Sermon: “Boxing with God”

Text: Job 38:1-11, 16-18; 40:1-5

29^th Sunday in Ordinary Time (B) alt.

October 18, 2009

Scripture introduction.  Much, although by no means all, of the Old Testament is based on the understanding that God rewards the righteous with good things in this life and punishes the lawbreakers through deprivation.  Yet there are also those books in the Old Testament, books like Ecclesiastes and Job, which acknowledge that faithful and law-abiding persons, too, experience misfortune in life, just as the unrighteous sometimes seem blessed.  Job is a long book, and we will read just a part of one scene this morning, so a brief summary is in order.

Way back in time, even before Abraham, there was a man named Job, who had a large family and who was very wealthy.  Job was blameless and upright and very religious.  One day the heavenly court was having a discussion, and God remarked upon Job’s righteousness.  Satan was also in the heavenly court.  (At this point in the development of scripture, Satan was not a very developed character.  Here he seems to be more of an accuser or a prosecuting attorney.)  Satan responded to God’s praises of Job by observing that God had blessed Job tremendously.  “What if those blessings were taken away,” Satan asked, “how would Job act then?”  Accepting the challenge, God gave Satan power over Job, his family, and his possessions.  In short order Satan had deprived Job of his children, his servants, and his wealth.  He inflicted loathsome sores upon Job’s body, and Job was reduced to sitting in the ashes and scraping the sores with a broken piece of pottery.

At that point several of Job’s friends came by and made long speeches, to which Job made long replies.  In these exchanges the friends suggested to Job that he must have done something wrong—he must have broken God’s law—in order for these bad things to have befallen him.  Through it all, Job insisted that he always had been righteous.  Yet while Job knew that his friends were wrong, he still could not understand why he was suffering.  He cried out to God and insisted upon his own blamelessness.  “I wish God would show himself,” Job wailed; “Then I could make my case against God directly.”  At this point in the story, God actually appears to Job; and that is where our reading this morning begins.

Sermon.  Job is a story that draws us back again and again.  A movie called “The Serious Man” opened recently.  It’s about a Midwestern Jewish family in 1967, as they bear up under various afflictions.  Basically, it’s a modern adaptation of the story of Job.  In the late 1950s the Pulitzer Prize-winning play “J.B.,” by Archibald MacLeish opened on Broadway.  The play is set in a circus, and two vendors play the biblical roles of God and Satan.  They overhear a wealthy banker describing how he has prospered because of his faithfulness to God.  Soon, the millionaire’s estate is gone and his children perish in terrible accidents.  Again, it’s the story of Job, told with a modern twist.  It’s a testament to the artfulness of the biblical book of Job that present-day playwrights still come back to it and still find inspiration in it.  Job speaks to some of our deepest questions:  “Why do bad things happen to good people?”  “Why did this happen to me?”  “Has this misery befallen me because I did something wrong?”  “Is God punishing me?”

On this day that we recognize Children’s Sabbath, the importance of children in worship, the challenges that children face in the world, and the threats to the well-being of children in all societies, there’s a sense in which the book of Job makes us all children.  Children are still learning the answers to life’s questions, and Job asks the questions that for which we do not have the answers.  Just as we sometimes are reduced to answering the questions of our children with something like, “Well, that’s just the way things are,” or the classic, “Because I said so,” in the same way, if we identify with Job in the story, we hear God telling us that we must accept some things on God’s authority.  As God’s children, we must accept things from our heavenly parent, even when we do not understand, knowing that whatever may come our way, God intends good things for us.  I love the way the old hymn[1] expresses this thought:

O God, what you ordain is right,

Your holy will abiding;

I shall be still, whate’er You do,

And follow where You are guiding.

You are my God;

Though dark my road,

You hold me that I shall not fall;

Wherefore to you I leave it all.

O God, what you ordain is right;

Here shall my stand be taken.

Though sorrow, need, or death be mine,

Yet I am not forsaken.

Your watchful care

Is round me there;

You hold me that I shall not fall,

And so to you I leave it all.

Of course, compared with God, we are children.  As the Apostle Paul wrote in First Corinthians, “Now we see as in a mirror, dimly.”  We do not have God’s perspective.  We do not have all the answers.  God has chosen (to quote Ecclesiastes) to “place eternity in the hearts of humans,”[2] so that we naturally ask questions about our existence and where we are going; but we still cannot know everything that God is doing or has planned.  The publishers of National Enquirer got at least one thing right: “Enquiring minds want to know.”  That’s human nature.  But sometimes our curiosity leaves us feeling like the character Guy Noir, on Garrison Keillor’s radio variety show, Prairie Home Companion, searching for—and not finding—the answers to “life’s persistent questions.”  So, there’s some frustration in being anyone’s child—even God’s child—when we want to know the answers.

On the other hand, what a relief to know that we are not completely in control, that everything does not depend upon our decisions and our actions.  Maybe you have seen the movie, Bruce Almighty, in which for a while God turns God’s powers and responsibilities over to a human, Bruce Nolan.  Bruce makes a colossal mess out of the world and, in the end, gratefully gives up his divine powers and turns the world back over to God.  After all, there are good things about being children of a loving parent.  When we fall down and scrape ourselves, our loving parent is there to calm us down and to administer the first aid.  When we are perplexed and do not know which way to turn, we can depend upon our loving parent to care about our troubles and to listen lovingly as we recount them, just as God listens to us in prayer.  And once we stop talking, if we ourselves begin to listen, then God our parent may have some direction for us—and certainly some comfort.

There’s something else about being a child that I believe goes to the heart of the passage from Job that we are considering this morning.  Children have a healthy sense of mystery, and they love it.  Consider for a moment the expression on the face of a young child who blows soap bubbles from the wand and then watches them float upon the breeze, finally breaking into ephemera on lampshades and noses.  To a child, a tiny beetle running across the sidewalk is a miracle and a matter of sheer joy.  What will it do when it gets to the crack?  Oh, look!  It went down and up the other side and now it’s in the grass and . . . gone.  When our son Lee was very young, he was captivated by the dinosaurs that walked upon the earth in ages past.  He was entranced by whales and the big fish that lived in the sea.  I wonder, if he could have read Job at the time, whether he would have been put off by God’s response to Job’s questions, or rather would have considered it an invitation to enjoy all the mysteries of God’s creation.  “Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth, . . . when the morning stars sang together and all the heavenly beings shouted for joy?”[3]  I wasn’t there, Lord, unless I was there as a part of your imagination and plans for the future; but all this stuff you have made is pretty neat.  Thank you!  Our lives would be happier, I think, if we could just park the questions every now and then and simply enjoy the mystery of being a child of God in a wondrous world.

There’s another thing about children: unless something is seriously wrong in the family, children are accepted simply for who they are.  Later on things like grades, occupation, athletic ability, good looks, and other attributes may begin to make a difference; but at first the only thing that matters is that they are there and that they are a part of the family.  That’s how God is with us, accepting us for who we are.  Not that God doesn’t care how we behave—God wants us to live in ways that are healthful and whole, true to God’s intentions for us—but that comes second.  Before any of that, however, God loves us and accepts us just as we are.  That is, our worth before God does not depend upon our actions, but simply on the fact that we are a child of God.

About the time I was graduating from college, there was a new musical opening on Broadway, the first ever directed by an African-American woman.  It was called “Your Arms Too Short to Box with God.”[4]  I never saw the play, but I have remembered the title.  Job learned that his arms were too short to box with God.  The mystery of God is too great even to fit into our minds, let alone be solved by us.  In the end our most honest response to mystery is silence—and joy.  The important thing for us is the same as it was for Job—to trust God even when troubles come, even when there are no answers.  When the “road is dark,” we are confident that God’s “watchful care is round us there.”  Though our arms are short, God’s arms are long—long enough to “hold us so we shall not fall;  . . . and so to God we leave it all.”