Job I
The First in a Series of Three Sermons.
Job 1:1-22; Psalm 26.
Rev. Patricia Barth
October 8, 2006
It's been a hard few weeks—Iraq is going up in smoke, splintered by sectarian violence; there have been bomb threats in Culpepper, VA and three recent shootings in schools. This last week a gunman shot ten Amish girls, killing five of them. One is in grave condition. In our own church, Dorothy Becker's daughter-in-law died suddenly and unexpectedly in her 50's, and church member Virginia Colangelo died a peaceful death, after a long life— but still, for her family, it is hard nonetheless.
Where is God in all this?
This is not a new question, of course. Humanity has been asking "why" and "where are you, God" since the beginning of time.
Here's the beginning of a story of one man's journey into "why." There are several characters in this drama — Job, the main character, is a wealthy man, with a wife and 10 children. He is described as a blameless and upright man, who is in awe of God, who turns away from evil. It is God who describes Job this way — I wonder how God would describe you or me? But that's another sermon for another day.
Other important characters in this scene are God and ha-satan. Although your Bibles say Satan, ha-satan is more accurate. That is Hebrew for "The Accuser" or "The Adversary." Ha-satan, in the ancient Middle East, was not the same as the Christian concept of the devil or Father of Lies. Ha-satan was one of God's valued advisors, who had the role of seeking out and accusing unfaithful humans who were a threat to God's honor. That may sound strange to our postmodern ears, but remember that the entire Bible was written in the context of an ancient honor/shame based society which was very different from ours in some significant ways.
Job: "The Lord gave; and the Lord has taken away, blessed be the name of the Lord…"
It's hard to get our minds around that, isn't it? Although people have repeated that saying forever, it begs the question. Other common expressions in times of tragedy are "It was God's will." "God doesn't give you more than you can bear." Or, as an Amish farmer in Nickel Mines, PA said about the school shootings, "We don't know what God's purpose is, but we believe there is a purpose." Those sayings can be a comfort, or not—but whatever they are, they are not really answers to one person's, one family, or one community's tragedy.
We'll see as we read more of Job over the next few weeks that Job does not remain so patient and resigned, as his losses and his despair deepens. How about our response to loss? When we hear of tragedies like the Amish school, we ask "Why." When tragedy touches our own house, our own congregation, we ask "Why." It's the eternal question for people of faith—how can we believe in a good God, who allows bad things to happen to good people? Or as J.B. Priestley put it in his play about Job, "If God is great he is not good. If God is good he is not great."
Why, why, why. How could you let this happen, God? We demand an answer. Our modern-day sensibilities tell us that this is a problem, and each problem has an answer! We assume that if we work hard enough, we will achieve a solution, like we did for airplanes and putting a man on the moon and in vitro fertilization. No matter how much we pretend they are, life and death are not problems to be solved. No matter how hard we try to make it so, the universe is not a finite machine that engineers can manipulate and that scientists can understand down to the last particle.
People expect definitive answers from pastors, too. I know when I first started going back to church as a young adult, I expected a lot of answers. I would wait until the end of sermons saying, "Here it comes! The pastor's going to answer all my questions! Wait for it, wait for it ... that's all? You're ending with another question???" Sheesh!
I wish I had answers for you. But even Jesus spoke in parables, stories to be wrestled with rather than summed up neatly. God's role in life and death is a mystery; what one pastor calls a Pearly Gate question. "We'll understand it all by and by," as the old gospel song goes. For now, in this lifetime, we can only read scripture, wrestle with the questions, and pray.
We'll wrestle with different aspects of Job for two more Sundays. For today, let's focus on the question of God's power. The Amish farmer quoted in the press feels that God "had a purpose" for the school house killings. Presumably that God means that God either deliberately caused them, or allowed them to happen, or was unable to stop them. I believe it's too terrible to imagine that God would deliberately cause them as some kind of test, but much of Job is devoted to exploring that idea. If that were true, then, it would be impossible to determine ultimate causes.
Charles Carl Roberts IV, the school shooter in Nickel Mines, PA, left a suicide note before he went to went to work. He mentioned their baby girl that had died shortly after birth: "Elise's death 'changed my life forever,' the milk truck river and father of three wrote to his wife. 'I haven't been the same since it affected me in a way I never felt possible. I am filled with so much hate, hate toward myself hate towards God and unimaginable emptiness it seems like every time we do something fun I think about how Elise wasn't here to share it with us and I go right back to anger.'"
Did God then intend for baby Elise to die, setting up the chain of events that led to the violence in an Amish school?
Or did God help Roberts pull the trigger? I don't think so.
I can't believe that the God I love would cause the death of innocent children deliberately. I believe that God works through terrible tragedies, helping people, and finding ways for new life and new growth to blossom. I don't believe God causes them.
But God either allowed it to happen, or was powerless to stop it.
There's a popular book our by Rabbi Kushner, in which he addresses the reasons why bad things happen to good people, or in fact, to anyone at all. Kushner's son died from premature aging, at about age 11. Going back to the creation story in Genesis 1, Kushner points out that God created our world by taming chaos; separating land from sea and light from dark. According to this worldview, the universe is not fully tamed yet, there are still pockets of chaos that God is unable to control. There's a lot to be said for this reasoning. The world does seem pretty chaotic.
But many Christians believe in an all-powerful God who created the universe out of nothingness — As JB Priestly wrote, "If God is great he is not good; if God is good he is not great."
If God is all powerful, then he can stop all the tragedies. If God can stop bad things from happening, why doesn't she?
I believe that God could be all-powerful, but chooses not to. There's a Hebrew word that I forget which means shrinking or drawing in, and it refers to the idea that God holds himself back. Otherwise, we would have no free will. If God ran the world, it might be glorious, free from pain — a true Garden of Eden again. But we would be mere puppets.
Is God in control or not? I believe that God is in control, but I don't fully understand what that means. I believe that statement is true on a deep, deep level, deeper and more basic than mere facts or happenstances. It is both more complex than a feeling and yet simpler than a thought. God is in control in a large, a macro sense. Like the contemplative Julian of Norwich said, God holds the world in the palm of God's hand, just like a small hazel nut, and gazes on it lovingly. God created it, and God loves it; and God redeems it. God is in control.
But God is not directly responsible for every single action that takes place on the planet. God does not will evil.
Let's look at the second creation story, found in Genesis 2. God set the world in motion. God creates a-dam, the human, from the dust of the earth; [a-dam means from the dust] the being we call Adam, and then steps back and says, "Hmm. Perhaps the human could use some help." So the Creator creates all the animals of the earth—and then steps back again and says, "Hmm. That won't do. None of those animals is really the partner a-dam needs". So God creates another human, a partner to be a helper for a-dam; another person to stand face-to-face and work side-by-side. And God said, "Yeah! That's right"
Our God is a wait-and-see God. I don't believe that God plans every step of our lives, because if he did that, then we wouldn't have any freedom. God could have puppets, of course. But God wants free men, women and children, who turn to her in love instead of compulsion. God has given us our freedom, and how and when or even if, God intervenes, we will never know for sure. I believe that we can know, that God weeps with us. I am reminded of William Sloan Coffin's remarks. In December 1982, the 21 year old son of the then pastor of Riverside Church in NYC, drove off a bridge into Boston harbor and drowned.
Trying to comfort Coffin, a woman said to him, "I just don't understand God's will." Angry, Coffin shouted back at her, "I'll say you don't understand God's will, lady. Do you think it was the will of God that Alex never fixed that lousy windshield wiper, that Alex was probably driving too fast in such a storm, that Alex had probably had too much to drink? Do you think it is God's will there are no street lights along that stretch of road, no guard rail separating the road and Boston harbor?"
Coffin later commented, "For some reason I can't get it through people's heads that God doesn't run around the world pulling trigger fingers, clenching knives, turning steering wheels. God is dead set against all kinds of unnatural deaths. This is not to say there are no unnatural deaths. There are. But the one thing that should never be said about any violent death like Alex's death is that it is the will of God. My own consolation lies in knowing that it was not the will of God that Alex died -- but that when the waves closed in over the sinking car, God's heart was the first of all hearts to break." Amen
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