THE SILENCE OF GOD Job 23:1-9, 16-17 October 11 th, 2015 As I was working on this sermon, I came across a meditation in a book titled A Season of Grace, by Elizabeth M. Hoekstra. Some weeks it s a struggle to know how to begin the sermon in a way that seems appropriate for that particular text. You will have noticed that sometimes it s a story or a joke or maybe information about the context of the Lectionary scripture for the day. Usually once I get the opening down on paper the rest of the sermon which has been in my head waiting to get out comes in its due time. But this meditation was an answer to prayer as I asked to be led to an opening for today s text. Last week we began a four sermon series on the book of Job. This book is a folktale probing faith in the midst of suffering. In our text last Sunday we immediately jumped into Job s reaction to the pain and suffering he was experiencing. How can evil exist in the world if God is good? Job didn t doubt God s existence and would not let his wife or his friends cause his faith to waver. Elizabeth Hoekstra tells this story: Even at age ninety-four and legally blind, my grandmother determinedly lives alone in her 200-year-old Cape Cod cottage. Understandably she feels that leaving their home would mean abandoning my grandfather s memory. They invested their hearts in their house. Each creaky pine floorboard, aged beam, and uneven plastered wall holds a memory for her. But they aren t all good memories. Tragedies followed her extended family over the years: the untimely death of her brother and his wife, leaving my grandparents four orphaned girls to raise; illnesses and accidents; two world wars and the great depression. People of her generation were shaped by hard- 1
ships. They either fell into the abyss of self-pity or learned to be grateful for what was good. My grandmother chose the second option. Even now in her whispery voice she ll say, The Lord has been good to me The Lord is good. Has she forgotten those horrible times, the tear-drenched hours and weeks of coping? No, she hasn t forgotten. Instead she has chosen to take Job s words to heart: The Lord gave and the Lord has taken away; may the name of the Lord be praised. Job 1:21 She allowed the circumstances to shape her character and attitudes, while still holding on to the hope she invested in the Lord. In our own circumstances we are offered the same choice. When we are feeling overwhelmed with circumstances, we can meditate on this passage: We also rejoice in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character hope. And hope does not disappoint us. (Romans 5:3-5a). When we left Job last week, he was huddled on his heap of ashes, the very picture of misery. His crops, his animals, his servants, his children all had been taken from him as the Satan sought to demonstrate that, given enough provocation, Job would turn from God. Job hasn t done that. As we watched he muttered words which no doubt some of us have repeated, The Lord gives and the Lord takes away. Shall we accept the good and not the bad from the Lord? Blessed be the name of the Lord. Phrases which have caused people for centuries to refer to the patience of Job. But we ask, is that enough? Is it enough to talk about God in times of trouble, to offer the teachings of faith in the face of catastrophe? Today, we ll hear one answer to that question and, as you might have 2
imagined, it s a definite No! Job s patience is at an end. Job is finished with platitudes. Job is finished pretending that what s happened to him is in any way acceptable, or even tolerable. The pious, willing-to-bear-all-without-argument Job-he s gone. Now we have the Where the heck are you, God? Why haven t you shown up for me? Those are the questions Job is asking now. Haven t we all been there? Haven t we all had moments when, in spite of our faith, in spite of our trust, in spite of our deep and abiding love for God, we have found ourselves fall- ing into the pit of darkness and doubt? I m thinking we could all answer Yes to this question. What we don t need is the platitudes from our friends or our pastor. Even though Job has been faithful and continued to be righteous, his patience is waning and he wants his day in court. He wants to plead his case before God. He wants some answers. It s a tough place to be, but one we all-even the most faithful among us at some point or another face. The temptation for people of faith is to become like Job s well-meaning friends and try to come up with the task of explanation. But this is a dangerous game and too often, we are reaching to give answers to questions that might need a little more time to ferment. Out intentions are honest. We don t like to see people in pain. We want to help. And so we become well- meaning friends like Job s. Authors John Holbert and Alyce McKenzie of the book What Not to Say advise staying away from simplistic platitudes that may prove to really be unhelpful. Instead of saying: The Bible is a book that provides answers. Try: The Bible helps us ask the right questions. Instead of saying: Bad days and problems are teachable moments from God. There are no accidents. Suffering is our cross to bear as faithful disciples. 3
Try saying: God is with us in our suffering. Instead of saying: If you have faith in God, you will be healed/ your problems will disappear. God has it all worked out. If we follow God s will, it will all be good. Or-- God helps those who help themselves! Try saying: God is the source of our abundant life, not our abundance in life. Everything we have is a gift from God. Back to our text in the twenty-third chapter of Job. A lot of water has gone under the bridge. The broken, but altogether devout, man we left in the early narrative section has met his prosperity-gospel friends. They ve tried to convince him that God is just, and therefore his own terrible sins are the cause of all his tragic misfortunes. There can be no other explanation: God is a just God. But the more they ve pressed that point, the more Job comes to his own conclusion: Since he knows that he s innocent, it is clear that God has mistreated him. For Job, there can be no other explanation: he has done nothing wrong. Job wants to have a day in court. He s utterly convinced that if he can plead his case to God, and for God to hear him, that he will be vindicated. And, honestly, isn t it really hard not to side with Job on this one? I mean if Job did get his day in court what would God say? Job lost his family, fortune, and health on a bet? With the devil? It is difficult enough to endure the losses that Job has suffered; now added to that hardship is his growing sense that God is eluding him. We struggle along with Job as he searches in vain for the place where he can deliver his complaint, his lawsuit against God. As we join in that struggle, we would also do well to learn Job s persistence, his unrelenting conviction that he will have his day in court. Job wants his hearing because, for all of the curses he hurls into the chasm of divine silence, 4
he cannot let go of the conviction that God is ultimately just, and that God ultimately hears him. Until that day, Job s questions linger. Many times, our questions linger as well, and so we have a tendency to let ourselves engage in a premature move to resolution that undermines the power of the response that does come. While he waits God s response, Job testifies to his anguish and frustration in the face of God s seeming absence; 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 (vv. 8-9). His bleak testimony finds many echoes in our human experiences. In a Grief Observed, C.S. Lewis is awash in a sea of grief and pain in the wake of his wife s death. He too probes deeply into dark questions of faith, asking Meanwhile, where is God? In previous times of happiness, Lewis claims that he found God present everywhere he turned. But in the midst of his present anguish, searching for God is like knocking on the door of a house and hearing the door being bolted in your face. What are you left with, he says, is silence and the disturbing fear that maybe this is what God is like after all. In bitterness upon the ash heap, Job cries out, Oh, that I knew where I might find [God] (v. 3) In our contemporary society, Job s bitterness can still be understood. Poet Ann Weems lost her son Todd on the day of his twenty-first birthday; in her Lament Psalm Eight, she joins Job and the host of others who struggle with faith and loss when God is nowhere to be found. That same searching, longing for God in the face of hardship, finds voice in popular music, too. At the end of the CD Pop, the U2 s singer Bono pleads for God to do something in the midst of the suffering that threatens to undo faith and life, wondering if God 5
is busy or Jesus hands are tied. Speaking the darkness of faith is a daring, and faithful, act. The character of Job s struggle goes beyond simply lamenting the injustice and loss that he and others have experienced. Hardly the patient Job of the beginning of these scriptures, here Job longs to argue his case with God. Job s argument and complaint are reflected in Ivan Karamazov in Dostoyevsky s The Brothers Karamazov, who in the face of human suffering, particularly the horrible suffering of children, is led to deny the existence of God altogether. Dostoyevsky paints Ivan s denial of God sympathetically, for he knows that such horrid suffering is a very real threat to faith. Job too is well acquainted with suffering, but his faith endures. His mouth is full of arguments, but they are arguments with God. Too often we simply give in, resigning ourselves to our misfortunes; It must be the Lord s will; I guess we will just have to accept it. Or like Ivan, we abandon faith in God altogether. Job offers us a third way; he is unwilling to accept suffering passively, but he also refuses to abandon his faith. Could it be that we are being called as a church to a more active struggle with faith in the face of the hardships and atrocities of our time? Maybe we are being reminded that arguing with God is an act of deep faith deeper, perhaps that a passive acceptance of whatever happens as God s will, or a carefully thought out rationalization for why things are. After all, doesn t God in the end vindicate Job s speech, and chastise Job s friends for not speaking rightly about God? (42:7) Finally, there is a word of hope for the church, for the God whom Job sought has indeed sought us and found us, even in the midst of our suffering. Actually, as Dietrich Bonhoeffer noted in his Letters and Papers from Prison, 6
in a world of suffering only a suffering God can help. Job s cry is answered by Jesus on the cross; My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? (Mark 15:34). For here, in the midst of Jesus anguished cry, we find that the depth of human suffering has been taken into God s very being. God is very much aware of the realities of suffering, for God s Son has himself suffered. The apostle Paul reminds us, in light of Christ s suffering, that the good news of the gospel is that in Jesus Christ, we know that nothing not injustice, not suffering, not even an overwhelming sense of God s absence can separate us from God s love (Rom. 31-39). Safe and secure in this good news, we are set free to lament and to argue our case with God. Amen and amen. 7