06/17/2018
Job 38:1-24
Chris Breslin
[Audio Unavailable]
Sermon Notes
Job gives us immeasurably more than a theology of suffering. It gives us a theology of the sufferer…Job instructs us perhaps more about respect than compassion; if we read this book well, then it enables us to honor the sufferer as a teacher, a theological resource for the community. –Ellen F. Davis, Getting Involved With God
“Abstraction can only live on and bloom like cut flowers…everything Job says is baptized in the fire of a painful encounter with Him.” –Karl Barth
“The creator goes off on one wild, specific tangent after another, or millions simultaneously, with an exuberance that would seem to be unwarranted, and with an abandoned energy sprung from an unfathomable font. What is going on here? The point of the dragonfly’s terrible lip, the giant water bug, birdsong, or the beautiful dazzle and flash of sunlighted minnows, is not that it all fits together like clockwork — for it doesn’t, particularly, not even inside the goldfish bowl — but that it all flows so freely wild, like the creek, that it all surges in such a free, fringed tangle. Freedom is the world’s water and weather, the world’s nourishment freely given, its soil and sap: and the creator loves pizzazz.” –Annie Dillard
“Come into the peace of the wild things…” –Wendell Berry
“The challenge before us is to figure out how to link these two callings, these two imperatives from the voice in the whirlwind – the call to humility and the call to joy.” –Bill McKibben
Scripture:
Songs for Today’s Worship Gathering:
Were You There? by Ward
Alive by Hoisingtons/Jordan/Leonard
We Will Feast in the House of Zion by McCracken
From Everlasting to Everlasting by Eader
Psalm 126 by Wardell
Be Still My Soul by von Schlegel/Sibelius
Doxology
Pentecost/Holy Spirit Reading:
On the Holy Spiritby St. Basil the Great
Spiritual Theologyby Simon Chan
God, Sexuality, and the Selfby Sarah Coakley
Paul, the Spirit, and the People of Godby Gordon Fee
Presence, Power, & Promise: The Role of the Spirit of God in the Old Testamented. Firth & Wegner
Creator Spirit: The Holy Spirit and the Art of Becoming Humanby Steven Guthrie
The Holy Spirit: Hand-raisers, Han, and the Holy Ghost(Homebrewed Christianity) by Grace Ji-Sun Kim
Pneumatologyby Veli-Matti Karkkainen
Fresh Air: The Holy Spirit for an Inspired Lifeby Jack Levison
Flame of Love: A Theology of the Holy Spiritby Clark Pinnock
After the Spiritby Eugene Rogers
Thinking in Tonguesby James K.A. Smith
Knowing the Holy Spirit Through the Old Testamentby Christopher J. H Wright
The Spirit Poured Our on All Flesh: Pentecostalism and the Possibility of Global Theologyby Amos Yong
Hospitality and the Other: Pentecost, Christian Practices, and the Neighborby Amos Yong
The Missiological Spirit: Christian Mission Theology in the Third Millennium GlobalContextby Amos Yong
Who is the Holy Spirit?: A Walk with the Apostlesby Amos Yong
Sermon Manuscript
What a great Father’s Day passage! We encounter Job, who seems to be minding his own business, literally. Taking care of his familyand is shiny, beautiful life, when all of the sudden, unbeknownst to him he seems to get caught in the crossfire of some sort of divine spitting match between God and the Adversary.This Diabolical One accuses God of being too easy to worship by Job. It seems that Job has lived this charmed life, full of kids (7 sons & 3 daughters), 7 thousand sheep, 3 thousand camels, 500 pair of oxen, 500 female donkeys, many servants. This is an Ancient Near Eastern episode of Cribs. He even always decides on his birthday to make sure to praise the Lord by making sacrifices. So… THIS STORY FREAKS ME OUT!Job is seeming to do everything by the book (and more), and he’s being blessed and being a blessing.
It seems the major test at hand here is whether there is a direct correlation between what Job gets from God and how things are going and what Job gives to God. Once the fount of every blessingturns off, will he continue to love and know and pursue God? Once that same fountain seemingly starts producing poison, can Job praise God?So the Accuser is granted the power to mess with and take away basically everything within an inch of Job’s life.
The oxen and donkeys were stolen (it starts with his work and income). Natural disastersthen take his sheep and servants (this is the sort of thing that insurance companies know as ‘an act of God’). Messengers continue to knock at the door with reports of raids on camels and more servants by the Chaldeans. And if that all didn’t start to make Job wonder if he was somehow cursed, another messenger comes to report that Job’s kids were all feasting togetherand their party was hit by some sort of windstorm, everyone died.
Job responds: “Naked I came from my mother’s womb; naked I will return there. The Lord has given; the Lord has taken; bless the Lord’s name.” In all this, Job didn’t sin or blame God. This guy is rock solid.
After a series of attacks on Job’s own body (sores from the top of his head to the soles of his feet). Not to mention a wife who is either hyper-realistic or massively non-supportive(or both!) saying: “Are you still clinging to your integrity? Curse God, and die.”
Job said to her, “You’re talking like a foolish woman. Will we receive good from God but not also receive bad?” In all this, Job didn’t sin with his lips. Still solid. What perspective in the middle of it all! Is Job in shock?
Then enters his “friends” who come to console him and don’t even recognize him at first when they see him. They look at him and just start wailing, they can’t even pretend its not that bad. Sometimes that gasp can be a gift, an acknowledgement that everything sucks.
Their assessment is right, for the next chapter Job’s suicidal thoughts start rolling in: “Why didn’t I die at birth? Why wasn’t I miscarried?” A side note: For those of you who’ve had some of these thoughts yourself, know that they are not out of bounds for our Faith. They’re in our Holy Book. God hears them and wants to attend to them.They’re not out of bounds for this church. We want to hear them and attend to them. To speak the truththat those thoughts don’t represent the reality which God makes, to offer connection to professional and medical helpif we can, and to offer the sort of friendship and presencewhich lifts the veil ofsecrecyand isolationwhere those thoughts take root in action. We’ve seen over the last several weeks (this is not a new or recent phenomenon) that literally anyone, no matter how successful, wealthy, esteemed, healthy, or interesting, is susceptible to the sort of despair of wanting to end your life. Before it gets there, would you please reach out to someone who is able to see a little further than what you’re currently able to see and feel?
Job’s friends come and sit Shiva(“seven”) with him. This is a sort of Jewish practice of presence. When there is death and despair, the community comes and sits in lament. There is not a whole lot of doing, simply being. This is a wonderful pastoral skill that shouldn’t only be required for pastors. Just showing up at hard times and patiently being there.So often we don’t do it because we don’t feel like we know what to say, or that we don’t have anything at our disposal to do to make the situation better or at least speed up the process of suffering and the start of moving forward. If you’ve felt those things, you are absolutely correct, go anyway. If you don’t have words, don’t say words, just hold space. If you can’t make things better, make them beautiful by small acts of very concrete service. You might call this the ministry of casseroles(or take out), The ministry of rom-com binge-viewing, or the ministry of making sure the couch is counterbalancedby someone else who knows and cares.
This Shiva period for Job’s family and farm is a turning point in the story. It is from this silencethat Job starts to formulate language after being blindsided by tragedy. Unfortunately, it is also when Job’s friends start to gather their own words too. Most of the text of the book of Job is replete with their theologizing around why this happened to Job, and to crudely sum it up, most of it centers on how it is somehow Job’s fault. The strange thing is, here, that Job didn’t just get a visit from his fundamentalist friends, Job and his buds seem to be in broad theological agreement. Much of what they’re saying is actually pretty orthodox. Another strange thing, for the purposes of our study, is how often they appeal to the Spirit.
Several times they talk about a Spirit of creation and power. That gives life and the “breath of God in my nostrils.” It is the “Spirit in man, the breath of the Almighty, that gives him understanding.” “The Spirit of God has made me; the breath of the Almighty gives me life.” These are all beautiful, inspiring, and theologically accurate statements. Sometimes I think a major function of the book of Job is to see how many times Christians will read sections like these in a straight forward and instructive manner, not realizing that they come from the mouths of the disconnected, Spirit-splaining, blow-hards of the story and not from the protagonist Job, who possesses “absolute integrity, and fears God and avoids evil.”
The message is subtle but powerful. That Scripture and the things of God can be easily misapplied to perilous and destructive ends. The words of Jobs friends, while technically true, only have so much potential to give life, as Barthsays, “abstraction can only live on and bloom like cut flowers.” This shouldn’t be surprising to us as we’ve all had Scripture thrown at us at some point (perhaps even with good intentions (in all things God works for the good of those who love him… Rom 8:28). Perhaps this week is an especially easy week to see this as Romans 13 is trending on Twitter (perhaps the most excited Christians have gotten on twitter since Koinoniawas the winning Scrips Spelling Beeword!). We can start to see the difference in how these friends speak and how Job speaks. Sure the friends offered their presence to Job, but they haven’t suffered with Job. Everything they say, no matter how true, still has the luxury of going home to their intact lives, whereas (again in Barth’s words)“everything Job says is baptized in the fire of a painful encounter with Him.”
It is this painful encounter with God, that Job is met by the Spiritwho gathers up the shards of Job’s words and forms speech, not out of theologically acute speech about the Spirit. (this is also a Romans 8: the Spirit agreeing with our spirit- teaching us that this present suffering is nothing compared to the coming glory, and coming to us and all Creation in our weakness pleading for us with our groans and labor pains (all of that came before the “all things work for the Good passage))It is living before the face of God in the midst of both tragedy and triumph that allows Job to know God not solely as some powerful Creator, but the Redeemer who lives, even now, even after the fallout. Ellen Davis: “Job gives us immeasurably more than a theology of suffering. It gives us a theology of the sufferer…Job instructs us perhaps more about respect than compassion; if we read this book well, then it enables us to honor the sufferer as a teacher, a theological resource for the community.”Job comes to find and be able to start to articulate that the Spirit of Creation is also the Spirit of Ongoing Presence and New Possibility. But even Job, for as steadfast as he is doesn’t know this until he encounters God out of the whirlwind!
Interlude: [Ridiculous animals]
God finally starts to speak, out of the tumultuous Spirit-wind of Creation. It might initially seem, as Dr. Davis puts it, that “God just rolls out that big Creation Machine and mows Job down with a stream of non sequiturs that have nothing to do with what is really at stake.” But perhaps this stream of non sequiturs is really the sort of tangent that shows who God is to Job, in all the power and messiness and grace and creativity. Job is getting a look behind the curtain, so-to-speak.
Annie Dillard puts it:“The creator goes off on one wild, specific tangent after another, or millions simultaneously, with an exuberance that would seem to be unwarranted, and with an abandoned energy sprung from an unfathomable font. What is going on here? The point of the dragonfly’s terrible lip, the giant water bug, birdsong, or the beautiful dazzle and flash of sunlighted minnows, is not that it all fits together like clockwork — for it doesn’t, particularly, not even inside the goldfish bowl — but that it all flows so freely wild, like the creek, that it all surges in such a free, fringed tangle. Freedom is the world’s water and weather, the world’s nourishment freely given, its soil and sap: and the creator loves pizzazz.”
“Come into the peace of the wild things” (Berry) by the Spirit is the invitation, because it is in the wild-ness, the wilderness that you will find me. This would come off as a thin invitation, a cheap gracefrom God to a man who has suffer so deeply, who has been so sincere in his devotion and has lost everything, who has been fed theology, even good theology that just tastes like tin in his mouth, as he looks for relief. All of this would be wrong, if God hadn’t known all of this for himself. Had the Father not sent his Son to suffer, and felt that searing loss, there’s no way God could say anything to Job.
But again, in Job we find no theology of suffering, but rather Theology from the Sufferer. Now it seems that Job and God have something more in common. Because following the death of Jesus, only now does the Spirit who’s been present the whole time begin to work in powerful and mighty, surprising and superfluous new ways. The Spirit had been a part of Creation, just like Job and all of his friends knew and could recite by heart (this is not a small thing). But now, since there’s been suffering, since there’s been death, since all of the words have ended and all of the reasons have been exhausted, now there’s space for the Spirit to resurrect, to bring new life, to bring new creation.
Following the whirlwind, note again, that it’s no small thing that God speaks out of a windstorm, (has·se·’a·rah–a tempest, maybe even meant to evoke the drama of God’s answer (tempestuously…) Job repents. He has encountered God in all of God’s divine strangeness and power, and he can only respond by “repenting in dust and ashes.” He has been reoriented to God. His mind has been changed through the crucible of his pain WITH God. God WITH him. Perhaps the greatest indication that this sort of reorientation has happened isthe faith Job shows to start a new family. To be a part of a new beginning.There is a note at the end that Job’s life is beginning to be put back together with 7 sons and 3 daughters.This might seem creepy and strange. As if everything is now okay, because now Job has a replacement family. But look closer and see the names Job gives his daughters, even after all of his grief: Yemina(Dove), Ketsia(Cinnamon, Keren-haPuch(Horn of Eye Shadow). These are remarkably hopeful and superfluousnames for someone who has suffered so. We’re told that Job’s youngest daughters are exceedingly beautiful,which is nice, but not all that necessary. It seems that Job’s encounter with God, some of the wisdom he’s learned from the whirlwind, has made him more sensitive, more wonder-filled, more open to enjoying, receiving, and naming beauty.
“The challenge before us is to figure out how to link these two callings, these two imperatives from the voice in the whirlwind – the call to humility and the call to joy.”(Bill McKibben, environmental writer)
The Voice coming forth from this wild whirlwind of the Spirit of God is calling us to humilityand joy. Perhaps that’s precisely why the Apostle Paul, in speaking to the suffering community at Philippi (Phil 2) notes:
Therefore if you have any encouragement from being united with Christ, if any comfort from his love, if any common sharing in the Spirit, if any tenderness and compassion, then make my joy completeby being like-minded, having the same love, being one in spirit and of one mind. Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit. Rather, in humility value others (even creation) above yourselves, not looking to your own interests but each of you to the interests of the others. In your relationships with one another, have the same mindset as Christ Jesus…
This is the Work of the Spirit:transforming the problem of sufferinginto the possibility of beauty. This is the Wisdom brought about from the Whirlwind, the very Mind of Christ: humility and joy. An honest encounter with God in and through suffering. Wonder amidst heart ache. Opening our lives up to the Spirit’s work of creating us anewalongside all of creation, in surprising and ridiculously unseen ways.
