Sermons

“Seeking Meaning, Seeking God”

Psalm 139:1-12; Job 23:1-17 – Rev. Rebecca Littlejohn

Vista La Mesa Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), La Mesa, California – October 14, 2018

 Holy God, bless the speaking and the hearing of these words that we might truly believe you are with us in every moment and find comfort in your presence.  In Jesus’ name we pray, Amen.

There is a lot going on in the Book of Job.  It’s one of those parts of the Bible that I’m normally hesitant to preach on, because it’s dense and complicated, and I haven’t spent enough time studying it.  I am not an expert, and in this case, that makes preaching feel risky. But some of you are suffering today, and the book of Job speaks to suffering.  Some of you are not suffering today, but you will be some day.  So perhaps I can be forgiven for wandering beyond my depth and attempting to find something helpful to say about our suffering, based on a non-expert’s perspective on Job.

One of the challenges of preaching about Job is that we can’t read the whole book in worship, so it’s hard to get the full story. The basics that set up the story are that Job was blameless and upright, with a wife and ten kids (who might have been a little wild), and tons and tons of livestock.  Then a heavenly being, whom our translation confusingly calls Satan, convinced God to test Job’s faithfulness by making his life a living hell. Job’s livestock are stolen, his servants are all murdered, his children are killed when a house collapses on them, and his entire body is covered with “loathsome sores.”  Still Job will not curse God.  And all that happens in the first two chapters.  Must of the rest of the book is taken up with dialogues of Job’s friends who come to visit him and offer counsel, none of which sways Job from his faithfulness.

The chapter that we read, however, is part of Job’s commentary; and while he still isn’t cursing God, he’s clearly suffering and frustrated.  This is a good chapter to focus on, if we want to understand suffering from the inside.  Job is doing two quintessentially human things in this chapter: he is seeking meaning and he is seeking God.  These are our two impulses in the face of suffering, are they not?  We want to make sense of things, find reasons for what happened, or at least have someone confirm that our suffering wasn’t fair. And we want to curl up in the lap of God and cry.

It’s important before we get much further to note that there are two kinds of suffering in the world.  The book of Job is concerned with what we might call “senseless” or undeserved suffering.  There is, of course, also the kind of suffering that can reasonably be called “natural consequences”.  On the other hand, the line between the two is blurred when, as so often happens, the negative consequences of one person’s actions are inflicted on someone else. As it turns out, once we’re caught up in the midst of suffering, unless a new choice we can make could improve the situation, there isn’t that much difference in what we need, whether it’s our own darn fault or somebody else’s or no one’s at all.  The only difference is that we can explain the negative consequences of our own bad choices, which makes it slightly easier to handle.  The randomness of tornado damage or the complete devastation of a hurricane like we saw this week in Florida is intensified by a certain level of mystery about why such things happen the way they do.  Nevertheless, the suffering caused by addiction or bankruptcy or adultery isn’t any less intense because we can explain it.

In any of those situations we may still need to crawl into God’s lap and cry.  Which brings us back to Job’s monologue in chapter 23.  I chose to read it from the New International Version this morning because the differences between that and the New Revised Standard Version are interesting.  The NIV felt more visceral to me, in its description of the experience of suffering. Job wants to present his case before God, but Job can’t find God.  Not in the east, not in the west, not in the north, and not in the south.  Using the directions (as opposed to the NRSV’s forward, back, left and right) makes the contrast with Psalm 139 even more obvious. Job is going everywhere looking for God, while the psalmist is going everywhere trying to find a place where God hasn’t already arrived.

As Christians, we proclaim that it is the psalmist’s confession that describes how things are, while Job’s words describe how things sometimes feel.  The longer Job can’t find God, the less it matters why he began looking and the more we just need God to show up.  That’s how it goes, right?  When terrible things are happening to us, if we cannot feel God’s presence with us, that absence can sometimes almost overshadow the other things that are going wrong.  Because we are perpetually trying to make meaning, even where there is no meaning, we interpret bad things as punishment, and God’s seeming absence as rejection or judgment.  Like Job, we are bitter and indignant and fearful.  But also like Job, we cannot hide.

Did you notice that part at the end?  It’s interesting, because the two different translations sound like they’re saying two different things.  In the NIV, the chapter concludes with Job saying, “Yet I am not silenced by the darkness, by the thick darkness that covers my face.” His situation is horrible, like thick darkness covering him, but he is not silenced.  In the NRSV, he says, “If only I could vanish in darkness, and thick darkness would cover my face!”  His situation is so horrible, he’d like to be able to hide, but he can’t.  At first glance, it sounds like these two statements are describing opposites, but in fact, they are saying the same thing: God may be hidden from Job, but Job is not hidden from God.  God still hears Job’s cry and sees Job’s righteousness.  The “thick darkness” of suffering can neither muffle Job’s plea nor make him invisible to the Almighty.  It is perhaps the bitterest proclamation of hope in all of scripture.  But sometimes that’s exactly what we need, isn’t it?

In a sense, by the end of the book, Job has gotten what he desired: a chance to argue his case before God.  And he won.  God almost admits that he did Job wrong, as evidenced by the ways God tries to compensate Job for his suffering.  He gets back all the livestock.  And he has ten new children, even more beautiful than the wild ones who died when the house collapsed.  But do ten new children really compensate for losing the first ten?  We know that they don’t.  Despite Job’s desire to press his case and win, it turns out that winning is cold comfort.

The search for meaning and reason and fairness in the book of Job falls short.  The “happy ending” isn’t actually that happy.  And the root cause of Job’s suffering – as explained in the story, that is, that God is letting a less scrupulous heavenly being have its way with Job to test his faithfulness – is simply unacceptable.  It’s not an explanation for suffering, senseless or otherwise.  God does not send us hurricanes or tornadoes or genetic disorders or addiction to test us. Our suffering is not part of some “master plan” that God cooked up for reasons beyond our comprehension.  To say such things is to promote an image of God other than the one testified to by Jesus Christ.  What the book of Job does do for us, in the end, however, is to affirm the psalmist’s proclamation that there is nowhere we can go where we are not held in God’s hand.  Though there may be moments when it seems as though “thick darkness” is covering us, “darkness is not dark” to God, for the “night is as bright as the day.”  Though it may seem as though we’ve looked in every direction for God and not caught a glimpse, even at the farthest limits of the sea, God is there.

In the end, what we learn is that we spend too much time asking the wrong questions about suffering.  We focus on “why?” and “why me?” or “why them?” and “how is this fair?” when what we need to ask is “How will I respond?”  When another is suffering and unable to see God, how will we make Christ’s presence real for them?  When another is suffering and struggling to remain faithful, how will we help them hold on?  When we are suffering and tempted to curse God, how will we sustain faithfulness instead? How will we practice the discipline of hope, even if it’s only with a bitter tongue?  When things don’t make sense, how will we work to cultivate trust in the God of compassion, rather than distorting our image of God to satisfy our need for meaning?  These are the questions we need to ask in the face of suffering.  Our search for meaning is part of our human nature, but our search for God is what will bring us comfort.  Our happy endings will never be sufficient; our explanations will never fully satisfy.  But God, who knows our every word and breath, will never not be able to find us, even when we would like to hide.  May our hearts find rest in the One who holds us fast, even in the thickest darkness. Alleluia and Amen.