October 20, 2024
10 AM
Great Island, Lock Haven
“Impatience”
Job is the most haunting book in the entire Bible. My favorite book. It’s why we Chrsitians love and embrace our Hebrew heritage.
Job shouts: WHY have I been wronged! Nothing patient about an aggrieved and bitter Job. Fed up with suffering’s unfairness.
Anybody here never suffer? Do you know why there’s suffering? Oh, on the basis of ordinary cause and effect we can attribute cause for some suffering. Different types of suffering. A missionary once said that lacking a refrigerator in the Congo is not suffering for the gospel. It is an inconvenience. Not sure mission trips to help shovel mud in North Carolina qualifies. That’s just hard work for a good cause.
Not quite the cup that Jesus drinks.
Suffering. Drunk drivers kill innocents. War killing innocents. Addicted to gambling apps ruins families. Hurricanes cause rivers to rise and creeks to overflow. Blame global warning. Blame criminal Putin. Blame ourselves.
We blame God when we should look in the mirror. Can we at least get insurance adjusters to stop saying about hurricanes and floods: “An Act of God.” No! Stop it! It’s choices of others, our own choices, or the whim of nature because nature couldn’t care less.
Still, tongues twist in knots, throats swallow thistles, chests tighten when we try to explain the inexplicable, justify the unacceptable, excuse the indefensible.
Job as an opera takes a predictable, Disney-like folktale – where tested Job lived happily ever after -- and rejects the folktale. The modern composer of Job took this ancient folktale of a man whose faith is tested but maintains piety, and is justly rewarded – it’s a folktale common to most cultures – but our composer turns it on its head into an opera singing how the old god doctrine of reward and punishment doesn’t ring true in neither experience nor existence. The race doesn’t always run to the swift. The best and the good aren’t always victorious. The deserving aren’t rewarded. Life oft is unfair, cruel even. Suffering stares at us like the cold eye of a shark.
One Sunday a TV preacher with excellent teeth preached how God sends angels to protect you from enemies. He described how his father, when a toddler, fell into a fire but God sent a passer-by to rescue him. Thus, years later the preacher was born to bless us with his oratory (and excellent teeth).
Pagan superstition sold on TV as Christianity. No surprise, We should chaff at this convenient formula. Hello Houston, we’ve got a problem.
What would this preacher say to the young mother I dealt with years ago in my first church when I was a volunteer fire fighter and chaplain whose son did die in a house fire? -- there was no passer-by, no God, no angel to rescue her little boy. What does that say of this preacher’s God? I weary us using God.
Listen please. Job 38:1-7, 16-17
Then the Lord answered Job out of the whirlwind:2 ‘Who is this that darkens counsel by words without knowledge?3 Gird up your loins like a man, I will question you, and you shall declare to me.
4 ‘Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth? Tell me, if you have understanding.5 Who determined its measurements—surely you know! Or who stretched the line upon it?6 On what were its bases sunk, or who laid its cornerstone7 when the morning stars sang together and all the heavenly beings shouted for joy?
8 ‘Or who shut in the sea with doors when it burst out from the womb?—9 when I made the clouds its garment, and thick darkness its swaddling band,10 and prescribed bounds for it, and set bars and doors,11 and said, “Thus far shall you come, and no farther, and here shall your proud waves be stopped”?
12 ‘Have you commanded the morning since your days began, and caused the dawn to know its place,13 so that it might take hold of the skirts of the earth, and the wicked be shaken out of it?14 It is changed like clay under the seal, and it is dyed like a garment.15 Light is withheld from the wicked, and their uplifted arm is broken.
16 ‘Have you entered into the springs of the sea, or walked in the recesses of the deep?17 Have the gates of death been revealed to you, or have you seen the gates of deep darkness?
In this opera, the friends of Job who visit Job don’t visit to comfort Job but to give Job orthodox answers as to why Job suffers. Isn’t that exactly what people want when they are suffering? Lots of advice. Job’s friends are all quick to tell Job what they think. God bless those who have all the answers. Not one of them simply sits with Job and listens to Job. Job’s wife at least is the most practical: curse God and die, get it over with. At first Job replies nobly to her. One must accept both the good and the bad. Job’s noble obedience and acceptance doesn’t last. Now the fairy-tale fades and the opera begins.
Job yells at them: “Look at me! Don’t look past me. Don’t look down at me! Don’t look up to me! Don’t look away from me! Just look at me! Will someone please just listen to me.”
None does. They actually get angry, indignant with Job, blaming him.
The first friend, Eliphaz, wags his finger and affirms the tired old doctrine of reward and punishment. Stop complaining. Be pious, patient, faithful and it will turn out well in the end. Great, but that still doesn’t alter the fact that my kids are dead, my wealth gone, and I’m covered in loathsome sores.
The second, Bildad, preaches God cannot be unjust so trust the will of God. “Trust and obey for there’s no other way.”
~~~
Why? Job asks. Why? Why, God? Why evil, why suffering, why unfairness, why such wrong? We scream voicelessly at the bigger WHYS because we are forced to concede to the ordinary, mortal whys of genes, nature, cells, accidents, mistakes, choices. Intentions.
Thus I am met in my weakness by a God neither tame nor puny nor convenient.
~~~
Job’s third friend, Zophar, actually reprimands Job to examine himself. You must be guilty. Confess what you did wrong if you hope to earn God’s blessings.
The fourth false friend, Elihu, is a pushy young man more interested in pushing his agenda ridiculing those orthodox moralistic views. He’s young, hence he knows everything. He pushes the view that to anybody truly enlightened God is awe-full, distant, and mysterious and we are nothing before God. Stop justifying yourself! Why should almighty God bother with you and your complaint?
We are ill-served by moral clichés, by popular and profitable religious pandering. God as slot machine. God as Quid Pro Quo. Our Bible is brave enough, honest enough, human enough to declare how it takes great faith to be angry at God, to vent, to hurt, to feel betrayed by God. It takes wounded faith to embrace such feelings so that holiness may embrace us. Ask Job.
I do not require a nice God. Nor do I believe God expects me to be docile and polite in the face of suffering, whether mine or yours. Read the Psalms, so full of pain…
~~~
After all this frenzy of advice and counsel, God finally shows up, for God alone has been listening. That’s the passage read. Out of the whirlwind, God speaks with Job, a moment itself too astounding to imagine. God is with Job, present, the way a true friend should be. Job matters. God says to Job he has heard Job’s demands that God account for God’s actions, he has heard how impatient Job demands to know why he has been made to suffer, why he has suffered unfairly.
Interesting: throughout most of this opera, the names of God referred to are religiously generic – Elohim, for example. When it comes to Job’s encounter, the name of God become Moses’ holiest name – Yahweh – deeply personal.
There’s a big difference between a failed orthodox belief in an omnipotent God Almighty manipulating and controlling existence from outside existence and a radical belief in a Sovereign Lord woven and wounded within existence. God inside, not outside. Lest God be a cruel tyrant and we puppets denied dignity and freedom.
The crescendo to our modern opera?
There is no justifiable answer. Can Job explain why such things in the world are the way they are? No. That’s the real test, accepting that there is no answer. Can Job explain why an ostrich can’t fly? Can he explain why the stars shine in the sky? Why the ocean water stops where it stops? Can we explain how despite our prayers the cancer got worse? Can you explain the unexplainable mysteries?
Job’s catharsis, his cleansing insight, him humbled, releases his anger in a long breath and Job accepts how this frantic desperation to know WHY will drive you insane or deeper into anger, disbelief, depression, isolation, cold cold rigid religion. The only spiritual question that makes sense isn’t asking WHY? but asking HOW?
HOW do I live in a world of suffering? In a world unfair? In a world of loss? How?
For one of the key Biblical themes of faith is called in Hebrew mishpat. Mishpat speaks of justice, judgment, balance, trying to get right what we can get right. Things made right.
The HOW needs the recognition that we are not alone, we are not abandoned, – even when it feels as if we have been.
The HOW begins by trusting God to believe we are not being punished by God. God is awe-full and distant and mysterious, yes, yes, and, surprise, we mean everything to God as Jesus reveals God and God comes to us to be with us through it all. We often trot out Paul’s words in Romans 8:28 that “We know everything God works for good…” But we cut it off there as if God is the cause of bad things in order to make something good out of them. No – traffic accidents, hurricanes, cancer, false witness, idolatry, hated, war – they’re not good.
That’s exactly the point.
Bearing the cup of Christ for the sake of others. Glorifying God in the midst of sufferings.
But the rest of Romans says: “…with those who love him, who are called according to his purpose.” God, I testify, doesn’t cause bad to force a good. Can’t. With love and with faith in God, that’s when even something terrible can result, with faith and love, in something godly. It is how we respond that makes the difference. Nature deems. Faith and love redeems.
Persons who only weep for themselves have never truly wept.
~~~
What does it mean to be great? We ask this of a church named Great Island, or should I say its original name, Mechek-menatey.
To be anointed by God means not the throne but the cross.
Casey Stengel (go Yankees!): “You can’t get into the Hall of Fame unless you limp.”
Which is a pretty good reason to say: we sure need God because life is a whirlwind. .
Mark 10:35-45
35James and John, the sons of Zebedee, came forward to him and said to him, "Teacher, we want you to do for us whatever we ask of you." 36And he said to them, "What is it you want me to do for you?" 37And they said to him, "Grant us to sit, one at your right hand and one at your left, in your glory." 38But Jesus said to them, "You do not know what you are asking. Are you able to drink the cup that I drink, or be baptized with the baptism that I am baptized with?" 39They replied, "We are able." Then Jesus said to them, "The cup that I drink you will drink; and with the baptism with which I am baptized, you will be baptized; 40but to sit at my right hand or at my left is not mine to grant, but it is for those for whom it has been prepared."
41When the ten heard this, they began to be angry with James and John. 42So Jesus called them and said to them, "You know that among the Gentiles those whom they recognize as their rulers lord it over them, and their great ones are tyrants over them. 43But it is not so among you; but whoever wishes to become great [megas] among you must be your servant [diakonos], 44and whoever wishes to be first among you must be slave of all. 45For the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many."
~~~
If we are going to suffer, let it be for a reason. Ever counter-intuitive Jesus flips the world’s notion of greatness:
“Those who desire ‘megas’ must be ‘diakonos”
“Whoever wants to be first must be last of all and servant of all.”
Defined by Jesus as servanthood. Bringing out the potential best in others. Treating others with gracious courtesy, with respect, with fairness, even when, especially when, they disrespect you.
Our works reveal who we are.
~~~
It took those silly and greedy and proud disciples the cross and crucifixion for them to figure out what it really meant to be Jesus’ disciple.
They had joined up for what they thought they were going to get out of the deal, out of the bargain from being with Jesus – the fame, the reward, the power, the prominence, fueled by that desperate and pathetic need to be liked. So impatient to be favored, rewarded, they begin to get angry at each other, literally, indignant, blaming, attacking their brothers.
Oh, they learnt all right the reward they’d receive -- eventually -- when they finally realized greatness meant offering their lives as a living sacrifice for the sake of Jesus and all the least whom Jesus loves first.
To live to bring misphat into the world that sorely lacks it.
To be chosen by God means not the throne but the cross.
If you’re going to suffer, let it be for a worthy reason.
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