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No More Therefore
Sermon by Andrew Plocher October 8, 2006, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill
There once was a man from the west coast. He was a man of perfect integrity; he feared God and avoided evil. This man, blameless as he was, had finished top of his class. He had completed business school at age 26, married his high school sweetheart, and entered into a lucrative profession. He had, to his credit, seven thousand shares of original Microsoft stock (since multiplied), three thousand shares in Coca-Cola, five hundred million in property, and a fine collection of classic automobiles. He was the owner of a Fortune 500 business and oversaw many workers. He had seven sons, all of whom attended Ivy League institutions. His three daughters were polished, having attended the finest finishing schools and academic institutions. Now, every year, the man’s sons threw a big party in his honor. They would rotate whose home the party was in and the daughters always came and joined them. The bounty was plenty and the wine flowed. Even with the perennial squabbling that would occur, the party was the high point of the year for the sons and the daughters. Yet, the man was worried. He lived a perfect life, but did his children? Had he managed to keep them from sin? From sex, drugs, and purposely or inadvertently hurting other people? They were wealthy, but did he succeed as a father? He hadn’t put up cameras in the boardroom yet, but he was paranoid. What sin had his children committed? They must have done something. So he prayed and sacrificed a bit of his wealth. He gave a million dollars to the United Way and offered a car to a non-profit auction. He even served at a soup kitchen. “This,” thought the man, “will atone for my children’s sins, prosperity shall continue in my house.” Unbeknownst to the man, there was another player on the field. God was watching him, and with God were a rag-tag team of Angels. One of these angels was an Accusing Angel: a Satan. Now, God, being the good supervisor that God is, asked the angel where he had been. The Accusing Angel replied that he had been on earth, “just wandering here and there, to and fro.” So God asked the Angel, “have you noticed my servant on west coast? There’s no one like him. He has perfect integrity: he fears me and avoids evil.” The Accusing Angel, sassy and smart, replied, “Well, doesn’t he have good reasons for being so good? You bless everything he does! He gets great cars and cheap stock that is now worth billions. But…but… just reach out and strike everything he has, and I bet he’ll curse you to your face.” God said, “Fine; everything he has is in your power. Just don’t lay a hand on him.” It’s comedy. The prose trickles off the tongue. One cannot help but chuckle at the characters and the scene that unfolds. Yet, the humor only masks the horrific questions and struggles that truly befall Job. The truth lies beneath, and within, the poetry of the author. The story of Job was not a new story when written down by an anonymous author and included in our Scriptural canon. The story of a righteous man circulated in Babylon and Mesopotamia; it was the story of the blessed man who lost everything and was restored in the end. The author (s) of Job continue that story but tell it with even greater depth and without the absolute restoration in the end. The prologue of the story, part of which we read today, is thought to have been the ‘general’ introduction that accompanied the many variations of the story, and the chapters following the prologue are the work of the wisdom writers, exposing a depth in the practice and story of theology. It is a story that still resonates today: echoes of the God questions and of human suffering. Most of us squirm at the beginning of the story. A dialogue between God and a Satan is not what we generally talk about over the breakfast table. Yet when we do talk, if we have a moment for a cup of coffee and the paper, we chat about what’s going on in our world. The news that surrounds us is a conversation of good and evil, of war and peace, of betrayal and support. But our experience with Job doesn’t stop with discussions of good and evil: of news. No, our lives themselves are very similar. We are, most of us, used to absolute comfort. Except for a small portion of our society, we all, rich and poor, belong to the top five percent of wealth in the world. Blessing is a matter of piety to our society. “We are blessed” has begun to mean more about our status in society than about our faith. Don’t get me wrong, it is good to affirm God’s blessing and to do good works, but there is something inherently troubling about understanding life, and God, as a soda machine: insert coins, receive product. Wealth comes from goodness: a reward for playing by the rules. It’s-- happiness comes from Holiness, righteousness comes from our own behavior, salvation can be earned. Yet, as the story of Job unfolds, goodness cannot stay center stage--suffering enters the picture. His stock is lost by a corporate fraud, his daughters are raped and murdered and his sons, all doctors, are sent to Darfur with Doctors Without Borders and killed. Job loses it all. Numbness sets in. Grief hits. As C.S. Lewis aptly put it, “I never knew that grief could be so much like fear.” Job was afraid. Job was angry. But Job was a pious man. He loved God and believed that God both gives and takes away: he just didn’t understand why it was all taken away from him, the loved. He couldn’t have sinned, and he’d even atoned for the sins of his children! And the God questions, oh the questions. God placed a bet with a Satan? What was going on!!? And God gave Job up to suffer, without cause? Why? Those of us who have faced trauma in our lives, who know loss, whether it be of loved ones, relationships, jobs, control, or self-identity, we have seen what Job sees. We have felt what Job felt. We have even had friends who don’t know what to say. We don’t understand why it happens. Rabbi Kushner’s title is right, “bad things happen to good people.” I do not believe that the answer is a found in the belief that good things happen to good people. Christianity is not a religion that believes in karma, in an eye for an eye. That is not to say that we don’t allow for natural progression and reaction to actions and events, but that we should believe our blessings are not always tied to our own actions. The questions that appear in Job are not a matter of piety: they are a matter of faith. Faith is a hard concept to wrap our minds around. It has been written about and struggled with since the inception of creation. It is the trap of easy answers, of moral certainties, that often substitutes for our faith. While serving a hospital, I ministered to a catholic mother of a child who was missing half of his heart. He had lived, thus far, to the unexpected age of 14. The boy, when he could speak, offered a sharp contrast to his mother. His mother kept searching for what she had done wrong, for what had been done, for a way out of the suffering, out of her suffering. The son, instead, offered an acceptance of his suffering and an amazing love for God. Instead of struggling with whether or not God was right, and if he or his mother had erred, the boy offered space for God, space for there to be no easy answer. Similarly, in a university class on special education law, a man stood up and announced that because he and his wife had done everything right during pregnancy and childbirth, their child was perfect. My mother, usually shy, stood up, offered her congratulations, and then, with quiet fury, told the class that if they were going to be teachers, they had better not self-righteously blame the parents or the child for its disability, because even when everything is done “right,” things do not always turn out as we expect. I was born with a clubfoot and without my left arm. Job’s friends, like the boy’s mother and the man at the parenting class, could only see one syllogism, one logical progression: That Suffering comes from God. God is just. Therefore Job is guilty. In our world, suffering comes from God, God is just, you or I must have done something wrong because we struggle. Or, on the flip side, goodness comes from God, God is just, we must be doing something right. Job sees it differently then his friends: Suffering comes from God. I am innocent. Therefore God is unjust. The idea that there might be a third possibility is beyond them, and is often beyond our limited thinking. Job is firm in his innocence; the friends are firm in their belief that Job must have done something to deserve his suffering. The third option, not so simple, is: Suffering comes from God. God is just. Job is innocent. (no therefore) This is the perspective that the child in the hospital had. It is a perspective that makes space for God. When we reach the depths of Job’s story, the question appears to no longer be, what did Job do or not do, but, rather, a result of the inner conflict with God and the Accusing Angel, maybe even an internal struggle with God. They are in conflict about whether or not people do good because of reward or out of faith in God—out of love for God. God had created a wonderful world, but was it a world of love, or of human need and greed? God wanted to know. Job was the question. Back in the early 5th century, St. Augustine distinguished between two different types of love, in Latin, uti and frui. Uti love is love of use. I love money -- not because I particularly enjoy looking at it or feeling it. I love money because I can use it to get something else I want. Uti. Now, frui love is different. I love -- I'm not sure that's a strong enough word -- I love the Fox television show House MD, not because of what I get out of it, which really isn't all that good. sore eyes, lethargy and a seemingly useless vocabulary. But it doesn't matter. I just love the show. I'll schedule my life just to see it, unhealthy as that may seem. Frui. Augustine said we have this bad habit of loving God with uti love. We love God because we hope to get God to help us get whatever it is we want. Lord, I'm after the good life, a better job, this or that success: so, bless me! But God prefers not to be used. God wants us to love God with frui love. We just love God, not because of what we get out of it, but just because God is God, and we would do anything for God. As the Westminster Confession put it, the chief end of humanity is to love God and enjoy God forever. Does Job love God and enjoy God always? Job’s love for God, humanity’s love for God was put to the test. Augustine called the struggle, the desire for uti, cupiditas. Today we might call it the desire to be righteous, to be correct, and to be blessed in all that we do. It is the lure of the credit card company, service projects to build up a resume, the new car, the right shoes, the black and white moral answers. At the heart of our “Reformed” theology is love- God’s and our own. Theology, to most of us, isn’t found in the textbooks that sit, collecting dust, in the church library, but in the practice of our lives. Within our practice we must ask what is right and what is wrong. Liberation theologian Jose Comblin notes, “The right theology is the one that is of service to God and the people of God. The wrong theology is the one that is helpful for some human interest, such as security, fear, prestige, control of the state, control of public opinion, control of the people.” The lines between right and wrong theology are, however, not always explicit contradictions. Society doesn’t help us much. When passing through Chicago a friend of mine noticed a billboard for a new car, it read, “When want justifiably becomes need.” Confusing? Maybe I do need a new car…it’s good for the people of God right? The differences between uti and frui love are not always clear. Yet we can look at ourselves and determine whether we are living to a self established standard of piety, serving our needs, or if we are truly children of God: willing to sacrifice our own comfort, security, prestige, and control for our love of God and Jesus. Even if we can say why we and Job serve God, there is no answer to the suffering and evil. We are left with a Job who suffered. The perfectly wonderful turned perfectly miserable. Yet, when we look close, we see that Job has made a remarkable spiritual transformation. His friends, having failed to see the third possibility, that God is just and Job is innocent, are left behind... They were too busy making “Get back to God” signs, cranking out the religion machine rather then loving God because they love God—without reason, logic or need. Job’s friends could only understand uti love, they could only understand things in terms of want and human action. Job, no longer the man afraid that his children might have sinned, having given up his expectations for God, can now move forward. He was not reduced to nothing. He was restored! Job was innocent, but he was also presumptuous. He assumed that because he had done things right, only good things would happen to him. He had started out like his friends. Yet Job, after losing everything, eventually realized that he could not control God. He didn’t get a verbal answer from God, but he does enter into the presence of God. By giving up his desire to control everything Job makes space for God. The presence of God, the experience of God becomes the answer. It is in our lives that we are challenged to let go of our own answers and allow space for God. Loving without logic we seek to surrender to God’s justice and mercy—whether or not it meets our self proclaimed expectations. Thomas Long notes that “…Jesus' own life was marked by suffering with "loud cries and tears," and death is named as a very real and powerful "last enemy." in the New Testament.. At the same time the New Testament [does] affirm that "in Christ all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or principalities or authorities-all things were created through him and for him. He is before all things, and in him all things hold together" (Col. 1:15-17). Scripture does not deny the presence of the painful "no" at work in human life. Nor does it attempt to balance this "no" with a countervailing " yes," saying, in effect, that, all things considered, human suffering is not all that terrible. Instead, like Job, it underscores the inescapable reality of that "no," and then offers [us] the death and resurrection of Jesus as the promise that the ambiguous interplay between "no" and "yes" in human experience will finally be absorbed into the "Yes" of Christ, who is all in all. The Book of Job never does answer Job's aching question, "Why me, Lord?" Indeed, not even the New Testament resolves the urgent question of suffering beyond the bounds of moral justice: we have no answer to why bad things happen to good people. Instead, Job poses a deeper and finally more searching question: Do we ultimately want to offer our own scheme of moral order, the very one we employ to determine that some human suffering is unjust, as a replacement for God? Do we want, in other words, to be God, or are we willing to move toward being the kind of human being who, even in the midst of inexplicable pain, trusts the One who is God?" It is a Gethsemane-sized decision.” A decision of frui: a decision of love, trusting in God’s grace. Amen. |