Sermons

 Out of the Whirlwind, Grace

John Wilkinson	Third Presbyterian Church
October 18, 2009	Job

“Grace is ‘the last best word,’ the only unsullied theological word remaining in our language.” So wrote the theologian Philip Yancey in his book What’s So Amazing About Grace? Yancey wrote that words like love and charity and hope had lost their theological punch in our culture, but grace retains its deep and profound meaning.

Remember that thought as we explore the book of Job. Job, you will remember, is often characterized as a book about patience – hence the patience of Job. But it is deeper than that. It is a book about a man’s life, whose struggles may be more pronounced than yours or mine, but perhaps not, and how he faces those struggles in light of his absolute faith and trust in God.

Throughout October, the lectionary offers us little snippets of Job – you would be benefited to read the entire book, savor it, take it all in.

Job is blameless and upright, and he fears God and rejects evil. We expect only good things to happen to him. But we know better, in the story, and in our own lives, that the dispensing of blessings and curses and the moral quality of our own lives can reflect a disconnect.

Satan and God engage in a debate – what would it be like, Satan wonders, if bad things started to happen to job. Would the Teflon-like quality of his faith begin to chip away? Does Job worship God for nothing, and will he maintain that faithfulness if the blessings start to crumble?

This is heavy stuff, as they might have said in the 70’s, and we know what follows. Job loses his family, his property, his own health. His wife tells him that if he rejects his faith that he will die, in her mind a kind of mercy-killing.

He persists. He persists in the face of his friends’ less than helpful advice. They determine that Job deserves this, that something has happened in his life to cause his suffering. Job laments. He complains to God. He prays and prays and prays. His bitterness grows and he demands an audience with God.

This is surely a Reader’s Digest condensed version that does very little credit to the grace and power of the full story, but this morning, after Job defends himself before God, clinging to his integrity in the face of his deep, deep suffering and his profound religious questioning, God answers. Out of the whirlwind, God’s voice comes. The story will conclude next week, on Reformation Sunday. I don’t want to spoil things, but if you want to read ahead, please go for it.

Today, though, out of the whirlwind, we receive a vision of God flexing God’s muscles. Last week we considered the doctrines of sovereignty and grace; this morning, sovereignty is on full display. Who is this, God asks. Who is this who talks without knowing? The God who earlier acknowledges Job’s integrity now questions his credentials, or any mortal’s credentials. Who is this? Were you around when I made the earth, when the morning stars were cast in the heavens, when I formed the seas, spread the clouds across the sky? Who are you? Can you make the rain fall, the human mind function, give food to animals and humans alike? Who are you?

It seems dramatic, a little sarcastic, a little harsh, perhaps. God being God. Norman Habel identifies this section of Job as the movement toward conflict resolution. Habel suggests that God simply showing up might have been enough for Job, that the voice of God in the whirlwind would have been all he would have needed to maintain his faith and trust. But he gets more. He gets a conversation. (The Book of Job, page 33)

Habel writes that God’s challenge from the whirlwind complicates the conflict. Job has insisted on his integrity before God. Now God insists on God’s integrity before Job. It is complex, but what remains is this – a relationship, a covenantal relationship. Job gets no easy answers, no quick fixes either to his personal dilemmas or to his dilemmas about who God is. But he really is not looking for them. He is looking for a hearing, a conversation, a relationship. That is what God promises. And that is what Job gets.

God owes Job nothing. But to God’s credit, God shows up at the hearing as well, engages Job in conversation, and simply by showing up, God indicates to Job and to all of us who overhear that God also takes this relationship seriously.

That’s all we want, I believe. To be taken seriously by God who we take seriously. And so it is.

We may be seeking answers to why Job suffers, why we suffer. Gerald Janzen reminds us that we do not get those answers. What we do get is a reminder of God’s dominion. (Job, page 225)

We called that dominion sovereignty last week – God being God of all of creation, not a part, all of life. It puts us humans in our proper context, and that is enough. But it is enough only because our proper context also includes a relationship with that same Lord, the sovereign God who not only put all of creation into motion, but who formed us, who will speak to us, and more interestingly, listen to us.

James Newsome writes that what Job desires, he gets – an audience. Says Newsome “Job’s sufferings are now seen as part of a vast scheme of things which is far too transcendent for any mortal to comprehend. Human wisdom is derivative of (God’s) wisdom, and, if there are areas that human wisdom cannot penetrate, it is not because (God’s) wisdom is deficient. It is because human wisdom is too limited… (But the story) offers a straightforward answer, as remarkable for what it omits as for what in contains: You, Job, simply do not possess the wisdom to contest God. Therefore, trust God and you will be at peace.” (Texts for Preaching, Year B, page 550-551)

I do not know how that fits with us, we 21st century, rational, searching for answers seekers. I do not know. The work I am privileged to do brings me into contact with human suffering – physical, emotional, spiritual. What I find, though, is that people – you – do not want easy answers, quick fixes, magic formulas, either to explain away the bad things or to make them disappear. What you want is trust, sustenance, and a sense that whatever is happening to you – from divorce to addiction to job loss to cancer – fits into a larger purpose. That’s the sovereignty part.

The grace part of all this is the promise of acceptance, of the notion that no, you are not being punished, and yes, I am with you because I love you and care for you and will sustain you.

I remember speaking to an adult class some time ago – a so-called “secular” class who wanted to know about us Presbyterians and what we believed. Grace was hard to understand for them.

* You mean I am accepted by God no matter what? Yes.
* I don’t have to believe anything or say anything or do anything or buy anything to earn that grace? Yes – in fact you cannot earn it.
* And I can’t lose it? Can’t lose it.
* No matter what I do? No matter.
* Anything? Well, I am not sure what you have in mind, but yes. Grace is a gift, a free gift, and it cannot be taken away.

In the context of Job, it is God’s promise to show up and listen, listen to Job’s challenges and complaints and to take them seriously. For us, it is God’s promise to do the same.

John Calvin preached some 160 sermons on Job. William Bouwsma writes that Calvin was baffled and perplexed by Job; Bouwsma believes that Calvin was much more sympathetic to Job’s friends than was deserved, and less open to the merits of Job’s own integrity than the book of Job itself demands. (John Calvin: A Sixteenth Century Portrait, pages 94-96)

That may be our dilemma as well. We live in a world that seeks to assign blame or attribute cause. Since we are a by-the-bootstraps culture, where hard work is rewarded and sin is punished, we have trouble understanding that such is not the case for grace. If it were up to us, we would be up a creek. But it is not.

Here is where John Calvin is at his best. Stacy Johnson writes that Calvin believed that divine grace “was the answer to what (he) thought was life’s most important question: how can a sinful human being come into the presence of a holy God?” (John Calvin: Reformer for the Sixteenth Century, page 23-24) And the answer is that we can’t. Or we can’t unless God allows us. Or better said, we can because God invites us, welcomes us. That unmerited welcome, acceptance, invitation, is called grace.

“Our hopes for salvation,’ Johnson writes, “are in vain if they rest upon our own faithfulness or efforts at righteousness. Rather, our hopes rest upon the certainty of the promises of God and upon the integrity of God to be faithful to God’s own Word. That God is true to God’s promises (is) the key feature of grace.” Johnson concludes: “(Grace) means two things…it is a conviction about the way in which sinful human beings are saved: only God’s favor, bestowed without regard to human merit, is able to redeem human life. On a deeper level, grace is the very definition of who God is… a God who is fundamentally for human beings.”

* How that works itself out is left to the mysteries of a sovereign God.
* That it works itself out is the very definition of grace.

So that when we place our lives, our questions and doubts, our struggles and sufferings, at the throne of grace, in the very vortex of the whirlwind, with this God who we take so seriously, the whirlwind will take us seriously as well, will meet us there, will answer, and we will know grace, and be saved. Amen.