October 21, 2012, 21st Sunday after Pentecost

October 21, 2012, Proper 24, The 21st Sunday after Pentecost

Job 38:1-7

The Rev. Jo Miller

The Patience of Job, Really?

Those who have the written copy of the homily can see my title. So for those of you who are listening I titled my homily “The Patience of Job, Really?” A brief break down of this wonderful folk tale turned into a play is needed here: Two weeks ago the scenes from Chapters 1-2 were set to tell of God’s testing of Job. Chapters 3-31 grows into a dialogue between Job and three of his “friends”. Modern counselors may call them toxic friends. The debate is over the meaning of divine justice, Job’s suffering, ending with Job

demanding that God appear and defend himself if he is a just God.

Then there is a sudden appearance of a fourth adversary, Elihu, who challenges both the friends and Job demanding they submit to divine control of human events. The penultimate act in Chapters 38 -41 has God himself appear and recite the powers and marvels beyond human understanding which show Job’s demands for justice to be arrogant. Job summits twice and then the final act of the old folk tale has God restoring Job to his past greatness.

Like I said Job is a great play written in stages around 600 to 500 BCE.  Suffering is primal. Suffering has been with human kind for as long as our kind has walked the surface of this beautiful earth. There are many forms of suffering and for the most part we want or demand that someone or something be responsible. In the book of Job we have Job’s wife and friends throwing salvos of blame on Job. It’s Job’s fault. Job knows himself to be righteous and above reproach and cannot fathom why God has harmed him. Is it God’s fault?  In America we take care of much of our suffering by suing someone in hopes that their pain will relieve our own or bring us closure.

The book of Job has become an indictment on God at times. Carl Jung wrote such a book called “God’s Answer to Job.” He understood ultimately that he was writing more about the inner dark qualities of the Self because talking about God is nearly impossible. As Jung wrote, “The tendency is to anthropomorphize and give the Deity a quasi-human personality.” In my opinion this is what most if not all of our theologies do. In the earlier years of

Christianity people were brought under many forms of suffering by the powers that be if they did not agree with the authorities who had a firm handle on God.

When we talk about God, we are creating God, psychologically speaking, and we are, in essence, talking about ourselves which is limiting. In Jung’s terms we can only apprehend or try to comprehend God through our own, limited psyches. And, oh the suffering this has caused not only to ourselves but to others as we impose our own small finite understandings of God and the Universe on others.

Job was hurting and his friends did not bring a salve to soften the pain but barbs. They played the judgment game. Throughout this play one hears false judgments and false expectations which inflict mental suffering upon the already physically and emotionally suffering Job.

Job kept asking the unanswerable question why?? Why is the question that falls out of our mouths when pain and suffering hit us. Why did I get sick?  Why did my son get washed off the rocks by the ocean? Why did my husband have to die at that random shooting? No answer. When we hear the troubled cry we give feeble answers. We try to find someone or something to blame when the best thing we can do is to sit and cry with them. There are no answers. And, it is hard to find God in the pain. We struggle to grasp how God works in this universe of ours. Instead of us realizing we are in God's universe.  Has God preprogrammed my life and there is no choice? Is this universe just a random experiment of chaos versus order?

There is nothing wrong in wanting life to be pleasant and free of pain and suffering. We all want that. However, every pleasant experience must inevitable change or end. Even the best ones of all. We are routinely separated from things we enjoy. And someday that separation will be permanent. Friends drift away, children leave home, careers end, families disappoint, and eventually our own final breath comes and goes. Everything that begins must also cease. Everything that comes together must also disperse. Experiences are incapable of being completely satisfying. That is a downer if I ever heard one.

The biggest downer however is the doctrine of retributive justice which is the overall theme in the book of Job. Retributive justice is the doctrine found especially in Proverbs and all too often today. It is the doctrine that God so ordered the world that everyone receives reward or punishment commensurate with his or her behavior. Jesus worked against this doctrine throughout his short ministry and yet it hangs tough today. We forget that the rain falls on the just and unjust alike. Jesus gives us a glimpse of God. Jesus touched the untouchables, loved the unloved, healed the sick, gave hope to the hopeless.  Jesus confronted those who cast judgments and who looked for power.  Ultimately, in Jung’s book he writes that God’s answer to Job was Jesus. Jesus understood and knew the meaning of suffering. There is a salve in that. There are many healing depths in the living Spirit of the Christ.

But, what do we hear in God’s answer out of the whirlwind? Last week we heard Job demand an audience with God. This week he gets that audience, but it wasn’t what he was expecting or wanted perhaps. God pours out on the poor man sixty rhetorical questions that cascade out of the whirlwind like stinging pellets of ice that render Job speechless.  Centuries of reflections on this rather cryptic answer have failed to produce a generally agreed-upon answer. So I’m not going to give you one. I may suggest that it all depends on how we have decided to view and have a relationship with this whirlwind. One early 20th century mystic and healer

simple referred to the IS-NESS of God. The IS-NESS of God works for me.  God is. I am also rather fond of the Celtic view of God. It is the wildness of God they comprehend.

From “The Book of Creation” J Philip Newell writes, and this is long:”  Into this essentially unknowable and infinite realm of God a dome of space and time is created. It is like a womb or matrix of life. In it will appear all that is to be created. St. Paul speaks of the One ‘in whom we live and move and have our being.’ Creation is planted, as it were, in the waters of God’s life. It is rooted in the Unseen. All that is born in this matrix of life has its inception in the Infinite. Creation’s life partakes of the essence of God’s life, and to that extent is a theophany or manifestation of the mystery of God. 

A mighty wind sweeps over the face of the waters. Earth, air, fire and water, the constituents of everything that will be, are in a whirlwind of motion.  It is a wild wind carrying the incipient life of the universe in its wings.”

We are carried at all times in the wings of the creative divine. It is not always an easy ride.

J