Job’s Integrity

Sermon by Rev. Steven McClelland on the Book of Job.  Focus on how God’s ways are not our ways.  And our morality tales are not suitable to describing the full content of life.  We think we define life.  But life define’s us.  Check out our New Music Director – Simona Frenkel and the choir. They blew the doors off this anthem!

Job was one of the richest men around, but in a single day he was wiped out. The Sabeans ran off with his donkeys and oxen and they slaughtered his hired hands. Lightning struck his sheep barn and burned up the whole flock and the shepherds who lay sleeping with them by night. The Chaldeans stole his camels and killed all of hi camel drivers. And a hurricane hit with such devastating force that the house where his seven sons and three daughters were having a party was wrecked beyond recognition. Like a drivers liscense floating down from the World Trade Center on 9/11, all that remained of a human life was gone in the blink of an eye!

And this is just the beginning for Job. Because the next thiing that happens to Job is that he comes down with leprosy. But Job was having much more than a bad hair day. Job was going through a living hell.  Job said that if he had his way, his birth and life would be wiped off the calendar of life, never to be mentioned again. He prayed to die, but his heart wouldn’t agree and it just kept on beating. His wife advised him to curse God and then go hang himself, but he stopped just short of that because there are some lengths only the strong survive. Hemingway got it right even though he got it wrong.   “The world breaks everyone and then some become strong at the broken places.” But not everyone!

Job was a good man! He was a righteous man! He was a man of integrity. So why does God let such things like this happen? Unfortunately Job had four insufferable friends who tried to explain it all to Job. To try and make the senseless make sense. “Job what did you do to make God so angry with you? Job, examine your life and you will find something that you did or that your family did that God is punishing you for.”

But Job hadn’t, and he said so, “Worthless physicians are you all,” Oh that you would keep silent, and it would be your wisdom” (Job 13:4-5). They were a bunch of theological quacks, in other words, and the smartest thing they could do was shut up. But they were too busy explaining things to realize they knew not of what they spoke. So Job didn’t even dignify their charges. He simply talked about God instead. Something he was becoming an expert in.

There had been a time when God and Job had been close. There was a time when as he said, “The lamp shone upon my head. And by “his light I walked through the darkness. When my children were all about me.” (29: 3, 5)

But that was no longer the question. Now the question was: Where is God? And this was Job’s take on it. “God has cast me into the mire, and I have become like dust and ashes… I cry to thee, and thou dost not answer me, and with the might of thy hand thou dost persecute me” (30: 19 – 21).

And then after chapters and chapters of silence, comes a voice without compare. Out of the abyss that Job has been in, for how long we have no idea, but long enough to wish he’d never been born. Comes the voice of God Almighty.

And for its sheer literary beauty it one of the most georgous and preposterous questions ever asked of a human being, God thunders at Job: “Where were you when the foundations of the world were being laid… Have you entered into the springs of the sea, or walked in the recesses of the deep? Where is the dwelling of light? Have you entered the storehouses of the snow, or has the rain a father? Who has put wisdom in the clouds or given understanding to the mists?” (Job 38) “Have you given the horse strength? Does the hawk fly by your wisdom?” (Job 39)

There was obviously only one thing for Job to say, and he said it. “Behold, I am of small account. What shall I answer thee?” I will proceed no further” (40:3-5)

I like how Frederick Buechner puts it in his book Peculiar Treasures.

You can think of God here as a great cosmic bully, but you can also think of him as a great cosmic artist, a singer, say, of such power and magnificence and so caught up in the incandescence of his own art that he never notices that he has long since ruptured the eardrums of his listeners and reduced them to quivering pulp.

“Have you an arm like God, and can you thunder with a voice like his?” God asked (40:9) And it’s almost as if God had to pause to catch his breath that Job breaks back into this divine conversation and says: “I have uttered what I did not understand, things too wonderful for me, which I did not know.” (42:3)

Job had heard all the nice stories about God. I’m sure he was raised in the synagogue as a child and had heard about how God blesses all who follow him, but that wasn’t the full picture of God. No the full picture of God is so much bigger: Both the fear and the awe of God’s otherness, God’s holiness, both God’s wrath and God’s great mercy. And all questions of whom God was and why life is the way it is disappeared from Job and he simply says: “I had heard of thee by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees thee; therefore I despise myself and repent in dust and ashes” (42:5-6).

But God would not allow Job to despise himself for long, because Job was telling the truth. God knew that Job was a man of integrity. In fact, God had bet the devil that Job was a man of integrity and faith and so God turns to Job’s friends and says: “You have not spoken of me what is right as my servant Job has” (42:7), with the clear implication that Job had been right in standing up to God. Like saying, “What’s wrong? Your arms too short to box with God?”

It is out of the whirlwind that Job first experiences God. “Who is this that darkens counsel by words without knowledge?” (Job 42:3). It is Job’s friends who speak words without knowledge because they fail to see that we do not define life. Life defines us. And while it may seem of little comfort that God does not answer our questions. There is something very comforting about the fact that God gives us Himself.

There is a peace that passes our understanding in having an encounter with God. Even if it’s an encounter with El Shaddai, God Almighty! Make and Shaker of all that was, is and ever will be. Or in knowing Emmanuel, the man God on the cross. In either case, it is God who gives Himself to us. Amen