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:


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)

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)

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.