiencing must be the result of some sinful behavior in Job’s past. As one commentator puts it, “the friends argue backwards from Job’s suffering to his supposed unrighteousness; since Job is clearly suffering, he must have sinned in some way that has brought God’s punishment upon him.” And “his only way out is repentance.”(1)
The problem is, Job refuses to agree with his friends’ calculations, insisting over and over again that he has done nothing wrong, certainly nothing that could justify the punishment he has received at the hand of God. In today’s passage, Job is responding to his friend Eliphaz, who has argued that God has no use for human beings because, morally speaking, human beings are filled with wickedness. What Job needs to do to feel better, says Eliphaz, is receive his suffering as a gift from God, a gift that motivates Job to repent of his sin -- whether or not he knows what his sin is -- and be at peace with the all-powerful God who rewards the righteous and repentant.
Job has no patience for that argument. When he responds to Eliphaz he shows that he isn’t interested in whether God is all-powerful or loving or gracious to the righteous and repentant creature; what Job wants is a God who is present. And for Job, the primary reality of his existence at this point is that God is nowhere to be found. Job wants God to be present not just for the comfort he might find in God’s presence, but also so that Job could make his case to God, so that he could convince God that he truly has done nothing to deserve this. Job is having a “why me?” moment and he wants some answers from God.
Well, Job certainly isn’t the only human being in the world who has ever had such a moment of profound frustration and despair, when, just at the moment you need God the most, suddenly God is not there. You have no comforting sense of God’s presence and all the theological declarations in the world sound empty and trite. Surely most of us have had such moments. Hopefully they were short-lived, but if not, then it turns out we are in good company.
The book Psalms of Lament is a collection of fifty poems modeled after the psalms. Each of these poems was written by poet Ann Weems as she grieved the death of her son Todd, who was murdered just hours after his twenty-first birthday. In one of these psalms Weems challenges God with no less passion than Job:
In his book Surprised by Joy, British writer C.S. Lewis describes his unexpected conversion to Christianity at the age of 33. Even though he was raised in the church, Lewis proclaimed to be an atheist at age 15. He later described himself as a young person as having been “very angry with God for not existing.” I just love this quote, since how can you be angry with someone or something that does not exist? That anger itself, the very kind of anger Job expresses in today’s passage and Ann Weems proclaims in her poetry, presupposes the existence of God even if all that is perceived is God’s absence. But Lewis’ experience of God’s absence became even more profound many years after he converted to Christianity when his wife of four years died of cancer. A Grief Observed, Lewis’ book describing his grief, is so raw and honest that it’s no wonder that Lewis originally published it under a different name. Finally, after numerous friends recommended the book to him as one that might help with his grieving process, he decided to claim the work as his own. One of the most disturbing sections from the book describes his sense that God has completely abandoned him to his suffering.
“Meanwhile, where is God,” Lewis writes. “...go to Him when your need is desperate, when all other help is vain and what do you find? A door slammed in your face, and a sound of bolting and double bolting on the inside. After that, silence. You may as well turn away.” (3)
You’ll find this quote in its entirety in the inside of your bulletin today. When our church secretary, Carol, brought me a draft of the bulletin to proofread, she asked, “Is that quote right? It just seems, so, so...” She didn’t finish her sentence, but she didn’t have to. It seems awful at best, downright heretical at worst. It certainly isn’t a quote that you’d take home and stick on the refrigerator or the bathroom mirror. But I wanted that quote in the bulletin because it’s true. It is a reflection of an experience that most of us are likely to have at some point in our lives and when that experience happens to you, when you feel like God has left the scene and slammed the door in your face on the way out, I want you to know that you are not alone. Job, Ann Weems, C.S. Lewis and countless unnamed people of faith have had these moments too, when they felt only the chilling, disorienting, unnerving presence of God’s absence. The gospel of Mark even suggests that Jesus had such a moment as he hung dying on the cross when he shouted out -- as his last words! -- “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
Such questions, such experiences of God’s absence do not prove our lack of faith. And there is no “right” way to respond to such experiences. But I want to offer you a few options if and when you find yourself in the depths of despair, when the thing that seems most real to you is not the presence of God but God’s absence.
The first option is the one that Job and Ann Weems and C.S. Lewis each demonstrate: let God have it. One of the gifts of the book of Job is that is shows us an example of faithful anger toward God. Job is not walking away from God and abandoning his faith; he is challenging God as an expression of his faith and in that, he is gaining a maturity of faith that can only be won through suffering. We can do the same thing in our moments of suffering, whether our anger is spoken or written or shouted to the night.
A second option is the opposite of the first. Instead of expressing your anger at God, retreat instead to a place of expectant quiet. “Be still and know that I am God,” writes the psalmist (Psalm 46:10). Especially in Job’s case, he wants God to be present to him so that he can argue with God about whether or not he deserved the suffering that had been heaped upon him. Job wants God to show up in the courtroom and hear the facts of the case. But God is not just a judge or arbiter, and perhaps that’s why Job’s experience of God’s absence was so profound here: because God refused to show up and be what Job wanted God to be. The psalm doesn’t just tell us to be still, but to be still with our knowledge, our faith that, whether we feel it or not, God is with us in all things. Sometimes in the face of suffering we may find that silence is the only acceptable option.
To explain the third option, I’m going to tell you the story of a woman whose experience of God’s absence did not last for just a moment or a particularly dark season, but for most of her adult life. That woman was Mother Teresa, who devoted her life to the poor and dying of India. Most of us probably think she was “a God-intoxicated saint,” as one writer put it, but after Mother Teresa died in 1997, letters she had sent to spiritual directors over the years painted a very different picture. Although she experienced a profound union with Christ and had visions of him that prompted her to go to work on the streets of India and to create the Missionaries of Charity, from 1947 until her death -- fifty years! -- she experienced a spiritual darkness, a true dark night of the soul. She wrote that she had intense feelings of doubt, loneliness, and abandonment; she had no sense of God’s presence, only an awareness of “just that terrible pain of loss, of God not wanting me, of God not being God, of God not really existing.” (4)
And yet, in the face of that emptiness, Mother Teresa neither challenged God in anger nor did she wait in silence for God’s return. Instead, she “deal[t] with her trial of faith by converting her feeling of abandonment by God into an act of abandonment to God.” (5) In other words, she abandoned herself to the work to which she knew Christ had called her, the work of loving and serving Christ in every person, no matter how poor or sick. Her faithfulness was revealed in the very fact that for fifty years she labored for Christ, fulfilling her vows as a nun and her personal vow to Christ to serve the poor, in spite of the fact that she herself had no subjective experience of God’s presence.
Although an experience of God’s absence is something that almost every person of faith confronts at some point, our responses to that experience will all be different. There is not one “right” way to respond, and if Job’s unhelpful friends teach us anything it is that we should be very careful what we say to someone who is in the midst of suffering. But may we all remember in these moments, whether we respond through silence, anger, or by abandoning ourselves to God’s work, may we remember that even when the only thing real to us about God is God’s absence, we are not alone. We are in the company of many people, from Job to Jesus to Mother Teresa to countless unnamed souls, who confronted and endured their suffering with honesty and integrity and, yes, with faith. May we find the strength to do the same. Amen.
Endnotes:
1. Throntveit, Mark A. Feasting on the Word, Year B, Vol. 4, Westminster John Knox, 2009, p. 151.
2. Weems, Ann, Psalms of Lament. Westminster John Knox, 1995, p. 14.
3. Lewis, C.S., A Grief Observed. HarperOne, 2001.
4. First Things magazine, “The Dark Night of Mother Teresa” by Carol Zaleski, May 2003 Issue.
(http://www.firstthings.com/article/2007/08/the-dark-night-of-mother-teresa-42)
5. Ibid.
Throughout the Bible runs a common theme: God is with us. In Jesus Christ, who was God incarnate, we have the ultimate proof that God loves us and that God desires to be with us. We know this because God became human and walked among us, experiencing all the realities of life on earth. Because of the incarnation we may take comfort in God’s presence and know that God’s love is the most dependable aspect of our existence. In many ways we might think of this as a primarily New Testament theme, since the NT is devoted to the story of the incarnation. But it turns out the foundations for the theme God is with us were laid in the Old Testmant. Just listen to this portion of Psalm 139:
O Lord, you have searched me and known me.
You know when I sit down and when I rise up;
you discern my thoughts from far away...
Where can I go from your spirit?
Or where can I flee from your presence?
If I ascend to heaven, you are there;
if I make my bed in Sheol, you are there.
If I take the wings of the morning
and settle at the farthest limits of the sea,
even there your hand shall lead me,
and your right hand shall hold me fast.
If I say, ‘Surely the darkness shall cover me,
and the light around me become night’,
even the darkness is not dark to you;
the night is as bright as the day,
for darkness is as light to you.
(Psalm 139:1-2, 7-12)
You know when I sit down and when I rise up;
you discern my thoughts from far away...
Where can I go from your spirit?
Or where can I flee from your presence?
If I ascend to heaven, you are there;
if I make my bed in Sheol, you are there.
If I take the wings of the morning
and settle at the farthest limits of the sea,
even there your hand shall lead me,
and your right hand shall hold me fast.
If I say, ‘Surely the darkness shall cover me,
and the light around me become night’,
even the darkness is not dark to you;
the night is as bright as the day,
for darkness is as light to you.
(Psalm 139:1-2, 7-12)
In the New Testament, apart from the gospels, which are devoted to the revelation of God on earth in human form, we read in Paul’s letter to the Romans, that nothing, “neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.” (Romans 8:38-39)
God is with us, in all things, in every circumstance. This belief is at the core of Christian theology.
What happens then, when the only thing we can discern about God is not presence, but absence? Well, those are the moments when we can be grateful the the Book of Job is also in the Bible.
Job presents the antithesis to those lines in Psalm 139 when he declares, “If I go forward, he is not there; or backward, I cannot perceive him; on the left he hides, and I cannot behold him; I turn to the right, but I cannot see him. God has made my heart faint; the Almighty has terrified me; If only I could vanish in darkness, and thick darkness would cover my face!” (Job 23:16-17)
When we left Job last week back in chapter 2, he was still an inspiration to us: “Shall we receive the good at the hand of God and not receive the bad?” he asked in the face of unimaginable grief and hardship. But now Job seems, not patient and resigned, but angry and frustrated. In one translation of chapter 23 verse 1, Job describes himself as “bitter”; in another translation as “rebellious.” Either way, this is not the Job we met in the early chapters of the book. What has happened to bring Job to this place?
What has happened between chapter 2 and 23 is that Job has had several visits from men who claim to be his friends. For twenty-five chapters, three of Job’s friends each get three chances to convince Job that the suffering he is experiencing must be the result of some sinful behavior in Job’s past. As one commentator puts it, “the friends argue backwards from Job’s suffering to his supposed unrighteousness; since Job is clearly suffering, he must have sinned in some way that has brought God’s punishment upon him.” And “his only way out is repentance.”(1)
The problem is, Job refuses to agree with his friends’ calculations, insisting over and over again that he has done nothing wrong, certainly nothing that could justify the punishment he has received at the hand of God. In today’s passage, Job is responding to his friend Eliphaz, who has argued that God has no use for human beings because, morally speaking, human beings are filled with wickedness. What Job needs to do to feel better, says Eliphaz, is receive his suffering as a gift from God, a gift that motivates Job to repent of his sin -- whether or not he knows what his sin is -- and be at peace with the all-powerful God who rewards the righteous and repentant.
Job has no patience for that argument. When he responds to Eliphaz he shows that he isn’t interested in whether God is all-powerful or loving or gracious to the righteous and repentant creature; what Job wants is a God who is present. And for Job, the primary reality of his existence at this point is that God is nowhere to be found. Job wants God to be present not just for the comfort he might find in God’s presence, but also so that Job could make his case to God, so that he could convince God that he truly has done nothing to deserve this. Job is having a “why me?” moment and he wants some answers from God.
Well, Job certainly isn’t the only human being in the world who has ever had such a moment of profound frustration and despair, when, just at the moment you need God the most, suddenly God is not there. You have no comforting sense of God’s presence and all the theological declarations in the world sound empty and trite. Surely most of us have had such moments. Hopefully they were short-lived, but if not, then it turns out we are in good company.
The book Psalms of Lament is a collection of fifty poems modeled after the psalms. Each of these poems was written by poet Ann Weems as she grieved the death of her son Todd, who was murdered just hours after his twenty-first birthday. In one of these psalms Weems challenges God with no less passion than Job:
God, have you forgotten our covenant?
Have you forgotten your promise?
Can’t you enter my world of tears?
Can’t you make your home
in a heart that is broken?
O God, acknowledge that
you hear my cry!
Send word that you
are on the way!
Answer me so that
I can cling to some hope
of your presence,
for I have believed
that you would come. (2)
Have you forgotten your promise?
Can’t you enter my world of tears?
Can’t you make your home
in a heart that is broken?
O God, acknowledge that
you hear my cry!
Send word that you
are on the way!
Answer me so that
I can cling to some hope
of your presence,
for I have believed
that you would come. (2)
In his book Surprised by Joy, British writer C.S. Lewis describes his unexpected conversion to Christianity at the age of 33. Even though he was raised in the church, Lewis proclaimed to be an atheist at age 15. He later described himself as a young person as having been “very angry with God for not existing.” I just love this quote, since how can you be angry with someone or something that does not exist? That anger itself, the very kind of anger Job expresses in today’s passage and Ann Weems proclaims in her poetry, presupposes the existence of God even if all that is perceived is God’s absence. But Lewis’ experience of God’s absence became even more profound many years after he converted to Christianity when his wife of four years died of cancer. A Grief Observed, Lewis’ book describing his grief, is so raw and honest that it’s no wonder that Lewis originally published it under a different name. Finally, after numerous friends recommended the book to him as one that might help with his grieving process, he decided to claim the work as his own. One of the most disturbing sections from the book describes his sense that God has completely abandoned him to his suffering.
“Meanwhile, where is God,” Lewis writes. “...go to Him when your need is desperate, when all other help is vain and what do you find? A door slammed in your face, and a sound of bolting and double bolting on the inside. After that, silence. You may as well turn away.” (3)
You’ll find this quote in its entirety in the inside of your bulletin today. When our church secretary, Carol, brought me a draft of the bulletin to proofread, she asked, “Is that quote right? It just seems, so, so...” She didn’t finish her sentence, but she didn’t have to. It seems awful at best, downright heretical at worst. It certainly isn’t a quote that you’d take home and stick on the refrigerator or the bathroom mirror. But I wanted that quote in the bulletin because it’s true. It is a reflection of an experience that most of us are likely to have at some point in our lives and when that experience happens to you, when you feel like God has left the scene and slammed the door in your face on the way out, I want you to know that you are not alone. Job, Ann Weems, C.S. Lewis and countless unnamed people of faith have had these moments too, when they felt only the chilling, disorienting, unnerving presence of God’s absence. The gospel of Mark even suggests that Jesus had such a moment as he hung dying on the cross when he shouted out -- as his last words! -- “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
Such questions, such experiences of God’s absence do not prove our lack of faith. And there is no “right” way to respond to such experiences. But I want to offer you a few options if and when you find yourself in the depths of despair, when the thing that seems most real to you is not the presence of God but God’s absence.
The first option is the one that Job and Ann Weems and C.S. Lewis each demonstrate: let God have it. One of the gifts of the book of Job is that is shows us an example of faithful anger toward God. Job is not walking away from God and abandoning his faith; he is challenging God as an expression of his faith and in that, he is gaining a maturity of faith that can only be won through suffering. We can do the same thing in our moments of suffering, whether our anger is spoken or written or shouted to the night.
A second option is the opposite of the first. Instead of expressing your anger at God, retreat instead to a place of expectant quiet. “Be still and know that I am God,” writes the psalmist (Psalm 46:10). Especially in Job’s case, he wants God to be present to him so that he can argue with God about whether or not he deserved the suffering that had been heaped upon him. Job wants God to show up in the courtroom and hear the facts of the case. But God is not just a judge or arbiter, and perhaps that’s why Job’s experience of God’s absence was so profound here: because God refused to show up and be what Job wanted God to be. The psalm doesn’t just tell us to be still, but to be still with our knowledge, our faith that, whether we feel it or not, God is with us in all things. Sometimes in the face of suffering we may find that silence is the only acceptable option.
To explain the third option, I’m going to tell you the story of a woman whose experience of God’s absence did not last for just a moment or a particularly dark season, but for most of her adult life. That woman was Mother Teresa, who devoted her life to the poor and dying of India. Most of us probably think she was “a God-intoxicated saint,” as one writer put it, but after Mother Teresa died in 1997, letters she had sent to spiritual directors over the years painted a very different picture. Although she experienced a profound union with Christ and had visions of him that prompted her to go to work on the streets of India and to create the Missionaries of Charity, from 1947 until her death -- fifty years! -- she experienced a spiritual darkness, a true dark night of the soul. She wrote that she had intense feelings of doubt, loneliness, and abandonment; she had no sense of God’s presence, only an awareness of “just that terrible pain of loss, of God not wanting me, of God not being God, of God not really existing.” (4)
And yet, in the face of that emptiness, Mother Teresa neither challenged God in anger nor did she wait in silence for God’s return. Instead, she “deal[t] with her trial of faith by converting her feeling of abandonment by God into an act of abandonment to God.” (5) In other words, she abandoned herself to the work to which she knew Christ had called her, the work of loving and serving Christ in every person, no matter how poor or sick. Her faithfulness was revealed in the very fact that for fifty years she labored for Christ, fulfilling her vows as a nun and her personal vow to Christ to serve the poor, in spite of the fact that she herself had no subjective experience of God’s presence.
Although an experience of God’s absence is something that almost every person of faith confronts at some point, our responses to that experience will all be different. There is not one “right” way to respond, and if Job’s unhelpful friends teach us anything it is that we should be very careful what we say to someone who is in the midst of suffering. But may we all remember in these moments, whether we respond through silence, anger, or by abandoning ourselves to God’s work, may we remember that even when the only thing real to us about God is God’s absence, we are not alone. We are in the company of many people, from Job to Jesus to Mother Teresa to countless unnamed souls, who confronted and endured their suffering with honesty and integrity and, yes, with faith. May we find the strength to do the same. Amen.
Endnotes:
1. Throntveit, Mark A. Feasting on the Word, Year B, Vol. 4, Westminster John Knox, 2009, p. 151.
2. Weems, Ann, Psalms of Lament. Westminster John Knox, 1995, p. 14.
3. Lewis, C.S., A Grief Observed. HarperOne, 2001.
4. First Things magazine, “The Dark Night of Mother Teresa” by Carol Zaleski, May 2003 Issue.
(http://www.firstthings.com/article/2007/08/the-dark-night-of-mother-teresa-42)
5. Ibid.
Wednesday, October 7, 2009
The Dilemma of Faith (sermon, Oct. 4, 2009)
Job 1:1, 2:1-10
In his book The Perfect Storm, Sebastian Junger tells the true story of a fishing boat called the Andrea Gail during the 1991 “storm of the century.” The Andrea Gail was a seventy-two-foot fishing vessel from Massachusetts with an experienced crew that had faced many bad storms, but this storm was simply more than it could handle. And the storm was totally unpredictable. Meteorologists had been keeping an eye on a hurricane moving north from the Caribbean, but it had headed out to sea, no longer a danger -- or so they thought. No one expected that when the remnants of the hurricane combined with an offshore Atlantic storm the results would be disastrous, not just for the Andrea Gail, but also for the whole peninsula of Massachusetts known as Cape Ann. Aboard the Andrea Gail, the crew reported that one minute the seas were calm with light winds; then the water started to boil and the clouds blew in and a storm began to rage with an intensity that rendered even experienced sailors and a solid ship helpless.
It’s a fact of physics that if a boat faces a wave taller than the boat is long, it will get turned end over end to its doom. Well, in this storm, the Andrea Gail encountered waves one hundred feet high, and when that happened, the ship and its crew were cast deep into the sea.
In the opening chapters of the book of Job, we meet a man whose life is decimated by a perfect storm of tragic events. In the portion of chapter one we didn’t hear today, we find out that Job is a rich man. And Job is not just rich in material things, like land, property, livestock, and the servants to take care of these things; he is also rich in family -- he has ten beautiful children, seven sons and three daughters.
But Job is not one of those rich men who take all the credit for themselves; in spite of his material and familial wealth, Job is righteous. He is a man of integrity. As we heard in chapter one, verse one, he is blameless and upright, one who fears God and turns away from evil.
Like the sailors of the Andrea Gail, Job was going about his daily life and the weather looked fine. Little did he know a colossal storm was brewing.
For the next few weeks, I am going to be preaching from the Book of Job. Now I hesitate to even admit that for fear that you’ll all take this opportunity to take a little break from church for several Sundays. I really hope you won’t do that. Although the Book of Job is one of the most challenging books of the Bible, it is also a book that is incredibly relevant to the challenges of maintaining an honest and tenacious faith in the face of the realities of daily life.
So, as we work out way through the book of Job over the next few weeks, we need to keep something in mind. The Book of Job is in the tradition of what is called “Wisdom literature,” which includes the books of Ecclesiastes. Scholars believe that these books were written and included in the Hebrew Bible to challenge the prevailing view in the rest of the Old Testament that people who follow God’s laws will be blessed by God. In other words, the Book of Job challenges this notion that our relationship with God is conditional, that we have to earn God’s love and blessing through righteousness and obedience.
So, back to Job who is going about his life while, unbeknownst to him, the storm of the century is headed his way. As we read the beginning of this book, we find out something that Job doesn’t know: the storm that’s coming his way is the result of a wager between God and a character called “the satan.”
I added that little word “the” in front of “Satan” when I read the Bible passage o for two reasons: First, that word is there in the Hebrew. In the original language of the Bible, what’s written is “the satan.” Second, putting the word “the” in front of “satan” helps us remember that this being, this satan, is not God’s equal. Is is only much later that we begin to refer to and think of Satan as God’s counterpart, nearly equal to God in power but evil where God is good. The satan, the one referred to here, is simply an office holder, like the district attorney. The satan is one of the heavenly beings, like the angels, who throughout the Bible visit God’s people to deliver good and bad news. The job of these heavenly beings is to do God’s bidding. The office of the satan is basically that of a prosecuting attorney, one who wanders the earth and reports back to God on how things are going. In other words, the satan is under God’s control and does God’s says.
For many people, perhaps the most disturbing, unnerving part of the Book of Job is that God is willing to allow someone called “the satan” to test Job. Is God really so cruel? Are we really just pawns in a cosmic game? God brags to the satan about Job’s faithfulness, but the satan just laughs. “Of course he’s faithful,” the satan says. “You’ve blessed him with everything a man could want. You can’t really know he’s faithful unless you take it away.” In other words, the satan points out to God that until Job has really known suffering, God can’t know whether Job’s faith is genuine or whether he simply believes in what’s now called “the gospel of prosperity,” the belief that if we are faithful and obedient to God then God will reward us.
In the first chapter, as in today’s passage, God gives the satan power to do whatever he wants to Job, except for one thing, God draws the line at inflicting illness or death on Job. And so, in a series of “perfect storm”-type accidents, Job loses his servants, his livestock, and his ten children all in the same day.
And yet Job persists in his faithfulness. “The Lord gave and the Lord has taken away,” he says. Which brings us to chapter 2, when God gives the satan permission to inflict Job personally after the satan tells God that plenty of people could deal with a tragedy that doesn’t involve their own flesh and bones. The satan inflicts Job with a vengeance, causing Job’s body to erupt in painful, itchy sores from head to toe. No wonder his wife tells him to curse God and die. It seems to most of us not the response of a so-called “foolish woman,” but in fact the only sane response to tragedy of that magnitude. In the face of the kind of grief and pain and anguish that Job and his wife must have been feeling, we can imagine that even death might have looked better than the suffering they faced.
Job’s response is simply this: “Shall we receive the good at the hand of God and not receive the bad?”
And with those words we see that, remarkably, surprisingly, that tidal wave of suffering the satan inflicts on Job is in fact not enough to send Job’s boat end over end to the bottom of the sea of despair and faithlessness. Job is not a follower of the gospel of prosperity. This rhetorical question Job flings at his wife not only reveals the depth of his faith, it reveals for all of us the central dilemma of faith itself. Because there is, of course, a danger to faith, and that danger is that we see faith as a means to an end...the end being to receive the blessings of God throughout our lives, right up to when we’re ushered through the pearly gates of heaven where we’ll spend eternity in a realm where we’re always happy, no one fights, food is forever available and we never have to cook or clean up. It happens to the best of us that from time to time we slip into thinking that the goal of faith is to earn a spot on what amounts to the best cruise ship ever.
In these opening chapters, Job reminds us of something we’d really rather not be reminded of: that faith cannot simply be about receiving God’s blessings or earning some heavenly reward. God tells the satan that Job is a man of “integrity.” Well, the root of the word integrity in Hebrew is a word that means “complete” or “whole.” And, in fact, it turns out that integrity is precisely what Job has because his faith is not one-sided or one-dimensional; he does not subscribe to the gospel of prosperity; instead, Job possesses a genuine faith that acknowledges that if God is truly Lord of heaven and earth, if everything he has and everything he is comes from God, then that really means everything: all the goodness and beauty but also the tragedy and the suffering too.
God created this world in which animals must kill other animals to survive, in which the human body is vulnerable to all kinds of bacteria and viruses, in which people of different countries and tribes kill one another over land and political differences, in which people suffer unimaginable losses both at the hands of fellow human beings and as a result of natural disasters. We do not live in a one-dimensional world and so if we possess only a one-dimensional faith then it will not take a very big storm to capsize us.
The book of Job is not a book that provides easy answers. Actually, it is not a book that provides answers at all. So this sermon will not provide answers either. Instead, I urge you to take some time this week, perhaps especially when you are confronted with whatever it is in your life right now that feels like an unending, increasingly threatening storm, take some time to think about this question: “Shall we receive the good at the hand of God and not receive the bad?” And maybe even take that question one step further and ask yourself this: if you could take all the bad things in your life: the illness, the loss, the pain -- and put it beside all the good things in your life: the love, the joys, the hope, the wonder -- would you trade away the good if it meant you wouldn’t have the bad? Because without one, you cannot have the other. In fact, without one, I’m not sure we could really appreciate the other. After all, how can we know what is “good” if we do not know what is “bad”? To be sure, tragedy wounds us, harms us, leaves us forever changed; but one of the ways tragedy changes us is to give us the capacity to appreciate what is meaningful and important in our lives.
Ruth Picardie was a British journalist who died from breast cancer at age thirty-four. When she died, she had been happily married for several years and had twins who were barely two years old. She and her husband had spent two years trying to get pregnant and ultimately conceived through in vitro fertilization, which Ruth later learned accelerated her cancer. But, she said, her children were the meaning of her life. Would she have traded them in order to delay her cancer and extend her life -- a life without her children?
Accepting that we must receive both the good and the bad at the hand of God does not mean that we should see tragedy as inevitable or as some kind of gift from God that shapes our faith and reminds us of what is important. The world is not as it should be and while the Creator God bears some responsibility in that, we humans bear responsibility too, and so if we are to be Christians of integrity, followers of Jesus that see the whole picture, then we must still do what we can to work for peace and justice and to stand beside our brothers and sisters who are in the midst of deepest sorrow and despair. Job’s refusal to give up in the face of his personal tragedy is ultimately an expression of his “genuine and life-giving relationship with God.”1 Expressing our faith while asserting that all is not right in our lives or in the world does not diminish our faith, it reveals the many dimensions and complexities of it.
Today is World Communion Sunday, which means that people all over the world are going to come to the Lord’s table and enjoy the feast that we call communion. This sounds like a quaint thing, but it’s not. Communion is one of the primary ways we proclaim our belief that on this side of heaven, things are not as they should be, but that somewhere, in God’s kingdom, there is peace and justice and deep, abiding joy. On World Communion Sunday we join with our brothers and sisters around the globe and acknowledge that all is not right in the world, that too many people experience an imbalance of good and bad, and that those of us who have known so much good must work on behalf of those who have known so much bad. Today we receive together the gifts that God offers to all people -- gifts of bread and wine, which represent God’s own self given so that we might know and practice God’s love throughout the world. Today, may we receive these gifts in a spirit of hope and in a spirit of service that even as we acknowledge the suffering in the world, suffering exemplified by Job, we also acknowledge the goodness in the world, goodness exemplified by the self-sacrifice of Jesus Christ, a sacrifice we receive personally and communally when we gather around this table. And as we do may we keep in mind Job’s question: “shall we receive the good at the hand of God and not receive the bad?” Amen.
In his book The Perfect Storm, Sebastian Junger tells the true story of a fishing boat called the Andrea Gail during the 1991 “storm of the century.” The Andrea Gail was a seventy-two-foot fishing vessel from Massachusetts with an experienced crew that had faced many bad storms, but this storm was simply more than it could handle. And the storm was totally unpredictable. Meteorologists had been keeping an eye on a hurricane moving north from the Caribbean, but it had headed out to sea, no longer a danger -- or so they thought. No one expected that when the remnants of the hurricane combined with an offshore Atlantic storm the results would be disastrous, not just for the Andrea Gail, but also for the whole peninsula of Massachusetts known as Cape Ann. Aboard the Andrea Gail, the crew reported that one minute the seas were calm with light winds; then the water started to boil and the clouds blew in and a storm began to rage with an intensity that rendered even experienced sailors and a solid ship helpless.
It’s a fact of physics that if a boat faces a wave taller than the boat is long, it will get turned end over end to its doom. Well, in this storm, the Andrea Gail encountered waves one hundred feet high, and when that happened, the ship and its crew were cast deep into the sea.
*****
In the opening chapters of the book of Job, we meet a man whose life is decimated by a perfect storm of tragic events. In the portion of chapter one we didn’t hear today, we find out that Job is a rich man. And Job is not just rich in material things, like land, property, livestock, and the servants to take care of these things; he is also rich in family -- he has ten beautiful children, seven sons and three daughters.
But Job is not one of those rich men who take all the credit for themselves; in spite of his material and familial wealth, Job is righteous. He is a man of integrity. As we heard in chapter one, verse one, he is blameless and upright, one who fears God and turns away from evil.
Like the sailors of the Andrea Gail, Job was going about his daily life and the weather looked fine. Little did he know a colossal storm was brewing.
For the next few weeks, I am going to be preaching from the Book of Job. Now I hesitate to even admit that for fear that you’ll all take this opportunity to take a little break from church for several Sundays. I really hope you won’t do that. Although the Book of Job is one of the most challenging books of the Bible, it is also a book that is incredibly relevant to the challenges of maintaining an honest and tenacious faith in the face of the realities of daily life.
So, as we work out way through the book of Job over the next few weeks, we need to keep something in mind. The Book of Job is in the tradition of what is called “Wisdom literature,” which includes the books of Ecclesiastes. Scholars believe that these books were written and included in the Hebrew Bible to challenge the prevailing view in the rest of the Old Testament that people who follow God’s laws will be blessed by God. In other words, the Book of Job challenges this notion that our relationship with God is conditional, that we have to earn God’s love and blessing through righteousness and obedience.
So, back to Job who is going about his life while, unbeknownst to him, the storm of the century is headed his way. As we read the beginning of this book, we find out something that Job doesn’t know: the storm that’s coming his way is the result of a wager between God and a character called “the satan.”
I added that little word “the” in front of “Satan” when I read the Bible passage o for two reasons: First, that word is there in the Hebrew. In the original language of the Bible, what’s written is “the satan.” Second, putting the word “the” in front of “satan” helps us remember that this being, this satan, is not God’s equal. Is is only much later that we begin to refer to and think of Satan as God’s counterpart, nearly equal to God in power but evil where God is good. The satan, the one referred to here, is simply an office holder, like the district attorney. The satan is one of the heavenly beings, like the angels, who throughout the Bible visit God’s people to deliver good and bad news. The job of these heavenly beings is to do God’s bidding. The office of the satan is basically that of a prosecuting attorney, one who wanders the earth and reports back to God on how things are going. In other words, the satan is under God’s control and does God’s says.
For many people, perhaps the most disturbing, unnerving part of the Book of Job is that God is willing to allow someone called “the satan” to test Job. Is God really so cruel? Are we really just pawns in a cosmic game? God brags to the satan about Job’s faithfulness, but the satan just laughs. “Of course he’s faithful,” the satan says. “You’ve blessed him with everything a man could want. You can’t really know he’s faithful unless you take it away.” In other words, the satan points out to God that until Job has really known suffering, God can’t know whether Job’s faith is genuine or whether he simply believes in what’s now called “the gospel of prosperity,” the belief that if we are faithful and obedient to God then God will reward us.
In the first chapter, as in today’s passage, God gives the satan power to do whatever he wants to Job, except for one thing, God draws the line at inflicting illness or death on Job. And so, in a series of “perfect storm”-type accidents, Job loses his servants, his livestock, and his ten children all in the same day.
And yet Job persists in his faithfulness. “The Lord gave and the Lord has taken away,” he says. Which brings us to chapter 2, when God gives the satan permission to inflict Job personally after the satan tells God that plenty of people could deal with a tragedy that doesn’t involve their own flesh and bones. The satan inflicts Job with a vengeance, causing Job’s body to erupt in painful, itchy sores from head to toe. No wonder his wife tells him to curse God and die. It seems to most of us not the response of a so-called “foolish woman,” but in fact the only sane response to tragedy of that magnitude. In the face of the kind of grief and pain and anguish that Job and his wife must have been feeling, we can imagine that even death might have looked better than the suffering they faced.
Job’s response is simply this: “Shall we receive the good at the hand of God and not receive the bad?”
And with those words we see that, remarkably, surprisingly, that tidal wave of suffering the satan inflicts on Job is in fact not enough to send Job’s boat end over end to the bottom of the sea of despair and faithlessness. Job is not a follower of the gospel of prosperity. This rhetorical question Job flings at his wife not only reveals the depth of his faith, it reveals for all of us the central dilemma of faith itself. Because there is, of course, a danger to faith, and that danger is that we see faith as a means to an end...the end being to receive the blessings of God throughout our lives, right up to when we’re ushered through the pearly gates of heaven where we’ll spend eternity in a realm where we’re always happy, no one fights, food is forever available and we never have to cook or clean up. It happens to the best of us that from time to time we slip into thinking that the goal of faith is to earn a spot on what amounts to the best cruise ship ever.
In these opening chapters, Job reminds us of something we’d really rather not be reminded of: that faith cannot simply be about receiving God’s blessings or earning some heavenly reward. God tells the satan that Job is a man of “integrity.” Well, the root of the word integrity in Hebrew is a word that means “complete” or “whole.” And, in fact, it turns out that integrity is precisely what Job has because his faith is not one-sided or one-dimensional; he does not subscribe to the gospel of prosperity; instead, Job possesses a genuine faith that acknowledges that if God is truly Lord of heaven and earth, if everything he has and everything he is comes from God, then that really means everything: all the goodness and beauty but also the tragedy and the suffering too.
God created this world in which animals must kill other animals to survive, in which the human body is vulnerable to all kinds of bacteria and viruses, in which people of different countries and tribes kill one another over land and political differences, in which people suffer unimaginable losses both at the hands of fellow human beings and as a result of natural disasters. We do not live in a one-dimensional world and so if we possess only a one-dimensional faith then it will not take a very big storm to capsize us.
The book of Job is not a book that provides easy answers. Actually, it is not a book that provides answers at all. So this sermon will not provide answers either. Instead, I urge you to take some time this week, perhaps especially when you are confronted with whatever it is in your life right now that feels like an unending, increasingly threatening storm, take some time to think about this question: “Shall we receive the good at the hand of God and not receive the bad?” And maybe even take that question one step further and ask yourself this: if you could take all the bad things in your life: the illness, the loss, the pain -- and put it beside all the good things in your life: the love, the joys, the hope, the wonder -- would you trade away the good if it meant you wouldn’t have the bad? Because without one, you cannot have the other. In fact, without one, I’m not sure we could really appreciate the other. After all, how can we know what is “good” if we do not know what is “bad”? To be sure, tragedy wounds us, harms us, leaves us forever changed; but one of the ways tragedy changes us is to give us the capacity to appreciate what is meaningful and important in our lives.
Ruth Picardie was a British journalist who died from breast cancer at age thirty-four. When she died, she had been happily married for several years and had twins who were barely two years old. She and her husband had spent two years trying to get pregnant and ultimately conceived through in vitro fertilization, which Ruth later learned accelerated her cancer. But, she said, her children were the meaning of her life. Would she have traded them in order to delay her cancer and extend her life -- a life without her children?
Accepting that we must receive both the good and the bad at the hand of God does not mean that we should see tragedy as inevitable or as some kind of gift from God that shapes our faith and reminds us of what is important. The world is not as it should be and while the Creator God bears some responsibility in that, we humans bear responsibility too, and so if we are to be Christians of integrity, followers of Jesus that see the whole picture, then we must still do what we can to work for peace and justice and to stand beside our brothers and sisters who are in the midst of deepest sorrow and despair. Job’s refusal to give up in the face of his personal tragedy is ultimately an expression of his “genuine and life-giving relationship with God.”1 Expressing our faith while asserting that all is not right in our lives or in the world does not diminish our faith, it reveals the many dimensions and complexities of it.
*****
Today is World Communion Sunday, which means that people all over the world are going to come to the Lord’s table and enjoy the feast that we call communion. This sounds like a quaint thing, but it’s not. Communion is one of the primary ways we proclaim our belief that on this side of heaven, things are not as they should be, but that somewhere, in God’s kingdom, there is peace and justice and deep, abiding joy. On World Communion Sunday we join with our brothers and sisters around the globe and acknowledge that all is not right in the world, that too many people experience an imbalance of good and bad, and that those of us who have known so much good must work on behalf of those who have known so much bad. Today we receive together the gifts that God offers to all people -- gifts of bread and wine, which represent God’s own self given so that we might know and practice God’s love throughout the world. Today, may we receive these gifts in a spirit of hope and in a spirit of service that even as we acknowledge the suffering in the world, suffering exemplified by Job, we also acknowledge the goodness in the world, goodness exemplified by the self-sacrifice of Jesus Christ, a sacrifice we receive personally and communally when we gather around this table. And as we do may we keep in mind Job’s question: “shall we receive the good at the hand of God and not receive the bad?” Amen.
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