1 Blurred by Tears (Part 2) 28 th Sunday in Ordinary Time Job 23: 1-9, 16-17 Hebrews 4: 12-16 Oct. 14, 2018 Rev. Rob Carter Blurred by Tears Last week we began exploring Job. This uncomfortable, painful book that deals with uncomfortable, painful questions. Like: Why do bad things happen? Does God cause suffering? Do we suffer because God thinks we re bad? Is our pain some kind of punishment, or maybe some kind of teaching tool God uses? Or does God not cause suffering, but simply allows it? And if so, then how can we say that God loves us that God is, in fact, full of love when so much of life seems to contradict it? To be sure, this book is uncomfortable. Even painful. Now, as a quick refresher, the book begins by making clear Job was a good and faithful man. Job was blameless and upright, one who feared God and turned away from evil. More than that, Job was prosperous. He had seven sons and three daughters, 7000 sheep, 3000 camels, servants, and more. The text made clear, this man was the greatest of all the people of the east. But Job s faithfulness was quickly put to the test as the life he knew was ripped away from him. Last week we learned that a member of God s divine council The Satan or The Accuser had gotten into a debate with God over why people are faithful in the first place. God assumed people are faithful because they love God. People are faithful because they trust in God. The Satan, however, had another theory, insisting people are only faithful as long as they are blessed. He said if you rob people of their blessings, their praise of God would morph into curses at God. So to solve their dispute, God decided to let The Satan do whatever The Satan wanted to Job in order to get Job to curse God, with the only exception of sparing Job s life. It s a disturbing premise, is it not? Job being made the pawn in God and The Satan s special experiment? It s hard to fathom a loving God who could so easily hand over Job s care and well-being to another. But remember, this is not a historical biography we re exploring. Job is not a literal story in any way, but part of what s known as Scripture s wisdom literature. It s a book aimed at exploring actual events, but deep questions and mysteries. Like why suffering exists in our world and how faithful people are called to live not just in good times but in bad. And oh, the bad that befell Job. In one fowl swoop of four simultaneously disasters, Job lost all of his children and grandchildren, along with all of his livestock and property. Yet, as unimaginable as that was, Job wouldn t curse God. Instead, he actually arose, tore his robe, shaved his head, and fell on the ground and worshipped. He said, Naked I came
2 from my mother s womb, and naked shall I return there; the Lord gave and the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord. Seeing how he hadn t yet succeeded in causing Job to curse God, The Satan dug in for round two, inflicting loathsome sores on Job from the sole of his foot to the crown of his head. As we shared last week, it was the ultimate double-whammy, as the sores not only made Job feel miserable, but made him an outcast one who had to be shunned by the rest of Hebrew society due to his leprous disease. So at this point, Job has lost absolutely everything his children, his wealth, his health, and even the ability to live among society. There is nothing absolutely nothing left for Job to lose. And yet, still, Job won t curse God. Shall we receive the good at the hand of God, and not receive the bad? Job asks his wife. Job s wife, on the other hand, has suffered enough Curse God and die, she tells him. Curse God and die. We may be shocked to read such a verse, but remember, Job s wife has suffered, too. She s watched her children die, and their children die. She s seen her home and life ruined and her husband go from a great man to a poor, pathetic leper. Curse God, and die, she cries giving credence to our Psalms of lament, and every person of faith who has ever cried out in anger or pain or confusion or despair and cursed God through a haze of terror or tears. That is where we left off. Today, we pick up over 20 chapters later, with Job still a poor, pathetic leper. But throughout those 20 chapters between last Sunday and today, Job has been visited by three different friends. In fact, the bulk of this book is made up of the dialogue between Job and his three friends, who each come to offer their take on exactly why Job has endured so much suffering. Their professed aim is to help Job, but who help him, they don t. Instead, what they actually do is try to rationalize Job s pain away. They try to explain it as if there must be some logical explanation to all that s happened to Job. In fact, Job s friend Eliphaz essentially tells Job that we receive from God exactly what we deserve. If we re good and faithful, he says, God blesses us. And if we re bad and sinful, God punishes us. So Job, it s pretty clear, buddy. You re being punished. For what, I don t know, but you ve clearly done something evil in the eyes of God. So you need to repent, Eliphaz says. You need to accept your punish, repent, and turn from whatever evil you ve done. Many in the world today agree with Eliphaz. Many, including some here today, I m sure, wonder if our suffering is a sign that God must be upset with us that God is trying to teach us a lesson. It s a natural assumption based on a natural question. If God loves me, then why would God allow something so bad to happen to me? If God really loves me, then why am I sick? If God really loves me, then why do I feel so alone? If God really loves me, then why does it feel like I can never get my head above water?
3 If God really loves me, then why did God take my loved one away? Why?! It s such a natural question seeking an answer that, most religions, including our own, long taught that suffering was the result of sin. That whatever may befall someone, it s the result of some sort of divine, karmic justice. This ancient belief could be seen as the Pharisees ran all around investigating the incident when Jesus healed a man born blind. For back then, even blindness was considered to be a deserved condition. Who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind? the Pharisees asked proving that they believed blindness was either the results of the parents sin, or the actual blind man s sin. While we know better than to associate blindness with sin today, the connection of suffering and sin still runs rampant. The slave trade was partially founded on the theological belief that Africans were inherently less moral, more sinful than the whites. It was an unimaginable but widespread use of theology to condone the suffering of slaves. In the early 80 s, when AIDS was first coming to our attention, Jerry Falwell initially explained it as God s condemnation of the gay community, and lots of people agreed. After 9/11 occurred, the Arab and Muslim population throughout America suffered a horrible increase in hate crimes and bigotry that largely got swept under the carpet, as if the sins of radical terrorists could be imputed to anyone other than the terrorist himself. And lest we think it was just Jerry Falwell or the radical religious right or anti-muslim bigotry at work in our world today, it still happens every day when folks pass the homeless man and wonder, What did he do to deserve this plight? Did he mismanage his money did she fall prey to addiction. We want to connect their suffering to something they did to cause it. Same thing happens when we hear of yet another inner city murder and just let the name pass by our ears without so much of a thought, as we assume those killed must be gang members or drug dealers even though they re often not. And, by the way, does it make a difference if the victim was a drug dealer or gang member? Do the victims of inner city poverty somehow deserve to be victims of gun violence? Do their families deserve such grief? Does a whole city deserve such cyclical violence? Do you see how easy this string is to pull? Does the streetwalker deserve the nightly abuse she suffers because of how she does? Does the addict deserve his inner torment because he s unable to get help? Do Syrian citizens deserve the loss of life as they knew it because they happen to be from Syria? Do the Yemen citizens deserve their fate because of their corrupt government? Do those in Florida, or the Carolinas, or Palu, Indonesia reeling from nature s wrath deserve such loss?
4 Is suffering ever deserved? Does God really bless those who do good and punish those who don t? All of Job s friends all of them insist Job had to have done something horrible or else he wouldn t be suffering! Otherwise, he wouldn t have lost his kids and grandkids. Otherwise, he wouldn t have lost his property and prosperity, his health and well-being. But Job knows better. Job knows better. And so do we. For we remember what was written in the very first verse of the very first chapter. There was once a man in the land of Uz whose name was Job. That man was blameless and upright, one who feared God, and turned away from evil. So no Job did not do something horrible. His suffering is not the result of some sort of divine karmic justice system. God is not punishing Job to teach him a lesson. For Job has been blameless and upright! Job has trusted in the Lord, and lived his life based upon this trust, and he knows it. No, Eliphaz, Job lets out. Enough! I haven t sinned. Say what you want but I know I am innocent, blameless, and I do not deserve this! he cries. And I would tell it to God s face, if only I could find God! Oh, how I d love nothing more than to tell it God s face. And God would hear me. And God would acquit me, for God would see that I really am innocent that I did nothing wrong that I do not deserve all that has happened. But the problem, he continues explaining to Eliphaz, the problem is that I can t find God anywhere. I search high and low, but to no avail. If I go forward, he isn t there. If I go backward, he s nowhere to be found. I look to the left, the right, but I can t find him anywhere! he cries. And here, friends, here we see Job reach the lowest of all his lows. God has made my heart faint, he cries; the Almighty has terrified me; if only I could vanish in darkness, and thick darkness would cover my face! And Job hits rock bottom. The whole world seems to be telling Job that he must surely deserve all this suffering. But Job knows better Job knows he doesn t deserve it and only wants the chance to say so to God. But amid the darkness of his pain amid the haze of his tears Job can t find God anywhere around him. Why do bad things happen? To others? To you? To me? And where exactly is God, when it does hurt? Where is God in the midst of pain so deep it hurts to breathe? It s natural to ask these questions and yearn for some kind of answers. So we search and strive to find them. In fact, Christian theologians and scholars much smarter than I am have spent lifetimes hunting for answers.
5 And sometimes, sometimes we encounter people maybe even churches who ll tell us something like Eliphaz told Job. That God does cause suffering. That we deserve what we get. So God must not be anywhere within our pain. But nothing could be farther from the truth of what Scripture proclaims. For the book of Job is clear. God did not cause Job s pain. And God does not cause ours. As Scripture reveals, God does not punish, but redeems. God does not break, but heals. God does not banish, but embraces. God does not condemn, but loves. So no, God does not cause our pain. Rather, what we see in Jesus Christ is a God who actually joins us in the midst of our pain. So while we don t have an answer as to why so much bad happens in our world And while the Christian church does a tremendous disservice every single time we try to rationalize or explain away pain too deep for words that doesn t mean we have no response. We do. We do have a response when bad things happen. We do have an affirmation. A hope. We have a Lord who lived a mortal life as we live. A Lord who went all the way from heaven to earth to experience the breadth and depth of all this life has to offer. He was born and grew up; he played and yelled, and laughed and cried; he bled, and was mocked, rejected, abandoned, spat upon, tortured, and ultimately killed in a barbaric scene of loss and agony. So while we don t know why God allows such bad things happen, we can be sure that we have a God refuses to abandon us to the pain. We have a God who is willing to suffer for us, and with us. As our first lesson from Hebrews puts it: We don t have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weakness, but we have one who in every respect has been tested as we are And as Paul puts it in his letter to the Romans: There is nothing nothing in this life, no suffering, not even death that can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. And as the Gospel of John makes clear, when Jesus first appeared to the disciples in his risen state, he invited them to reach out and touch the wholes in his hands, and put their hands in the hole in his sides, revealing that, even in his risen state, our Lord maintains the scars of his earthly wounds and pains. So while I can t stand here today and tell you why bad things happen, friends, I can offer you this affirmation God is with us even when they do. Holding us, loving us, even crying with us. Like Job amid his quest to find God, we might not be able to discern God s presence when our eyes are blurred by tears. But even amid our questioning and searching, even amid our crying and our cursing of God, in Jesus Christ we know our God not only suffered for us, but promises to suffer with us. And in the end of all things, though it s not an answer, perhaps God s presence is enough. Amen.