blip : Basic Living Instruction Protocol :

A few weeks ago I preached at my church on Job. When I got home from church I found out that one of the kids in the neighborhood who came over to our house a lot had just died. He was only 15. Brandon died while playing basketball. He just dropped dead and the doctors have no idea why. I have no idea why. I guess I was the person who needed to hear my sermon.
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Title: Reasons of things
Date: Nov. 7, 2004
Place: Chapel Hill Mennonite Fellowship

Lectionary Texts: Job 19:23-29; Ps. 17:1-9.

Mary lives in Walltown. She wasn’t dealt the best hand in life. Things have never been that easy. But most recently, her life took a turn for the worse. Late one night this past summer her son died in a gunfight between hostile gangs. Mary found Robert’s cold, stiff body the next morning—Sunday morning—in her friend’s backyard. Mary’s world was shattered.

“There once was a man in the land of Uz whose name was Job” (1:1). His life was shattered one day when terrorists consumed all his wealt—they took all Job’s oxen, donkeys, and camels (vv14-15, 17); then a great storm killed all his children (vv18-19); and, if that wasn’t enough to ruin your life, he broke out in painful sores all over his body (2:7). In despair he cried out, “Naked I came from my mother’s womb, and naked I will depart” (1:21).

His friends soon arrived on the scene and tried to help Job figure out why his life fell apart. Relying on the best of their wisdom they reasoned with Job. They said, “Obviously you’ve sinned. All these evils are God’s punishment for something you’ve done. You must Repent now, and quickly!” But these friends failed on two fronts. First, the writer of the book tells us that Job was “blameless and upright, one who feared God and turned away from evil” (1:1). So, no. Job wasn’t suffering as a consequence of sin. Second, Job’s friends failed to offer him the comfort he so desperately needed. Instead of ministering to Job in love, they lectured him. After his friends’ speeches, Job cried out in frustration and despair, “I’ve heard this before; what miserable comforters are you all. How long will you torment me and crush me with words?” (16:2; 19:2).

Don’t we all want answers, or maybe like Job’s friends, want to give answers? We want to make sense of our pain, and the evil around us. We want to find safety in an explanation, in some kind of reason. If we can explain it then we can tame it. We think if we know why it happened, then we don’t have to be afraid anymore. If we can explain the pain or evil and name its cause, then we can place it in our well ordered world, make it fit in our plan for how things should work.

Let’s think of my friend Mary. I want to know why Mary’s son Robert died. I mean, of course I can explain it in terms of some cause and effect reasoning. Like, he died because he was hanging out with the wrong crowd. But that line never satisfies; it always begs more questions. We can start asking why are there gangs in the first place. And if we follow the trail we might find crack cocaine and ask why it had to hit Durham so hard. But there are always more questions to ask, more paths to follow, endless paths that lead everywhere only to turn back on us and shatter us by confronting us with our own limitations. As much as we try, we can’t think our way back to a starting point that explains why our story, or Mary’s story, had to lead to this point of pain and evil. In our anxious quest to escape from the confines of the middle of our story, we pound ourselves and our friends to pieces.

Remember what Job said to his so-called friends? He said, “How long will you torment me and crush me with words?” Job’s friends thought they were helping with the wisdom they thought they had. The world they knew was ruled by a God who exercised retributive justice. In this world, if you did something wrong, God wacked you. That’s why they told Job that the problem had to be his sin. And the solution—and, I mean this makes perfect sense, it’s actually quite logical—the solution had to be Job’s repentance.

But Job knew that the God he worshiped didn’t work the way his friends thought. The God Job knew was a mysterious God who didn’t fit into any world or plan devised by humans. The reason why we can never reach that starting point from which we can see how and why our stories, full of pain and evil, unfold the way they do is because that place belongs to God and God alone. To try to put ourselves in that position, that place of knowing, from which we can explain all evil is to claim divinity, to set ourselves up as our own gods.

But Job never claimed to know the reason for his pain and the evil he experienced. He never tried to stretch his rationality to the breaking point where he thought he could see the world from God’s perspective. Unlike his friends, Job didn’t claim to know how God works with justice in the world. Instead, in remarkable humility, Job cried out, “The Lord gave and the Lord has taken away; may the name of the Lord be praised” (1:21). At the point where the world was crumbling before his eyes, this point where he felt the helplessness of absolute abandonment, Job praised God. For Job, if all of life is a gift from God, then how can he tell God how to manage those gifts?

But Job didn’t stop with praise. Like Jacob who wrestled the Lord till daybreak, Job wouldn’t leave God alone. He didn’t retreat into the solitude of resignation. Job wasn’t some type of Stoic who believed that an impersonal divine will governed the world, a god who didn’t really care about the affairs of humanity. The God Job knew was the God, who out of the overflow of divine love created a people; a God who entered into a relationship with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob; a God who made a covenant with a people, to care for them and use them to be a blessing for all the nations. Although God’s fidelity to Israel may look different than anyone expected (think about Israel’s experience of exile), God promised to remain faithful.

Even though Job felt as if God had turned on him, that God had abandoned him, Job still hoped. This hope that defies all hopeless appearances testifies to the power of the Spirit of God to sustain us. How else can we explain Job’s impossible response? In the depths of his pain, Job bursts out, “I know that my Redeemer lives, and that at the last he will stand upon the earth?then in my flesh I shall see God” (19:25). This hope for the Redeemer breaks through all conceptions of reality, it breaks through our layers of commentary on the way the world works. At this moment when Job feels completely abandoned by his God and friends, when death seems to close in on him on every side, he tastes the hope of a Savior.

Job never gets an answer to all his questions about pain and evil. God never gives Job explanations. God never apologizes or justifies the nature of his just rule over the affairs of the world. But Job receives a gift far more wonderful than the answers he wants. He gets a glimpse of our Redeemer, he receives the overwhelming gift of seeing the resurrected Jesus Christ whom, Job says, “I shall see on my side.”

I think Job teaches us that there is nothing wrong with asking God why. I even think God wants a wrestling match. Like Job, our wrestling with God draws us into a relationship with God. Out of the honesty of our limitations, we have no where else to turn but to God who knows all and, more importantly, promises a Redeemer for our liberation. But, unlike Job’s friends, we must never think we can explain why we and our friends and enemies experience pain. Our wrestling match with God should lead us to confess our dependence on God’s grace for our livelihood. In the story of Job, the outcome of his questions to God is an encounter with his own limitation.

I have no doubt Robert’s death brought Mary to the point of questioning God. I am sure she wanted to know why her son was taken from her. But what I find remarkable about Mary’s story is that she didn’t curse God and return to a life of despair. She started coming to a church in Walltown. She became a member about a month ago. She comes to the Wednesday night meeting where we read our Bibles and pray with one another. Her life is a testimony to everyone at Northside Baptist church that our Redeemer lives. Every time I see her I can see the power of Jesus Christ to reveal himself in the midst of pain and evil. I hope, whenever I taste the pain and death of this world, that I will remember Mary?s witness to God’s faithfulness.

In the meantime, we must train ourselves to think like Job and Mary. We must develop good habits of praising our Redeemer. Rev. Daniels at St. John’s Baptist church in Walltown always tells his congregation, “We must praise God anyhow!” This is the sort of gift we receive in the Psalms. In the Psalms we find prayers of lament and praise, passed down from Israel’s mothers and fathers to their children. The people of Israel learned to respond to the evil in their lives by joining in prayers like the one we heard tonight from Psalm 17. Listen to a few of those lines again: “From you let my vindication come… I call upon you, for you will answer me, O God; incline your ear to me, hear my words… Wondrously show your steadfast love, O savior of those who seek refuge…at your right hand.” We must learn how to faithfully wrestle with God from these songs of praise and lament.

The good news is that God does not turn a deaf ear to our cries for liberation from the powers of this present evil age. God responded in Jesus Christ, our Redeemer, who lives and reigns with the Father and the Holy Spirit. This Redeemer Jesus is Immanuel, God with us—the God who conquered death through the death and resurrection of Jesus, the Messiah of Israel.

When we gather to worship, we confess our frailty, our lack of understanding. And in our frailty we proclaim hope in our living Redeemer who, through the cross, experienced the world’s evil and now sits at the right hand of the Father as our liberator from evil. A 6th century pastor and theologian named Maximus the Confessor put it best. He said, “The one who knows the mystery of the cross and the tomb, knows the reasons of things. The one who is initiated into the infinite power of the Resurrection, knows the purpose for which God knowingly created all.” That is our hope. May the Holy Spirit teach us what it means to trust in the faithfulness of God revealed in Jesus Christ.