Oct 6, 2024
I speak to you in the name of God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.
Back in 2017, after a couple of difficult years, my wife Christine had a psychotic break. And even seven years into recovery, the realities of living with long-term PTSD means that our new normal is very different from what our lives were like before. I’ll be honest – some days I’m on that ash heap with Job – with my own questions about why bad things happen to good people, and where God is in the midst of suffering and loss.
My guess is that all of us have asked questions like these at some point in our lives.
In his book The Problem of Pain, Anglican theologian C.S. Lewis says “The existence of suffering in a world created by a good and almighty God … is a fundamental theological dilemma and perhaps the most serious objection to the Christian religion.” The challenge is rooted in the idea that this good and almighty God wants creation to thrive. So it’s easy to see God’s hand at work on a beautiful spring day, or in the joy we feel when we gather with loved ones, or in the sound of beautiful music. But when we get that piece of bad news that changes our lives – we can struggle to see God’s prescence. Because it doesn’t line up with our idea of who God is.
And when God doesn’t seem to be there at the very moment when we need God the most – or when God doesn’t act in the ways we expect God to act – that can be absolutely fatal to our lives of faith. So today I want us to sit for a while with Job and think about how suffering and loss can make us re-think who God is.
In the Book of Job, our ancestors in faith are trying to work out these same kinds of questions. Their theology emphasized an unbroken connection between faith and blessing. Job is a good and faithful person who always acts ethically and worships God. By all rights, he should be richly blessed. And he has been, until now. But if we’d read the first chapter of Job, we’d learn that Job has lost his cattle and his sheep and his donkeys and his servants and his family. And in today’s reading, we’re told that he’s lost his health. Nothing is going the way it’s supposed to.
On the surface, the story tells us that in response to his suffering and his wife’s accusations, Job maintains his faith in God. But if we look more closely, we’ll see that something important is happening in Job’s heart.
Back in that first chapter, Job’s response to catastrophe was to say that he was born with nothing and he’ll die with nothing. “YHWH gave”, he says, “and now YHWH has taken away. May his name be praised!” Job uses God’s personal name – YHWH – and makes a powerful statement about God. Now, though, after this second round of calamities, Job is changing his tune. It’s no longer “YHWH”, it’s the more generic “God”. And his robust statement has turned into a question.
These subtle shifts aren’t just splitting hairs. Job’s convictions about God have been fundamentally shaken. He’s spent his life exchanging faithful obedience for blessing. He’s assumed that God will hold up God’s end of the bargain – that God will protect him from catastrophe because he’s been good, or maybe just because he belongs to God. But now his experiences are sending him on a journey where he finds the God who is to be very different than the God he’d been believing in.
So we need to let Job inspire us as we sit with him on the ash heap. Because – like Job – we need a faith that aligns with our experiences of God in the world. We need to be real about who God is. We believe in a good God who’s all-powerful and all-knowing and all-mighty. And that’s true. But our lived experience is that God doesn’t use that power and knowledge and might the same way that we would. On a top-down, “control the world” basis.
So we need to widen our horizons of who God is. We have to remember that God is something else, too. Ever-present. God is present with us all the time – especially in our suffering. God promises over and over again in Scripture to sustain us through all our griefs and sorrows. And God wants so much to be in authentic relationship with us that instead of being completely unaffected by our joys and sorrows – rather than being unchanged by the world – God is supremely affected by even the tiniest of our joys and the smallest of our sorrows. God is the most moved being of all.
My friends, I can’t explain why suffering happens. Frankly, Job will find that there are no easy answers. But what he’ll also find on his journey – and what we can find too – is that God is utterly faithful to God’s promise to be in relationship with us. Jesus went to the Cross to show us that there is no place God will not go to be with us. And when we know that God is with us – in joy at our every happiness and in tears at our every sorrow – then we can begin to recognize God’s presence even in the most desolate of experiences. That’s when we realize that the ash heap and you, and I, and Job are sitting on is being held – safely – in the palm of God’s hand. Amen.