SunOct42009
WORLD COMMUNION SUNDAY
Scripture: JOB 1:1; 2:1-10
Indonesia, as you know, suffered a massive earthquake this week. The government there says over 700 people have died, thousands more are missing, and countless others were lifted from their homes and their routines, lives shattered, aspirations ruined, bodies mangled. I confess that until I wrote and thought that sentence, I had not thought for one moment about any of the lives destroyed in that awful event. I knew about it as an abstract idea. But I had not stopped to take in the very specific and particular agony that earthquake brought about. My obliviousness doesn’t make it any less real, though. It’s all too real to those who are enduring its onslaught.
You may be able to imagine yourself in the midst of the city of Padang or an outlying village. But you really don’t have to imagine that scene to know something of the terror and pain that are such a common part of our world.
We’re all far too familiar with the gruesome facets of our own lives. Tip O’Neill once said “All politics is local.” Perhaps the same can be said about pain: all pain is local. We know the pain that we see in front of us. We know the agony that we experience. That’s what’s real to us. That’s what haunts us. And it’s ultimately part of what connects us, all across the globe.
We, too, are Job, in other words—all of us, everywhere. We here at Federated may not have had family, servants and animals taken from us. We may not have been afflicted with sores over our entire bodies. But we have been through our share of agony. Some here have lost children. Some have lost parents. Others have lost jobs or health or potency or pregnancies. Some have been treated atrociously. Not a few have been raped. It’s a pretty dismal litany, one we seldom mention.
So we, too, are Job. Those scars live in us. And for many of us, those scars are not just personally painful. They are spiritually upsetting, as well. Because they inevitably raise questions about why God would allow such awful things to happen. It won’t surprise you if I tell you that the biggest reason people give for not believing in God is that they can’t believe a good God would allow such pain to exist. Countless people have left the faith, or never had it, because they couldn’t make sense of any God letting such terrible things occur. How could God allow Elizabeth Smart to be raped three or four times a day for the nine months she was in captivity? How could God allow little children to die in accidents? How could God allow such terrible clergy sexual abuse, and the cover-ups that kept it going? How could God allow you or your friend to lose a job, or maybe a house, or maybe a marriage? If a good God made the world, why is it so full of suffering and evil?
Not such a cheery thought, perhaps, for an overcast October day, but one we really can’t escape if we’re to give an honest accounting of our faith. Can you believe in God when holocausts and hurricanes and hatred abound? Can you trust in a good God when disaster and cruelty and abuse flourish?
We’re going to explore these questions this week and the next three, as we delve into the book of Job. Job is a book that never settles for easy answers.
For that reason, it’s difficult to read—it doesn’t come up with a simple 1-2-3 plan for faith. But for just that reason, it’s also a fabulous book to read, because it takes seriously the lives we lead and the questions we ask. It’s a folk tale about a man to whom the worst things happen. And he had to deal with the assumption that it was his fault. In Job’s world, the common wisdom was that bad things happen to bad people. If you suffer some appalling calamity, it must be because you did something to deserve it. So when Job loses his family and his farm and his servants and his health, the question he and his friends talk about for most of thirty-seven chapters is: why did this happen to Job? What did he do wrong? Was this some sort of divine punishment for his failures and inadequacies?
While most of us might find some comfort in knowing that the world was ordered so predictably—if you do something wrong, you’ll be punished—we all also can see that that’s not the way it works. Awful people prosper and good people suffer calamity again and again. We’ve all known reprehensible people for whom nothing ever seemed to go wrong, and who didn’t seem at all bothered by their questionable character. How can this be?
If Job couldn’t answer that question, then you certainly won’t be surprised if I don’t either. But I am going to lay out some broad general principles this morning as a way of addressing the issue. And underlying them all is the central conviction that suffering is never God’s punishment of our sin.
With that as a baseline, let’s lay out four guidelines about faith and God in the wake of suffering. First, as Job knew, we badly miss the boat if our love for God is based on a bargain, if we only love God when things go well for us: “God, I’ll love you IF you give me a giant house with a swimming pool and a fabulous kitchen; I’ll love you IF you keep me healthy; I’ll love you IF my business succeeds and I keep my job.” It’s tempting to make our love for God conditional and to be people of deep faith IF everything goes our way.
If we do that, though, we’re treating God worse than parents should be treating their own children. Even though we’re sometimes tempted to act that way with our children, we know we shouldn’t. Our love for them can’t be conditional on their getting all A’s or winning the soccer game. If we don’t love them when they get F’s and sit on the bench, we know we’ve failed them as parents. The same is true with God. If we love God only when things go our way, we’ve failed God. We haven’t really loved God. We’ve loved only what God can give us.
So guideline #1: Don’t bargain with God. Love God just for the sake of God, not for what God gives us. Love the fact that we’re alive. Love the fact that each new day we get to start afresh. Love the fact that even when things go terribly askew, there are still opportunities for growth and joy and hope. No bargaining.
Second, remember that even in the worst chapters of our lives, God can do a new thing. I may have said it before, but I remember so distinctly, on Sept. 12, 2001, the day after the terrorist attacks, Bill Moyers was interviewing James Forbes, then the senior pastor of New York’s Riverside Church. Moyers asked Forbes if God had caused this disaster. And Forbes said something like this: ‘I don’t believe God makes everything happen. But I do believe God can make something happen out of everything.’ God may not have brought about that calamity, but God could bring about a new day in the wake of it all. The most terrible trajectory can be reversed.
So guideline #2: God is working even in the most debilitating scenes of our lives, to bring about something good from the rubble. Job loss? Illness? Divorce? Death? Even there God can be working a new chapter.
Third, we have no real idea how the universe works. Things we think of as awful are sometimes so related to our blessings that they can’t be separated. John Polkinghorne was once a leading particle physicist. In mid-life he left his distinguished position at Cambridge University to become an Episcopal priest. “We tend to believe,” he says, “that if we had been in charge of creation we would have done it better. With a little more care about the detail, we would have kept the beauty of sunsets, but eliminated germs like staphylococci.” Of course, as it happens, “the same processes that allow cells to mutate, making evolution possible, are those that allow them to become cancerous.” Polkinghorne puts it this way: “You can’t have one without the other. In other words, the possibility of disease is not gratuitous; it’s the necessary cost of life” (Context, January 2007, Part B, p. 8). No evolution without cancer. No victory without defeat. No hope without despair. No life without death.
So guideline #3: we really don’t know what we’re talking about most of the time. Things are connected in ways we can’t imagine. And God is often working when we can’t see it at all.
So let’s not bargain with God. Let’s trust that God is working to reverse our disasters. And let’s remember that our knowledge is minuscule. Last guideline for today: even when life is at its worst, there are remarkable forces for good working their way right where we are. This is the stuff of God. For example, as I was reading the Christian Science Monitor account of the Indonesian earthquake this week, it noted that World Vision was on the scene helping in a myriad of ways. What struck me immediately was that this is the organization our Sunday School chose as its mission partner this year. Every penny we put in the container at the bottom of the red staircase at Bell St. will go to helping people around the world deal with the disasters and accidents that happen to them. On World Communion Sunday, World Vision and our commitment to it are part of the work of God.
And then there’s Royal Brettrager. Brettrager plays football for Kirtland High School. He was to be their featured running back and a linchpin of their defense this year. But he broke his thumb and is out for the season, a cast covering most of his hand and forearm. This fall, after one of Kirtland’s games, a loss to a visiting rival, a writer for The Plain Dealer was sitting in the high school hallway writing some notes on the game when he heard the sounds of someone sobbing. The person was out of sight, around a corner. Soon Brettrager walked by the sportswriter and around that corner. “A few minutes later, the sobbing stopped. Another 10 minutes passed,” and the sportswriter says, “I heard voices getting closer. Brettrager and the teammate, still wearing a sweat-drenched undershirt, walked up the hallway. Brettrager had his good arm draped tightly around his friend’s shoulder, and he was still talking to him as they walked out the front door, telling him it was going to be all right. They slipped out into the night.
“‘I’m the one who has to keep their heads up and make them see what they can do,’ Brettrager [says]. ‘For me to have a negative attitude about this injury right now is out of the question. It’s not for me to sit there, to cry about what I’ve got going on, when I’ve got my team that needs me, and the entire city of Kirtland looking to the Hornets.’
And the sportswriter says, “Sometimes, the best plays on Friday nights happen after they turn out the lights” (Tim Warsinskey, The Plain Dealer, Sept. 29, 2009, p. D2).
Indeed they do. Guideline #4: no matter how severe the pain or loss, there is a relentless force for good that comes around again and again. Sometimes even when we lose the game, or our health, or our marriage, or our house—sometimes even then a strange and unseen power shines a light into the shadows and “makes all things new” (Rev. 21:5). Yes, the world is full of terrible events and abusive people. But it is also full of a radiant beauty that cannot be quelled. This holy meal is a sign of that love. With others all over the world, let us eat and drink of it, and be filled.