Fourth Sunday in Lent

Today's text is Job 2:11-13, read by Paul Kalapathy. This morning's sermon was delivered by the Rev. Emily Bowen-Marler.

Lead Pastor: Rev. Dr. Phil Snider (he/him)

Associate Pastor: Rev. Emily Bowen-Marler (she/her)

Youth Director: Paije Luth (she/her)

Children’s Church Coordinator: Valerie Bush (she/her)

Executive Assistant: Wacey Rivale (she/her)

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Our scripture reading is uh Job chapter 2, 11 to 13. And when Job's three friends heard all of these troubles that had come upon him, each of them set out from his home. Eliphaz the Temanite, Bildad the Shuhite, and Zophar the Naemithite. They met together to go and console and comfort him. When they saw him from a distance, they did not recognize him, and they raised their voices and wept aloud. They tore their robes and threw dust in the air upon their heads. They sat with them on the ground seven days and seven nights, and no one spoke a word to him, for they saw that his suffering was very great. May we hear what the Spirit is saying to the church.

SPEAKER_03 0:40

So, funny thing, do you remember in the sermon that I preached a couple of weeks ago as part of this Lenten sermon series that's based on Kate Bowler's book, Everything Happens for a Reason and Other Lies I've Loved, I mentioned that I had been searching for a scripture that could offer some wisdom for when life isn't fair. And I said that a book in the Bible that could offer some wisdom perhaps, but that I didn't really want to use was the book of Job, even though it does depict a whole lot of unfair things happening to one man. So, yeah, about that. I decided that I was just gonna go to the book of Job for this Sunday. As I considered verses that could be used this week, I just kept going back because there really is so much wisdom that we can glean from the book of Job, but it is also one of those books that has been interpreted so many different ways across the ages. And so I just feel like it's a book that should be handled with care, but I also think that it's a book that can offer us a lot in the midst of these topics. So I'm gonna set the stage. There was a man from Ooze whose name was Job. Now there is some debate on where the land of Ooze is and whether it's even an actual place. Some scholars believe that it's a fictional place with a name to serve the story of Job. The word Ooze in Hebrew means counsel or advice, which means that the story takes place in the land of counsel. This is certainly a fitting name as Job wrestles with all of the suffering that befalls him in the conversations with his friends, in the commentary of a bystander, and ultimately the response from God. So the way the story begins, we see a man who does everything right. More than that, he does everything right himself, and then he even makes ritual sacrifices to God for each one of his children in case one of his children did something accidentally to displease God. So he's really doing everything he can to cover all of his bases. God is certainly pleased with Job. Well, one day the heavenly beings come to meet with God and Satan joins them. God says to Satan, Where have you come from? And Satan answers, God, Oh, you know, walking to and fro upon the earth. God says to Satan, Did you notice my man Job? There is no one like him on the earth, a blameless and upright man who fears God and turns away from evil. So then Satan says to God, Does Job fear God for nothing? Haven't you protected him so that no harm can come to him? Haven't you blessed his hard work so that his wealth and influence have increased across the land? I bet if you took all that away, Job would curse you to your face. So God says to Satan, Okay then, do your worst, but don't hurt his actual body. So Satan goes out and does his worst. And all that is going right in Job's life goes wrong. His children are killed, along with his servants and his livestock, all of his wealth is lost. And yet, in spite of it all, Job does not sin or blame God. So the next time the heavenly beings meet with God, Satan joins them, and God asks once again where Satan has been, and Satan says, Oh, you know, walking to and fro upon the earth. And God says, Did you notice my man Job? There is no one like him on the earth, a blameless and upright man who fears God and turns away from evil. You convinced me last time to let you do your worst because you are apparently a twisted being. But still, Job is as faithful as ever. So Satan replies, Well, you did let me hurt his body. A person can endure a whole lot when they are in sound mind and body. If you actually let me hurt his body, I bet he'd curse you to your face. So God says, Okay then, do your worst, but don't kill him. So Satan makes sores break out all over Job's body, and Job is absolutely miserable. He goes out and sits by the garbage heap and scrapes his sores with a broken piece of pottery. His wife looks at him beside herself with sorrow over the suffering of her husband and says, I can't believe that you remain faithful even after this. You should just curse God and die. But even then, Job remains faithful. Now it is at this point in the story that our scripture reading that you heard Paul read takes place. Job's three friends, Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar, have all heard what has befallen Job, and they want to go and console him and offer him comfort. They journey together to the place where Job sits crumpled on the ground, and at first they do not recognize him. He is so disfigured by what has happened to him. They cry out and weep, tearing at their clothes and throwing dust up on the air so that it covers their heads. And then they go and they sit on the ground with Job for seven days and seven nights. They sit with him, not saying a word, but just being with him in his sorrow, letting him know that he is not alone. For they can see that his suffering is so great. And oh how much better it would be if it ended there before Job's friends open their mouths and undo this beautiful act of solidarity, support, and friendship in the face of suffering, but they just can't help themselves. They do what so many of us have done in the face of suffering. They reach for explanations and justifications of the suffering, trying to make sense of it all. Now, I don't think any of us have said some of the things that you're about to hear Job's friends saying to him, but I know that there are times when we just don't know what to say in the face of great suffering. And so we say the first thing that comes to mind, or we say something that might be comforting, and then we're like, oh, I wish I could take that back. I don't think that helped. Like you could just see on the person's face that what you said wasn't helpful or didn't make them feel better, and you think, oh, it's like that toothpaste moment, right? When you want to put it all back. So I don't think Job's friends had that moment. They just kept talking and talking and talking. Um, they didn't know what to say during those seven days and seven nights, and that's why they were silent. And I think maybe after that silence, they just felt like they had to say something. And so they started responding with things like, Oh, I will say Job was the first one to break the silence. So his friends did at least wait until Job was willing to speak. And he is lamenting all that has befallen him. And his friends respond with things like, Evil does not grow in the soil, nor does trouble grow out of the ground. No, indeed, we bring trouble on ourselves. And your children must have sinned against God, and so God punished them as they deserved. And put your heart right, Job. Reach out to God, put away evil and wrong from your home. And when Job says, My grief has almost made me blind, my arms and legs are as thin as shadows, my days have passed, my plans have failed, my hope is gone. Where is there any hope for me? Who sees any? Hope will not go with me when I go down to the world of the dead. And then one of his friends responds, Job, can't people like you even be quiet? If you stop to listen, we could talk to you. You were only hurting yourself with your anger. That is this is the fate of evil people, the fate of those who care nothing for God. And Job responds, Why do you keep tormenting me with these words? Time after time, you insult me and show no shame for the way you abuse me. Even if I have done wrong, how does that hurt you? But his friends just can't help themselves. There must be a reason for the calamities Job is experiencing, and they just keep grasping at straws to find it. Another one of his friends says, is there anyone, even the wisest, who could ever be of use to God, does your doing right benefit God? Or does your being good help God at all? It is not because you stand in awe of God that God reprimands you and brings you to trial. No, it is because you have sinned so much. It's because of all the evil that you do. Job's friends have fallen into that familiar trap that we often find ourselves in when we are with someone who is suffering, with someone who has just received a grim diagnosis, with someone who has just lost a loved one. Just trying to make sense of it, trying to offer explanations for things that our minds cannot quite grasp. And sometimes we turn to those tried and true platitudes, hoping those words will offer some comfort. But sometimes there aren't words that can help in the face of great suffering and pain. Sometimes what a person needs most is a hand to hold or someone to just rub their back, or to stroke their hair, or to clean up their house, or to organize all of the casseroles that have been brought by people who love them so that they can have a meal plan set out for the next couple of weeks. She writes, whenever there is a clarifying moment of grief, I jot it down. And then in a flurry, I shoot it off to the New York Times, not thinking too much about whether it's any good, but sending it because I have been infected by the urgency of death. So she speaks about this experience and the responses that she got to her editorial in an interview that I'm going to share with you now on the screen.

SPEAKER_02 11:29

I'd written this op-ed. I didn't think I would live till Christmas, and it was one of those, like, well, screw it, kinds of moments. Just say everything that occurs to me. And so I wrote a really, really sad personal story about what it was like to feel like I was dying in a culture where everybody had a reason, and everybody was suddenly a spiritual accountant, and everything that mattered to me was being lightly appraised. Well, how many kids do you have? Was it in your family? The sense that at every turn they were just deciding how very sad to feel or not.

SPEAKER_01 12:00

Depending on whether I could have known better.

SPEAKER_02 12:02

And I wrote about how lonely that felt. And then I've I'd never been published in anything but like an academic journal before. And I sent it to a friend who sent it to another friend who had an editor friend at the New York Times, and he just published it and put it on the cover of the big flappy flap you get on Sundays. And um it had a very big, very sad picture. And then because I'm dumb, I had my information at the bottom and a very easy way to let me know how you felt about the article. So I thought that I had written asking for people to have fewer reasons for why bad things happen.

SPEAKER_01 12:40

And many people instead read it and thought, you know, now that I've had some time to think about it, I think there's some reasons that I have for why you might be suffering, Kate. Thank you for providing your email here below. So I got thousands of emails.

SPEAKER_02 12:56

It was such a wild, vulnerable way to experience other people's stories about why. Some of them wanted me to understand that it was God's sovereign plan and that God was just. God was just to let me die. Some of them offered the explanation that I my life was becoming meaningful because now I could use this platform to explain to people the greatness of God. And if my life no longer had meaning at that point, then God would allow me a side door. In living through the desire for meaning, one thing I've always held close, I really don't think that there was any malicious desire to sort of like purge an awful thought. I think that it just sometimes feels impossible to know that someone is suffering or to know that something truly awful is happening and not be able to come close to some kind of explanation.

SPEAKER_03 13:52

So I just want to repeat what she says there at the end. In living through the desire for meaning, one thing I've always held close, I really don't think that there are any malicious desires to purge an awful thought. I think it just sometimes feels impossible to know that someone is suffering or to know that something truly awful is happening and not be able to come close to some kind of explanation. I've watched that clip and I thought she has a tremendous amount of grace. I mean, how many of us have to endure thousands of emails from people, well-meaning or not, explaining to us why the suffering that we're experiencing is happening to us. And yet she was able to see in those responses the pain and grief that other people were feeling. And how very likely it was that these were reasons that they had given themselves to explain the pain and suffering that they had experienced in their own lives. When Kate first offered up her editorial, she writes that she thought she was making a simple case. Maybe life would feel a little lighter if we didn't insist that everything happens for a reason. And as she expressed in the clip, that wasn't really something that a number of people were willing to expect. We need reasons, we need explanations, we need justifications, because as Bowler reflects, uncertainty is unbearable. We want answers. We want meaning. We want to know why. And she writes, My life's work is studying the stories we tell about pain and why we keep reaching for the ones that promise everything will make sense. Which has me thinking, maybe there really isn't a promise that everything will make sense. Which I know can feel bleak. And I'm not saying that we shouldn't try to make meaning of our suffering, but maybe when people in our lives are suffering, we should refrain from trying to make meaning out of their suffering in the words that we share with them. Maybe we just listen to them as they wrestle with those things and offer a kind heart, a listening ear, and hands to hold theirs while they try to come up with and struggle for meaning in the midst of what they're experiencing. Our job is to be their friend, their companion on the journey, so they don't have to go through it alone. Maybe we need to do what Job's friends initially did. Their first impulse was right. Just sit and be a comfort and consolation to their friend in a time of suffering without saying a word. Throughout the book of Job, in the land of counsel, we see Job and his friends engage in a frustrating back and forth as the theology they have been steeped in fails to explain the sufferings of Job in their own mind. His friends see how much have has befallen him and figure there must have been some egregious sins that Job committed for this to happen. There is no other explanation for what Job is experiencing. But Job maintains throughout the entire book, okay, yes, this is what I believed as well, but I'm telling you, I did not do any of the things that you are surmising. I have not defrauded anyone, I have cared for those who are less fortunate, I have offered sacrifices to God, I have been a good and upright man my whole life, and yet still these things are happening to me. I cannot reconcile it with all I have believed about God before. While Job's friends just cannot break out of the theological restraints of their tradition, Job finds himself having to break loose from them because what he is experiencing with his very being reveals the untruth behind those assertions of his traditional theological stance. Job's suffering simply cannot be explained away as punishment for sin. Something else is going on here. And God finally steps in and speaks to Job. And when God speaks to Job, God describes the power and the majesty of God, the Creator. And Job, with a new understanding of God swelling in his chest, once again feels the reverence he always held for God. As scholar John Holbert writes, John has at last witnessed Yahweh, and what he has learned is that the Yahweh he thought he knew, the one he had merely heard about from foolish teachers like his friends, was not Yahweh at all. That mechanical being who supposedly runs the universe in some sort of calculated way, rewarding and punishing, depending upon the easily understood actions of God's human creatures, plainly does not exist. The Yahweh revealed in the great speeches of the preceding chapters has now been seen as a God overseeing the rich mysteries of a vast and complex cosmos filled with life and death, huge and terrifying creatures like Behemoth and Leviathan, created by this God, a place where humans are not in the center of things, but rather apart only. In short, the ideas that Job and his friends have held about God are flat wrong in every important way. And finally, after revealing God's majesty to Job, God turns to one of Job's friends and says, My anger is stoked against you and your two friends, because you have not spoken to me what is correct, as my servant Job has. These friends who were so sure of their piety and of Job's sinfulness are told in no uncertain terms that what they were spouting to Job in the midst of his suffering were in fact lies. And it was Job who spoke the truth. Tolbort reflects Job is magnificently righteous and hence completely innocent of any deeds that could possibly elicit the horrors he endures. The story thus announces that the supposed nexus between human evil and divine punishment must be rethought. Job will not find himself on an ash heap because he somehow deserves it. Plainly, the universe does not operate that way at all. Perhaps there is a lesson we can learn from this man from Ooze. We all must search for God in our own ways, not relying only on traditions long hallowed and loudly held. It just could be that God would far rather have an unpleasant and persistent demander than a self-assured, comfortably pious, well-spoken traditional speech preacher any day. It just could be. In this way. William Sloane Coffin's brilliant sermon, delivered 10 days after the death of his son Alex in a car accident, just keeps coming to mind as I've read through this book and thought about ways to preach on this book. And so I want to share it with you now. It speaks so much to the struggles that we experience in the face of loss and the ways that we try to reorient what we understand about God and how God functions in our lives. And I just really appreciate kind of what he settles on in this. He writes, When a person dies, there are many things that can be said, and there is at least one thing that should never be said. The night after Alex died, I was sitting in the living room of my sister's house outside of Boston when the front door opened, and in came a nice-looking middle-aged woman carrying about 18 quiches. When she saw me, she shook her head, then headed for the kitchen, saying sadly over her shoulder, I just don't understand the will of God. Instantly I was up and in hot pursuit, swarming all over her. I'll say you don't, lady, I said. For some reason, nothing so infuriates me as the incapacity of seemingly intelligent people to get it through their heads that God doesn't go through this world with his finger on triggers, his fists around knives, his hands on steering wheels. God is dead set against all unnatural deaths. And Christ spent an inordinate amount of time delivering people from paralysis, insanity, leprosy, and muteness. Which is not to say that there are no nature-caused deaths. I can think of many right here in this parish, the five years I've been here, deaths that are untimely and slow and pain-ridden, which for that reason raise unanswerable questions and even the specter of a cosmic sadist, yes, even an eternal vivisector. But violent deaths, such as the one Alex died, to understand those is a piece of cake. As his younger brother put it simply, standing at the head of the casket at the Boston funeral, you blew it, buddy. You blew it. The one thing that should never be said when someone dies is it is the will of God. Never do we know enough to say that. That when the waves closed over the sinking car, God's heart was the first of all our hearts to break. So when life presents situations that we just can't explain, it's okay to just sit with that tension. To rest in the belief that love holds us in the midst of uncertainty. We don't need to make meaning out of every moment. That is not what we are called to do in the midst of suffering. We are called to see the person suffering, sit with them, journey with them, offer them concrete help while demanding nothing of them in return. All things that are easier said than done when our minds are constantly grasping for meaning in the midst of it all. But this work is holy work. And holy work is not always easy, but this holy work heals, it steadies, it strengthens. So in the face of broken hearts, broken spirits, and broken bodies, may we resist the temptation to offer platitudes when life hands something incredibly unfair to a loved one, and instead lean into the ways of offering comfort and consolation that sometimes can only be offered in silence and letting that person know that they are not alone in their suffering. Because we are none of us left alone. We are held in the embrace of love that will not let us go. Thanks be to God for giving us hands to hold when all seems lost.