Suffering, Creation, and Mystery

"Suffering, Creation, and Mystery"

Job 38:1-11
June 21, 2009

Then the LORD answered Job out of the whirlwind: “Who is this that darkens counsel
by words without knowledge? Gird up your loins like a man, I will question you, and you
shall declare to me.
“Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth? Tell me, if you have
understanding. Who determined its measurements—surely you know! Or who
stretched the line upon it? On what were its bases sunk, or who laid its cornerstone
when the morning stars sang together and all the heavenly beings shouted for joy? “Or
who shut in the sea with doors when it burst out from the womb?— when I made the
clouds its garment, and thick darkness its swaddling band, and prescribed bounds for
it, and set bars and doors, and said, ‘Thus far shall you come, and no farther, and here
shall your proud waves be stopped’?

Back in December of this past year, I picked up my copy of The Christian Century,
(December 30, 2008) one of my favorite magazines on the topic of religion and faith,
and paged my way back to a review of Bart Ehrman’s new book, God’s Problem. I have
a copy of this book, and yet like many of my books, I have not yet picked it up to read it,
though I have read Ehrman’s other works. (http://www.christiancentury.org/article.
lasso?id=6046) The reviewer was someone who is fairly well known in mainline circles,
and I have to admit that I’ve never been a fan, to be honest, mostly because of the tone
with which he sometimes writes: very dismissive of others, arrogant sometimes, a little
too self-assured about the rightness of his opinions. Now, saying that, it must be
admitted that what we accuse others of is usually what we are guilty of, so take my
criticism with a small bit of skepticism. The book he was to review was on the problem
of theodicy, the sticky issue of how to justify the existence of a good God in a world
where evil is obviously present. It’s one of those perennial problems of Christian
theology, the difficulty of having to explain how something like the Holocaust could
happen in a world with a God who has the power to stop it. This is no easy issue, and
my own bookshelves are simply lined with books by smart people trying to explain how
such a reality could be. And yet, as good as some of the explanations may or may not
be, some people simply cannot reconcile these two truths: the existence of a good and
powerful God with a world where evil continues to run rampant. My own father
struggled with this question, especially after his experiences in Vietnam, and the best
he could do was agnosticism, the belief that we cannot know whether or not there is in
fact a God. For Bart Ehrman, the author of the book under review in that December
issue of the Christian Century, the conclusion was the same as my father’s—that he
could not reconcile these two pillars of traditional Christian theology.

So, back to the review of Ehrman’s book: I flipped back to read the review, and quickly
found that this particular reviewer did not fail to meet my already low expectations. The
guy went after Ehrman with a sarcastic and dismissive tone, implying that Ehrman was a
narcissist and arrogant for having these kinds of faith struggles, and that he was
intellectual lightweight because he hadn’t been willing to take the theological and
intellectual journey that the reviewer implied he had gone on. The reviewer also
implied that Ehrman was assuming a position of moral and intellectual superiority,”
though I think he was actually calling himself out, unknowingly—remember what I said
about the arrows we cast, the complaints we have about others, are usually more
indicative of us than they are of the one we are complaining about. Nonetheless, after
reading the review, I just flew into a rage, mostly because I think this review embodies
why so many people walk away from Christianity, from the faith—the arrogance that
dismisses other people’s real struggle for simple faith—and not just other’s people
struggle, but many of our own struggle for faith in a world where horrifying things can
really happen, even as we continue believe in the goodness of God, and the power of
God, a God who could do something about it, and, according to the Bible, has done
things in the past to stop bad things from happening to people—for example, the
parting of the Red Sea to help the Israelites escape from a massacre at the hands of
Pharaoh’s armies.

But I have to admit that I took the reviewer’s dismissive tone as being about more than
just Ehrman’s book—it seemed as if he was also being dismissive of all those who have
struggled with faith, people like my father who genuinely struggled with this question. It
was as if he was saying that my own father was an intellectual lightweight, perhaps
intellectually lazy, for not having resolved the question of theodicy as the reviewer had
in his own mind. Now, look, those of us with faith all come to some sort of unsettled
peace on this issue, usually an unresolved peace, on how to reconcile a world where
people suffer with the belief in a good God, but to dismiss those who have not been
able to reconcile those two issues, to say that they are intellectually lazy, or
disingenuous, is ridiculous and is an example of why we can’t get people into our
churches, and why are youth flee the church when they get old enough. We sound
arrogant, we look arrogant, and if it looks and sounds like a duck, it’s probably a duck.

And so I did something I rarely do, which is to write an angry letter to the editor, in a
tone I am not proud of, and to which I subsequently groveled back to the editors the
next day to gingerly ask them not to publish my letter—because it would have included
my name and church, and a pastor should avoid being in the papers—rarely is it good
news to see a pastor’s name in the papers, as we’ve seen of late. But I do stand by my
instinct here, that it was wrong of this reviewer to be so dismissive of this issue,
because, in fact, the oldest text we have in our scriptures, the one that scholars think
goes back the farthest in terms of composition, deals with this very question—the book
of Job, of which we heard a snippet of today. If this question was asked 2800 years
ago, and it’s still being asked today, still being struggled with today, and the answers
that are given, both here and elsewhere, still seem unsatisfactory to some, then
perhaps it might not be best to quickly dismiss Ehrman’s struggle, or the struggles of
someone like my father, or perhaps a few of us in this place, if we were all to be quite
honest with each other.

One of the reason I love scripture is because it does call us to be honest and
sometimes frightfully honest when it comes to talking about the human-divine
relationship. Job is the story of a genuinely good man, a man who does the right thing,
who loves God, loves his family, loves the people around him, and has their respect,
the same kind of respect that he obviously doles out to others. The problem of evil in
the world is never a problem if we can trace the cause, if we can say when x did y, then
the obvious negative consequence, whether natural or supernatural, is z—if Bob steals
money from the company he works for and gets caught, and is then sentenced to 5
years in prison, it really is hard to stomach his question of “why did this happen to
me?” We know why it happened—you did a bad thing and the bad thing you are going
through—prison—is the consequence of your bad choice. That’s not a problem—the
problem is when good people suffer deeply for no apparent reason—it’s when Bob didn’
t steal the money, but his boss did, but he gets mistakenly convicted for the crime and
his life is ruined through no fault of his own. The book of Job doesn’t attempt to hide
the dilemma of what it means to love a God who sometimes seems absent in a world
where deep suffering is taking place, where the Bobs of this world get hurt badly for no
apparent reason.

But, before we get to this text, let me give you a brief overview of the story, let’s start at
the beginning where Job finds himself as a pawn in a weird contest between God and
the devil. As I said earlier, Job is an incredibly faithful man, and he is rewarded as
such—big family, successful career, lots of money. In ancient world, and even
nowadays, success was equated with faithfulness to God—good people get good
things, bad people get bad things. The devil, who is oddly enough, is in God’s own
court, basically tells God that the only reason why Job is so faithful is because God is
so good to him—send some bad things Job’s way, and then see how he responds, see
how faithful he actually is. God takes on the challenge, and allows the devil to cause
Job some deep suffering, even allowing him to ratchet it up a bit when it’s clear that Job
is not going to curse God, not at first at least. Finally, after so much loss, Job just
breaks—the frustration tumbles out of him, and he takes God to court to demand an
explanation—why is this happening to a good man. A series of three good friends of
his argue with him, telling that he must have done something wrong, because things
like what has happened to Job don’t happen to good people—after all, the universe is
fair, they believe, God is fair: people get what they deserve in this life.

So, after chapters and chapters of dialogue between Job and his three friends, God
shows up, God speaks up and gives Job and the others her two cents. What you get
here is God responding, in a way, to Job’s cry for justice, for an explanation, for some
semblance of the just world that he thought he once knew. God’s response is not quite
an explanation, of course—it’s a series of questions of Job, in fact—God responds to
Job’s questions of God with a series of question of his own to Job, so to speak. What
we have here is a set of rhetorical questions asking poor Job about where he was when
God created different parts of the world, couched, of course, in the language and
beliefs of the ancient world—seas being shut up, cornerstones being laid, doors being
opened and shut. Still, it’s a powerful and beautiful set of questions—it’s almost as if
the ancient writer has God answer Job’s questions with poetry. It’s as if God reminds
Job of who Job is in the scheme of things—a mere human, and God does this by
reminding Job that he is not the Creator—he is the creation of the Creator, the
handiwork, alongside all the other parts of creation, of God’s divine hands. This kind of
questioning goes on for another chapter and a half, until chapter 40 when God invites
Job to respond, but he doesn’t—Job remains silent, though we are not quite sure
whether the silence is rooted in shame or in anger, rooted in the shame of realizing that
he tried to question the justice of the Creator of the world, or rooted in an anger at still
not getting answers from God about why he has suffered so deeply, despite the clear
fact that he is a just man. In response to the silence, God goes on, listing our more
things that Job clearly cannot do, simply because Job is a mortal, a human, and God,
God is the Creator of all.

In the end, Job doesn’t get what he wants—he never gets an explanation from God for
why he and his family have suffered so much. He doesn’t even know he was a pawn in
this game of chicken, in a way, between the devil and God—though, of course, we have
to acknowledge the fact that this text is an ancient one, with ancient notions about the
world, including the idea that God plays chicken with human beings, something I am not
sure I buy, to be honest. God doesn’t play games with us, or test us just in order to see
if we are faithful. Those kinds of games are inhumane, and certainly not something I
would want to ascribe to God. Still, it’s clear that humans have been struggling with the
problem of evil for a long, long time, and the story of Job is one of those ancient
attempts to explain why such things happen. I do think it’s important to note again that
Job never gets an answer to his questions—he doesn’t know that he has was part of
some divine contest between God and devil—that is never told to him. And so he is
stuck with the reality that when he questions God about justice, what he gets is an
answer about God’s omnipotence, about God’s all powerful self. And the writer has
God pointing to nature as a sign of that power, the creation of nature itself, as a marker
of how powerful, and how “other” God really is from us, from us humans. The morning
stars, the sea, the womb, the clouds—they point us to a God who is not us, who does
not act like us, and does not, despite our deepest desires, do what we wish God would
do, including doing the justice we think should be done.

But that is no dismissal of our right as human beings to question God, to call God into
account—God may have a say in the matter, but the book of Job also clearly makes the
case that we humans have a right to speak our mind when it comes to God’s
management of the universe, as odd as that sounds. You don’t spend 37 chapters
building the human case, and then see it so easily demolished by the 3 or 4 chapters in
which God has his rightful say. Having said that, I think what this text says, what these
purported words of God are meant to do, is to simply remind us that there is more
mystery in this life than there is clarity in this life—and if we cannot accept that truth,
then we will have a difficult time being able to be in relationship with a God who is more
unknowable than knowable, even as this same God is revealed to us in small traces, in
places like Scripture, or through reason, or through the richness of our own
experience, or through the slow moving wheel of history. My father and people like Bart
Ehrman, and millions of others who have walked away from the faith because they
couldn’t get a clear answer, they are not to be dismissed as spiritually or intellectually
lazy, as they are by that reviewer of Ehrman’s book. They simply could not be in
relationship with a God who could not give them an answer, a clear answer, to their
questions, and though I am comfortable with not knowing the answers, I cannot
authentically and honestly fault anyone for not being able to live without the answers to
why sometimes, just sometimes, there seems to be no justice in this world. If Scripture
can spend 37 chapters asking that question, that simple question, then certainly we
can all ask it, and we can name the fact that the answer given in that text doesn’t quite
satisfy us. Now, the choice for each of us is whether or not to walk away or to be in
relationship with God—I have chosen to be in relationship with a God whom I want more
answers from, more than I have been given, but I am willing to be in an imperfect
relationship, as all relationships are, divine or human, because I am an imperfect
person in an imperfect world. In September I will turn 40, which has me thinking that I
probably have more years behind me than I do before me, knowing my family’s history
of short lifespans, and what I think I have found is that the older I get, the less I know,
the less sure I am of things, and yet, that is fine, I am comfortable with not knowing and
acknowledging that most things in this world and in this life are ultimately a mystery. I
think that is the truth of this text, this text who points us to the mysteries all around us—
the seas, the clouds, the morning stars—and reminds us that they reflect the wonder
and mystery of their Creator, who is, ultimately, Mystery and Wonder itself. Amen.