October 14, 2012 – Job 23:1-9, 16-17
Job 23:1-9, 16-17
Absent God, Present People
20th Sunday after Pentecost [Lectionary 28] – October 14, 2012
First Lutheran Church – Winnipeg, MB
A few weeks ago I asked you to write down questions you have about God, faith, or the Bible.
Many of you have questions that the book of Job directly addresses. Here are just a few:
Why is there so much suffering and sadness (especially for older people)?
Why must innocent children suffer?
Why does God seem so far away at times?
Where is God when bad things happen?
Someone wrote the book of Job because he or she wasn’t satisfied with
The answers people were giving to such questions.
We learn in the first couple of chapters that the good man Job loses
all of his wealth, all of his children, and most of his health.
The rest of the book – 40 long chapters – tries to work out why this is so.
In today’s reading, in the midst of his distress, Job raises exactly the same questions you have.
He wants to know where God is in the midst of his tragedy.
He wants to know so he can ask God these deeply profound questions.
But he has no idea where to find God:
If I go forward, he is not there; or backward, I cannot perceive him;
On the left he hides, and I cannot behold him; I turn to the right, but I cannot see him.
He feels abandoned by God and wishes he could simply die:
If only I could vanish in darkness, and thick darkness would cover my face.
His suffering seems completely meaningless, and without meaning he cannot live.
What we’ve missed since last week is the so-called help Job receives from his so-called friends.
His friends have great names, so if you’re looking for baby names look no further:
Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar.
We are grateful when they turn up after all that has happened to Job.
We are grateful when they simply sit with him – in silence – for seven days,
mourning with him his great and unutterable losses.
And then they open their mouths – which is a mistake.
For 20 chapters his friends basically tell Job that he deserves what he gets.
God punishes sinners, therefore, Job must be a sinner, he must have done something wrong.
Job protests his innocence at every turn, but the friends just speak louder.
How’d you come by all that wealth anyway, they ask? You must have exploited the poor.
Maybe you made some bad lifestyle choices, maybe you have ignored and forgotten God.
Whatever it is, you must have done something really bad that now is haunting you.
But if you confess your sin and turn back to God, God will restore your well-being.
All of which just makes Job more and more angry as he protests his innocence more and more.
God does not appear to be just, says Job.
I have done nothing to deserve what I’m undergoing, he says.
And besides, who can deny the wicked often go unpunished.
Open your eyes, he says, look around: the innocent often suffer while the wicked prosper.
Unlike Paul McCartney, Job does not get by with a little help from his friends.
What he gets is angry.
Job’s friends did their best when they simply sat in silence and gave him room to
voice his despair.
Their platitudes as he calls them are of no use to him at all.
“Everything happens for a reason,” they say.
“God needed your children in heaven,” they say.
“God is testing you,” they say.
But Job just looks at them and says, “Your maxims are proverbs of ashes.” (13:12)
For the grieving, for the wounded, sometimes the best we can do is
give them room to voice their despair.
What Job’s friends and their maxims of ashes leave Job is utterly alone and absolutely isolated.
I mean, as if it weren’t bad enough that Job feels completely abandoned by God,
he feels misunderstood by and alienated from his closest friends.
Loss and grief can do this to a person, right? You lose not only God, but you also often lose the comfort and understanding of friends who
do not allow you any integrity in your grief.
This is one of the great ironies of the book of Job: surrounded by his friends who
talk and talk and talk . . . and talk, he is more alone than ever.
They talk about God, all right: God is and God does and God this and God that.
But never do they move to talking to God on Job’s behalf.
They never take up his case. They never pray for him. They never pray for him!
Sometimes, the second best thing we can do with people in grief,
after giving them space to voice their despair, is to pray with them, and for them.
Address the God who seems so absent to them, and bring God into the conversation,
rather than talking on and on about God.
But Job, unlike his friends, doesn’t want to talk about God.
He wants to talk to God.
He wants to direct his questions to God.
He wants to ask God where he is.
He wants to know, finally, that God can ultimately be trusted.
We can live without explanations, said the great theologian Karl Barth,
but we can’t live without knowing that God can be trusted.
The German theologian Jurgen Moltmann was not always a theologian, or even Christian.
When, during the second world war, he was taken as a prisoner of war to
a prison camp in England, a chaplain gave him a bible.
He read it.
And when he discovered that on the cross, Jesus cried out, in the words of today’s Psalm,
“My God, my god, why have you forsaken me,” he decided to follow Jesus.
For he could only trust a God who took on and experienced the same godforsakenness
that he felt in the midst of so much violence, so much death, and so much war.
This, he said, was a god he could trust, a God he could give his life to.
Job has not yet experienced this,
although next week you’ll see that he will experience something like it.
Right now, Job has no hope: he’s alone.
And as anyone who’s felt alone and isolated knows, hope is relational:
you can only have hope when you feel like someone is travelling with you.
Jurgen Moltman felt hope when he discovered that he was not alone in feeling godforsaken:
even god has felt just like he had in Jesus on the cross.
Job feels godforsaken because not only is God seemingly absent,
his friends are utterly useless:
he feels more alone and hopeless than ever in their presence.
They’re not helping!
But hope, though, is relational.
If you have a good relationship with friends, with God, you can get through a lot.
There was some research done many years ago about which form of psychotherapy was
the most effective: psychoanalysis, cognitive-behavioural therapy, gestalt therapy.
The findings were that they were all about equally effective,
and that what determined the therapy’s effectiveness was the relationship between
client and therapist: in other words,
what was healing was not necessarily the type of therapy, but the relationship.
Today, Job has little hope because his relationship with both God and his friends is broken.
Today is a day when our hope for Job is that he had better friends.
The absence of God is a terrifying thing.
Those of us who know what depression is know what that feeling is all about.
That feeling and the experience of depression are mysterious.
And what you need to know is that even the most Christian of people experience it.
Many were shocked a few years ago when Mother Teresa’s private letters revealed that
for most of her life she experienced the absence of God’s presence.
In her letters she described it as an emptiness, a loneliness, a dryness, a pain, a darkness.
With the help of some good friends, she ultimately discovered that while she might
never know why this happened to her, it wasn’t an obstacle to loving God and
serving her neighbour: it was actually a help.
As Christians, it’s never all about us: it’s about our neighbour in need.
Teresa discovered that her experience helped her minister to those many among the poor
who felt exactly as she did and that she could give voice to their prayers in way that
no one else could.
By God’s grace, she turned her experience into empathy.
At their best, Christians meet the absence of God with the presence of God’s people.
No person has ever seen God, writes John, and many Christians – many saints –
often don’t experience God to be present.
But, continues John, if we love each other, God lives in us and his love is made complete in us.
(I John 4:12)
As the Christian writer and thinker Daniel Clendenin has said,
Every human being should be able to say, “God might feel remote, but his people are near.”
That is our hope on New Member Sunday: God might feel remote, but his people are near.
Hope is relational: you can get through a lot if you have some good relationships.
We may be heading into darkness, but we’re going to head into it together.
There may be those among us feeling God’s absence with Job this morning,
but you are not alone.
There may be those outside our building who are feeling God’s absence with Job today,
but they are not really alone if we go out with our bodies to meet them.
There may be those experiencing the emptiness of hunger and the darkness of loss,
but they will not be alone if we take the light of our presence to them.
New Members: today you have joined Christ’s body with us.
It is a body that knows, with Jesus on the cross, what it is to be godforsaken.
But we know something the world doesn’t know: we know the hope there is in communion:
in being committed to each other, in being committed to the vulnerable of this world.
Today, with us, together, we have become People of the Incarnation, People of the Body.
And so my plea to you is this, People of the Incarnation:
how could we do otherwise than to meet the absence of God with
the presence of God’s people?
How could we fail to empathize with those who experience God as absent?
How can our own experience not help us all to join together in common sympathy and
common love?
Truly God can turn absence into presence, darkness into light, despair into hope,
but in order to do that we have to stick together.
So come to the table: become what you receive: one bread, one body.
Broken, but not despairing. Broken, to share.
Poured out, but not defeated. Poured out, for the life of many.
And together let us say, “Amen.
Pastor Michael Kurtz
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