Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
October 25, 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.

In our service last Sunday God responded to Job, and we considered that response. We considered the mystery of God and said that we need to let God be God God’s way. In our reading from Job this week Job responds to God, and the task before us today is to consider that response. Job’s response is, basically: O My God! I really didn’t get it, did I? Who did I think I was to question God? Who was I to think that I could understand God? Job buys into God’s answer to him. I was wrong, he says. Fair enough. That’s what we’d expect from a story like this, that the storyteller would have his human protagonist concede that God, the way the storyteller has portrayed God, was right. But then Job expresses how he reacts to his new insight about God. He says: “I had heard of you by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees you; therefore I despise myself and repent in dust and ashes.” That Job would eventually admit that God is right is predictable. Job’s response to that admission is, I think, a lot more interesting than the admission itself; and that’s what I want to focus on this morning, in this last of my sermon series on Job.

Job says first: “I had heard of you by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees you.” Recall that Job had been certain that he understood God. His was the conventional understanding of the time, that God rewards the righteous and punishes the wicked. Job heard it, probably repeatedly, and he accepted it as true. This understanding of God wasn’t grounded in Job’s own experience, it was grounded in what his culture and its religious authorities had told him. That is, I think, what Job means when he says “I had heard of you by the hearing of the ear.”

But then Job had an existential crisis. His experience didn’t jibe with what he’d been told about God. Job was righteous, but he was suffering. It wasn’t supposed to be that way, not according to what he’d always been told. The disconnect between his experience and what he’d been told about God plunged him into despair. God disappeared for him, as we saw two weeks ago when we considered his cry “O that I knew where I might find him.” What he’d been told about God wasn’t working because his experience was telling him something different. So God disappeared for him.

This part of Job’s reply to God points us to a really profound and really important spiritual truth. Job’s experience of a disconnect between what his religion told him about God and his experience of God is an experience that a great many people have today. I have known people who have had the experience particularly around two issues. One of the two issues around which I have had this experience is what most Christian churches tell people about homosexuality, about God’s gay and lesbian children. Most Christian churches tell people that all homosexual behavior is inherently sinful and that people with that orientation must either change their orientation or remain celibate. Yet that teaching conflicts with experience. Most of us, straight or gay, if we’ll let ourselves, experience gay people as not essentially different from straight people. They are as good, and as bad, as anyone else. We see gay people, or we are gay people, in loving, committed, life-giving relationships that are not essentially different from similar heterosexual relationships, and we say: My experience is different from what the churches say about these folks—or about myself. My experience is different from what the church is telling me my experience ought to be. I see God in these relationships where I’ve been told God is not supposed to be. And a great many people today, gay and straight, reject God because the God they’ve been told about is inconsistent with their experience.

The other issue around which people often have the Job experience of a disconnect between what they hear about God and their experience of God is more similar to Job’s experience. The churches tell people that if they have enough faith, and if they pray hard enough, bad things won’t happen to them or to their loved ones. They’re told that God will protect them, not just by being with them but by actually preventing bad things from happening. They’re told God works this way in everything they encounter in life. And then life doesn’t work that way at all. Bad things happen. Sooner or later bad things always happen, and the people with this understanding cry out: I thought that if I had faith and prayed, God would take care of me! And because God hasn’t taken care of them in the way that they expected, God disappears for them. People who know God only by the hearing of the ear, only by what the church tells them, often lose their faith altogether because what they see with their eye sees, that is, what they actually experience, so frequently clashes with what they have heard. We know that God is actually with them in the things that happen, but they can’t experience that presence because of what they’ve always been told. How much better off these folks would be if the church had told them instead: Trust your experience. Trust what you see of God in your life, even if what you see is different from what we say.

What Job saw was different from what he had heard too, but he didn’t stop believing in God. Instead he cried out to the God he saw with his eye: “I despise myself and repent in dust and ashes.” Which raises for us the question of just how we are to respond to the God of our experience. I think God wants us to repent of our arrogance in not letting God be God as Job did, but I don’t think God wants us to despise ourselves. After all, God loves us; so we can love ourselves, not despise ourselves, even when we make mistakes. Beyond that, God wants us to learn from our experience of what God is trying to say to us, what God thinks we need to hear. God wants us to pay attention and then to respond faithfully to what see, to what we experience of God.

Now, I need to add a word of caution here. When we claim to have had an experience of God, we’re playing with fire. Claims that we know God are always dangerous, as Job discovered. Last Friday evening I saw a film on TV about David Koresh, the charismatic leader who led his followers to disaster and death in Waco a few years ago. He claimed to have a direct experience of God, but his experience of what he thought was God was clearly demonic not divine. Experience can be way too idiosyncratic, way too individualistic. So our experience of God needs to be confirmed It needs to be confirmed in community, truly free, faithful community. It needs to be subjected to the judgment of scripture—all of scripture, the major themes of scripture, not just one extremely difficult book like Revelation, which is what Koresh relied on.

With that caveat, we can trust our experience of God. So much of what we hear about God, even from the Christian tradition and the Christian churches, contradicts our experience of God. Some of it contradicts what we know to be right. So: Let us be like Job in this, that we too say to God “I had heard of you by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees you.” Let us open ourselves to personal experiences of God, and let us trust those experiences. Amen.