"When Bad Things Happen"
October 8, 2006: 18th 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 1:1, 2:1-10
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... One day the heavenly beings came to present themselves before the Lord, and Satan also came among them to present himself before the Lord. The Lord said to Satan, "Where have you come from?" Satan answered the Lord, "From going to and fro on the earth, and from walking up and down on it." The Lord said to Satan, "Have you considered my servant Job? There is no one like him on the earth, a blameless and upright man who fears God and turns away from evil. He still persists in his integrity, although you incited me against him, to destroy him for no reason." Then Satan answered the Lord, "Skin for skin! All that people have they will give to save their lives. But stretch out your hand now and touch his bone and his flesh, and he will curse you to your face." The Lord said to Satan, "Very well, he is in your power; only spare his life." So Satan went out from the presence of the Lord, and inflicted loathsome sores on Job from the sole of his foot to the crown of his head. Job took a potsherd with which to scrape himself, and sat among the ashes. Then his wife said to him, "Do you still persist in your integrity? Curse God, and die." But he said to her, "You speak as any foolish [person] would speak. Shall we receive the good at the hand of God, and not receive the bad?" In all this Job did not sin with his lips.

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

Sermon:
The conductor taps his baton, and the hubbub of the audience fades to expectant silence. The lights go down and the curtains part and enter, Job, up right. Job is a rich man who lives in the mythical land of Uz in the time called Once Upon with his wife and his seven sons and his three daughters and his 7000 sheep and his 3000 camels and his 500 donkeys and his many, many servants. And though you may have heard that Job is a patient man, indeed, this story is about his piety, not his patience, not merely his ability to endure, but his remarkable relationship with God.

But you may well ask, what would such a man have to endure anyway? He has a loving spouse and a large and happy family and an embarrassment of riches. No wonder pious prayers of thanksgiving roll off his tongue. How hard can it really be to love life and the Lord of Life when your every need is satisfied, your every wish granted, when your children grow up straight and strong, and all your investments bear triple returns? Job's fairy tale life is so spotless and his conscience so blameless that he has to invent sins just to have something to confess come church on Sunday.

Until. Until raiders carry off his cattle and donkeys. Until fire consumes his flocks. Until foreign armies commandeer his herds of camels. Until. Until a tornado strikes the house where his sons and daughters are feasting and brings the roof down upon them, killing them all. And as if that were not enough, loathsome sores break out on every square inch of open skin, from the sole of his foot to the crown of his head. In the very moment of his grief, Job's body is as twisted and tortured as his spirit.

It's like some kind of cruel, cruel joke. The tabloid press plays it up—"Man Who Has Everything Loses It All"—turning out pitiful movie-of-the-week portraits of the broken man. The question on everyone's lips is Why? What terrible secret sin did Job commit to deserve such punishment at the hands of God? Speculation abounds, and Job's suffering takes on the air of a spectator sport.

Eventually even his wife cracks under the combined pressure of grief and pity, loss and libel. "What's the point?" she hisses between clenched teeth. "Our family is dead, our fortune is lost. What's the point of all your prayers? God is not listening, not to us, not anymore. That blessing is gone forever—gone along with our flocks and our servants and our children! Or worse, maybe God is just playing with us the way a malicious child stirs an anthill with a stick, just to see them suffer. Either way, God clearly doesn't care about us, so you know what? I don't care about God, either, and neither should you. Give it up: curse God and die!"

But despite everything, Job doesn't break. His heart breaks, for sure, but even as his salt tears mingle with the ashes to run in muddy tracks down his cheeks and sting his open sores, his faith doesn't. Even as the cheap and easy faith of the world runs smack into the inescapable concrete truth of his life, his loss, his grief, and is smashed into a million irretrievable pieces, Job's deep faith in God persists.

What does this famous faith of Job's look like? It may be easier to say what it isn't. It isn't a purely intellectual conceit, an extra to decorate the good times, like a gilded angel crowning the Christmas tree one month a year, but collecting dust the other 11. It isn't just a bunch of wouldn't-it-be-nice stories that come with coordinating hymns and prayers and platitudes, fit for Sundays, but hardly suitable the other six when the rubber meets the road. By the same token, neither is Job's faith just a therapeutic toll, a crutch to help him limp along when the going gets tough, or a pill to pop to dull the pain when it all becomes too much.

Most profoundly, Job's faith isn't in God as an economic principle, a great blessing and cursing robot in the sky relentlessly churning our rewards and punishments in response to human market forces. Job himself is the test case on which that theory falters. After all, there he was, "blameless and upright, one who revered God and turned away from evil," minding his own business, praying even, when—wham! bam!—all his supposed blessings come tumbling down in a rush of fire and wind and blood. And though the anxious world will look to lay blame for his misfortune at his door, as though his sons and daughters were slaughtered because he forgot to fill in some blank on his cosmic karmic tax return, Job doesn't trust in the petty tit-for-tat of worldly ways.

For Job, to have faith in God is to trust God. It is not so much to believe something about God as to believe in God, and not in principle but in person. Job's faith is not a noun, but a verb. It is not static. It is a relationship, a living, active relationship that stretches and pulls and grows and changes along with our lives. It's relationship, like other relationships, that we negotiate as partners, partners with God. When bad things happen to Job—very bad things indeed—he persists not because he is unbreakable, like an oak, and not because he is able to bend like a willow and just let it all go, but because, through it all, he believes he is in relationship with his God.

Years ago, in seminary, when I was taking one of my classes in pastoral care, the professor shared a scenario that stumped all of us students then and keeps me thinking still today. "Imagine you're a chaplain in hospital," she proposed, "and you walk into the room of a woman who has just been diagnosed with terminal cancer. She looks up at you and asks, simply, 'Why?' So you tell her that God has a plan for her life and somehow, mysteriously, this cancer is part of it, that there is a lesson to learn even in this. And the woman begins to weep and she tells you, 'But how can I believe in a God who plans cancer and uses pain to teach lessons?' The very next day you walk into another room where another woman is facing the same deadly diagnosis. And when she asks 'Why?' you tell her that God intends only good for her and this cancer and her pain are not at all a part of God's plan. And again, the woman weeps in response, 'But how can I believe in a God who is so powerless to end suffering in the world?'"

It's sort of like a Zen koan, if you're familiar with those spiritual riddles, and a lot like the story of Job. The book of Job poses a lot of questions—questions about the nature of faith and suffering and redemption, about who God is and who we are as human beings—and it offers no easy answers. It's no fairy tale, where everyone gets to live happily ever after. Neither is it a fable, with a bumper sticker moral tacked on at the end. Faithful persons in every age have found Job immensely frustrating in its unwillingness to bend to societal pressure to mean this or that, to yield at last one straight answer. But like the Magic 8 Ball of my childhood, you can shake this story up and down and sideways and come up with a whole host of different answers: that Job is variously a saint, a sinner, or simply deluded; that his friends are hateful, helpful, or helpless; that God is just, gracious, capricious, or even malicious. And sometimes what comes up is the message "outlook unclear, ask again."

Some folks who like their answers a bit more black and white than shades of gray might argue that such a slippery story has no place in church, at least not in the pulpit. They believe it confuses things, and that people come to church for clarity, not confusion. Faith, they say, is about easy answers to hard questions and straightforward guidelines to help us tell right from wrong and live good—that is, obedient—lives. Not that there's anything wrong with clarity or answers or guidelines, per se, but I believe that faith supposed to be more than that, more than a set of stereo instructions. Faith like Job's is resilient and gracious because it is rooted not in a set of rules but in a relationship, our mutual relationship with God. This faith can withstand our doubts—in fact, it can grow as a result of our questioning—precisely because it is based not on a laundry list of easy answers we must learn by rote but on our experience of God, for better or worse, for richer or poorer, in sickness and in health, as long as we shall live, and beyond. Job's story may frustrate our desire for quick fixes, but over the long haul it's precisely these unsettling stories that keep the ball in our shaking hands and encourage us to "ask again."

When bad things happen, it's not the answers that sustain us—the whats and wheres and whens—but 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.

It's these intimate relationships that allow us the freedom to wonder and not despair, to wander and not be lost. When in just a few verses, the proverbially patient Job loses his cool, it's his relationship with God that allows him to rage at God because he knows God as a longtime partner in faith and trusts God to be there and be able to take it; in fact, he demands it. In the same way, we remember that it's Jesus' relationship with God that allows him to cry out from the cross, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me," precisely because, based on his trust in God, he believes with every fiber of his being that God should be there.

We're going to be spending some time with Job in worship over the next couple of weeks, and it may indeed be unsettling, or even uncomfortable. Suffering strips Job of his reticence, and makes him bold to complain to God in a way we're not used to hearing in church. Over the course of the next thirty-four chapters, Job questions and complains and debates his case against God in no uncertain terms. Thirty-four chapters! But after all he's been through, the least we can do is offer him a couple of Sundays in our pulpit.

So next Sunday, we will follow in Job's footsteps. A notice will go out in the Newlight newsletter this week and via email, inviting you to bring your questions and, yes, even your complaints before God as part of next week's worship. So give it some prayerful consideration in coming days, and then bring your anxieties and concerns, those doubts that have dogged you, those experiences in the church or life in general that have caused you to ask the hard, painful questions. Bring your whys, and we will collect them and share them aloud, anonymously, under the rubric of prayer. And I'm not going to try to answer them. We're just going to sit with them a while. Think of it as a Q&A session without the A.

To be clear, this is not just a chance to air your personal complaints about the daily ins and outs of life at United Church on the Green, like why we don't sing your favorite hymn more often or why don't we use the nice silver ones instead of plastic—no, the Moderator and the Boards of Deacons and Stewards and I always stand ready to hear your concerns about those weighty matters. But it is an exercise in living with the questions of faith without rushing to easy answers, in leaning into the personal relationship with God that makes faith—real, living faith—possible.

As with any kind of exercise, there is a degree of danger involved as we stretch long-unused muscles; in this case, as we intentionally open our hearts to God and one another a bit wider than perhaps we are used to, particularly around situations that may still be sources of pain for us. So as we contemplate undertaking this work together next Sunday, I again commend to you our brother Job who is transformed by his confrontation with God, 34 chapters later. Like him, I encourage you to have faith—not blind faith, but faith with eyes wide open. Stand up for yourself in your relationship with God. Trust that God hears and cares about your concerns even as we know this community hears and cares. Trust that your voice matters, your life matters, you matter to God.