In the name of God- Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
Amen.
Imagine
that you lost everything. You get into an accident on the way to work and your
car is totaled. When you get to the office, you find out that you’ve been
fired. So you go home, only to see several fire trucks in front of the place
where your house used to stand. Tragically, all of your children also died in
that fire. Your phone then rings and it’s your doctor calling you with the test
results, and it isn’t good news. Then your neighbor comes over to you and says
“What did you do to make God so angry at you?” You insist that your actions
didn’t warrant such calamities, but everyone around you insists that this is
all your fault. The question that haunts you is “Why did this all happen to me?”
The
book of Job is a part of the Bible’s wisdom literature that focuses on that
question: “Why?”. During the month of October, the lectionary will present us
with four passages from Job, so I’m going to take this opportunity to preach on
Job this month. Many scholars suggest that it is the oldest book of the Bible.
Despite the fact that Job has a less developed theology when compared to other
Biblical books, it addresses the most pressing question that any of us has: Why?
Why do bad things happen to good people? Why does God allow suffering? Why is
grief so painful? In the lexicon of theologians, this is known as the problem
of theodicy, coming from a compound word of God and justice. It boils down to
the question that many three olds ask and no 103 year old has found a
sufficient answer for – if God is all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-good, then
why do bad things happen? Why do hurricanes and earthquakes destroy cities? Why
to plagues wipe out populations? Why do some people choose to act with evil intentions?
Of course, there are the
simple answers: those evils are actually a result of our actions, not God’s.
Others will talk about the importance of free-will. Or some postulate that we
are lacking in faith, and therefore are lacking in God’s favor. But none of
these solutions are satisfactory. The biggest knock against the
Judeo-Christian-Muslim faith system is that a lot of bad things seem to happen,
which raises questions about God’s nature and existence. Sure, we can always
say that God is above our understanding, and while that is certainly true, it
doesn’t mean that we give up and live in blissful ignorance.
We’ll get to the end of
Job later this month, but there never really is an answer given to any of these
questions. What this book does do for us though is to challenge some of our
assumptions about God and suffering. Job forces us to reconsider our positions
and to acknowledge that as much as we want clear answers, we simply do not have
them. One way in which Job challenges us is in our linear way of thinking.
Scientists tell us that our human brains have evolved to make meaning out of
chaos and to find patterns. We like to draw lines between cause and effect,
even when those lines don’t exist. Ambiguity is uncomfortable and our thirst
for knowledge is insatiable. So in our faith, we often assume that God blesses
the good and curses the bad. Or, if we don’t believe that, we assume that God
favors the good to the bad.
And today, much American
Christianity is built upon this flawed belief that, if you are faithful, God
will bless you. This is the foundation for a modern heresy known as the
Prosperity Gospel. You’ve probably seen this message before – as many
televangelists employ it. It’s how some, so-called “pastors” afford to drive
Lamborghinis and fly in private jets. They say, give your money to the church
and you’ll receive your blessing from God. And when you don’t receive your
blessing, you are told that either you are not faithful enough or you haven’t
given enough. And even if you don’t believe that garbage theology, it has
seeped into Christianity in other ways. When people go through tough
situations, we say “Well, you just have to pray and have faith.” But I’m sure
we’ve all known people, like Job, who have been struck by tragedy for no good
reason. The truth is, piety does not lead to prosperity. Job forces us to
rethink the connection between our actions and God’s blessings. As Jesus says
in Matthew 5, “God makes the sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends
rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous.” As wisdom literature, Job
introduces us to the ambiguity of faith.
Part of what is so
challenging about reading Job is that we have to rethink our views of God. For
a moment, forget everything that you know about God and focus just on what we
learn from today’s reading. The God of Job is a capricious braggart with a
gambling problem. God doesn’t know where Satan has been. It’s also worth
pointing out that Satan is not at all anything like what we’d call “the devil”
in Job. In Hebrew, ha-satan means
“accuser” or “adversary.” In this theological construct, Satan is a heavenly
being tasked with keeping an eye on God. You might think of Satan as a sort of
internal affairs officer. So God brings up Job to Satan as an example of how
good God’s creatures are doing. Apparently, God needs to stroke his ego and
prove himself before Satan. God then authorizes Satan to put Job through hell
on earth in order to test him. That doesn’t sound a view of God that I’m very
familiar with.
So a question that
naturally arises is “How do we read Job faithfully as Scripture when it isn’t
compatible with other images of God in Scripture?” And this is where it is
helpful to know there can be truth in stories even when the stories are not
true. As an example, though most children have tried to find it, CS Lewis’
world of Narnia is not waiting to be discovered in the back of any of our
wardrobes or closets. But that doesn’t mean that the Chronicles of Narnia do not speak to the truths of Christianity. The
same could be said of the creation narrative of Genesis. There is no possible
way that Genesis tells the literal story of creation, which it was never
intended to do. But just think about it, God creates light on day one, but the
sun, moon, and stars aren’t created until day four. And yet, despite the fact
that the narrative is not factually true, it remains a story full of Truth. Job
is in this genre.
As we consider the
question of “why?” with Job over the next several weeks, we’re going to find
that some of our standard answers that give us comfort no longer work. Piety
does not lead to prosperity. Sometimes there aren’t good reasons for why bad
things happen to good people. Perhaps our view of God is too simplistic. I
recently attended an outstanding lecture by Dr. Brené Brown. She’s a well-known
social scientist who specializes in shame, vulnerability, and courage. One of
the things that she said was we like to be safe, physically and emotionally. So
if a lion charged into this room, we’d all run for the door. And when we are
threatened emotionally, in the same way, we use self-preservation tactics. She
noted that in situations where we have limited data, we fill in the stories with
our fears, values, and assumptions. So for example, you ask someone out on a
date and they cancel at the last minute. It’s fairly common to either think
“Oh, I guess they really weren’t interested in me,” and we cave into
self-doubt; or we tell ourselves an honest lie like “Well, I really would
prefer to stay home and watch that special on The History Channel.”
We do this all the time,
we tell stories about ourselves and our world in order to be protected from
vulnerability. But these narratives are never true, because if they were, they
wouldn’t keep us safe. Brown refers to these stories as our “Stinky First
Drafts,” or SFDs. Though, “stinky” isn’t the exact word she uses. What stories
have you been telling yourself? When you have a bad day, do you tell yourself
“Well, I can’t do anything right”? When you have a good day, do you tell
yourself “Well, I’m greater than sliced bread”? And where it gets dangerous is
when we use the word “never” in our stories. “I’ll never be able to do that,”
“I’ll never see this issue differently,” “I’ll never forgive him,” “I’ll never
be able to love again.” Brown recommends either sharing these SFDs with a
trusted friend or therapist, or writing them down. Often when we are confronted
with these false narratives, we can move past them. We have to own our stories,
or they will own us.
The book of Job confronts
us with many of our SFDs about God and suffering. We think about God and assign
attributes to God. We say things like “God knows everything,” “God never
changes,” “God can do anything.” We take human ideas, and apply them to God. We
limit God by making God the opposite of us. If we are limited in power, then
God must be all powerful. But what if God is bigger than the limits of our
humanity The question that we should ask ourselves is – do we say those things
about God because they are true, or because they are comforting? It’s certainly
possible that something can be true and comforting, but we must always be
willing to dive deep into our faith and ask those tough questions.
It has been said that
“God is very, very big, and we are very, very small.” There is an entire school
of theology known as apophatic theology which claims that we are not able to
say anything about God, instead we can only say what God is not. I don’t
necessarily agree with that viewpoint, but I think there is something healthy
about approaching God with a sense of humility instead of circumscribing God
into a box. These things that we claim about God are often not supported by
Scripture or Reason, but they are messages that we’ve heard for a long time and
they are comforting. Job asks “Shall we receive the good at the hand of God,
and not receive the bad?” Socrates is reported to have said "the unexamined life is not worth living;" I'd add that the unexamined faith is not worth believing. Job invites us to reexamine our assumptions.
One scholar has noted
that perhaps the salvation found in the book of Job is a new vision of God. He
writes “Job is healed because, in letting go of the image of all-controlling
power, he is letting go of the experience of God as the enemy, the one who
‘crushes’ him. He comes to see God as his friend who is there with him in his
suffering and whose caring presence heals him. Perhaps the book of Job will not
make sense until we see it as turning away from the monarchical image of God
toward an image of God as vulnerable.” [End quote] This is a powerful image of
God, but also a more vulnerable one. God is not a statue to bow down to, but
rather a partner that we can shake our fist at, cry with, laugh with, argue
with. Job presents us with a living and compassionate God, not a distant and
intractable one.
Next Sunday, we’ll go
deeper in the book of Job. Our reading will come from chapter 23, so if you’re
able to read that far in Job this week, that would be helpful. The book of Job
addresses the ancient and persistent question – Why? In the end, we’ll see that
not every question has an answer, but that doesn’t mean that God isn’t with us
in the ambiguity. To give us safety and predictability, we consciously and
unconsciously tell ourselves stories, SFDs. We do this in our personal lives
and we do this in our faith. Job presents us with the opportunity to check out
these stories and find salvation in a more expansive, even if a more ambiguous
and humble, image of God. Almighty God, may you guide us to seek the Truth:
come whence it may, cost what it will, lead where it might. Amen.
