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Worship on Oct. 25, 2009 – Reformation Sunday

   Rev. Shannon Johnson Kershner
 

  
Why, Why, O God?
 

 The curtain rises and we meet Job face to face.  We meet him among the ashes.  We meet him as he is tired and weary.  Worn out from feeling like his world is crashing down around him and his shoulders are too weak to hold it up anymore.  Job’s oxen, donkeys, and servants had all been slain.  His children were killed in a freak accident.  His body had betrayed him by breaking out in loathsome sores.  His mind was reeling from the quick plunge from health and joy to despair and pain.  We meet Job among the ashes, scraping himself with potsherd, cursing the day of his birth. 

Before our curtain rose today, several other scenes flew by in Job’s life.  Had our curtain risen earlier, we would have seen Job in his finest hours.  Job as patient Job.  Job as blameless and upright.  Job as the greatest of all the people in the east—prosperous, faithful, big family, large estate.  Those scenes stand in the background. 

 But then, just as quickly as the North Carolina October winds can strip a tree of its golden and red leaves, Job is stripped of all that he has—wealth and possessions, the lives of his children, his own health—all of it falls away leaving only the bare branches of despair. 

 Three friends creep up to Job as he sits among the ashes.  They sit silently at first.  Initially, his friends are too stunned by what they see to say anything.  They cannot believe their eyes that this hollowed-out, empty-eyed man is their friend Job.  They sit for 7 days and 7 nights, rendered mute by his pain.  Job sits silently too, rendered mute by his pain.  Shocked.  Stunned.  And then… betrayed.

 Our curtain rises and we meet Job face to face.  We meet him among the ashes.  We meet him as he is tired and weary and very, very angry.  “What have I done to you God?” he shakes his fist.  “What have I done to deserve this?  Answer me.  I have been nothing but faithful and good and true to you, O God.  And yet you reward me with death and suffering. 

 How I wish I had not been born!  How I wish I had not given you the pleasure of creating me.  Why have you forsaken me God?  How have I wearied you?”  Our curtain rises and we meet a very angry Job.  A Job who has had it with all the pain and suffering he sees not only in his own life but in lives all around him. 

 Our curtain rises and we meet a Job who is sitting among the ashes, shaking his fist at God.  And some of us look at his grotesque drama and find the shape of our own suffering staring back at us.  “We hear our own worst terrors, fears, losses and tragedies in the contours and silhouettes of Job’s story”[i]. 

 Our details may be different, but the questions are the same—Why God?  Why are families losing their homes? Why is violence becoming just the way it is?  Why did I lose that job?  Why am I sick?  Why am I made fun of at school?  Why have you forsaken me, us, others?  Our curtain rises and some of us see ourselves in Job’s eyes, sitting among the ashes, feeling shocked, stunned, betrayed.

 And his friends experience the fiery heat of Job’s angry lament to God and they start getting nervous.  When he was a silent sufferer, they also sat silently out of pity and empathy for their friend.  But now that he is taking God to trial, they start to put some distance into the friendship.  As Job gets angrier and angrier, they feel more and more estranged.  His naked honesty with God scares them.  That kind of questioning of the Holy is not allowed, right? 

 So, his three friends who initially had all the right intentions take it upon themselves to try and answer Job’s questions.  They do not sit still in that heat of anger very long before they each launch off into a well-intentioned attempt to impose their own structure onto Job’s experience.  “You must have sinned in order for this to make any sense at all.  It must be your fault,” one concludes.  “Just deal with it, move on, repent.  That is just the way it is,” speaks another.  “Job, the only thing I can figure is that you deserve it.  Clearly, you were not as faithful as we thought.  If you were, you would not be sitting here today,” declares the third. 

 We hear their paltry responses and are shocked at their ignorance.  But we should probably pause before we stand in judgment.   How are their answers different from the answers to suffering that swirl around us?  “She was assaulted?  What was she wearing?” and, “You just need to try harder at school.  You must be lazy.” and, “Those guys in downtown Asheville should just get some jobs and make honest livings.” And, “It’s not our responsibility that child does not have health insurance.  His parents are the ones being irresponsible.”  Not very different at all. 

 On the stage we see the heat of Job’s anger rising from the ash heap and his friends scooting farther and farther away from him as they open their mouths with well-intentioned attempts to provide structure, meaning, to his suffering.  But with every reason they articulate, the power of their own helplessness grows stronger.  They press on, ignoring its force, hoping it goes away.

 Job presses on too.  Job presses on with his prosecution of God.  He presses on with his curses and his contempt.  He presses on with his honesty and fiercely hot anger.  He hears the paltry excuses of his friends and throws them right back in their faces.  He absolutely refuses to listen to their lies and digest them.  He absolutely refuses to let someone else put structure and reasoning on to his suffering. 

 But more than anything else, even as he shakes his fist as God, even as he curses his birth, even as his fiercely hot anger rises off the ash heap, Job absolutely refuses to let go of the very God he claims has abandoned him to this suffering.  At that moment on the ashes, Job could not remember who he was and why he had been given life in the first place, but he was not going to forget from Whom he had been given life.  Job clings to God with his ragged and dirty fingernails, demanding, expecting, something.  An answer?  Maybe.  A response?  Definitely.

 The curtain drops.  That scene ends.  More scenes pass—more prosecution, more debates, more anger, more questioning, more demanding.  And then the curtain rises again.  Job is still clinging to God with all that he has, with his raggedly fingernails, with every bit of strength that he has left in his hollowed-out body.  And he opens his sunken eyes to see a whirlwind.  And he opens his clogged ears to hear God’s voice. 

 We hear God’s response as the curtain rises.  “Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?” God begins.  Apparently God has paid great attention to the cries of his Job, this suffering son of God’s.  Job’s mouth closes and God’s mouth opens with God’s own long list of unanswerable questions.  In a blustry speech that goes on and on, “God huffs and puffs about the mighty mystery of God, a conundrum Job will never be able to resolve.”[ii]

 And as God’s speech continues, some things start to become clearer for those of us watching.  For we realize that apparently, appearances notwithstanding, during all of that time, God was holding on to Job just as tightly as Job was holding on to God.  While Job’s righteous, fiercely hot anger scared his friends, it did not scare God.  While Job’s cursing and contempt caused his friends to scoot farther and farther away- nervous, fidgety, uncomfortable- it only caused God to move closer, cling tighter, hold stronger on to this suffering son of God’s, God’s child Job. 

 And as our vision gets clearer, we continue to hear God’s blustery response, full of questions like “Where were you when I laid the foundation of the world?” and “Is it by your wisdom the hawk soars and spreads its wings?” and “Is it you who tames the sea monster?” 

 For in response to Job’s tenacious questions, God asks God’s own unanswerable questions.  And some of us might wonder if God’s response is merely divine evasion.  Perhaps it is.  God certainly does not respond the way Job’s friends respond.  God certainly does not give a response to the “why” question of Job’s suffering.  Rather, God chooses to change the question.  Through the blustery poetry of the whirlwind, God changes Job’s question from “Why does suffering happen?” to “Where is the presence of God when suffering happens?”  And through the blustery, unanswerable poetry of the whirlwind, we begin to see that like the question, Job is also being changed.  He is being changed not because he found answers, but because he encountered God. 

 Through the blustery poetry of the whirlwind, God lifts Job up above his own pain and the pain of the world to give him a larger picture of creation—a creation born, breathed, brought into being by God’s own breath—a creation redeemed, held, restored by God’s own body, Love Made Flesh. 

 And we realize that it is not what God says that changes Job.  It is the fact that God is there to say it that changes Job.  For in God’s blustery poetry of the whirlwind, Job realizes that just as tightly as he had clung to God, even in his fiercely hot anger, God had clung even more tightly on to him, God’s suffering child.  And Job is restored by that encounter with the Holy and the curtain falls.

 But our curtain rises one more time.  But this time, we see a lithograph by Czech artist Oldrich Kulhanek[iii].  On our stage we see his rendition of the Job story.  At first glance, we see a man crouched down, on his knees, chest seemingly to the ground.  He is naked and gaunt, head shaved, face turned away.  At first, it seems that he must be the Job we met earlier on the ash heap—forsaken, destroyed, broken.  A hollowed-out man. 

 But then, then, when we look closer, we see something else.  We see that this man is crouched over something.  He is holding something… or is it someone?  When we look closely we see the faint outlines of another face, another person underneath his chest, being held, being protected, being embraced by this man.  We realize that figure underneath is our Job.  Job is the one being held.  Job is the one underneath the embrace. 

 So who, then, is this other one?  Who is this one we see naked and gaunt, head shaved, face turned away?  Who is he?  And as we look even closer, we see the faint outline of a cross standing behind them—tilted down, empty.  Could it be?  Could it be?  And we hear a blustery whirlwind picking up speed…