"A Matter of Perspective"
October 22, 2006: 20th Sunday after Pentecost, Year B
The Rev. John MacIver Gage, senior minister
United Church on the Green, UCC: New Haven, CT
www.unitedchurchonthegreen.org

Scripture:
Job 38:1-18
Then the Lord answered Job out of the whirlwind: "Who is this that darkens counsel by words without knowledge? Gird up your loins like a man, I will question you, and you shall declare to me. Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth? Tell me, if you have understanding. Who determined its measurements—surely you know! Or who stretched the line upon it? On what were its bases sunk, or who laid its cornerstone when the morning stars sang together and all the heavenly beings shouted for joy? Or who shut in the sea with doors when it burst out from the womb?—when I made the clouds its garment, and thick darkness its swaddling band, and prescribed bounds for it, and set bars and doors, and said, 'Thus far shall you come, and no farther, and here shall your proud waves be stopped'? Have you commanded the morning since your days began, and caused the dawn to know its place, so that it might take hold of the skirts of the earth, and the wicked be shaken out of it?... Have you entered into the springs of the sea, or walked in the recesses of the deep? Have the gates of death been revealed to you, or have you seen the gates of deep darkness? Have you comprehended the expanse of the earth? Declare, if you know all this...!"

Hebrews 4:14-16
Since, then, we have a great high priest who has passed through the heavens, Jesus, the Son of God, let us hold fast to our confession. For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who in every respect has been tested as we are, yet without sin. Let us therefore approach the throne of grace with boldness, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need.

"May God speak through these words and make from them a holy word for us today. Amen."

Sermon:
Last week's service of questions was an experiment, and it asked a lot of you as a congregation—as if spending three weeks in a row with the book of Job didn't already. It asked—or, rather, I asked—that you be vulnerable enough and brave enough to bring your intensely intimate questions for God, those doubts that dog your steps along the journey of faith, and lay them before God and this gathered community and me, your pastor. For some of you, it might have been the first time you'd ever taken those questions, more often encountered within the claustrophobic confines of your own head in the 3am dark, and made them concrete by actually writing them down... and in church, no less.

Nevertheless, I invited you to take that risk. I asked you to trust that your questions are as welcome in this community of faith as any answers you may bring with you. I encouraged you to believe, like Job, that the same is true in your relationship with God, that God invites you to risk, asks you to trust, and encourages you to stand up for yourself in the life of faith, to ask the hard questions and even lay your complaints before God. I worried that it might all be too much, that you might choose not to play along. To be honest, I worried we might get only about ten questions turned in and I'd be stuck up here vamping till the end of the service without a sermon.

I needn't have worried. With a grand total of 110 men, women, and children in attendance last Sunday, we received 131 questions. You poured your hearts out onto those little green slips of paper until the offering plates we used to collect them overflowed. I began reading them aloud and we sat with them and sang and prayed with them. But by about 25 after the hour, it became clear we wouldn't have time to get to them all, or even most of them. So we blessed them altogether, and I told you I would take them with me and pray with them through the week.

Which I did, and it was a heartbreaking, humbling, and ultimately uplifting experience. Reading through this anonymous catalog of your questions and complaints, I felt as though you really had opened your hearts to me, to one another, and to God. You opened them to share a snapshot of the state of your faith, of those places in your faith where the rubber really meets the road. I was honored to walk with you along that road a bit closer this week. Thank you.

The questions you asked were ones theologians have been wrestling with for millennia. First, about the nature of God and religion: (1) Do you exist, O God? And how do I know? And (2) Is faith in Christ the only true spiritual path, or are you behind the best in all world religions? Then questions about putting that faith to work in our lives: (3) Do you love me, God, and if so, why is it so hard to love myself? And (4) Why is living the good, healthy, righteous life you want us to lead so difficult? Then about suffering, our own and others': (5) Why do you allow suffering, O God—both of individuals and of whole groups of people, as in Darfur, Iraq, and the Holocaust? And (6) Why do some seemingly innocent people suffer so much, while others, seemingly more deserving of punishment, suffer so little?

Job would be proud; after all, he is patron faithful complainers. In our moments of deepest doubt, Job is the lead defendant in our class action suit against God. It's Job who stands with us before the bench and cries out, "Your honor, I want to lay my case before God face-to-face, give God all my arguments firsthand. I'd find out exactly what God's thinking, discover what's going on in God's head. Do you think God would dismiss me or bully me? No, God would take me seriously" (Job 23:4-6, The Message).

And sure enough, God does. God Job takes seriously enough to answer him in person. God speaks to Job out of the heart of a whirlwind, the swirling depths of a dark storm cloud, with the divine voice booming like thunder. "Who wants to know? Stand up straight, little mortal, and I will question you..." What follows is four chapters of the most delicious divine smack-down, in verse form. And you're right, Jon Blue—the King James Version is majestic in its poetic grandeur at this point. Listen to the challenge of the Almighty come rolling off that tongue:

"Gird up thy loins now like a man: I will demand of thee, and declare thou unto me. Wilt thou also disannul my judgment? wilt thou condemn me, that thou mayest be righteous? Hast thou an arm like God? Or canst thou thunder with a voice like God? Deck thyself now with majesty and excellency; and array thyself with glory and beauty. Cast abroad the rage of thy wrath: and behold every one that is proud, and abase him. Look on every one that is proud, and bring him low; and tread down the wicked in their place. Hide them in the dust together and bind their faces in secret. Then will I also confess unto thee that thine own right hand can save thee (Job 40:7-14, KJV).

In other words: Bring it on, little man, but let's get one thing straight before we get into it. Are you God? Because you know what? I AM.

For some readers, God's response from the whirlwind sounds just that bad, and for them, it's the last straw, the one that breaks the believer's back, forever. For them, it's the ultimate power-play. It's exactly the kind of patronizing non-answer Job was sure a just God would not deliver, a kind of seemingly useless God the Father-Knows-Best "Because I said so." And they point to Job's subsequent sudden sitting down and shutting up as proof of religion's power to dominate and demean. "See," a once-indignant Job responds meekly, once God has answered, "I am of small account; what shall I answer you? I lay my hand upon my mouth. I have spoken once, and I will not answer; twice, but will proceed no further" (Job 40:4-5). But it's not really an answer, they say. It's a show of force; and besides, who wants to worship the Wizard of Oz, all smoke and fire designed to make you bow and scrape and stop asking impertinent questions, little girl.

Well, I don't. But as is usually the case, there is more than one way of reading the story. Another is to hear in God's answer an answer appropriate to God; after all, God did create heaven and earth. God did establish night and day and set the stars spinning. God did institute the entire created order. God is the Lord of life and death. And we human beings, Job included, did not. We are not. We are experts on our own lives, our own feelings, to be sure, but our perspective on how our lives are woven into the weighty issues of the world is limited. God's is not. God's holds the ends of the earth and all that is in it—including us—past, present, and future in God's heart all at once.

I hear in God's answer to Job not a put-down, but a necessary shift of perspective. "Shall a faultfinder contend with the Almighty? Anyone who argues with God must respond," God says (Job 40:2). In other words, if you want to question God, fine. More than fine: good, in fact. Do it. Do it all you want. But you'd better be prepared for an answer that is larger, deeper, more achingly complex than you ever could have imagined. Why do some seemingly innocent people suffer so much, while others, seemingly more deserving of punishment, suffer so little So who's innocent? Who deserves to suffer? Will you decide? Will you set out the punishment? Are you that discerning, that just? And, tell me, why should anyone have to suffer at all, no matter who they are, no matter where they are on life's journey?

True, it's not the pat answer we were looking for. It's not really much of an answer at all, as answers go. But setting our desire for certainty aside for a moment, what else could we really expect? I know it hurts not to understand, hurts deep down in our hearts and our bones. I have held enough shaking hands, stood by enough sick beds, prayed at enough gravesides to know just how much it hurts, and, trust me, my little slips of paper were there in those plates with yours last Sunday. But honestly, is our world really so simple, so black and white, that we should expect some bumper sticker slogan to set our minds at ease? When I face the deep questions of faith, when I am assaulted by doubt, when suffering slaps me in the face, I ask why, just like Job; I do my best to wrap my mind around it, just like Job; and then, just like Job, I am blown away by just how little I understand anything at all. I am thrown into the arms of God.

And God is there to catch me, just as God was there to catch Job, just as God will be there to catch you. That is the real answer of the book of Job: God's presence. Even when Job is so beat up and beat down by life that he cries out that the Lord is a rotten bastard playing a perverted game of hide and seek with his creation, God shows up. God is there to take it, to let Job call her names and pound his fists against God's chest in pain and anger and frustration. The God of the universe is with Job in the midst of the struggle.

As I said three weeks ago when we started this journey with Job, when bad things happen, I believe it's not really the answers that sustain us—the whats and wheres and whens, though certainly there is some satisfaction in understanding—but rather the whos who stand with us as we struggle with the questions. It's the presence with us of loved ones who comfort us and even challenge us as we grapple with the hows and whys of pain and suffering, of everyday frailty and, yes, sin and evil that make the real difference. It's the ears that listen to us, the shoulders we cry on, the chests against which we pound our fists, the arms that embrace us, and the hands that offer sustenance, the feet that seek us out when we'd rather not be found.

In the Book of Job, the answer isn't to be found in understanding things from God's perspective—as human beings, we never really will, we can't—but in trusting that God cares for us enough to show up and share our perspective. Job does indeed come face-to-face with his God. And that is the heart of our Christian faith, as well: that in Jesus, we see God face-to-face. In the one whom we call Emmanuel, that is, God-with-us, God shows up, not in some awesome epiphany of wind and flame but what is even more awe-inspiring: in the flesh, our flesh, to share our perspective, and even our suffering, all the way to the cross and the grave.

In Jesus we believe God stands in solidarity with all creation through all the laughter and the tears, the joy and the pain life can throw at us. Somehow, somehow in the mystery of incarnation, God even knows what it is to feel estranged from God, such that Jesus cries out from the cross, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me." As the author of the letter to the Hebrews put it so eloquently, "we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who in every respect has been tested as we are... Let us therefore approach the throne of grace with boldness, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need."

When I told one of the Deacons earlier this week that you all had turned in 131 questions last Sunday, they half-joked that, well, I'd better have 131 answers for you this morning. But I don't, I'm sorry. I have only this one: my faith in Jesus, who I believe is the sign and seal of God's presence with me, with us. It doesn't make the way ahead crystal clear. It doesn't make pain go away. It doesn't make everything better. But knowing that Jesus walks beside me, sharing my pain and urging me onward, upward gives me the strength to put one foot in front of the other. God's presence with me lifts me up when I am crushed under the weight of the world's questions, the world's pain, and gives me the grace to dust myself off and try, try again—try to understand, try to help and to heal, try to transform the world. Because of Jesus' holding mine, I find the sheer impertinence to approach God's throne of grace with boldness, so that I may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need, just as God has promised.

Like Jesus, you, all of you, individually and together, you manifest the presence of God for me. You spur me to ask the hard questions and help me shoulder their weight, as well. When I was reading your questions this week and laboring under the combined weight of the confusion and suffering of our community they represent, I was not alone. You had the courage to pour yourself out on all those little green slips of paper, and you were there with me as I prayed with them, as I prayed with you. And that's what it means to be the body of Christ, the church, with and for one another: We help bear one another's burdens.

As we continue on this journey of faith together, and the questions arise, as they inevitably will, we covenant together as God's people, as church, to walk together in all the ways of this life, in faith, in hope, in pain, in doubt, in sorrow, and in joy. And when we stumble, as we inevitably will, as church we will share with one another the stories of our faith and remind one another that like Job, like Jesus, like all the saints and sinners before us, God is with us, even here, even now. That change in perspective makes all the difference. For that privilege and that challenge and that comfort, thanks be to God.