Church on Morgan
When Answers Fail
[MUSIC PLAYING] From Church on Morgan, a United Methodist congregation whose desire is to be a reminder of the beauty of God and each other. This podcast is a collection of Sunday teachings inspired by the revised Common Lectionary and recorded weekly in Raleigh, North Carolina. And now a moment of silence before this episode begins. [MUSIC PLAYING] We continue to get today to move through the season of ordinary time in the Church calendar, which takes us in many directions as we explore the many aspects of the mystery of Christ and are invited to grow and mature in response. And so this week, we are in the Book of Job, which if you know anything about it is a real upper. [LAUGHTER] Father Richard Roar says of the Book of Job that it is the perennial ungodly story that must be told whenever God makes no sense. And we are tempted to tell stories other than the story of faith. And there were a couple options in the electionary to choose from today, but I felt drawn to this text because I read your prayer requests. Because it's one of the great honors of my role to be invited not just into your celebrations, but into your storms. And there's nothing like pain to unconvince you of all the answers you thought you had. So I know that there are some of you, despite what the Gregorian calendar and the weather tells us that life is meant to be like in the summer. There are some of you crawling in this morning in the dead of winter. And for the rest of us, for those of us who find ourselves in a season of abundance, sitting with this book and with this text, is like doing our homework. Preparing for the day when we two will go on a trip so that we might recognize the territory and learn from the notes etched on the map of suffering that gets passed down. The electionary plunges us into the 38th chapter in Job. So let me offer a quick refresher on the first 37. Satan, who in this legend is actually on God's court of advisors, Satan picks a bet with God. He says, "I bet the only reason that guy Job worships you "is because he's got it so good." One translation says, "You've put a hedge around him." You know these people? It's like nothing bad ever happens to them. Comedian Taylor Tomlinson says, like if someone has their soulmate, you don't want them to have their dream job too, right? If someone has their dream job, they don't get to be in love on top of that. If someone has their dream job and their soulmate, bare minimum, their parents better be divorced. She says, "I'd prefer if they were an orphan." Right? I mean, this is kind of how we feel about these people. And this is who Job was. Job has it all. Money, big business, great family, loving wife. So God gives Satan permission to take it all away. And he does. In short order, Job loses everything. His cattle are stolen and the servants who are defending them are killed. His sheep are struck by lightning. All of his children die in a tornado on the same day. And then Satan says, let's see what happens if we hurt his body. And he makes him into a leper. Sores and boils break out all over his skin. So Job's friends come and spend a week with him, not saying a word. And this is them at their most helpful. Then Job finally erupts. Job dares to be more honest with God than most of us are taught is permissible. He says things like, "Man's life is a prison. "Each day I live seems endless "and I suffer through endless nights. "When I lie down, I long for mourning. "When I get up, I long for evening. "All day I toss and turn." In another passage in Stephen Mitchell's stunning translation, which I would commend to you, Job says, "My days sprint past me like runners. "I will never see them again. "They glide by me like sailboats. "They swoop down like hawks on their prey." I wonder if any of you have felt this way? It's a picture of depression. Job's central question is why me? And Job's friends begin to offer their technically orthodox but utterly unhelpful explanations of how God works and why Job is being punished. And for 37 chapters, God doesn't make a peep. Until the epilogue, it seems that God doesn't even lift a finger. I mean, this is what we are most afraid of, isn't it? That we are in the hands of a quiet and incompetent God. I wonder if you felt this way before. I'm not sure you would be here if you hadn't. So that all brings us to this 38th chapter. And what we hear is the beginning of God's long, anticipated response. Here now, the word of the Lord. Then the Lord answered Job out of the whirlwind. Who is this that darkens counsel by words without knowledge? Gird up your loins like a man. I will question you and you shall declare to me, where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth? Tell me, if you have understanding, who determined its measurements, surely you know? Or who stretched the line upon it? On what were its bases sunk? Or who laid its cornerstone when the morning stars sang together and all the heavenly beings shouted for joy? Or who shut in the sea with doors when it burst out from the womb? When I made the clouds, its garments and thick darkness, its swaddling band and prescribed bounds for it and set bars and doors and said, thus far shall you come and no farther and here shall your proud waves be stopped. This is the word of God for us, the people of God. Well, we just thanked God for that word, but I wonder how you really feel about it. Sherry told me, who does her homework, she read the text before coming to church this morning. Said, I have no idea what any of that meant. 38 chapters of questions for God from Job. And then what do we get in response? More questions, zero answers. And I'm afraid it just keeps going after this. God speaks for two chapters of this book and they are all questions. In some ways, on first read, it feels like these two are just sort of missing each other. Like Job asks a lot of questions and then God asks a lot of different questions in return, sort of reframing the entire conversation as he does. Job is such a weird book. It's the emo music on our sacred mixtape. One commentator calls it a sore thumb sticking out of the Bible. It's mostly poetry or drama in poetic form. It does not claim any historicity and it's strikingly absent of all the usual Old Testament stuff like references to the law, Israel, Moses, Exodus, Deliverance. This book feels set apart from that entire Jewish history. And Job is not even a Jew. Barbara Brown Taylor says that this book is in the Bible at all is a testament to those who decided to include it. Apparently they too recognized that an uncensored account of the depth of human pain and suffering is more to be valued than any correct doctrinal answer to it. (mouse clicking) One side of my husband's family aren't big church people. Yet they remain very curious and kind about my line of work. They sort of engage with me like if I worked for the circus, like full time. (laughs) They're like, so people still go to that, huh? And that might take a lot of practice to make that look so easy. And what a great thing for kids, right? These are the kinds of things they say to try to connect with me. And this past Christmas, my father-in-law, I guess, wanted to see me walk the tightrope in front of everyone. And so we just gotten all the kids to bed and will, my husband has a million siblings and they're all there with their spouses. And we're sitting around the table and my father-in-law is telling a horrible story about a couple they know who has just lost their third adult child to a genetic defect that revealed itself later in life. And as he finishes telling us about this couple, he looks across the table at me kindly, but squarely at me and says, how do you believe in a God who lets this stuff happen? And all of Will's 18 siblings and partners look at me and I take a really long sip of whatever I was drinking and I said, I don't know. I think I muttered some other stuff, but everything I tried to say to those faces in that moment felt pretty flat. Tim probably wouldn't know what to say, but I didn't. And they didn't throw peanuts at me, but they might as well have. I went to bed wondering why I'd signed up to be on God's PR team. And at least in the circus, everyone knows it's an act. I don't know what you've been told or how you've learned to hold this central Christian paradox that we are loved by a good and powerful God who created a world that can be utterly cruel. I guess as long as your house is untouched by deadly storms or lost babies or chronic disease or gun violence or 11 year olds who don't come home or dads who forget your name or partners who leave or traumas that stay as long as you can cruise along. Maybe you can sort of kind of cover your ears and eyes like the way I watch scary movies and just count the blessings of a good God who's never given you any reason to doubt his power or love. But if you're paying attention at all or if the horror movie finally descends on your house, the tension reveals itself. Is this God not good or is this God not powerful? Why would he create a world for his beloved people that is so full of pain? And why would we seek comfort from the one who created the conditions that led to our suffering? Like Job, we long for answers. In his tremendous book, Unapologetic, Francis Spuffer takes aim at some of our most cherished arguments. I've thrown in a few of my own mixed in with his commentary and I want to run through these. These are more or less the explanations that Job's friends offer their destitute pal, his body covered in boils as he mourns the loss of all his children. They're the answers you may have been given in church or on a sympathy card. And as we run through these, I want to consider their helpfulness to us in the face of the unspeakable. First is that we suffer because we deserve it. Surely, Job has done something to merit this suffering. This is what his friends say. You must have screwed over a business partner or cheated on your wife or maybe your kids were up to no good and you just didn't know it. And it's true that sometimes we do make devastating choices that invite pain upon us, but the book of Job upsets this premise from the very beginning, proclaiming that suffering is not a punishment for sin, for Job has done nothing wrong. He's led a blameless life. Job actually prefigures Jesus in this way. The man who did not deserve to suffer or die. This argument doesn't hold. Try as some still do to spiritualize a scapegoat behind everything from natural disasters to mass shootings. Another answer we've been given, we suffer because God is refining us. Now, the gift, the miracle, honestly, in this framework is that God can use suffering to make us more like Christ. Yet this is not a foregone conclusion. Job could just as easily have come out the other side of this of vicious and distorted man, hurting his wife, punishing other children through unspeakable acts, forgetting to survive when his did not. I mean, we see this impact of trauma just as often as we see it breed resilience, don't we? But also if character building were the purpose behind the suffering that God allows, what about Job's friends? I mean, what do they know of grief? Why has God given us such unequal access to this education? Why has the bad stuff so unevenly distributed, leaving some of us with a lifetime of coursework? And others with scarcely any practice at all. Another argument they offer, we suffer because God has a plan in which our suffering is necessary. Everything happens for a reason. It's all part of God's plan. The thing we can hang on to here is the real hope and reminder that God's time and activity exists both within and also outside of and beyond our historical circumstances. We do have a limited perspective. And if the universe was created, then it was in some sense ordered, as we see in God's response to Job, that we just heard. There is in fact a design to all this complexity in order to the chaos, whether or not we perceive it. But where this falls apart for me is that love is not a means to an end. And that's manipulation. The suffering of a beloved child is not justified by some far off victory. If God truly loves Job, God must love Job, not because of what Job can do for God, or it isn't real love. Love is freely given without coercion. We suffer as part of a package deal that gives us free will. Maybe you've heard this or clung to this. And I do think this makes sense of the kinds of suffering caused by human action. Yes, a God who loves us gives us the gift of belonging to ourselves, which includes the freedom to cause inexhaustible harm. But what about the suffering in Job's story? Most of it is the kind not caused by human cruelty. This is the skin ravaged by disease, the children sitting in the wrong place at the wrong time when the storm came, the strike of lightning that killed his sheep. I mean, couldn't God prevent such tragedies without threatening our autonomy? Another, we suffer, but it doesn't matter because it's only a momentary prelude to heaven. Just hang on, Job. Just wait. Someday, none of this will matter. Just look away, look ahead. Yes, the promise of God's kingdom does give us real hope when our world looks nothing like it. Love will outlast trouble, hallelujah. But it's no antidote to the reality of suffering in this life. Spufford says this idea turns God into a doctor who thinks it's okay to chat and dawdle on the way to the emergency room because he does have the morphine and he will get there eventually whenever he gets around to it after an hour or two of our screaming. It's not a plausible characterization of any kind of lover. Finally, the one that perhaps we can most stomach, we suffer because the world is not as God intended it to be. This one checks more of the boxes, right? It fits with our experience and it preserves God's love for us. Spufford says the problem with this one is that while it fits with what we see, it requires an explanation of how things got this way. Did the Almighty God create something defective? Some theologies suggest that we claim responsibility. It was us, Adam, Eve, we messed this up, but that just shifts God's responsibility for the fall to being responsible for the situation that was responsible for the fall. I do hold on to the reminder baked into this notion that creation is not the same as Creator. Sustained by Him, yes, loved by Him, yes, revealing of Him even, but nature itself isn't God. And that's a gift. Beyond that, this argument just seems to displace God's role and challenge His design. You get to keep whatever is true and beautiful and helpful about these arguments, but I don't find many of them useful. Any of the answers that we might have been handed, any of what Job's friends said in response to questions like, "Why won't my friend's child get to turn five?" Why didn't that young mom in North Raleigh wake up last week? Why was his car on that road at that moment? Why is my child disabled? Why do I suffer panic attacks? Why can't she break this addiction? I mean, what answer will do, really? It says that in the 38th chapter, God gives us our answer. It says, "The Lord answered Job, "but it is with no argument, no theology, "no airtight logical conclusion that we can memorize "or put on a card or fit on that skinny little screen." God seems to reframe the question altogether, and if there is any answer, it may be simply that God is God and we are not, which is not an answer to the question of suffering, not really, and yet it's something we forget. In one part of his astronomy series, Cosmos Carl Sagan points to a photograph of the Milky Way, and he says, "You probably imagine, "we're right in the center, "now we're actually way out here in the corner, "and what we call the sun is just one little sun "among billions of suns in this one galaxy, "and then there are billions of galaxies." And I'm up here talking about God, right? It's like my little head gets it? From my one little moment, in my one little city, on my one planet, in my one galaxy inside of billions, Job doesn't possess God. God is not a concept. God possesses him. Perhaps that's God's answer to Job. I love that this book is in our Bible. I love how Job honors the inescapable, deeply human hunger for logic. But tidy explanations are not a real antidote to despair. Answers can't hold you. They don't say much of the future, and they sure won't make sure you're not alone in the darkest hours of your grief. Answers have no face. This response from God might be dissatisfying upon your first read. So I wanna invite you out of your heads for a moment and into your imagination. God reveals himself to Job in a warm, personal, direct encounter. A face appeared out of the whirlwind, as the text says, "Not apart from the storm of chaos and pain, "but within it." And in that moment, Job discovered that he had not been abandoned. For whatever reason, God does not see fit to resolve this paradox of our faith for us. He offers us something so much more glorious than an answer, his unmediated presence. Whatever logic making we may have hoped for as readers, let us take our cue from Job's reaction. He is changed by that encounter. He says, "I had heard of you with my ears, "but now my eyes have seen you. "Therefore I will be quiet. "Comforted that I am dust." Barbara Brown-Taylor says, "This is like if a flea had insisted "that the lion upon which it was riding, stop. "Stop right now and explain why the ride was so bumpy and hot. "In the flea roared and roared as loud as it could, "never expecting to be heard, much less answered, "until one day the lion turned around and roared right back "so that the flea saw itself reflected "in both golden eyes at once. "Never mind what the lion said, "the lion turned around, the lion roared back, "and that is enough for anyone to live on "for the rest of his life." You know, most days things go reliably well. Today, you will take around 17,000 breaths, your heart will pump about 2,000 gallons of blood beating more than 100,000 times. You will think 50,000 thoughts and blink about 28,000 times so that you can keep your eyes clean and moist enough to see the adoration in your kid's eye when they ask you to play, to notice anew the beauty of your lover's smile, to see the bright green of the tree fort that we get to call home in this beautiful city. These bodily and natural miracles all happen, usually without our attention or support and in spite of the fact that most of us stayed up way too late watching Bridgerton and will nourish these bodies with little more today than packaged chemicals and a couple glasses of industrial waste. Maybe we'll switch to poison at happy hour. But still, we thrive. Evil upsets us so because things are mostly, for most of us, very good. Perhaps today you might feel yourself drawn to a posture of gratitude. God has not given us merely a difficult world, but an astonishingly beautiful one. We might as well ask what is the reason behind what Gustavo Gutierrez calls the sheer gratuitousness of life, the feast of non-necessity that God has given us. But we are quicker to complain than to marvel that we have a mouth with which to do so. Rights another commentator, others of us, others of you are in the eye of the storm this morning. And I'm so very sorry. I hope that you'll let us know someone in this room, someone on our host team, or that you'll submit a prayer request and give your church a chance to be with you rather than offering easy answers. And I also hope that you will take comfort in this book of Job. And in the God who praises Job for telling the truth. May you seek communion with this God, even if all you have to say to him is swear words and emo lyrics and hateful things, he can take it. God praises Job's defiance over the distant piety of his friends. Job talks to God. Job's friends talk about God. And God reveals himself to Job. Our wound can be a sacred doorway if we stay engaged. I don't know why God allows such horrific things to happen to his beloved people. I'll leave that to the books and the theologians. Though the best they can come up with is probably still not gonna move my father-in-law or a dinner table full of skeptics. What might move you though? What might shake you? What might sustain your faith when all answers fail is falling into the arms of the God who is with us in the tempest, carrying us while we rage and scream until the toddler runs out of fuel and falls limp in the father's arms. And all there is to do is cry. But no one is letting go. And there's nothing left to say, but I'm here. The God of the galaxies at your bedside. In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, amen. - Thank you for joining today. If this episode has been meaningful to you, would you take a moment to share it with a friend? To support this ministry or learn more about our community, visit us at churchonmorgan.org. (gentle music) (gentle music) (gentle music) (gentle music) [BLANK_AUDIO]