October 10, 2021 – The Twentieth Sunday After Pentecost
Mother Elizabeth Farr
“God has made my heart faint; the Almighty has terrified me.”1
“O my God, I cry in the daytime, but you do not answer;
by night as well, but I find no rest.”2
“When [the man] heard this – [that he must go, sell what he
owns, and give the money to the poor], he was shocked
and went away grieving…”3
Pain, outrage, lament, despair, and grief. We have all of them today in our readings – lest we forget that our Holy Scriptures include the fullness of our human experience – from joy ascending to the heavens to pain and suffering that defy words.
There is good news in there for us because as it turns out, we are fully human. And on days like today when we hear the story of Job, or the words of the twenty-second Psalm, or the deeply human response of those – like the man in today’s gospel – seeking but also struggling to follow Jesus, well, we’re reminded that our full story is holy too. We’re reminded that God welcomes our full human experience into relationship with God – Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. And the fullness of our humanity includes our pain, and our anger, our despair, and our grief.
Let’s turn back to Job. Beginning last Sunday, we have four Sundays of readings from the book of Job, four readings to encapsulate what is an often misunderstood story. We’re not going to jump ahead or try and wrap this story up in a bow – especially not today – when Job is searching in every direction to find God in the midst of his anguish. But we are going to revisit more of the story. Last week we began in Chapter 2; today we’re in Chapter 23 – there’s a lot we’ve missed. So let’s recap.
And as we recap, let’s first remember that this story of Job is understood as a folktale – and not just to modern ears – but would have been received as a folktale even to the community that first heard it. So last week when we heard, “There was once a man in the land of Uz whose name was Job,”4 we can imagine the fantastical land of Uz and settle in for the parable and story about this man.
So now that we’re in the genre of parable and story and fantasy, here are the cliff notes that get us to today:
1)Job is the picture of an impossibly good, impossibly wealthy, and impossibly blessed man. Think perfect man, perfect family, perfect land and animals.
2)An Adversary – we hear “Satan” in the story, but this is not “Satan” like the Devil or anything demonic – this is an Adversary as in one who challenges. So an Adversary who asks tough questions comes to God and wonders what Job the perfect – Job the righteous – might do if his impossibly good and wealthy and blessed life began to to be not so good or wealthy or blessed. Would Job curse God? So God and the Adversary make a bet – “Go ahead,” God tells the Adversary. I give you power over Job’s impossibly good life. Mess with it, and let’s see what Job does.
a. So quick note here to remind us again that this is a folktale. It is not the character of God to make bets or to sanction suffering in order to test us or to make a point. The original hearers of this story would have known this; we need to make sure that we’re reminded.
3)Okay – back to the bet. So the Adversary takes everything from Job – his oxen, sheep, camels, and finally, all ten of his children. And when Job still does not curse God, the Adversary goes as far as to cover Job’s body in sores. The Adversary brings Job right to the edge, that very human place – where pain and grief and despair seem more real than anything else.
Job sits in the ashes – the ashes on the edge, and that’s where we find him today. Sitting with his bitter complaints and his frantic seeking after God, wondering if there is any cure to this whole being human thing.5 (Job also has some well-meaning friends who come to him in his grief but are more wedded to their own theologies of why Job is suffering than responding to Job’s actual experience of suffering – and that is another sermon for another time – leave your platitudes of “everything happens for a reason” behind.)
But here on the edge – this is where the folktale begins to communicate some truth because all of us, in one way or another, have sat in the ashes on that edge. We have come right up against our capacity to acknowledge the pain we are experiencing or the pain we are witnessing – does God have us and the world in God’s hands?
As he sits on the edge today, Job is not so sure. His grief is real, and he knows uncertainty in ways he never has before. It’s not a comfortable place – here – on the edge, but even in the midst of a folktale, the edge is real. Job gives us permission to navigate the edge – to navigate our pain and suffering and grief as we experience them.6
We’re reminded that others have felt this way before and that if this is how we are feeling and what we are experiencing then it is okay. It’s not only okay that we’re feeling or experiencing anger or lament or grief, but it is okay – and in fact, it is good and holy – to be experiencing those things in sacred spaces and in sacred community.
It is okay – and in fact, it is good and holy – to be in conversation with God wherever we are – if all we have on our hearts and our lips is, “God, you have made my heart faint, and you terrify me.” / “God, I cry day and night – but you are still so far from me.” / “God, I am grieved.”
Jesus shared some of these very words from the cross: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? and are so far from my cry and from the words of my distress?” In Jesus, God knows the fullness of our humanity. God knows the edge and has sat in the ashes of pain, and anguish, and lament. We don’t have to protect or exclude God from our experience of these things – even if what we are experiencing is distance from God in the midst of our pain.
Some of you may be familiar with author and professor Kate Bowler who has written two books whose titles I have already alluded to: Everything Happens for A Reason (And Other Lies I’ve Loved) and No Cure for Being Human (And Other Truths I Need to Hear). Kate was diagnosed with Stage 4 colon cancer at age 35 and given a grim prognosis – that was five years ago, and she lives today from scan to scan, and has her own experience of the edge – of pain and suffering and faith and hope.
We are going to leave Job on the edge today with his faint heart, but I think Kate has something to share about where we may find Job in the coming weeks. Kate wrote a blessing for when there’s no cure for being human, and the final lines go like this:
. . . then life happens and we realize all over again that we are human, frail and finite,
and that there’s no cure for that, despite illusory promises that say otherwise.
this is where we live, in this reality.
come help us in our humanity. help us enjoy all the beauty that is here, the sweetness that comes to us unbidden. the light that gives us eyes to see.
it’s not all up to us, thank heaven.7
1 Job 23:16
2 Psalm 22:2
3 Mark 10:22
4 Job 1:1
5 Kate Bowler, No Cure For Being Human.
7 https://katebowler.com/blessings/a-blessing-for-when-theres-no-cure-for-being-human/
Year B, Proper 23 – October 10, 2021 – The Rev. Elizabeth Langford Farr
