October 20, 2024 – The Twenty-Second Sunday After Pentecost

Fr. Cal Calhoun

In the Name of our Creator God, an infinite holy mystery: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.

The last few weeks, in our Old Testament readings, we have heard from the Book of Job. Job is an interesting and complicated thing. You have likely heard me say that the Bible is not a book, it is a library, with nearly all the genres, historical writing, faithful witness, poetry, self-help (Proverbs), wisdom writing, and, yes, fiction. For instance, Jonah. The overriding truth that comes from the Jonah parable is not that Jonah spent three days in the belly of a fish, but the the truth of the Jonah parable is: if God calls you to a ministry or a task, and you turn and run the other way, there will be consequences. Many commentators today, place Job in that parable category. First of all, it starts like a story, “There once was a man…” Secondly, no one has ever been able to locate the land of Uz. Commentators mention that likely readers or hearers in the pre-exilic Israel would hear “the land of Uz”… much like we hear “the land of Oz.” And they would know we have a parable, a story. Additionally, Uz sounds very much like the Hebrew word for “counsel,” which could be a clever play on words. Furthermore, very early in the story, we have a conversation between God and Satan. Now, I know there are some really good historians, and some really good journalists, but I don’t know any that are THAT good.

So what we have in Job is a struggle with a question that is at least as old as… God. It is a question that is as old as time. It is called the question of theodicy. If God is all good, and God is all powerful, why do bad things happen to good people? That is not a new question. The first problem I have with the story is that God appears to be an agent in Job’s suffering, allowing Satan to coerce Job to sin. I have to hope that this story presents an imperfect picture of God.

As a result of this conversation between God and Satan, Job has a really bad time of it. He loses all his herds and property, his children are all killed when the house falls in, and if that weren’t enough he gets sick. Really ugly sick. His wife tells him to curse God and die. We are going to give her the benefit of the doubt here, realizing that she too is grieving the loss of her children. We are told that three of Job’s friends come to visit: Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar. We are told they come to Job and sit shiva. “Sitting shiva” is a custom in the Jewish tradition. When someone is grieving or hurting, you go and sit with them and say nothing. I have heard so many people say of one they know and love who is hurting, “I don’t know what to say.” Our Jewish ancestors in the faith would say, don’t say anything. Go and sit with them. Let them know they are not alone. And know that quaint platitudes won’t make the one who is suffering feel any better. Just your presence is needed. Job’s friends sit with him seven days and seven nights. Eventually, Job speaks. Job curses the day he was born, but he still doesn’t curse God. His friends begin to speak and basically they tell him, you have sinned, you must have, this kind of thing doesn’t happen unless you have sinned. And for about 35 chapters, his friends make their case and Job maintains his innocence.

Ultimately, Job challenges God. What have I done? Tell me! And in today’s reading, Job finally gets an answer. God speaks out of the whirlwind. God’s answer isn’t really an answer to Job’s question. “Who is this that darkens counsel without knowledge? Gird up your loins and I will question you! Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?” Who laid the cornerstone of the earth? Can you lift up your voice to the clouds and make it rain? Can you send forth lightnings? And God continues for a long time, mostly pointing to the many aspects of creation, who set the sea and its boundaries, lions and donkeys and mountain goats, get a mention, even ostriches, which one might wonder how those in Ancient Palestine would have even seen an ostrich!

God’s answer is strong on Creation. It portrays God as creator, and nurturer of that creation. How different is our view of creation than the author of Job’s view of creation? Theologian Elizabeth Johnson writes:

Ancient biblical writers, imbued with faith in God’s creative power, described poetically how God stretched out the heavens, laid firm the foundations of the land, gave the sea instructions to stay within its bounds. Their model of the cosmos put an unchanging Earth at the center with the sun, moon, and the stars circling around it under the dome of the sky, which is actually the way things appear to the unaided human eye.

Many centuries later we have a different understanding. Scientific discoveries have led us to see the heavens and the earth as the still-unfinished result of natural processes…. Since life began on this planet more than 3.5 billion years ago, different species of plants and animals have evolved in sync with this changing environment, emerging and disappearing….

Johnson continues: The ambling character of life’s evolutionary emergence over billions of years … is hard to reconcile with a simplistic idea of God the Creator at work…. She says, it is best to let go of the idea of God as a monarch acting upon other beings. Move your mind in the direction of the living God who is infinite holy mystery. Sit with the truth that our finite minds cannot comprehend the One who is infinite; our finite hearts cannot grasp love without limit.

Which is essentially what Job says, next week, in the final piece of our taste of Job. Job says, I get it. I know nothing. I uttered things I did not understand, things too wonderful for me. Job finally seems to get that God is infinite holy mystery.

Johnson concludes: To put this succinctly, God creates the world by empowering the world to make itself. Far from compelling the world to develop according to a pre-designed plan, the Spirit continually calls it forth to a fresh and unexpected future. And I have to ask, what is more amazing? A creation that is a finished product? Or a creation that is itself a collection of on-going diverse creative processes?

Infinite holy mystery that desires relationship with us as an answer to the creative process. In some ways, it is not really an answer, to says the answer is mystery, but it hits me as something I can live with.

We still have the question of theodicy. Why do bad things happen to good people? The two biggest issues I have with the Book of Job lie here. First is God’s apparent agency in Job’s suffering. Second, is the restoration of all Job’s property and family, again at the end of Job we will hear next week.  This restoration seems to undo the part that bad things do indeed happen to good people. The ending of Job seems to reinforce the Old Testament premise that God prospers the faithful.

There is a classic book on the subject titled: Why Bad Things Happen to Good People, written by Harold Kushner, interestingly a rabbi. Harold and his wife had a son Aaron. Harold describes Aaron as a bright, happy child who could name 12 different dinosaurs before he was two years old, and patiently explain to an adult that dinosaurs are extinct. At about eight months of age, Aaron had trouble gaining weight. Shortly after his first birthday his hair began to fall out. At the age of two, in concert with the birth of their daughter, they got the news that Aaron had progeria, or rapid aging. They were told that he would never grow taller than 3 feet, he would have no hair, and look like a little old man, while being a child, and he would die in his early teens. Rabbi Kushner calls the book Aaron’s book, he says, “because his life made it possible, and his death made it necessary.”

Does Rabbi Kushner come up with any real answers to the question of theodicy? If he had, I think we would all know his name. He does tell us that: “Life is not fair. The wrong people get sick and the wrong people get robbed and wrong people get killed in war or in accidents. Some people see life’s unfairness and decide, ‘There is no God; the world is nothing but chaos.’ Others see the unfairness and ask themselves, ‘Where do I get my sense of what is fair and unfair? Where do I get my sense of outrage and indignation at the injustice I see? Where do I get my response of sympathy for the suffering of others? Don’t I get these things from God?” “Isn’t my feeling of compassion for those afflicted just a reflection of the compassion God has when God sees the suffering of God’s creatures?” Kushner writes that humankind depends on God for everything; God depends on humankind for just one thing: Love. Without humankind’s love, God does not exist as God, but only as Creator, and love is the one thing no one, not even God, can command. We love God not because God’s creation is perfect, but because God is best part of ourselves and the best part of our world.

Kushner concludes, the ability to forgive and the ability to love are gifts from our Creator God that allow us to live fully, bravely, and meaningfully in a less than perfect world.

Infinite holy mystery. Forgiveness and love. Job hasn’t answered all our questions. Neither has Elizabeth Johnson or Rabbi Kushner. But maybe they have given us just enough to carry on. Onward. Amen.

Year B  –  The 23rd Sunday After Pentecost  –  October 20, 2024   –   The Rev. Cal Calhoun