Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
October 11, 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.

Some of you have seen my handwriting. It’s not something I am—or my elementary school teachers would be—proud of. Sometimes I can’t even read it myself. Thank God for computers and printers! Lately, however, I’ve noticed one odd thing about my handwriting in particular. Often when I write the word “bad” it looks a lot like “God.” I make a small b look like a type of g, and my o’s are indistinguishable from my a’s. And of course the last letters of bad and God are the same. So, magically, bad becomes God. I’ll often go back and rewrite the word “bad” more carefully so it doesn’t look so much like God; but as I was doing that earlier this past week, it suddenly seemed to me that maybe my writing “bad” to look like “God” wasn’t a mere coincidence. I thought I saw a possible meaning in it. I asked: Is this quirk of my handwriting trying to tell me something, like maybe there’s a connection between the bad and God? Then it occurred to me to ask: Are the bad times the God times? And immediately the answer came to me Yes! Yes, the bad times are—or at least can be—the God times, the times when God is particularly close, when we can feel our strongest connection to God. That has in fact been my experience. Perhaps it has been your experience too.

It certainly isn’t Job’s experience in our reading this morning. By this point in his story, Job has suffered about every calamity a human being can suffer and still be alive. He’s lost his fortune, his health, even his children. So far from feeling near to God in his time of suffering, Job is having a profound experience of the absence of God. He cries out: “Oh, that I knew where I might find him, that I might come even to his dwelling!” And: “If I go forward, he is not there, or backward, I cannot perceive him; on the left he hides, and I cannot behold him; I turn to the right, but I cannot see him.” I said that in my experience the bad times can be the God times, but I’ve Job’s experience here too. I suspect we all have. This experience of despair at the seeming absence of God is so common that the Christian tradition even has a name for it. We call it “the dark night of the soul.” The term comes from the 16th century Spanish mystic St. John of the Cross. He considered it a normal part of spiritual experience, indeed a necessary part of spiritual growth. Mystics ever since have called the dark night of the soul a blessing in disguise, a blessing because it is part of our journey to God and in disguise because when you’re having it, it sure doesn’t feel like a blessing.

Whether it’s a blessing or not, Job is certainly in the dark night of the soul. Yet if we are to draw any lesson from Job’s experience—and since it’s in the Bible I suppose we’re supposed to draw some lesson from it—we need to look more closely at just what Job’s problem actually is. When he cries “O that I knew where I might find him” it’s because he wants to plead his case to God. He seems to believe that God must be somehow misinformed about him, because if God just knew how righteous he was, God wouldn’t be inflicting these disasters on him. He says: “There an upright person could reason with him, and I should be acquitted forever by my judge.” Job’s perception of the absence of God is grounded in his understanding of what God’s presence looks like, of what being in God’s presence means. He is absolutely convinced that being in God’s presence means being rewarded, means having material blessings showered on him as a reward for his goodness. And since that’s not happening, Job experiences God as totally absent. He is plunged into the dark night of the soul and cannot see his bad time as a God time.

Job’s story here presents us with two really important and closely related questions: How do we find God in the bad times, and what does it mean to find God in the bad times? If Job could have found meaningful answers to those questions, he wouldn’t have been in such despair. What could we say that would help him find those answers? Let’s take the first question first. How do we find God in the bad times? As hard as finding God in the bad times can seem in the midst of those bad times, the answer to this one is actually quite simple. We find God in the bad times the same way we find God at any other time. And the Christian tradition is rich with wisdom in how we do that. We do it by resorting to the tried and true spiritual practices of our tradition. The primary one is, of course, prayer. Prayer is even more important in the bad times than it is at other times. Perhaps if Job had had a copy of Psalm 130 with him, he would have known what to do. That Psalm begins with the plaintiff plea “Out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord.” When in the depths we cry out to God, we will find God. At least, I know that the most powerful experience of God that I have ever had came that way, and our spiritual tradition is full of examples of the same thing. If Job had been able to cry out to God in prayer, and he would eventually have found God.

Or rather, he would have found God is he could have gotten over the thing that was really keeping him from finding God. That thing was his understanding, or rather his misunderstanding, of what it means to find God in the bad times. He was absolutely convinced that finding God in the bad times means having God make the bad times go away. And as we have already seen in this sermon series, that just isn’t how it works. If the only evidence we will accept of God’s presence is the bad times turning good, we will often fail to find God in the bad times. Sometimes we will. I mean, sometimes we come out of the bad times. Things get better, and we can attribute those developments to God if we want. But Job’s bad times weren’t getting better, and sometimes ours don’t either. The real question is, how do we know we’ve found God when the bad times don’t get better? Or before the bad times have gotten better? Job couldn’t. We can.

We can when we realize that what God offers us in the bad times is not some magical solution to our problems. We find God in the bad times when we realize that what God offers us in the bad times is God’s presence precisely there, in the bad times. And we may ask: So what? Those of us who have felt God’s presence in the bad times answer: So everything! God’s presence is everything because God’s presence with us in the bad times isn’t passive. It is gracious. It is active. It is active in our souls. It lifts us up. It comforts us. It gives us hope. It gives us courage. Perhaps most of all, it gives us peace.

Job never found that peace. He never found it because all he could do was argue with God about Job’s own righteousness. He got hung up on self-justification. And he never found God’s peace because he was looking for the wrong thing from God. He was looking for vindication. He was looking for a divine solution to his problems. And that’s not how it works. That’s not how God works. Not in my experience. Perhaps not in yours. Not in the experience of the spiritual giants of our tradition.

If I could have spoken with Job, that’s what I would have told him. I would have told him that the bad times really can be the God times. I would have had him read Psalm 139, which tells us that God is never really absent. And I would have told him that God’s presence is enough. I know that there are times when it doesn’t feel like enough. Sometimes the pain is just too great. Sometimes the pain overwhelms us. I know that, and I know that God knows that. But I also know that if we will keep seeking God through the pain, if we will pray long and often, if we will worship regularly, if we will seek good pastoral counseling, with time God’s presence will heal us. God’s presence will restore our souls and make us whole. Not the way Job wanted. The way God wants. Thanks be to God. Amen.