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.
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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.
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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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