Sermon delivered Sunday, Oct. 21, 2012, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Franklin, Tenn.
21 Pentecost, Proper 24, Year B (Job 38:1-7, 34-41; Psalm 104:1-9, 25, 37b)
As we continue in our reading from Job this Sunday, we get to the part where God finally responds to Job’s cries of despair. And, interestingly enough, God does not directly address any of Job’s complaints or questions about the injustice of Job’s suffering or the senseless suffering in the wider world. Instead, God’s answer to Job is a creation story.
“Why has all this pain come upon me for no reason?” Job cries, “And what about all those orphans and widows starving out there, and all the wars, and the people who exploit and abuse others and get away with it? I demand an answer!”
And God replies, “Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth? Can you create lightning and make it rain? Can you provide food for all the creatures of the earth?”
He draws Job’s attention to the intricate workings of the wider world outside of Job’s small realm of existence and reminds Job that Job is not God, nor does the entire world revolve around Job. The story of Job seems to be suggesting that one possible solution to the “problem of evil,” the question of why suffering exists if the world is created by a benevolent God, is to shift our perspective from a human-centered point of view to a God-centered point of view. To “zoom out,” if you will, to see the bigger picture of how all the elements of the natural world fit together in an amazingly intricate and awe-inspiring configuration, of which humans are just one part. It can be humbling but comforting to realize that we are not the center of the universe.
Sewanee biologist David Haskell recently published a book called The Forest Unseen, in which he records his observations of one square meter of forest on the Cumberland Plateau over the course of a year. Although chock-full of scientific facts and figures, his approach is contemplative: his goal is to “search for the universal within the infinitesimally small” in the same way as Tibetan monks see the entire universe within the circular meditation aids called mandalas that they create out of colored sand, or in the same way as the Christian mystic Julian of Norwich saw the divine love and design of God in meditating on a hazelnut.
Whether describing the atomic physics behind the consistent hexagonal shape of snowflakes or the ways in which plants warn other plants about approaching insect predators by sending out chemical signals, Haskell’s meditations make fascinating scientific insights about the interconnectedness of all life accessible to a general audience. Although Haskell speaks of the inner workings of cells and organisms evolving through natural selection, not of God “tilting the waterskins of the heavens” to make it rain, his meditations on the greater workings of the universe put things in perspective for me in a similar way to what I think the story of Job intends to communicate in imagining God’s response to Job as an account of creation. Meditating on the wonders of creation reminds us that we are part of something much bigger than any of our individual lives.
Other authors of biblical texts turn to creation narratives in times of suffering as well. The “Song of the Three Young Men,” one of the canticles optional for use at Morning Prayer, is a passage from the Old Testament Book of Daniel that appears in the Greek version of the text but not the Hebrew. It details the song sung by Shadrach, Meshach, and Abendego after they are thrown in the fiery furnace for refusing to worship the golden image created by King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon. Significantly, their song in a moment of persecution and near-death is an extensive meditation on creation and a call for all creation to praise and worship the Lord:
“Glorify the Lord, every shower of rain and fall of dew, all winds and fire and heat,” they sing. “Storm clouds and thunderbolts, glorify the Lord, praise him and highly exalt him forever… Glorify the Lord, O mountains and hills and all that grows upon the earth… O springs of water, seas and streams, O whales and all that move in the waters. All birds of the air, glorify the Lord, praise him and highly exalt him forever.”(BCP 88-89)
In the face of possible death, they sing about the glories of creation. They recognize that the vastness of creation over which God is sovereign is much bigger than their individual lives and that the created order will continue to give glory to God, whether or not they personally survive to continue to give witness to him.
Many of the psalms also recount beautiful creation narratives, sometimes in the midst of a lament or struggle with God’s apparent absence or silence. Today’s psalm, 104, is a song entirely of thanksgiving and praise, with no verses of lament, but taken within the entire corpus of the psalms as a whole, they represent a body of poetic literature that both cries out to God in times of despair and finds hope through remembering and recounting the sacred stories of Israel’s history and recalling God’s creation of the world. During times of suffering, when, like Job, we wonder where God is and cannot feel his presence, we remember the places we’ve seen and experienced God in the past to find comfort – and creation or the natural world around us seems to be one of the primary places that many people, both ancients and moderns, find testament to God’s presence.
Meditating on creation can be comforting because it relieves us of any notion that it is our job to rule the world, to manage or control or “fix” things. Although we see many things that may seem wrong or broken with the world, we are reminded that that “God is God and we are not,” and that can be a very liberating thought for those of us who sometimes feel like Atlas, holding the weight of the world on our shoulders.
Meditating on creation can also help us to see that what may seem evil or horrific from one perspective might actually be quite magnificent and awe-inspiring when seen in the greater scheme of things. Watching a lion devour a gazelle might seem to be cruel, and certainly that moment is one of great suffering for the gazelle, but in the death of the gazelle comes nourishment for the lion. And the lion’s eventual death will provide nourishment for vultures or other birds of prey. Nothing is wasted. The energy bound up in each of these living creatures will not cease to exist, but be transformed, serving another purpose in the great cycle of life that many cultures and religions regard as sacred.
In leading a recent Quiet Day (9/28/12, at St. Mary's Sewanee) on the Song of the Three Young Men, that canticle of creation from Morning Prayer, Episcopal priest and author Barbara Cawthorne Crafton commented on the peace that comes from spending time meditating on creation. “The more time we spend with plants and animals, the more at peace we will be with our own end,” she said. Observing the cycle of life reminds us that, as we say on Ash Wednesday, we are dust and to dust we shall return.
God answers Job’s cries of despair with a song of creation because an awareness of our own mortality and our place in the great cycle of life has the potential to bring great comfort. And there is some indication in the text that Job does find comfort in reflecting on these things.
Although most translations of the final chapter of Job, which we will read in the lectionary next week, say that Job responds to God’s speech by repenting, by apologizing and “taking back” everything he’d said before, Hebrew Bible scholar Rebecca Abts Wright suggests a different translation. She is convinced that Job never repents, since he has done nothing wrong of which to repent – and even God acknowledges this in the final chapter when he says that Job has spoken truth about God while Job’s friends have not. Instead, she points out that the root of the Hebrew word translated as “repent,” while it can mean “to change the mind,” is never used in calls for people to repent elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible. The root also means “to comfort,” and indeed, that same word is translated as “comfort” just a few verses later when Job’s relatives come to him and comfort him after the ordeal is over. Wright suggests that rather than translating the final verse of Job’s response to God’s speech as “therefore, I despise myself and repent in dust and ashes,” it could more accurately be translated as “therefore, I melt away and am comforted concerning dust and ashes.”
There’s a very different message there if she is correct. In Wright’s interpretation, the message is not that Job gets put in his place for questioning God and submits after receiving a divine “smack down.” Instead, after being reminded of the vastness of God’s creation and his small place in the grand scheme of things, he finally “lets go,” so to speak – that’s what I hear in the “melt away” part – and is “comforted concerning dust and ashes” – he is comforted about the fact of his own mortality and the human condition. He is reminded that he is dust and to dust he shall return, and he is “at peace with his own end.” He is comforted knowing that God is in control of the universe, and that God has heard his cries of pain, even if he does not understand the reasons for his suffering.
So perhaps the next time you find yourself struggling with something difficult, you might remember God’s answer to Job from the whirlwind and take a step outside to contemplate the movement of an ant on the pavement or the intricacies of the veins of the leaves on the trees around you. Step out of your mind for a moment and contemplate the bigger picture of God’s wondrous creation. Cultivating a sense of awe and respect for creation over time may bring you deepening waves of peace and a holy sense of connectedness with all life.
Sunday, October 21, 2012
Sunday, October 7, 2012
Shall we receive the good at the hand of God and not receive the bad?
Sermon delivered Sunday, Oct. 7, 2012 (19th Sunday After Pentecost, Proper 22B), at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Franklin, Tenn. (Job 1:1, 2:1-10)
“Shall we receive the good at the hand of God and not receive the bad?” (Job 2:10)
Job’s question is a poignant one, coming from a man who had experienced unspeakable loss. Our lectionary passage leaves out most of the first chapter of Job, which describes the loss of Job’s livestock and the death of his servants and all ten of his children. Then Job is stricken with a painful illness. Things are so bad that his wife comes to the conclusion it would be better to die than to continue to live with the suffering Job is experiencing, and encourages Job to curse God and die.
But Job refuses, continuing to accept God’s sovereignty over his life. “The Lord has given and the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord” (Job 1:21), he says when he learns of the death of his children. “Shall we receive the good at the hand of God and not receive the bad?” he asks (Job 2:10), in response to his wife’s words of anger and despair.
This question could be the “topic sentence” of the entire Book of Job: Are human beings willing to receive the good at the hand of God and not to receive the bad? It is the question that Satan, or “the Accuser,” asks in the heavenly court. “Of course Job is faithful and upright,” he says to God, “It’s easy for people to be faithful and give praise to God when things are going well for them. But what about when things are tough? How much will they love you then?”
The entire “game” that the Accuser plays with Job is an experiment to answer that very question: “Shall we receive the good at the hand of God and not receive the bad?” Will Job continue to be in faithful relationship with God even when his comfortable life is stripped away from him?
Now, before we go any further, let me say a word about the disturbing opening of this story. What kind of God, you might ask, would agree to let all these calamities befall an innocent person just to win a “bet,” if you will, with an unruly angel? Does God also send death and destruction upon us intentionally, just to see if we’ll cave under the pressure? Are the suffering of our lives a result of God making a similar bargain with the Accuser?
In my understanding of God, the answers to those questions are “no” and “no.” It is helpful to understand that the Book of Job was never intended to describe actual events that happened to a real person. Hebrew Bible scholar Rebecca Abts Wright describes the book of Job as the ancient equivalent of a “Dr. Seuss” story, a story meant to illustrate a particular question or topic through creative imagination. The story of Job describes a perfect man with a perfect family in a made up land (no one knows where “the land of Uz” is) with a made-up name (“Job” is not a Semitic or Hebrew name, or a name common to any of the surrounding cultures). This is the ancient Near Eastern equivalent of a story about the Whos down in Whoville. The description of Job is a kind of stereotype of perfection that does not exist completely in real life. But the author of the story posits the existence of this hypothetical “perfect” person to explore a significant theological question: Is it possible to remain faithful to God in the midst of unexplainable suffering, suffering which we have done nothing to deserve?
The story of Job is something like a parable, through which we are invited to consider our own lives of faith. Are we “fair-weather” friends of God, happy to praise him when things are going well, but quick to curse him when they are not? Are we like the seed in Jesus’s parable of the sower (Luke 8:4-15) that was sown on rock, who receive the Word with joy when we first hear it, but when troubles arise, we fall away?
Reading this passage from Job at this particular point in time, I cannot help but think of the response of the Sikh community in Wisconsin to the shootings at their place of worship two months ago. Despite enduring the horror of a violent attack during a worship service and losing six members of their community, the Sikh community has responded with love and compassion, continuing to be at prayer and to encourage one another to remain in chardi kala, a state of optimism and high spirits that is central to the Sikh faith. My friend Valarie Kaur, a third-generation Sikh American from California and a nationally-known interfaith activist, went to Milwaukee to be with the community in the days and weeks after the shootings. She gathered first-hand stories from the people there and began sharing them through op-ed pieces, blog entries, Facebook posts and tweets.
One of the most powerful stories she shared was that of Santokh Singh, a 50-year-old man from India who came to the U.S. to serve the community in Milwaukee as a granthi, a devotional singer who recites prayers from scripture in Sikh worship services. In the attack on the gurdwara in August, he survived two gunshot wounds to the stomach. In reflecting on the shooting, Santokh said, “I have no hate for the gunman. What happened was done by God. How can I wish ill upon the gunman if it is God’s will?”
“The Lord has given and the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord.” (Job 1:21)
In the face of unspeakable loss, the Sikh community in Wisconsin, like Job, has affirmed an acceptance of God’s sovereignty in their lives. “Whatever God gives, we receive with grace,” says a Sikh prayer. Turning to prayer for solace in the days and weeks after the shooting, Sikhs received the gut-wrenching pain of their loss as a gift from God. “One does not turn away a gift, or bury it, or rage against it, but receive it with an open heart,” Valarie wrote in an article for The Washington Post, describing the community’s theological response to the tragedy.
“Shall we receive the good at the hand of God but not receive the bad?” (Job 2:10)
But Job’s acceptance of his fate and his poignant words of faith and trust are not the whole story. In this book of 42 chapters, Job’s strong statements of trust and acceptance of God’s will appear only in the first two chapters. From chapter three onwards, Job begins to lament his loss. He says it would be better if he had never been born, and question God’s justice at allowing such pain to come into his life.
“Truly the thing that I fear comes upon me, and what I dread befalls me,” he says. “I am not at ease, nor am I quiet; I have no rest; but trouble comes” (Job 3:25-26). This is a far cry from the calm acceptance of his fate and peaceful worship and blessing of God that he expressed when he first lost his children and livestock. After the loss has a chance to sink in more deeply, the raw pain seeps out, perhaps even against his will, since Job was a deeply pious man who most likely would have wanted to remain in chardi kala, as the Sikhs would put it, optimistic and faithful despite his sufferings. But the pain was too much.
And it is too much for some members of the Sikh community in Milwaukee as well. Not all members of the community are able to trust that the shootings were a part of God’s will with as much peace and grace as Santokh Singh. Valarie also shared stories of members of the community who continue to see images of their loved ones lying on the floor in pools of blood, who continue to hear the gunshots in their dreams, who cannot sleep at night. The trauma of the shootings strips away their sense of peace and violates their most sacred space.
“Truly the thing that I fear comes upon me, and what I dread befalls me. I am not at ease, nor am I quiet; I have no rest; but trouble comes” (Job 3:25-26).
So what are we to do when we are unable to stay in chardi kala? When the pain and grief are simply too much, when we cannot honestly thank God for this supposed “gift” that he gives?
Well, we can do what Job does. Job expresses his anger, his frustration, his despair, and his pain to God. He does not give in to the temptation to beat himself up, to agree with the unhelpful suggestions of his friends that surely God must be punishing him for some sin he has committed. No, Job maintains his sense of integrity by insisting on his own innocence, and in questioning God’s justice in allowing innocent people to suffer.
But in all this, Job never curses God, as his wife suggests. He still acknowledges that God is in control, even if he doesn’t like it! He makes his complaints about how God is running the world known, and at the end of it all God actually affirms Job’s response over the response of Job’s friends, who support traditional wisdom in saying that God rewards those who are righteous and brings suffering upon those who are wicked. In the last chapter of the book of Job, in a passage you won’t see in the lectionary when we get to this section at the end of October, God scolds Job’s friends, saying, “My wrath is kindled against you, …for you have not spoken of me what is right, as my servant Job has” (Job 42:7).
Accepting God’s will and God’s sovereignty over our lives does not mean denying the feelings of frustration, grief, anger, and despair that well up within us when inexplicable suffering comes to us. With Job, we can say, “The Lord has given and the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord” (Job 1:21), but still cry out in pain. With the Sikh community in Milwaukee, we can say, “Whatever God gives, we receive with grace,” but still acknowledge when the grief is too much to bear – and seek help from friends, family, and professional counselors to get us through. And we can be gentle with ourselves in that place of both/and, of faith and doubt, gratitude and despair, because the important part is that we stay in relationship with God – not that we say nice things about God or always like God and never question God – but that we are in authentic relationship with God – a God who knows something about the depths of inexplicable pain, whose desire to be in authentic relationship with us led him to death on a cross.
“Shall we receive the good at the hand of God and not receive the bad?” (Job 2:10)
Job’s question is a poignant one, coming from a man who had experienced unspeakable loss. Our lectionary passage leaves out most of the first chapter of Job, which describes the loss of Job’s livestock and the death of his servants and all ten of his children. Then Job is stricken with a painful illness. Things are so bad that his wife comes to the conclusion it would be better to die than to continue to live with the suffering Job is experiencing, and encourages Job to curse God and die.
But Job refuses, continuing to accept God’s sovereignty over his life. “The Lord has given and the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord” (Job 1:21), he says when he learns of the death of his children. “Shall we receive the good at the hand of God and not receive the bad?” he asks (Job 2:10), in response to his wife’s words of anger and despair.
This question could be the “topic sentence” of the entire Book of Job: Are human beings willing to receive the good at the hand of God and not to receive the bad? It is the question that Satan, or “the Accuser,” asks in the heavenly court. “Of course Job is faithful and upright,” he says to God, “It’s easy for people to be faithful and give praise to God when things are going well for them. But what about when things are tough? How much will they love you then?”
The entire “game” that the Accuser plays with Job is an experiment to answer that very question: “Shall we receive the good at the hand of God and not receive the bad?” Will Job continue to be in faithful relationship with God even when his comfortable life is stripped away from him?
Now, before we go any further, let me say a word about the disturbing opening of this story. What kind of God, you might ask, would agree to let all these calamities befall an innocent person just to win a “bet,” if you will, with an unruly angel? Does God also send death and destruction upon us intentionally, just to see if we’ll cave under the pressure? Are the suffering of our lives a result of God making a similar bargain with the Accuser?
In my understanding of God, the answers to those questions are “no” and “no.” It is helpful to understand that the Book of Job was never intended to describe actual events that happened to a real person. Hebrew Bible scholar Rebecca Abts Wright describes the book of Job as the ancient equivalent of a “Dr. Seuss” story, a story meant to illustrate a particular question or topic through creative imagination. The story of Job describes a perfect man with a perfect family in a made up land (no one knows where “the land of Uz” is) with a made-up name (“Job” is not a Semitic or Hebrew name, or a name common to any of the surrounding cultures). This is the ancient Near Eastern equivalent of a story about the Whos down in Whoville. The description of Job is a kind of stereotype of perfection that does not exist completely in real life. But the author of the story posits the existence of this hypothetical “perfect” person to explore a significant theological question: Is it possible to remain faithful to God in the midst of unexplainable suffering, suffering which we have done nothing to deserve?
The story of Job is something like a parable, through which we are invited to consider our own lives of faith. Are we “fair-weather” friends of God, happy to praise him when things are going well, but quick to curse him when they are not? Are we like the seed in Jesus’s parable of the sower (Luke 8:4-15) that was sown on rock, who receive the Word with joy when we first hear it, but when troubles arise, we fall away?
Reading this passage from Job at this particular point in time, I cannot help but think of the response of the Sikh community in Wisconsin to the shootings at their place of worship two months ago. Despite enduring the horror of a violent attack during a worship service and losing six members of their community, the Sikh community has responded with love and compassion, continuing to be at prayer and to encourage one another to remain in chardi kala, a state of optimism and high spirits that is central to the Sikh faith. My friend Valarie Kaur, a third-generation Sikh American from California and a nationally-known interfaith activist, went to Milwaukee to be with the community in the days and weeks after the shootings. She gathered first-hand stories from the people there and began sharing them through op-ed pieces, blog entries, Facebook posts and tweets.
One of the most powerful stories she shared was that of Santokh Singh, a 50-year-old man from India who came to the U.S. to serve the community in Milwaukee as a granthi, a devotional singer who recites prayers from scripture in Sikh worship services. In the attack on the gurdwara in August, he survived two gunshot wounds to the stomach. In reflecting on the shooting, Santokh said, “I have no hate for the gunman. What happened was done by God. How can I wish ill upon the gunman if it is God’s will?”
“The Lord has given and the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord.” (Job 1:21)
In the face of unspeakable loss, the Sikh community in Wisconsin, like Job, has affirmed an acceptance of God’s sovereignty in their lives. “Whatever God gives, we receive with grace,” says a Sikh prayer. Turning to prayer for solace in the days and weeks after the shooting, Sikhs received the gut-wrenching pain of their loss as a gift from God. “One does not turn away a gift, or bury it, or rage against it, but receive it with an open heart,” Valarie wrote in an article for The Washington Post, describing the community’s theological response to the tragedy.
“Shall we receive the good at the hand of God but not receive the bad?” (Job 2:10)
But Job’s acceptance of his fate and his poignant words of faith and trust are not the whole story. In this book of 42 chapters, Job’s strong statements of trust and acceptance of God’s will appear only in the first two chapters. From chapter three onwards, Job begins to lament his loss. He says it would be better if he had never been born, and question God’s justice at allowing such pain to come into his life.
“Truly the thing that I fear comes upon me, and what I dread befalls me,” he says. “I am not at ease, nor am I quiet; I have no rest; but trouble comes” (Job 3:25-26). This is a far cry from the calm acceptance of his fate and peaceful worship and blessing of God that he expressed when he first lost his children and livestock. After the loss has a chance to sink in more deeply, the raw pain seeps out, perhaps even against his will, since Job was a deeply pious man who most likely would have wanted to remain in chardi kala, as the Sikhs would put it, optimistic and faithful despite his sufferings. But the pain was too much.
And it is too much for some members of the Sikh community in Milwaukee as well. Not all members of the community are able to trust that the shootings were a part of God’s will with as much peace and grace as Santokh Singh. Valarie also shared stories of members of the community who continue to see images of their loved ones lying on the floor in pools of blood, who continue to hear the gunshots in their dreams, who cannot sleep at night. The trauma of the shootings strips away their sense of peace and violates their most sacred space.
“Truly the thing that I fear comes upon me, and what I dread befalls me. I am not at ease, nor am I quiet; I have no rest; but trouble comes” (Job 3:25-26).
So what are we to do when we are unable to stay in chardi kala? When the pain and grief are simply too much, when we cannot honestly thank God for this supposed “gift” that he gives?
Well, we can do what Job does. Job expresses his anger, his frustration, his despair, and his pain to God. He does not give in to the temptation to beat himself up, to agree with the unhelpful suggestions of his friends that surely God must be punishing him for some sin he has committed. No, Job maintains his sense of integrity by insisting on his own innocence, and in questioning God’s justice in allowing innocent people to suffer.
But in all this, Job never curses God, as his wife suggests. He still acknowledges that God is in control, even if he doesn’t like it! He makes his complaints about how God is running the world known, and at the end of it all God actually affirms Job’s response over the response of Job’s friends, who support traditional wisdom in saying that God rewards those who are righteous and brings suffering upon those who are wicked. In the last chapter of the book of Job, in a passage you won’t see in the lectionary when we get to this section at the end of October, God scolds Job’s friends, saying, “My wrath is kindled against you, …for you have not spoken of me what is right, as my servant Job has” (Job 42:7).
Accepting God’s will and God’s sovereignty over our lives does not mean denying the feelings of frustration, grief, anger, and despair that well up within us when inexplicable suffering comes to us. With Job, we can say, “The Lord has given and the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord” (Job 1:21), but still cry out in pain. With the Sikh community in Milwaukee, we can say, “Whatever God gives, we receive with grace,” but still acknowledge when the grief is too much to bear – and seek help from friends, family, and professional counselors to get us through. And we can be gentle with ourselves in that place of both/and, of faith and doubt, gratitude and despair, because the important part is that we stay in relationship with God – not that we say nice things about God or always like God and never question God – but that we are in authentic relationship with God – a God who knows something about the depths of inexplicable pain, whose desire to be in authentic relationship with us led him to death on a cross.
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