October 21, 2012 – Job 38:1-7, 34-41
Job 38:1-7, 34-41
The Medicine of Friendship
21st Sunday after Pentecost [Lectionary 29] – October 21, 2012
First Lutheran Church – Winnipeg, MB
The physician Jerome Groopman wrote movingly last month about realizing that,
at a certain point, there was nothing he could do to treat a patient’s cancer.
Barbara, he said as he took her hand, we’ve been honest with each other every step of the way.
I know of no medicines that I can give at this point to help you.
And after a long, difficult silence, she said, No, Jerry. You do have something to give.
you have the medicine of friendship. (quoted in the Christian Century, Oct 17/12, 8)
Like I said last week, hope is relational: if you have a good relationship with friends and
a good relationship with God, you can get through a lot.
Friends, at their best, offer compassion, from the Latin, “com-passio”:
literally, friends offer to suffer with you. And that is, in a great measure, healing.
In today’s reading from the Book of Job, after 38 chapters, God finally, finally responds to Job:
God comes and offers a response to Job’s questions.
Only, what God offers in response to Job’s question is not answers, but . . . compassion.
What God offers is not answers, but – in a great and wonderful irony in the Book of Job –
more questions! 60 of them, in fact.
And what God prefaces all these questions with is a simple, direct command to Job:
Gird up your loins, God says to Job, which is biblical idiom for, “Man up!”
Now when you read these questions God puts to Job,
you have to decide what tone of voice God is saying them in.
As I’ve said before tone of voice criticism is often essential in figuring out what the Bible means.
What tone of voice does God have in asking all these questions of Job, do you think?
Angry? Disappointed? Sarcastic? Impatient? Disdainful? Imperial?
Most critics would plump for one of these, as different as they are, but I never have.
What I think is that the predominant tone with which God asks these questions of Job
is one of great weariness.
These questions almost take Job out of himself and orient him to the vastness of creation,
from the furthest reaches of the cosmos to the remotest parts of the earth;
to those parts, in other words, where God has no human partner or steward to assist.
God is responsible for it all.
What I take from this is that it is not easy being God.
It may not be easy for Kermit the Frog to be green, but it’s really not easy for God to be God.
What I sense above all in these questions to Job is the sense that while Job certainly is suffering,
God is suffering too.
I mean God where is speaking from here?
From the very midst of storm, a place of stress and difficulty.
God shares something of the divine self here.
God doesn’t answer Job’s questions, God knows we can live without explanations.
Rather, God offers Job something else here.
God offers Job something very like the medicine of friendship.
For God know we cannot live without knowing that we are not alone.
The African American writer James Baldwin – who really knew something about suffering –
put it this way:
You think your pain and heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world,
but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most
were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive,
or who had ever been alive. (Christian Century, Oct 17/12, 27)
You may be suffering this morning.
But the thing is, there is not one person in this room who has not suffered heartache and
difficulty and torment.
The thing about Christian community is that we can be honest about that, and share it,
and suffer it with each other.
And we can suffer it with each other with the promise so beautifully expressed in the recent film,
The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel:
In the end, everything will be alright, and if things are not alright, then it is not yet the end.
What Job discovers this morning is not something about God or about the world or
about himself.
Much of that remains, I think, mysterious.
What Job discovers this morning is an actual relationship with the living God,
the God who is responsible for this vast, wondrous, mysterious creation.
He discovers a point of connection with this God:
he discovers that he is not the only one suffering in this creation:
He discovers that God is his compassionate companion in a world where a certain degree of
wildness and freedom and unpredictability necessarily entails
a certain amount of suffering.
Job discovers that his suffering connects him to the God who also suffers.
500 years or so after the Book of Job was written, this God who is willing to suffer with us out of
a great love and responsibility toward creation – this God would be most fully revealed
in Jesus on the cross, where the suffering God’s triumph is not
a triumph of power, but of compassionate, suffering-with love.
On the altar here at 1st Lutheran always stands a crucifix which has become so important for me.
It never lets me forget that in the midst of all our suffering
God is suffering too, right now, with us:
God is suffering with Job, and God is suffering with you.
The Christian writer Rodney Clapp recently wrote that
Christians should not remove Christ from the cross too quickly, for, he writes,
Where injustice bears down and oppresses, there Christ suffers alongside on the cross.
And where illness and death threaten, there Christ suffers alongside on the cross. . . .
In short, Christ not only ultimately eliminates our darkness,
but knows firsthand the darkness that can engulf us,
and there patiently, tenaciously abides with us. (Christian Century, Oct 17/12, 69)
Jesus doesn’t explain our suffering. Jesus offers us something better:
Jesus participates in it, takes it on, and suffers it with us.
Hope is relational: you can get through a lot if you know someone is journeying with you.
Job discovers that he is not alone in the end.
Job discovers something better than answers to his questions:
Job discovers the medicine of a strange friendship with God.
This strange encounter with God finally heals Job’s relationship with God,
a relationship which had been strained to the breaking point.
Now, he says after God finishes speaking, now I have seen God truly.
Not the God he’d been told about all his life, the God who is supposedly in control of
everything, the God who orders every single thing in the world as if
this were a clockwork universe.
He now sees God truly, a God who struggles mightily, just like us, to care for a vast,
wild creation and who suffers, just like us, the consequences of that freedom.
We too have seen this God, on the cross, who does appear indeed just as one of us.
This God – this true God – is the one Job finally comes to trust.
His healed relationship with God takes on the character of trust, or faith.
In other words, a healed relationship with God takes on the character of trust.
My teacher in the Book of Job, Dan Simundson – who experienced his own deep suffering –
once wrote that what Job comes to trust is that finally
God will take care of what Job and others cannot know or do.
This trusting relationship with God opens Job up to life again.
After having been turned inward by his isolating suffering – which suffering does to a person –
he turns outward after this encounter with the living God who suffers with him.
Even though – as I mentioned last week – his friends never once pray for him,
an omission which alienates them from him – remember that? Well guess what?
You know what one of the first things Job does after his relationship with God is healed?
He prays for his friends!
He prays that God may forgive them for the erroneous and stupid things they said about God.
And God does: precisely because God has created a world with freedom in it.
Not a clockwork world in which punishment must absolutely follow sin,
but a free, albeit wild, world where forgiveness and a new start is possible.
And then, in the end, life is once again given Job, in the restoration of his property,
in new children, and in physical cure.
Healing or wholeness begins for Job when God comes to him,
and when Job realizes that he is not journeying and suffering alone.
Hope is relational: there is healing in knowing that someone is journeying with you –
and that is the wonder of the church and of this congregation.
And for us flesh and blood people, healing touch is healing for that very reason.
People are not often wanting to touch the sick and suffering,
and yet that is often what they long for most of all.
The great American preacher Tom Long recently told a story about taking his
elderly father to the hospital after he’d had a fall.
While sitting – exposed and fragile – on an examining table in
an examination room, a team of doctors whooshed in,
went directly to a computer screen in the corner,
pronounced that everything looked okay, and promptly whooshed out again!
And there was his father, “the patient, the human being, shivering, perplexed, and untouched.”
(Christian Century, Oct 17/12, 65)
And yet, as the writer and physician Lewis Thomas once wrote,
The doctor’s oldest skill in trade was to place his hands on the patient. . . . Medicine . . .
is no longer the laying on of hands, it is more like the reading of signals from machines.
And yet, “the health-giving gesture of the physician’s hands derives, after all,
from the more ancient ritual of the priestly blessing.” (Long, ibid.)
In the healing rite in a few minutes, what you will be offered is medicine –
the medicine of friendship, the medicine of God’s healing spirit,
the medicine of knowing that you have a whole community of faith journeying with you.
This medicine will come to you through the healing touch of the laying on of hands – of mine, of
Brian’s, of whoever is behind you in line, of those who wish to come forward with you – and this medicine will come to you through prayer, through words spoken by a human voice.
The healing comes through touch that connects you with the suffering and compassion of others,
through touch that connects you with God,
and through words that bring God into the conversation and into this very room.
Words that do not answer, but words that offer something better:
a relationship with the living God who suffers and struggles in the care of you and
in the care of an unimaginably large world,
A God who can be trusted to ultimately take care of what Job – or us –
cannot possibly know or do.
So together, let us say, “Amen.”
Pastor Michael Kurtz
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