Sermons

The Whirlwind of Protest

John Wilkinson                                 Third Presbyterian Church  October 26, 2003                       Excerpts from the Book of Job

Perhaps you remember a book by Rabbi Harold Kushner, now some 22 years old. It was entitled When Bad Things Happen to Good People, though most people quickly translated the title to Why Bad Things Happen to Good People. The big question posed by Kushner's book seemed to be in that re-framed title; why do bad things happen to good people, or why do bad things happen at all.

The theologians have a fancy word for it, "theodicy." Theodicy, the word itself meaning something like "the justification of God," asks the question how the existence of a good and benevolent God can be reconciled with the existence of evil.

It is a question we face every day, is it not? We ask it on large scales. We ask it when a famine makes its way across sub-Saharan Africa, and thousands and millions die, including untold numbers of babies. We ask it when a natural disaster - a tornado or earthquake of hurricane, you name it – kills countless numbers of people. We ask it in the face of tyranny, or warfare. We asked it big time in the prior century, in the face of what came to be known as the Holocaust. And we ask it on more localized scales.

We ask it in the face of a fatal car accident. We ask it when a dearly beloved one, or even we ourselves, faces a diagnosis that is critical if not terminal.

Sometimes we attach the bigger questions to all this. “How could this happen?” Or "why did this happen?" Or “why me?”

And sometimes we attach the even bigger questions to all this. "How could God let this all happen?"

The first thing to say about all this is that the questions, even the ones about God, are good questions, valid and fair and faithful.

There are times when we have been taught that doubt, somehow, or sadness or rage, needs to fall beyond the bounds of our faith.

They do not.

Today is Reformation Sunday, the Sunday closest to October 31, when we remember Martin Luther's daring act of nailing 95 theses, or protests, to the church door in Wittenberg. I wondered this week if Luther received permission from the Property Committee beforehand.

Luther's dangerous act of protest gained momentum, we will remember. John Calvin took those early ideas and applied them in new ways - in France, and particularly in the Swiss town of Geneva. The protests were not entirely theological ones, but ecclesiastical as well.

That is to say, Luther and Calvin and many others found deep fault with the church, and with the way the church was teaching the faith to the faithful. Hence the protest.

At the heart, however, of all this, is a theological affirmation. We Calvinist, Reformed, Presbyterian types most typically have called it "the sovereignty of God."

Sometimes we toss around words like omnipotence (as we sang in Calvin’s great hymn this morning) and omnipresence. The point of all that, by the way, is NOT to construct an image of God that is intimidating or capricious. It is rather to articulate a God big enough for our worship, a God that lives beyond our human capacity to understand or control, a God that is a reflection of a just, righteous, loving sovereign deity - made known to us in Scripture and made known to us through Jesus of Nazareth - rather than a concoction that best represents ourselves.

The sovereignty of God is political and theological. In the face of the selling of indulgences, our forbears insisted that God, and not the church, was in charge. In the face of our efforts to assure our own salvation, our faith insists that God, and not we ourselves, is in charge.

The implications of embracing the sovereignty of God, or rather embracing God’s sovereignty embracing us, are radical and life-changing, but not always easy. We seek small and easy gods, perhaps, in order to formulate comprehensible answers to our questions. Or we seek no gods at all - or rather the gods of fate or luck or chance or hard work.

But given the options, our tradition has determined over time that the notion of a sovereign God, sovereign in love and mercy as well as sovereign in justice and righteousness, best helps us understand the world, and more so, is most worthy of our attention and worship. Not that a sovereign God needs our affirmation in order to be sovereign, but you get what I mean.

Job got that.

Perhaps you remember the Book of Job, or references to it. The suffering of Job, or surely the patience of Job. Job is an odd book in the canon of the Bible. Its provenance is not precise.
It probably dates between 2000 and 1500 years before the time of Jesus. It is called "wisdom" literature, that is to say, a literary work that offers learning beyond a particular historical context, like the Book of Proverbs or the Psalter.

Job has long been a literary subject - poems by Robert Frost and numerous works of drama, including Archibald MacLeish's well-known J.B. and even a work by Neil Simon.

We have lumped four weeks of lectionary readings into one big Job experience this morning, this Reformation morning, in the hopes that the big questions posed by Job and posed by us are given some faithful consideration, even if we need to go back to this work, perhaps in a season of education.

We hear of the patience of Job. To read Job, though, is to discover that such patience is exercised sparingly, only at the beginning and the end. The rest of the book is what we might call a rant – or even a protest - Job against God, Job's friends against Job, Job against his friends.

But first a little review. Job is described as a good man, upright and God-fearing. He is very prosperous, blessed with children and livestock. We read the opening paragraphs, and we sense we are being set-up for an intriguing ride.

We then overhear a conversation with the heavenly beings, including the Lord and Satan, whose job it seems to be to wander the earth looking for trouble. The Hebrew word “Satan” has the word “the” in front of it – it is best translated not as a person or character, but rather as “the adversary.”

The Lord seems to be in a boasting mood, drawing the Satan's attention to Job. "Have you not considered Job?" the Lord asks. Satan replies, "does Job fear God for nothing," essentially suggesting that yes, it would be pretty easy to be so religious when things are going so swimmingly, as they seem to be for Job.

And so Satan seems to entice the Lord into a kind of experiment. If things turn bad for Job, Satan hunches that Job will turn on God. God reluctantly agrees, the only provision being that Job’s life will be spared. It’s all downhill from there. Job’s employees are killed in a raid. His livestock is plundered. His children are killed in a tornado, in the midst of a great feast.

And yet Job maintains his integrity, and it drives Satan absolutely to the brink. He convinces God to allow him to move to Job himself, and so Job is afflicted with debilitating and painful sores, so bad that all he can do is sit in the ash heap outside of town in his misery and agony.

Job's wife enters the picture. She ends up being his best friend. Hers is a voice of sympathy and solidarity, but also of anger, both toward Job and God. "How do you still persist in your integrity? Curse God and die." That is to say, give up your set of beliefs and end your misery.

And Job poses an extraordinary question: shall we receive the good from God, and not the bad? This religion thing must be more than happy experiences and good investment returns.

Job's three very good friends, the “three amigos,” I call them, show up. They show up to demonstrate their friendship, but at the end of the day, they demonstrate something much less than that. Originally sympathetic, they search for answers where they cannot be found. Their consolation turns into other things. "Buck up, Job, everything will be OK." Or, "perhaps your children DID do something to deserve this. Everything will be OK." Or, "maybe you are not as righteous as you appear, but if you buck up, everything will be OK." Thanks a lot.

Or, as Martin Buber once said, “with friends like these, who needs Satan?”

(Might we re-define friendship for our day as one who provides sympathy and solidarity, but no easy answers in the face of hard questions, a kind of strong, silent presence in the face of adversity.)

Job hears it all and will have none of it. He asks his friends if their "windy words" will have no limits. What does persist is his integrity.

What he really wants now is to take God on, to contend with God in a kind of cosmic debate, a trial in the heavens. The patience of Job becomes the righteous anger of Job, and if you work through the 40-some odd chapters, you will recognize anger, confusion, and what the late Robert Boling called "the brink of blasphemy."

For many more chapters and verses and windy words, the friends continue, until finally, finally, God's voice speaks, and a kind of theological "game on" begins.

The Lord answered Job out of the whirlwind. And you, Job, where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth. And Job trembles in silence. God asks Job whether you find me guilty in order to find yourself innocent. And Job says "no."

Job learns in that very moment, that his faith has been made real by his experiences and his encounters, by the hollow words of his friends, even by his suffering.

"I had heard of you by the hearing of the ear - but now my eye sees you..." Now I see a glimpse of the cosmic design, and I am in awe.

What to make of this on this Reformation Sunday, when each of us, all of us perhaps, are asking the questions Job asks or facing the realities Job faced.

To be true to the message of Job, I would propose no easy insights, but I would propose faithful insights, and perhaps even hopeful ones.

When Job asked “where shall wisdom be found,” Walter Brueggemann writes, "he moves from a conventional quarrel to a cosmic confrontation.” (The Creative Word) We must be heartened by that and not discouraged.

As Norman Habel writes, “it is the right of the sufferer to be angry with God.” (Old Testament Library, page 68)

Marvin Pope writes that “the problem of theodicy continues to thwart all attempts at rational solution.” (Anchor Bible Commentary, page lxiii)

That leaves us twenty-first century, rational, enlightened, scientific believers a little frustrated.
But I will take that frustration any day in exchange for following a God who is free and transcendent. That God can seem capricious to us, or unfair. But that God is not small, or mechanical or controllable. We can rely on no lesser Gods than this, the God whom Luther called a mighty fortress.

And lest these big questions knock us off track, or leave us searching, remember that Job sought God’s face, and transformation happened. We are affirmed by God when we speak from the anguish of protest.

From the whirlwind we cry to God, we protest: our lives, the health of those we love, the church, our work, the world, war and tragedy. From the whirlwind we protest and from the whirlwind God responds.

“I had heard of you by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees you.”

It is into that promise that we lean on this Reformation morning, where our big questions are met by an even bigger God, who received our cries, and who receives even us. Thanks be to God.
Amen.