Back Roads of the Bible: Job, Part III First Baptist Richmond, October 21, 2018 The Twenty-First Sunday after Pentecost Job 38:1-7

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1 Back Roads of the Bible: Job, Part III First Baptist Richmond, October 21, 2018 The Twenty-First Sunday after Pentecost Job 38:1-7 Then the LORD answered Job out of the whirlwind: Who is this that darkens counsel by words without knowledge? Gird up your loins like a man, I will question you, and you shall declare to me. Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth? Tell me, if you have understanding. There s a book that s been making the rounds lately. It s called Everything Happens for a Reason: And Other Lies I ve Loved. The inside flap of the dust jacket reads like this: Kate Bowler is a professor at Duke Divinity School with a modest Christian upbringing, but she specializes in the study of the prosperity gospel, a creed that sees fortune as a blessing from God and misfortune as a mark of God s disapproval. At thirty-five, everything in her life seems to point toward blessing. She is thriving in her job, married to her high school sweetheart, and loves life with her newborn son. Then she is diagnosed with stage IV colon cancer. The prospect of her own mortality forces Kate to realize that she has been tacitly subscribing to the prosperity gospel, living with the conviction that she can control the shape of her life with a surge of determination. Even as this type of Christianity celebrates the American can-do spirit, it implies that if you can t do and succumb to illness or misfortune, you are a failure. Kate is very sick, and no amount of positive thinking will shrink her tumors. What does it mean to die, she wonders, in a society that insists everything happens for a reason? i Well, here s the good news: Kate didn t die. At least, she hasn t died yet. Her cancer is in remission and her book is selling like hotcakes, partly because all of us have heard that line before everything happens for a reason and partly because we have suspected on some deep level that it wasn t true. If we didn t suspect it before reading 1

2 the Book of Job, we certainly suspect it after. Because Job s friends subscribe to that theory. They believe that everything happens for a reason. And when Job s entire fortune is wiped out in a single day, when his children are killed and his body covered with loathsome sores, his friends believe that God must be punishing Job for something he has done, something terrible. They say they have come to comfort him, but for more than thirty chapters they rake Job over the ashes, insisting that he must have done something wrong. He calls them miserable comforters, but they are really not much worse than some of us when we try to comfort people who are suffering. Kate Bowler includes an appendix in the back of her book, based on her experience with cancer. It s called Absolutely never say this to people experiencing terrible times: a short list. I m going to read it to you, but brace yourself. You may have already said some of these things in your attempts to comfort others. Kate would simply ask that you never, ever say them again. Ready? 1. Well at least Whoa, she says. Hold up there. Were you about to make a comparison? Were you about to say At least it s not Stage V cancer? Don t minimize. 2. In my long life, I ve learned that Geez. Do you want a medal? I get it, she says. You ve lived forever. Well, some people are worried that they won t, or that things will get so hard they won t want to. So ease up on the life lessons. Life is a privilege, not a reward. 3. It s going to get better, I promise. She says, Well, fairy godmother, that s going to be a tough row to hoe when things go badly. 2

3 4. God needed an angel. This one takes the cake, she says, because (a) it makes God look sadistic and needy and (b) angels are, according to Christian tradition, created from scratch. Not dead people looking for a cameo in Ghost. 5. Everything happens for a reason. The only thing worse than saying this, Bowler claims, is pretending that you know the reason (like Job s friends). She says, I ve had hundreds of people tell me the reason for my cancer. Because of my sin. Because of my unfaithfulness. Because God is fair. Because God is unfair. When someone is drowning, the only thing worse than failing to throw them a life preserver is handing them a reason. ii Bowler mentions a few others, as well as a list of things you should say (which are included in the footnotes of this sermon), but I think I ll stop with this one, which is also the title of the book: Everything happens for a reason, and other lies I ve loved. We love that lie because we would love to believe we could make sense of suffering. We would love to believe that if we understood it, we could figure out a way to avoid it. I was talking with friends on Tuesday who noticed how quickly they rationalize why the bad thing that happened to someone else will not happen to them. Oh, he was shot and killed. But that s because he was in a bad part of town. Oh, she died in a car wreck, but that s because she d been drinking. Sometimes there is a connection between what we do and what happens to us. It s why your mother told you not to play with matches, not to run with scissors. Sometimes bad things do happen for a reason. But often they do not. There was no reason Job suffered as he did. It wasn t because of anything he had done. The opening chapters of his story make that clear: God says to Satan, In all your 3

4 travels upon the earth have you considered my servant Job, a blameless and upright man, one who fears God and turns away from evil? God himself calls Job blameless and upright. Wouldn t you love to hear God say that about you? But Satan contends that Job s righteousness is exactly what you would expect from someone who has been so extravagantly blessed. Take all that away from him and he will curse you to your face! Satan snarls. And so God gives him permission to do just that, to take it all away. But it s not because Job has done anything wrong. The question raised by the Book of Job is the question of whether any of us will love and serve the Lord simply because of who he is, or only because of what he can do for us. God puts his money on Job, and God is not disappointed. In all of this, the author tells us, in all of this horrible calamity that came upon him, Job did not sin or charge God with wrongdoing. Instead he said, Naked I came from my mother s womb and naked I shall return there. The Lord has given and the Lord has taken away. Blessed be the name of the Lord. But when his friends begin to tell him that he must have done something wrong Job argues for his innocence, and when they won t believe him he begins to ask for an audience with God. In last week s reading he said, Oh, that I knew where I might find him, that I might come even to his dwelling! I would lay my case before him, and fill my mouth with arguments. And in this week s reading he gets his wish. At the beginning of Chapter 38 the Lord answers Job out of a whirlwind and says, Who is this that darkens counsel by words without knowledge? Gird up your loins like a man, I will question you, and you shall declare to me. Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth? To my ear the voice of God sounds a little sarcastic, mocking Job for his impudence. It doesn t seem fair after all that has happened to Job, but as I mentioned last 4

5 week that is one of the lessons of this book: life isn t fair. And the other lesson may be that the world we live in is the world God made (as God explains for nearly four chapters in this book, taking special pleasure in describing the hippopotamus and the crocodile), and the world God made appears to have a certain amount of randomness in it. In his book When Bad Things Happen to Good People Rabbi Harold Kushner chronicles the lessons he and his wife learned as their son Aaron suffered from a disease called progeria that caused him to age rapidly, so that he never grew to be more than three feet tall, looked like a little old man while he was still a child, and died a few days after his fourteenth birthday. In those years Kushner often wondered: Does everything happen for a reason? Is there a reason my son is dying from this terrible disease? He could think of reasons God might be punishing him. His wife could think of reasons God might be punishing her. But try as they might, they couldn t think of any reason God would punish their beautiful boy. Near the end of the book Kushner says he came to accept the idea that there is a certain amount of randomness in the world God made that Aaron didn t have progeria because of anything Kushner or his wife had done, and certainly not because of anything his son had done, but simply because we live in a world that has progeria in it, and sometimes it happens to even the best people. The same could be said for cancer, as Kate Bowler eventually concluded. Not everything happens for a reason. Sometimes people get cancer just because we live in a world that has cancer in it. Which leaves us wondering: if this is the world God made is there a reason God made it this way? Are we supposed to learn something by living in a world like this? 5

6 Some of you may remember the conversation I had with Sally Ann Smith a few years ago, when we were talking about this very thing in a sermon series called The Seven Big Questions. We were discussing the question of why God allows pain and suffering and we were looking at that passage from Luke 13 where Jesus talks about some Galileans who had been slaughtered while offering their sacrifices, and also about a tower that had fallen, killing 18 people. Everybody wanted to know why but Jesus acknowledged that there isn t always a reason. He said, Those Galileans didn t die because they were worse sinners than all the other Galileans. Those eighteen didn t die because of anything they had done. They just died! Death happens! But when it does we often look for someone to blame. Sally Ann said that when she suffered a miscarriage she couldn t think of anybody to blame except herself, and maybe God. I said, Maybe that s where we need to re-think this whole question. What if there s not anyone to blame? What if these things just happen? In one of my churches there was a woman who suffered from a painful and crippling illness, who wanted to know, Why is God punishing me? But I couldn t believe that God was punishing her; I didn t know anyone who had tried harder to do God s will. And so I shrugged my shoulders and told her we live in a broken world these things happen. But then she wanted to know why. And Sally Ann said, I think a lot of people want to know why. So, I gave her the answer I learned in seminary. I told her about Irenaeus, one of the early church fathers, who said that the world we live in is a vale of soul-making, which means that this may not be the easiest world to live in, but it s the kind of world where you can grow a soul. iii Sally Ann asked for an example and I said, OK: you re a mom, right? 6

7 Right. And you know what a playpen is, right? Right. A playpen is a good place for a baby. They can t hurt themselves in there. You can walk into the other room for a minute and chances are good that they will be just fine when you get back. But a playpen isn t a good place for an adult. If you were so afraid your baby would get hurt that you never let him out of the playpen he might never grow up. He might still be in there, at 21, playing with stuffed animals. So, you let him out. You let him out into a world that has some sharp edges and some dangerous intersections. You do everything you can to keep him safe but you know, one of these days, he s going to be old enough and confident enough to go off to college on his own, and even though it will break your heart it will break it with pride. Are you with me? Yes. That s what Irenaeus was talking about. When he said the world was a vale of soul-making he meant that the world in which we live even though it isn t particularly safe is the kind of place where we can grow up, the kind of world where we can grow a soul. And that s what Job was doing on that ash heap: he was growing a soul. But I think it helped him to know (as God acknowledged later iv ) that it wasn t his fault, that he hadn t done anything to deserve the suffering that came upon him. And I think it will help us to know that not everything happens for a reason. Then we can stop trying to figure out why we are suffering and instead start growing a soul. And while we re at it could we do this? Could we remember that along with the random suffering we 7

8 experience in this world we also experience a great deal of random beauty, and joy, and kindness, and love? What did we do to deserve that? After surviving cancer for an entire year (when she had been told that her chances were only 30 percent) Kate Bowler asked her doctor how much longer he thought she would live. He said, I don t know. We re all terminal. She said, I just need to make it to fifty. I need to make sure [my] kid is launched. I need to get most of my life done. I need to get it locked down. He said, But it comes undone. There are so many times in life when we think we have it locked down, [but we don t]. There was silence after that. Kate writes: Plans are made. Plans come apart. New delights or tragedies pop up in their place. And nothing human or divine will map out this life, this life that has been more painful than I could have imagined. More beautiful than I could have imagined. v I don t know what that sounds like to you, but to me it sounds like a soul growing growing in God s garden, which is full of wonder and mystery and growing in a way it never would if everything happened for a reason. Jim Somerville 2018 i Kate Bowler, Everything Happens for a Reason: and Other Lies I Have Loved (New York: Random House, 2018). ii Ibid, pp She also includes an appendix of things you could try saying, like: 1. I d love to bring you a meal this week. Can I you about it? 2. You are a beautiful person, 3. I am so grateful to hear about how you re doing and just know I m on your team, 4. Can I give you a hug? 5. Oh, my friend, that sounds so hard, and 6. (my favorite) Silence. iii From John Hick s book, Evil and the God of Love (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1966). iv See Job 42:7. v Bowler, Everything Happens, pp