The Man From Uz

Yesterday's sermon, preached at The Church of the Good Shepherd in Clinton, Massachusetts. The readings for the day can be found here.

I'm going to preach on Job today. But before I do that I want to offer a prayer that comes from the Jewish tradition, as we remember those who were killed yesterday in their house of worship in Pittsburgh. May we do more than offer "thoughts and prayers." May our prayer spur us to action. 

Let us pray: 

Disturb us, Adonai, ruffle us from our complacency;
Make us dissatisfied. Dissatisfied with the peace of ignorance,
the quietude which arises from a shunning of the horror, the defeat,
the bitterness and the poverty, physical and spiritual, of humans.
Shock us, Adonai, deny to us the false Shabbat which gives us
the delusions of satisfaction amid a world of war and hatred;
Wake us, O God, and shake us
from the sweet and sad poignancies rendered by
half-forgotten melodies and rubric prayers of yesteryears;
Make us know that the border of the sanctuary
is not the border of living
and the walls of Your temples are not shelters
from the winds of truth, justice and reality.
Disturb us, O God, and vex us;
let not Your Shabbat be a day of torpor and slumber;
let it be a time to be stirred and spurred to action.
(The Amidah for Shabbat, which can be found in Shabbat Evening Service Prayer Book)

Over the past four weeks, our Old Testament readings have been coming to us from the Book of Job. And while we’ve not read the whole thing, we’ve gotten the contours of the story down pretty well. There are other things for us to talk about today as well, but all of that in due time. Because we only get this chance at Job every three years and because it’s such a good story, I need to tell it to you today.

To review: Job was a guy who had it all. He had a beautiful wife, well-adjusted kids, a great job, good health, and plenty of friends. And then the bottom fell out. He lost it all practically overnight. It sounds a bit like a fairy tale. It begins with “once upon a time” and it ends with “he lived happily ever after.” It’s not necessary to insist that it happened for it to be true. We know it’s true. As that American theologian, Billy Joel, put it: only the good die young. Bad things do happen to good people, in real life.

What is amazing to me, and scary to me, is just how quickly an ordered life like Job’s can unravel. All of a sudden the economy takes a nose dive and the company we worked for is closing its doors to open a new plant in China. Gone is the salary we had assumed would cover college tuitions and the mortgage on the summer place. Before you know it your marriage is falling apart and the kids’ grades are dropping. Or a mentally ill person with a gun walks into a synagogue. Or a church. Or a mosque. Or a school. Or a mall…

We’ve been given the contours of the story, if not the whole thing, over these past four weeks. We meet successful and happy Job, but then the bottom falls out. Two weeks ago we heard him crying out to the God whom it is no longer clear is even there. It’s just too dark for Job to tell: he looks to his right and left, in front and behind, but he can’t find God. And he needs to find God because he wants his day in court. He wants to make his argument, to make his case before the Almighty: what has happened to him is not fair. It’s always interesting to me that even more than wanting restoration of all those good things, that’s what Job wants: to be heard.

Job is no whiner and his complaint is justified, I think. His questions are fair ones that go to the heart of faith: if God is just and if God is powerful then why is there so much pain and suffering in this world? Last weekend the story continued, and God showed up like a whirlwind in the midst of thunder and lightning! Imagine that! Imagine yourself praying for a sign, praying for God to show up and it happens just like that. Only God doesn’t show up sheepishly to be cross-examined by Job. Nor does God show up with answers as to why the just suffer or, to be more specific, why this bad stuff has happened to this good man. God shows up loaded for bear. God shows up with God’s own set of questions. Job had one question for God: “why me?” God literally comes at Job with a whirlwind of questions: “gird up your loins like a man, Job and I will question you…”

·        Who is this…?

·        Where were you…?

·        Who determined…?

·        Who stretched…?

·        Who has put…?

·        Who has given…?

·        Can you lift?

·        Can you provide?

·        Can you send…?

·        Can you hunt…?

What does it mean? One interpretative trajectory focuses on the sovereignty and inscrutability of God. God gets to be God, not us. God’s questions remind Job (and more importantly the reader of the Book of Job) that we aren’t as smart as we think we are. God’s ways are not our ways. That isn’t an answer to the question of human suffering. Nor should it hinder us from asking these hard theological questions.But it is a clear reminder that the universe doesn’t work like a clock, and God isn’t a giant clockmaker in the sky. It’s also a reminder to not try to force an explanation on the unexplainable.

Another interpretive trajectory starts at the opposite end, with Job. One thing about suffering—and this is an observation, not a judgment—suffering can make us very self-centered. Our world becomes smaller and smaller. Elizabeth Kubler-Ross, in her work on the stages of grief, spoke about isolation and depression as stages one who is going through loss has to navigate. That is very real and part of what has happened to Job. Granted, his friends are real schmucks. But nevertheless, Job’s very real pain has meant the loss of family and a rift with his friends. He’s all alone in the world and worst of all it feels as if even God has abandoned him. He’s become very isolated.

So the mere presence of God is a kind of grace. Because at least he knows that he is not alone. God’s speech also points him outward to the natural world that is back to the world beyond himself. God is like a tough, but wise therapist, in this speech; a truth-teller who helps Job make a break-through to a new place. So one might hear God’s whirlwind speech as something like this: 

Job: you need to go on a whale watch and consider Leviathan that I made for the sport of it. Or take a walk along the ridge of the Grand Canyon or hike the Rockies or camp underneath Pleides and Orion in Acadia National Park. Or consider the glorious array of maples in New England on a clear autumn day in New England. Sit on your porch during a lightning storm and consider. Consider the ravens and the mountain lions. Consider the lilies of the field, Job. Consider the birds of the air. Consider…

Now this trajectory isn’t mutually exclusive from the first one. In fact, I think they are really just two sides to the same coin. The first focuses on God’s sovereignty; the second on human limitations. In both cases we are reminded that the job of being the Almighty is not, in fact, open in spite of that theologically sound film, Bruce Almighty. God is God. We are not in control of the world or even our own lives.

As I read, the Book of Job, this parable or fairy tale or whatever it is, I think that the character of God in the story who speaks out of the whirlwind is saying that it’s a big world out there and it’s not all about us. That doesn’t mean that God doesn’t care deeply about us. It simply means that our measure of the universe can’t always be about what is or is not working for us at any given moment. That in no way means that our pain is less real when we suffer. It just gives it a larger context.

Last Thursday night I spent the night on the north shore, in West Newbury, at Emery House, a ministry of the Society of St. John the Evangelist. I was going to be meeting the next morning with my spiritual director and when I can do it this way I like to, rather than driving back and forth on the same day. I head out and have dinner with the brothers, get a good night’s sleep and then do have my meeting in the morning.

But here is what I did not know when I made that plan three months ago: that the Red Sox would be in a game-clinching ALCS final that night. Did I tell you that there are no televisions at Emery House? So, what to do? I went out and found a sports bar in Newburyport so I could watch at least some of the game. I sat there and ordered a beer and wanted to just mind my own business, focused on the screen. This woman who had apparently had a few beers before I arrived was chatting to everyone as she ordered her second Yeungling. I kept my eyes on the game. But the two guys on my right were engaging with her. And then they left around the second inning. I knew what was coming because I’d overheard her rather loud conversation with the other two guys. That’s when she asked me, “what do you do for a living?”

Now let me be clear. I love being a priest. No one really knows what a canon to the ordinary does, including me, but I love doing that work as much as I loved being a parish priest. I hate that question though (at least on an airplane or in a bar) not because I’m ashamed of what I do, but because it’s good to be off-duty sometimes. Especially when the Sox are on. Because when I answer the question I can predict the conversation that will follow will quickly put me back on duty.

So I didn’t respond. I mean literally, I ignored her, at first. But she, nevertheless, persisted. And so I told her. And predictably, she began to pour out her heart. I had to tear myself away from the game. She told me that it was five years since her brother had died of cancer at 42 years old. And she asked me to remember him when I said “mass” next time. And then she asked a question, a Job question: “why did God take my brother from his wife and two kids?”

I was there to watch baseball, not to preach this sermon on Job. Even so, I told her I just don’t think it works that way. I told her that I don’t believe God “took her brother,” that sometimes things happen and we don’t know why. And that we continue to love, and to be sad, and that of course I would remember her brother in my prayers. And her too.

Here’s the thing: the questions that the Book of Job raises aren’t just for Sunday mornings. They are for Thursday nights in a bar. They are for late on Friday night in the Emergency Room and for Shabbat Worship on a Saturday morning in a synagogue when everything suddenly changes. And for early Tuesday mornings waiting for chemotherapy. Job is about real life and it’s about the baggage we carry with us. Not just church goers. Not just religious people. Not even just spiritual but not religious people. When we hurt, even when we aren’t sure about God, we question God’s motivations. Why did God do this? Why didn’t God answer my prayer? Why do bad things continue to happen to good people in this world? Why is life not fair?

In the reading we heard today, we leave Job behind for another three years. We get a happy ending to our fairy tale: Job gets his life back. We want to believe that and in a way, I do believe it. Often, over time, those who suffer gain perspective again and we get back on track and we find at least a “new normal” even if we can never go back to a time of innocence. I like to believe that suffering people, like Job, sometimes get a new lease on life and that’s how the story ends. They may even find meaning. Matthew Shepherd was finally laid to rest this past week at our National Cathedral and we pray that the world has changed, just a little bit, since the hate crime that took his life twenty years ago.

And so even at the grave we make our song: alleluia, alleluia, alleluia.  

Having said that, however, I will admit to you that I’m not crazy about this ending. Because the danger is that we rush there. The danger is that we friends and pastors tell people in pain that it’ll all be ok because it’s hard to stand in the breach with them. Or we tell them that God took their brother or their husband or their daughter, for a reason. Enough. I think whatever else it means, the Book of Job suggests that’s bad theology.

I am drawn to the pathos of Job, and to its wisdom, which does not ever really answer the question of human suffering. It just says out loud that sometimes like is not fair. That sometimes life is profoundly unfair, and the good die young, and the world does nothing. Job wrestles with the big questions, and God shows us to ask even better questions and perhaps at the very least in seeing the failings of Job’s friends we learn a bit about what not to say if we want to be a decent friend to someone in pain.

Job models for us the courage to speak out loud to God and to question God but also the courage to listen for God’s response, even if it’s not what we had anticipated and even if it’s not what we wanted to hear. By God’s grace, if we hang in there long enough and take the long view, we do get to a place of new life, by God’s mercy and by God’s grace. May it be so, for us, and for those we love.