NOT JUST BUSINESS
Job 2:1-10
O Come, Holy Spirit. Come as the fire, and burn. Come as the wind, and cleanse. Come as the light, and reveal. Come as the water, and refresh. Convict, convert, and consecrate us until we are wholly yours. Amen.
The time--August of 1994. The place, my parents living room in West Lafayette, Indiana. In the living room, my father, about eight months after a diagnosis of incurable prostate cancer; I was there, and my mother; and Betty Clark, who had come to visit. Betty Clark was a woman our family had known from the first parish my father had served. Betty was an alcoholic. She went to my father for counseling, and he helped her deal with "her demons," she would call them. And it was my father who led her to understand the love of Christ, and that Christ's love was more powerful than her desire to drink. She became a Christian, and was able to become a recovering alcoholic through the power of Christ.
We found out upon her visit that she had discovered certain spiritual gifts in the midst of her Christian journey--she had become what one calls a charismatic Christian, and she discovered gifts for healing people, she told us, getting rid of their diseases in Jesus' name. She wanted to cure my father of his cancer, she told us.
She prayed in tongues. She prayed over my father, put her hands on him. And we sat there, around that round copper coffee table that I remember gathering around throughout my childhood--we sat around that copper coffee table giving thanks for how Jesus was going to cure my father. We didn't just sit, though, we stood and prayed, and then in a scene I'll never forget...in a phalanx of people snaking through the living room, we danced around, giving thanks for how Jesus was going to cure dad. And I'll never forget my father's face in that moment: he was trying to smile, he was trying to look joyful. He wanted it to be well, for Betty. Because he loved Betty Clark.
My father was not cured. He died about three months later. But although he was not cured, I believe that at the end of his life, he was healed. I believe that though his body had wasted, when he died he entered as a whole human being into the arms of the savior to whom he devoted his life.
Betty didn't come to the funeral. A postscript to the story. We learned that a few months after that, after my dad's funeral, that Betty took her own life.
And though I don't know if there is any connection between that event and my father's death, in my own imagination I wonder if somehow the universe in which Betty found herself living was not big enough to handle such things as that. My father not being cured; God not doing what she was sure would be done, because of her strong faith. As I look back--I wonder if her universe had somehow become too small for God to fit into it.
This is all, is of course, a backdrop for our study of Job. The prologue to the Book of Job is what we're studying today--and I hope you do take time to read the Blue Sheet I provided, with some background about Job; I didn't want to take time in the sermon for that--but studying it will enrich your understanding of these sermons.
This section of Job is really, to me at least, about that moment in life when the universe changes. You've I'm sure had such a moment in your life. Perhaps that moment was 9/11--when the universe changed for America; everything changed on that day. Or perhaps for you it was a diagnosis. News of an accident or a tragedy. A financial disaster. For me, it was that cold day in October when I held the phone, looked out my window over Brooklyn and I learned my father had cancer. Whatever it was, it is that moment in life in which your universe changes, that moment when you realize that tragedy and suffering are not what just happen to other people. And it is at such moments that our understanding of God inevitably changes: this God we knew is no longer; that God who ensured that all would be well is no longer. This is some different God I'm dealing with now. Who is this God? We might call it a Psalm 22 moment, when you say, "My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?"
That is in essence what is happening in Job here in this part of the book. We see Job at such a moment--at a moment when the universe changes. The familiar paradigm on which he had based his life--on which the entire community based its life--was no longer in effect. This is essentially the plot of Job. In last week's sermon, I described the universe in which Job was living, which is characterized by this sort of relationship with God: it is about business. God is in essence about business; it's a business relationship, really, that Job has with God. Job's relationship with God was essentially transactional: I display good behavior, I keep the covenant of the Law (the first five books of the Bible, the Torah), and God blesses me. If I transgress that law, if I do evil, I get punished. That's how the universe is supposed to work, according to the religion and science of the time.
But you see, Job does obey every bit of the law--he insists that he's blameless; he's kept up his end of the bargain. But aha, here's the thing: he's suffering. To all witnessing it, that appears to be God's punishing Job. And to Job, who insists he's innocent, God apparently, again, has not kept up God's end of the bargain. Job's relationship with God is apparently no longer just business.
One of my favorite shows is--I suppose I shouldn't admit this to the congregation--is the "Sopranos." We watch it when it comes out on DVD. And, it really is a terrific show--once you get past all the violence and language and all that; it really is a very poignant drama about human character. And one of the things that amazes me about that show, about the way such people in that world operate--is about how they can keep business and personal things so separate. They will do such awful violence to someone, and say, "Just business, nothing personal." One of the main characters in the show, one of the beloved members of the family (I won't mention his name here from the pulpit)--they all love him, but for various reasons, he has to be killed; they take him out on a boat, and practically with tears in their eyes, have to shoot him. Just business. Nothing personal.
But for Job, that is no longer the case. Job is entering a different kind of relationship with God; he is discovering that this God requires a different kind of relationship--not with a God who pulls the strings and pushes the levers of life; not a transactional, mechanical God. But a real relationship with a real God.
Job is that book of the Bible that forces us to ask ourselves: what kind of relationship do I have with God? Is it a business relationship? Think about it: what is your relationship to God? If I were to ask you to turn to your neighbor, and describe what kind of relationship you have with God, what would you say? (I was going to do that today, but I've already pushed the envelope enough with worship--so you're off the hook). But if I asked you to say to your neighbor, how are you and God doing--what would you say? Is God simply an abstract concept, the author of a good book? The one to whom we give thanks for the abundant blessings of life? The one you pray to, asking that all will be well with your life?
The question is: what does God look like to you when what you thought was the unsinkable ship of your life has gone down with the first encounter with an ice berg? Do you cling to the debris that's left, or sink? Do you hold onto God, when God seems a tiny fragment of what you originally thought? That's the question Job must face. "Curse God and die" or hold onto what's left of his faith. That's really the main question in Job.
Let's talk a moment about that line--"Curse God and die." That is really a euphemism for committing instant suicide, using God as the deadly weapon. It was thought that one could not get away with cursing God, the author and ruler of the universe, and get away with it. One would be zapped instantly out of existence. And Job's wife has, throughout the ages, by various biblical commentators, been almost universally maligned for her encouragement to her husband. But, I myself wonder if that is right. We might think of Job's wife here as speaking words of compassion to her husband, whom she sees is suffering so terribly--imagine her words spoken as one wishing Job to be out of his misery. Why suffer like this? Think of these words like you would a wife to a husband dying from cancer: why suffer like this? Why don't we just put a few dozen cc's of morphine in the drip, and shuffle off?
The main question in Job is this: will he maintain his hope, in the face of a universe in which hope no longer seems to exist, with a God he no longer knows? What do you do when the universe changes, and you lose sight of God?
The philosopher Paul Ricouer speaks about faith and forming faith...he says that developing faith is, initially at least, like falling in love. He calls this stage of faith: "the first naivete." When we fall in love, we see the other person in an idealized but naive way--all around them is frosty-edged, music plays when they walk by. We project our own idealized image onto them; they can do no wrong. And in the same way, we come to faith like that: our experience of God is like an experience of magic; God is like Santa, the provider of magical blessings, a mystical stocking filler and answerer of prayer. God is in some ways a projection of our fantasy about God.
Some young people involved in evangelical Christianity have this experience--an experience like falling in love with God. And let me be clear; I'm not really knocking it. We need to fall in love. If we didn't fall in love, how would the species continue? People need to fall in love with God as an entryway into the life-changing path of faith. But the problem comes when suddenly we realize in such a relationship--wait a minute. You are a real person; you're not the idealized image I've projected onto you. If I'm going to love you, I've got to deal with the reality of you. In the same way, after the first naivete of faith in God, people often have an experience in which the God they knew no longer exists--they have a crisis in which this magical image of God doesn't add up. And they are left in the wilderness, where the whole business doesn't make sense.
You could say that moving to a new and real understanding, what Ricouer calls "the Second Naivete," requires, in a way, losing sight of that God in order to find a new faith, based on what's real. A deeper relationship with God--not a business relationship. A personal relationship. And strangely, we can only get there by an experience of crisis in which God no longer makes sense.
That is what Job experiences in his odyssey. A God who no longer makes sense. But even in the midst of it, he doesn't lose hope that even though he cannot see God, God is there.
In this chapter, Chapter 2 (like in Chapter 1) we encounter the patient Job; Job endures his suffering with patience, and without losing faith. Hence the phrase, "the patience of Job." But in the subsequent chapters, Job is not quite so patient, though. We meet a very different Job, as I'm sure Brandon will explore next week. And yet, even throughout his impatience, even in the midst of his "Psalm 22" moments ("My God, why hast thou forsaken me")...despite his anger with God, Job never loses faith.
Here is the faith of Job, in chapter 19, for example; in the midst of all this mess, he says in perhaps one of the best-known lines from Job: "For I know that my Redeemer lives, and that at the last he will stand upon the earth. And after my skin as been thus destroyed, then in my flesh I shall see God." What an image. Even after my skin has burned away, I will then see God, who will vindicate me.
What do we do when we lose sight of God? What do we do when our skin is being burned away? When the God we knew is gone, when the predictable divine business partner seems to have gone south?
Betty Clark must have lost sight of God in the end. But...I do not believe, I can never believe, that God ever lost sight of her. That is the Good News; hopefully, this is what we'll remember when we're in that wilderness where we lose sight of God. I don't believe God lost sight of Betty Clark, and even though she lost hope in the end, I believe that she, like my father, when she reached that farther shore was welcomed into the arms of the savior who still claimed her.
We can think we are lost, but God will never lose us. I believe that. I believe that though there is no ship we can make with our frail human hands, no engine of mind powerful enough to guarantee our passage into that mystery...despite all that, not one will be lost by the one who will land us safely over on Canaan's side, to that promised land where, after our skin has been thus burned away, we shall see God.
In the meantime, where do we bring our wounded hearts, our anguish, but to that place where we hear this message: though we cannot see it, there is no place without God; there is no sorrow that heaven cannot heal.
Amen.
March 11, 2007
Jeff Vamos
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