SERMON OF OCTOBER 4, 2009
 M. Bruce McKay
 Pilgrim - St. Luke’s United Church of Christ
"The God in Whom we Trust"
 Psalm 26, Job 1:1, 2:1-10

I was talking with someone this week who said that he pictured heaven as a huge library containing books that answered all of life’s most difficult questions. 
This person would have given anything to get his hands on the library card for this heavenly library – short of having to meet his Maker.
On this World Communion Sunday we gather with Christians from every corner of creation to worship a compassionate, forgiving and just God who loves each of us as if there was only one of us to love – a God in whose Spirit we all “live and move and have our being.” (Acts 17:28)
And we gather on this World Communion Sunday in a world where tragic, terrible things happen – often to very good people – people who have to endure sadness and suffering that is often almost unimaginable.  Many of those people, just like us, are sitting in pews today looking for answers to life’s most challenging questions.  Questions like:
 Why do innocent people so often endure such great suffering if God is compassionate, forgiving and just?
 Can we continue to love and serve God no matter how much suffering we witness in the lives of others or endure in our own lives?
 Do we worship God only because we expect to be rewarded in some way in this life and/or in the life to come?
 Can God be trusted despite all the suffering we see around us and all the pain we feel within us?
 If so, who is this God in whom we trust – the God who created the world as it is?
 These are some of the questions that the person I spoke with this week hoped to answer when he knocked on heaven’s door and found his way to the library.
 These are also the questions that the Book of Job was written to wrestle with over 2400 years ago, so perhaps we don’t have to wait to find answers to life’s most difficult questions. 
 Let’s first be clear about what it’s easiest to be clear about.
 “Where have you come from?” the Lord asks Satan.
 And Satan replies, “From going to and fro on the earth, and from walking up and down on it.”
 Regardless of how we picture Satan or image evil, few, if any, of us would question the reality of evil in today’s world. 
None of us would deny that terrible and tragic things happen to people, often to very good people, for no apparent reason.
There is ample evidence that Satan’s sojourn on the earth has continued down through the ages to the present moment.
Satan was one of the heavenly beings mentioned in today’s text.  The word in Hebrew means The Accuser, The Disturber.  In Jewish tradition Satan wasn’t a pointy-tailed, horned creature whose favorite color was red.  Satan was one of many heavenly beings who were neither God nor human.  Angels are other examples of these heavenly beings.  The point isn’t what Satan looks like but what he does.  In today’s text Satan is seen as the source of Job’s sickness. 
We can all agree on the presence and power of Satan at work in the world.  We can all agree that terrible things happen, often to very good people. 
Sometimes these things happen because of the actions of other human beings. 
 
Sometimes they happen because somebody happens to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Sometimes they happen because of what insurance companies call “acts of God” – floods, earthquakes, hurricanes, tsunamis – events like the earthquake in Indonesia and the tsunami in the South Pacific this week.
 I don’t have any trouble with how Satan is pictured in today’s text. What bothers me is the picture the story paints of God.  In case you think we just skipped the parts where God is pictured in a better light, let’s go back to the beginning.
 
As the first verse of the first chapter tells us Job “…was blameless and upright, one who feared God and turned away from evil.”   Job had 10 children and over 10 thousand sheep, camels, donkeys and oxen.  He would have easily made it onto any list of the wealthiest people in the land of Uz. 
Then the worm turns.  In the first chapter, like the second, Satan and God find themselves talking about Job.  God praises Job for his faithfulness and devotion.  Satan argues that Job is only faithful because God has blessed him and protected him.  Satan asks, “Have you not put a fence around him and his house and all that he has, on every side?” (Job 1:10) 
Satan goes on to argue that if God destroys all that Job has, then Job will surely curse God.  God then gives Satan the go ahead to destroy all that Job has, yet without afflicting his body.
 Before you can blink Job’s animals are all stolen and his servants are all killed.  His seven sons and three daughters are eating together in the house of the oldest son, when a great wind sweeps across the desert, destroying the house and killing all of them.
 Hearing this news, Job stands up, tears his robe, shaves his head, and falls on the ground and worships.  He says, “Naked I came from my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return there; the Lord gave and the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord.” (Job 1:21)
 Who is this Lord in whom Job trusted?
 At this point our text for the day continues with the beginning of the second chapter.  We’re again reminded that Satan has been “going to and fro on the earth.”  God is again pleased with Job, whose faith stood firm in the face of extreme suffering.  Satan has gotten even hotter under the collar since his first attempt failed. 
This time he asks God for permission to go after Job directly – to attack his body – his own flesh.  God goes along with this, stipulating only that Satan spare Job’s life.  At this point Satan says, “All that people have they will give to save their lives.” Satan is convinced that Job will turn from trusting to cursing God.  
 Satan afflicts Job with loathsome sores from the soles of his feet to the crown of his head.  Job takes a piece of broken pottery and scrapes the sores raw.  His wife urges him to curse God and die, something Job still refuses to do.
Three friends then appear in the story.  They arrive to comfort and console Job in his suffering.  When they first see him they don’t recognize him.  They sit down with Job for seven days and seven nights, without any of them speaking a word to him because his suffering is so great.
 At the end of the seven days Job opens his mouth and curses the day of his birth.  “Let the day perish in which I was born,” he said.
 
 
Job is a person of exemplary piety who is suddenly overwhelmed with terrible misfortune and devastating disease because God cuts a deal with Satan. 
 Is that the God in whom you trust? -- a God who meets in a heavenly, smoke-filled backroom and cuts a deal with Satan to see if Job will trust God in very bad times as well as when times were very good.
 Is that the God in whom you trust?  -- a conniving, deal-making God who inflicts suffering, or allows suffering to happen, simply to see if someone will still trust God no matter what?
 I doubt it.  And yet, the questions remain.
  How can the injustice of Job’s suffering or that of millions of others in the world at this moment on this day be reconciled with divine justice and a loving God?
 If we worship an all powerful, all loving, and all just God then why do very bad things happen to very good people?
 Can we trust God no matter what happens to us in this life?
 Do we worship, love and serve God to be rewarded or to be faithful – to receive some future blessing or to live the life God intends for us to live?
 These are the questions the Book of Job was written to answer. 
 Over the next 35 chapters, Job’s friends all have basically the same answer.  Using somewhat different arguments they all say the same thing to Job – “You must have done something to deserve it.”
 “You must have sinned in some way, even if you have no idea what sort of sin it was, because the God in whom we trust is a just God who punishes sin and blesses righteousness. “
That was the traditional worldview then, and in many ways, for many people, it remains the traditional worldview now.   God orders the universe, this thinking goes, in a fixed, cause and effect sort of way.  It’s almost like moral arithmetic.  You get what you deserve in this life.  Evil is punished.  Good is rewarded.
 Job himself accepts this view of who God is and how the world works.  What he doesn’t accept is that he somehow has done something to deserve his suffering.  He insists on his innocence and demands to appear before God to plead his case directly. His friends keep telling him to chill out and accept his punishment like a man – even if he doesn’t know what he did to deserve it.
 Thirty-six chapters later God finally responds – not by allowing Job to come to God but by going to Job.  God speaks directly to Job.  Like a politician who’s asked a difficult question, God responds clearly and passionately without making any attempt to answer the question asked. 
God says nothing one way or the other about whether Job did in fact do anything to deserve his suffering.  God says nothing to explain why Job has suffered so much. 
Instead, God does what Job did.  God asks questions.
 “Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?” (38:4)
“Can you bind the chains of the Pleiades, or loose the cords of Orion?” (38:31)
“Can you lift up your voice to the clouds, so that a flood of waters may cover you?” (38:34)
“Who has put wisdom in the inward parts, or given understanding to the mind?” (38:36)
“Is it at your command that the eagle mounts up and makes its nest on high?” (39:37)
God doesn’t answer the question of why Job or anyone else suffers.  Instead, God reminds Job who he is, in relationship to God. 
And Job replies, “See, I am of small account; what shall I answer you?”  (40:4) 
And he repents “…in dust and ashes.” (42:6)
Job discovers that the complexities of life can not be reduced to an equation – a hard and fast rule that says you get what you deserve in life.  There is no hint of fairness in Job’s suffering.
In the end it’s not a matter of divine justice defined by a simple formula. 
In the end it’s a matter of God’s amazing grace that somehow enables people to trust in God even when they don’t have all the answers.
I learned recently that something I said meant a great deal to the son of my Co-Pastor in NYC.  James Brewer-Calvert is a Disciples of Christ pastor in Decatur Georgia.  This summer his mother reminded me that James really struggled with whether or not God was calling him to ordained ministry.  He felt that he had too many doubts to be become a faithful pastor.  James remembers me telling him about some of the doubts that I had and that helped him respond to God’s call to ministry. 
It was my doubts and not my faith that were most important to James at that time in his life. It was my questions and not my answers that enabled him to hear our Still Speaking God.
In the wondrous mystery of who God is and who we are Job doesn’t find answers to his questions.  Instead he finds peace.
In the midst of Satan’s sojourn through his life, God appears to Job to remind him who God is and who he is as a human being. 
And Job responds by saying,  “…I have uttered what I did not understand, things too wonderful for me, which I did not know…I had heard of you by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees you…” (42:3,5)
Despite not getting answers to his questions Job would never again say, “Why me, Lord?  Why me?”
Despite not getting answers to his questions Job would never again say, “What did I do to deserve this?”
Job had come to know the God in whom he trusted – not because he had all the answers, but because he now knew that he didn’t have to have all the answers.
 Throughout my ministry as a pastor, being with those who are suffering, I’ve heard countless people say, “I don’t understand what’s going on.  It doesn’t make any sense to me.”  
 They are assuming  that somehow suffering always makes sense.  It doesn’t.   They are assuming that suffering is something that can always be rationally explained.  It isn’t.
 Given God’s response to Job it’s clear that suffering happens whether people deserve it or not.  Whether there are rational explanations or not. 
The essential question isn’t why do innocent people suffer – but rather, can we, as people of faith, trust in a just and loving God without having an answer to that question.
 At the end of the novel A River Runs Through It by Norman MacLean a Presbyterian minister has just learned that one of his sons has been killed in a fight.  His other son told him what he knew about what had happened.  “Are you sure you have told me everything you know about his death?” his father asked.
 “Everything ,” his son said,
  “It’s not much , is it?” the minister replied.
 “No, “ said his son, “but you can love completely without complete understanding.” (p.112)
 “That I have known and preached,” his father said.
 That, I too, have known and preached.
 We can love completely without complete understanding.
 We can love the God who loves us not because we expect to be rewarded in this life or in the life to come but because God has loved us into loving God and loving our neighbor as we love ourselves.
We can trust completely in a God of love and justice without having all the answers to all life’s hardest questions.
 We can trust completely in God because God trusts completely in us!
Just as God trusted completely in Job – God trusts completely in us!
Knowing this we can trust God no matter what! 
Praise be to the God in whom we trust!  Amen!