Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
October 4, 2009

Scripture:

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

We’ve all heard it. Maybe we’ve even said it. Something bad happens. We get sick. We lose a job. Or a loved one gets sick or even dies. And we cry out in anger and despair: “Why, God?! Why have you done this thing?!” People have been crying out to God like that for as long as people have had a conception of God. We certainly see it in the Bible. It is, for example, the question that lies behind the Book of Job in the Old Testament. The lectionary readings for the Sundays in October all contain a reading from Job, so I have decided to do a four part sermon series this month on the profound theological and pastoral questions that Job raises. This is the first of those four sermons.

Let me remind you briefly what the Book of Job is about. Job is presented as a truly righteous man who fears God and has never done anything evil. To understand the book, we have accept that this is true and not get hung up on whether anyone is ever really that good. For purposes of the story, Job is that good. He is good, and he is prosperous and happy, with wealth and a good family. At the beginning of the book Satan, a name that comes from a Hebrew word that means “the Accuser,” gets God to agree that Satan may inflict Job with various calamities to see whether Job will still worship God when he suffers. Satan then indeed visits a series of disasters on Job—illness, the loss of his fortune, even the death of his children. Some friends of Job’s come, supposedly to comfort him. They insist that Job must have done something wicked somewhere along the line. Job’s friends represent the conventional wisdom of the time, and to some extent at least of our time, that God rewards virtue and punishes sin—in this life. That belief is the central theological tenet of the book of Deuteronomy, and it appears in many of the Psalms and elsewhere in the Old Testament. Job insists to the end that he has always been righteous and has never sinned. Finally, God appears to Job out of a whirlwind and says, basically, who are you to question me?! Job agrees and repents of his questioning of God. Whereupon, in what seems to me a Hollywood ending that doesn’t really fit, God restores Job’s fortunes.

Our reading this morning sets up the story and recounts the first of Job’s afflictions, bodily sores from head to foot. Job’s wife tells him to curse God and die, but Job isn’t going to do that. We’ll overlook the sexism of his response to his wife—you speak as any foolish woman—and go to the heart of the matter. Job says: “Shall we receive the good at the hand of God and not receive the bad?” When I read that again this last week, I flashed on how I would respond if I were Job’s pastor, and he had said that to me. So here’s an imaginary pastoral care session between Job and me, one difference between this imaginary one and a real one with one of you being, of course, that I would never share anything that happens in a real pastoral session with anyone else, pastoral confidentiality being sacred with me.

My friend, I imagine myself saying. You say that we receive the good at the hand of God, so we should also receive the bad. Let me ask you explore that statement a bit more. Do you see the assumption that lies behind it? Do you see the understanding of how God relates to what happens to us in life? It seems to me that you are assuming that God causes everything that happens to us. You are assuming, I think, that when good things happen to us it is God’s doing; and when bad things happen to us, that is God’s doing too.

Of course, Job would reply. That’s how it is. That’s how I’ve always been taught that it is. That’s how everyone says it is. Are you suggesting that it isn’t that way, that what happens to us in life isn’t God’s doing, isn’t God’s will for us? And I would respond: Well, I don’t think it’s my job to tell you what to think; but I will say that I at least have a problem with seeing the matter that way. The God I know, serve, and love is a good God, a God of mercy, compassion, grace, and love. So it’s hard for me to believe that God is causing these bad things to happen to you. The God I know loves you and just wouldn’t do that. And if I can’t believe that God causes the bad things that happen, I can’t really believe that God causes the good things that happen either. You say that we must receive the bad as well as the good from God. I would say that we receive neither the good nor the bad from God, at least not directly. Because at some times in our lives bad things happen to all of us, because suffering just seems to be part of what it is to be human, I can’t see God as the cause of what happens without blaming God for the bad things, without blaming God for the suffering. And I can’t blame God for the suffering without making God, at least to some extent, evil. The God I know is not evil, so I have given up seeing God as the cause of what happens.

Job replies: Well, if God isn’t the cause of what happens to us, does that mean that God has nothing to do with us? Does that mean that God is absent from the world? If God isn’t the cause of what happens, just how does God relate to us and to the world? Are you telling me that I’m alone in all this? Ah, I say. I always knew you were a smart one. Those are indeed among the questions that follow once we stop seeing God as the cause of the things that happen on earth. I can certainly understand people who say that God, if God is real at all, is absent from the world. It sure can feel like that at times. But my experience of God, and a lot of other people’s experiences of God tell me something different. My experience tells me that God isn’t absent from the world. God is very much present in the world, only not as a cause of what happens here. Rather, try thinking of it this way. God is simply present with us in the world. And God isn’t present as cause, but God’s presence isn’t passive either. I said that the God I know is a God of compassion, mercy, grace, and love. God is present in the world offering us all of those things. God is in the world forgiving us and holding us always in God’s unfailing arms of grace. God is in the world pouring out on us the fruits of the Spirit—hope, peace, courage, and patience. God is there offering us all of these things in everything that happens. God is here sharing the good times with us, sharing our joy and our pleasures. More importantly, God is here sharing the bad times with us, hurting with us, grieving with us, even, I believe, in some mysterious way dying with us. I have felt God’s powerful presence with me in the bad times. I know other people who have felt that presence too. To those who have not experienced it, it may not sound like much. To those of us who have experienced it, it is everything. It really is everything, everything we need.

So, Job, I ask you to reconsider your statement that everything we receive we receive “at the hand of God.” Maybe that understanding works for you. If it does, fine. I’m not here to take away something that gives you comfort. But as for me, I can’t see God as the cause of what happens to us. Too many bad things, too much suffering, happens to us for that. To me, God isn’t cause, God is presence. Holy, mysterious, gracious presence. And for me, it is enough. Amen.