Mystic Congregational Church, UCC

Mystic, Connecticut

Sermon from October 29, 2006

“Restoration”

Rev. Patricia L. Liberty

Scriptures:

Psalm 34:1-8

Job 42 (Selected Verses)

When all is said and done in the Book of Job, it’s far from finished.  Forty-two chapters and 1,059 verses—we have a complex tale about the dealings of God with humanity and humanity with God.  Over the last few weeks, we’ve taken an intimate look at Job’s tortured life and found as many questions as answers.  It is, perhaps, Job’s greatest value that the story, in many ways, mirrors the truth of our days, peppered as they with more questions than answers.

Elie Wiesel writes, “Through the problems he embodied and the trials he endured, he seems familiar, even contemporary.  We know his story for having lived it.  And times have stressed it is to his words that we turn to express our anger, our revolt or resignation.  He belongs to our most intimate landscape, the most vulnerable part of our past.”

Far from answering the question about why the innocent suffer, why tragedies befall humankind, and just what kind of God is in charge of this universe anyway, the Book of Job instead compels us to the murkier waters of what it means to have an honest relationship with God and with each other.  The context of the exploration is both set and sharpened by his unspeakable suffering and wrenching pain.  Whatever it is that we think we know about God and each other is always honed by human experience.  Now, that’s not to say that we get to make up our own notions about God out of the stuff of our days.  It does mean that life challenges our dogmatic notions of God in a way that nothing else can.

One of the biggest gripes Job had with his friend was that their academic theology and perfect doctrinal constructs were spiritually bankrupt.  If the were seminary-trained, they’re transcripts would reflect good marks in Systematic Theology and terrible grades in Pastoral Care.  Job’s friends would have benefited from a unit of Clinical Pastoral Education known as C.P.E.  It’s a field education opportunity that places seminary students in hospitals where they work as chaplains.  Their interactions with patients help them integrate their seminary studies with practical pastoral care. 

Every year, when I welcomed a new group of students into the hospital, for the first couple of weeks they pretty much look like deer in the headlights.  The sights, sounds, and smells of human frailty took them to the Emergency Room, the Intensive Care Unit, the Cardiac Surgery Ward, Oncology Ward, and everything in between.  The real needs of the patients they met there took them from academic theology to human, tender interaction that pointed beyond what they knew to what they believed.  A phrase often heard in the chaplain’s office was, “If you can’t say it to a patient in ICU, you probably can’t say it anywhere else and have it matter.”

As student chaplains, we learned not to be facile with people’s pain, not to give easy answers to unanswerable questions, not to babble about theology when people needed presence.  Old Job’s friends apparently missed that class.  The best they could do was mouth what they had learned because they hadn’t yet figured out what they believed.  Doctrine was all they had.

When the story’s about to wrap up for good, Job’s friends take their turn in the hot seat.  God is none too pleased with theological dazzle of Job’s clucky companions.  They had some explaining to do.  Far from being rewarded for their high theological IQs, God is pretty missed.  Since God doesn’t cotton to inaccurate theological mumbo-jumbo, no matter how well-intentioned, these three clods failed God as much as they’ve failed Job.  (I’ll say more about that in a minute.)

One of the sub-themes in all of the Book of Job is the invitation to an authentic religious and spiritual life.  It begs the question of how we move from the faith of our forbears to our own faith, how we move from what we know to what we believe, how we integrate our head and our heart.  The witness of Job suggests that one way, perhaps the most powerful way, is through the things that cause us the most pain, the deepest distress, and the greatest anxiety.

Without asking or answering the question “Why?”, Job invites us to meet God and the other side of silence and despair, emptiness and loss.  Job invites us to meet God on the other side of our protest, the erring witness to a promise that we will not be left on our own even as Job was not finally left on his own.  Faith is always tempered by the stuff of life.

That is how wise elders are born.  These are the people to whom we go not because they have answers but because they can sit with us in the question; the people who have found their way through the stuff of life and learned in their bones something of the truth of who God is.  They are truly wise elders though they’re not always older than we are.  They are people who have come out on the other side of their own emptiness into God’s presence.  They reach to us in moments of our own emptiness with the assurance that God will be there for us as well.

I learned that lesson again and again from patients I visited in the hospital.  Like Job, they waited out into the uncertainty of their days, moving beyond what they were taught about God into the murkiness of the unknown.  They no longer had the luxury of academics.  Oftentimes, they had neither the time nor the patience to deal with those who did.  Faithful to their own journey through the unknown, they came to a place of strength and peace, and insight and humility that was born of their struggle.

Job came to a place of humility and, for us modern folks, it’s a trait that has fallen into disfavor.  Oftentimes confused with humiliation, we have left it aside in favor of more contemporary, psychological concepts.  But humility is nothing more and nothing less than accurate self-appraisal that neither degrades nor exalts the self.  There’s quality of honesty.  One is neither arrogant nor apologetic.  Job’s encounter with God humbles him and the text tells us that he repented in dust and ashes. As I alluded to last week, Job’s repentance wasn’t about hating himself.  It was about authentic humility.  Repentance means nothing more and nothing less than changed behavior.  Job came away from this time in his life a different and changed man, not unlike Jacob who, after struggling all night with the angel, went away walking with a slight limp.  The stuff of life, indeed, changes us like it changed Job.

Now, back to this three friends.  Rather than enter Job’s struggle, they stayed at the edges and tried to pull Job back to what was familiar, to safer ground.  “It really is your fault, Job.  If you just wake up and smell the coffee, you’d see that you really have done something wrong.  You know how it works, Job.  It’s an eye-for-an-eye kind of world.”

But when the day of reckoning comes, it’s the friends who are called to task.  As God says, “You have not spoken of me that is right as my servant Job has.”  It’s a bit of an ironic twist.  Job gripes, groans, wails, moans, protests, screams, and demands.  His friends are utterly horrified at his cheekiness, sure that God will come along at any moment and finish him off as punishment for his bold speech.  Not so.  When God shows up, sure, Job does learn a few things.  But then it’s pretty much, “Well done, Job.  You get it.  Now, pray for your friends.”

It’s interesting to me that the lectionary leaves out these verses about Job being called to pray for his friends.  The text tells us nothing about what Job’s prayer might have been.  Wouldn’t you love to be a fly on the wall of history to hear what he said?  It leads us right up to the edge and then says, “When it was done, the Lord restored Job’s fortune.”

I think Job was restored long before his fortunes came along.  It was completed in the act of his praying for his friends because not only does an honest encounter with God bring about humility, it also brings about compassion.  Job reaches back from the other side of silence to invite his friends to a new place in faith.

Christina Baldwin says, “With compassion, we see benevolently our own human condition and the human condition of our fellow beings.  We drop prejudice.  We withhold judgment.”  Job has spent days with friends who berated him for all that he failed to be from their perspective.  They judged him; they mocked him; they angered him.  He turns around and prays for them because his encounter with God brought him to a place not only of humility but also of compassion.

A couple of thousand years later, Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote, “Compassion and non-violence help us to see the other’s point of view, to hear their questions, to know their assessment of us.  For from that view, we may indeed see the basic weakness of our own condition.  If we are mature, we may learn and grow and profit from the wisdom of those who are called the opposition.”  Job and his friends continue to learn from each other.  They all made their way along the journey from what they thought they knew to a deeper faith and who God truly was.

Restoration is not necessarily about getting all the stuff back.  That’s a later addition to the story.  The restoration comes from Job’s humility and the outgrowth of his compassion.  So, maybe, for us, as we follow in Job’s footsteps.  Amen.