The Story Continues - Job 14: 7-15, 19: 23-27

We started this series talking about how we can talk to God about anything, even when that means pouring our our hearts to God in pain and sorrow. Last week we talked about how we need to let people do the hard work of grief and not try to make it conform to something that makes us feel comfortable. 

How in the world do you find hope in the midst of suffering? It is an incredibly difficult question some days. Some days the pain just seems to weigh in on us like a blanket. How do we keep going, keep trusting, keep praying, keep believing in the face of sorrow. 

We are jumping back and forth between a few different chapters here, but the pieces that are in between are familiar ones. They are sections where Job’s friends are trying to convince him that he must be guilty, he must have sinned horribly, and just needs to confess before God to be free of what he is going through. 

While I hope that most of us have never known someone like Job’s friends, I’ve also been a pastor long enough to hear things like this being said to people. Things about how someone must have sinned. Things about how a lack of faith leads to a lack of healing. Absolutely hurtful things. 

But I’ve also seen folks with Job’s response. Job is going back and forth in this section between talking to himself and talking to God, and he starts to allow himself to hope again. To hope when there is zero reason that he should. 

Part of our struggle with faith is that we try to make everything logical. Well if Job is going through this thing, then he must have done something to cause it. If God wants us to hope, then God needs to show us a reason to hope. But faith isn’t logical. Faith is something that we experience. It isn’t based off of an easy formula - it’s lived, even when it doesn’t make any sense. 

Job says that there is hope. Hope that something new can spring up from what’s left of his life. Does Job have a reason for this hope. Yes - his reason is God. See we often think of faithfulness in terms of what God has blessed us with. But Job is saying that God is faithful because God is God. And maybe, just maybe God will remember him. 

Now has God forgotten Job? No. But sometimes we feel like that. Sometimes we feel overlooked or forgotten. Job is trusting that even in times like that - God will remember him. 

Job is also hoping in, trusting in, believing in, the divine compassion of God. We think of compassion as showing someone pity or concern, but really it means to suffer with. Job is calling on God to come and suffer with him. And friends, I believe that God does suffer with us. That God is with us in the midst of our heartache. That God weeps with us when our heart breaks. That God truly knows what it means to experience this world as we experience it, because Jesus came. Jesus, the incarnate word of God. Jesus, who died for us, and carried the weight of our sins. Job believes that divine compassion is possible - Jesus shows that divine compassion has come with flesh on. 

Before the section of scripture we find in chapter 19, Job collapses in his grief. Yet, even then - even when the weight of the suffering and struggle seem to much to bear, he still dares to hope. Why - because his redeemer lives. The one who will buy him back from his suffering is alive and is coming. And even if it isn’t on this side of eternity - he trusts that he will see God.

The question that comes up in the story of God is how do you approach God? How do you believe in God when it seems like all the beliefs you held before are falling apart? How to you continue to trust in God? 

You hope. 

You have the courage to hope.

Friends, if hope was rationale it would be easy. But by nature of being hope, its asks us to dare to believe. And that requires courage. In fact, what is one of the definitions of courage that we don’t talk about enough - strength in the face of pain or grief. We all too often think of courage as facing what we fear - like David faced Goliath. But courage means heart. To take heart. And we do that when we hope in the face of sorrow. 

Job has a lot of hopes. He hopes that God is a lot more compassionate and loving than his friends are being at the moment. He is hoping the tGod will come and surprise him with the unexpected. And he has a heavenly hope - that even if his prayer isn’t answered the way he wants on this side of eternity, that he will be redeemed. 

So we approach God not with reason. We approach God with hope. We approach God being honest and saying - God what I’m going through right now is a lot more than I can handle or understand. But I’m going to trust you in the face of all of that anyway. Because you are God and I am not. 

Janis Joplin has a lyric that always sticks with me “Freedoms just another word for nothing left to lose.” Well, friends, sometimes there is spiritual freedom that comes when where we are in a place like Job is. A place where everything else fades away between us and God. A place where we have the courage to hope, in the face of a world that can’t understand why we dare to do so. 

Because when everything else fades away - all that’s left is our relationship with God. Our trust. Our hope. It’s not about saying the right things. Or doing the right things. And there is freedom in that. 

Friends, how can we hope when everything around us tells us not to? How can we hope when it doesn’t make any sense? And how can we be a living testimony of that hope to the world?

Let us pray….

“Job” Job 1: 1-22

Stories didn’t used to be written down. They were shared around tables and campfires. Around beds and in the fields. Stories used to be passed on verbally. So why did people take time to tell stories, and what made them so important that someone eventually wrote them down and we find them now in the Bibles that we read?

I think stories in scripture are like a lens that help us reframe the world in order to understand. They tell us something about God. Something about ourselves. Something about what we experience so we can try to make sense of it. 

Yet, the story of Job doesn’t do that very well. Job tells this absolutely heart wrenching story that doesn’t seem to make much sense, yet it is one of the oldest in the Bible. It goes something like this…

There once was a man who everyone knew was blameless and upright. He was the person  that you could count on to be faithful. He was incredibly blessed - he had a large family, large herds of animals, and many servants. And Job prayed for his family. He was concerned that one of his family may have sinned and he may not know it, so he had offerings he made on all of their behalf. That was the faithfulness of Job.

But one day, Satan, the Advisory, and God were in a conversation. Satan had just spent time walking on earth, and God asked him if he had seen God’s servant Job. This blameless, righteous, faithful man. But Satan told God that the only reason Job appeared that way was because he was so blessed. Surely, if Job had more trials in his life than he wouldn’t act as he did. His faithfulness would falter. 

So God allowed Job to be tested by Satan, to prove that his faithfulness was not conditional. And calamity after calamity came upon the house of Job - to the point where one person couldn’t finish telling him about something horrible that happened before another would come up to tell him more. His servants were attacked and captured. Fire burned up his sheep and his servants. All of his children died. 

And Job could do nothing but mourn. He tore his clothes and shaved his head, all marks of deep grief. But he still praised the Lord both with his lips and the way he lived his life. 

Why, o why, would this be a story that is passed on from generation to generation? Maybe, because we have all been there. Maybe because no one makes it through this life without experiencing pain. Maybe sometimes we have even had Job-levels of pain where nothing seems to go right. Where grief is so profound that we are afraid that it is going to swallow us whole. Job’s story reminds us that we are not alone. We are known.

And more than known in our pain, we can bring that pain before God. I’ve had people tell me from time to time that they are afraid to bring their whole selves before God. They are afraid to tell God about their grief and their struggles. They are afraid that it will look like they are complaining. And I point them to Job. Job who cried out to God in mourning. I point them to the Psalms and other places of laminations in scripture. Laminations is not a word we hear very much anymore. Or even the more well known version of lamenting. When we lament, we express our emotions of pain and suffering and sorrow to God. And it doesn’t hurt God’s feelings. God will not turn away from our pain and suffering, because God knows us, God is involved in our lives, and God can speak to our pain. 

Over the years there have been books and songs and poems written about God. Who is God. How is God in relationship to us. One of the most prevalent images of God is someone “out there”. A being far away from us who looks down upon us. The grand master of time who wound up the cosmic clock, stepped back, and just watched what happened. 

But, friends, that is not our God. God is not far off and distant. We will find out later in this sermon series that God is so close that he comes to talk with Job. God is so close that he does not leave Job alone in his pain. 

Even though pain is universal, its something that we don’t talk about, especially in our society. We pretend that there is nothing wrong. Or we put on a brave face. We don’t let people see us cry in public or for too long. But because we are not open about our pain it is really hard to wrestle with questions about pain. And as a result, we feel like we are alone or that God has abandoned us. 

Or we want to make pain into some sort of ultimate teacher. We think God caused our pain to try to teach us a lesson. Friends, God does not cause our pain. Even in the story of Job, Satan is the one who brings the pain. But God can redeem our pain. God doesn’t need to use pain to teach us something, but with time it may transform something in us through the goodness of God. 

One of the pastors in our annual conference suffered a stroke several years of God that has lead to some profound reflection and insights. Recently on his Facebook page, he was talking about the stroke and how it opened up a whole new dimension to a quote he had in a sermon shortly before his stroke. The quote is from Pastor Mark Batterson in his book about prayer entitled The Circle Maker: “We need to ask God to give us the grace to sustain, the strength to stand firm, and the willpower to keep on keeping on.”

Why can we ask God for these things, because it is God who is right with us in our pain. Why can we ask God for these things, because it is God who sustains us in our pain. 

Satan wanted to challenge God about Job’s purity. He wanted to question whether or not Job actually as as devout or if it all just was a show because he was blessed. But in the midst of all that Job faced, he prayed, brothers and sisters. He still turned to God. 

For so many folks, pain has caused them not to seek out God, but rather to turn away. To think that God has abandoned them so they abandon God. The story of Job reminds us, that no matter what we have faced, that Job has been there. But no matter what we may face, we can still turn to God in prayer. Even prayers of crying out in lament. 

Friends, I don’t know what you are carrying into this place this day. I don’t know every heartache you have faced. Or what trials you are currently walking through. What grief you hold in your heart. But I do know this. God is able to take it. God is able to hear our prayers and walk with us, even through the valley of the shadow. So let’s take time this morning to simply cry out to God. To cry our for ourselves. To cry out for those we love. To cry out for this world. Let us come before God in an attitude of prayer, knowing that God will meet us, wherever we may be at…

“Job - Part 2” Job 3: 1-10, 4: 1-9, 7: 11-21

Have you ever been like Job, in a place of just unimaginable pain? Have you ever had someone come and accompany you in that pain? If so, what was that experience like? What did folks say or do that brought you comfort? And what do you wish would have been left unsaid?

Job has come before God in an attitude of prayer. He refused to curse God, even in the midst of losing what looked like almost everything.  All that was experienced by Job in chapter 1 and 2 was leading to this moment - Job Chapter 3. Job refused to curse God, as Satan wanted him to and as his wife had suggested. But he did curse that he was born. He would rather have never found life then go through what he is going through now. 

Up until this point Job has friends who had been sitting with him in silence. They were simply being a comforting presence. But as soon as Job makes this statement they feel like all of sudden Job is attacking God and so they jump to God’s defense. Was that actually what Job was doing? No. But the foundation of his faith life had been shook. He thought that all of the suffering he experienced would lead to something. Would mean something. But here he is, several days later and there is no resolution. So all of those old things that his faith had been built upon had to be stripped away. 

The problem is that his friends still had that old foundation. And they try to talk to him out of it. Or rather, Eliphaz, going first because he was the oldest of the friends, starts off by trying to gently remind Job that God makes the wicked suffer. Which is very much how the society around Job thought - those who were blessed must be close to the heart of God, and those who suffered must have some unconfessed sin in their lives that they need to bring before God in order to be restored. 

Here is Job, who has been sitting in silence for days, reflecting on what he has been going through. Silently praying to God. Trying to figure out what is going on. And he realized that this wasn’t the old system of justice theology at work. It wasn’t that the good guys would get ahead. Because Job knows his heart and know that he is upright and blameless and faithful. So he cries out to God that he would rather not have been born because he doesn’t understand. He doesn’t understand why this was happening. And that justice theology he had built his life upon is gone. 

Job openly expressing himself to God and Job’s friends response wasn’t to continue to just sit with him in silence. Or even to offer words of comfort. They set out to help Job realize the error of his ways, and gently nudge Job into a different perspective and direction. Don’t you know Job… its only the wicked who suffer, ergo you must have some wickedness in you. Why don’t you pay attention to that? Then their arguments get more and more defensive as they jump to uphold what they believe about God, about who God is and how God acts. 

The problem is we are all too often like Job’s friends. We don’t know what to say in times  of pain so we just start to say anything that comes to mind. I was recently talking with someone about funerals - what we want for our funeral. And what we don’t want at all. Only someone who didn’t know us walked in on the middle of the conversation just as we were expressing that we didn’t want anyone to look at us in a casket and say how nice we look. This person stopped dead in their tracks and said, “do people really say that?”

It’s one of many things that we say to fill the silence, when really just being there is the best gift we could ever offer. When someone is in sustained pain like Job is, we all too often want to try to give a theological explanation for what they are going through instead of just letting them be and being there with them. 

Job is trying to express his anguish to God - and that’s okay! But instead of getting the support he was hoping he would receive from his friends, they turn on him, just when they needed him the most. 

And let’s be honest, even if they truly believed that Job had his theology wrong - was then really the time to say it outloud and so vehemently? Of course not!

Yet, have we ever done that? Probably. We search for words of comfort, but all that does sometimes to drive someone in pain further from God. 

When I was in college I was studying abroad for my final semester and I was having a really hard time. A dear friend also was with me that semester and he didn’t know all of the struggles but he knew that I was in pain. And he would let me get it out. Or rather, he would leave me space to have silence when I just needed to be. 

But there was another classmate on that trip who didn’t understand what I was going through. And so, one day when I had been silent for a long time she decided to come up and scold me about how it wasn’t living into the idea of Christian community. 

Now in her defense, she didn’t know what was going on inside of me. But was that helpful to me? Not at all. It just made me feel worse. 

Job turns to God in desperation, but he never says that God is not holy or powerful. He never curses God. But he is wrestling with and expressing his faith in a way that made those around him uncomfortable. 

I think Job made them uncomfortable, because as long as Job admitted that he was wicked then they could distance themselves from his experience. Surely they were better than Job so they could never experience all that he is going through. But as soon as they believe that what Job was saying was true, that he wasn’t wicked, that there wasn’t a bigger reason behind this suffering, than they would have to admit that this could happen to them as well. And that would rock their faith world. 

This section of Job is hard. It’s hard to read. It’s hard to reflect on. Because there is just so much pain presence. But underneath all of that is the question - is our faith adequate for times of trouble? How would we respond if we had pain in our lives that just wouldn’t go away? How do we pray to God in times of a crisis?

Because if you’ve been there you know that such times change you. They strip away your faith of all meaningless platitudes, traditions that don’t stand the pressure of pain, and theological beliefs that are not true, but that we’ve always just assumed. And all that is left is you and God. Which can be a beautiful thing. But it is also hard for folks to understand if they haven’t been there. 

Friends, if you are going through a time like Job right now, know that I am praying for you. I am praying that God sustain you. I am praying that God sends folks just to be with you. I am praying that you experience the presence of God. And if you aren’t going through something like Job, but you know someone who is, I am praying for you as well. Praying that you have the courage to simply be a silent presence. Praying that you have a heart of compassion. Praying that you show love in a way that connects with someone in need. 

Friends, let us pray….