October 7, 2012 | 4:00 p.m.

A Sermon Series on Job: Part 1

Adam H. Fronczek
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Job 1:1; 2:1–10

This is the first sermon in a four-week series on the book of Job, a book I love because of the deep and important questions it raises about faith in the midst of telling a powerful story. I’m going to set the stage a little before reading tonight’s scripture Lesson, which is from the first and second chapters of Job.

The movie theater darkens. The commercials come to an end. A message plays about where you can go to buy popcorn; a thirty-second spot reminds you about cell phones, crying babies, coughing, and talking to your neighbor. And then it’s quiet. And the first thing you see is the same in every one of the six movies. One half of a sentence, written in blue letters, followed by an ellipsis leading you into the story, that begins: “A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away . . .”

In a world where there are fewer and fewer pop culture references everyone is familiar with, I’m confident that many of you instantly recognized that I am referring to the Star Wars movies, and you remember that following that half a sentence, the opening music comes to life, and the yellow letters begin to scroll up the screen, letting you know where the story picks up, a story of the epic struggle in the galaxy between the imperial forces of evil and the rebel forces on the side of the good.

There’s a storytelling technique going on here. Has it ever occurred to you that, watching the movie, you have no idea exactly when or where Star Wars takes place or how it was communicated to our own place and time? This is exactly the intention of the director, because from the moment we read, “A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away,” we have been invited not into one moment in history, but into a “timeless conflict applicable to [everyone]” (Mark Throntviet). The struggle between good and evil has always been a part of our world. In every place and time, good and faithful people must learn how to live in the midst of evil and suffering and struggle against it for a better, fairer world, and you are brought into that struggle the moment you read that opening half-sentence.

So it is with the story we begin today, the story of Job.

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“There once was a man in the land of Uz whose name was Job.” With that phrase we are invited into a story of the epic struggle between good and evil as told in this book of the Bible. Notice that I am not saying to you that the Bible is fantasy. What I am saying is that much more important than historically locating the man named Job in the land of Uz is the idea that you are supposed to get drawn into his struggle and claim it as your own, and that’s what I’m going to talk about tonight and in the next four weeks—what Job’s struggle against suffering might be able to teach us.

This story of Job does another thing to draw us into the struggle. Notice that in tonight’s introduction, we as readers get to hear what God is actually thinking about; we are told in detail the words of a conversation God has with another divine being. “Have you considered my servant Job,” says God? “There is no one like him on the earth, a blameless and upright man who fears God and turns away from evil.”

Courtesy of that setup, we learn something important to our initial understanding of this story. This moment of observing even God’s conversation reinforces the idea that it’s not supposed to be a historical report of what happened to a man named Job whom everyone knew about. Who could possibly have been a spectator in the heavens, witnessed this conversation, and then came back to write it down or tell everyone about it? It’s clear that, rather than being a historical report, it’s a narrative written down by one or more people, possibly very much like you and me, people who wanted to struggle and debate about a few vital questions of the human situation, questions we may never quite wrestle to the ground, questions that you could only answer definitively if you were in the same room with God. Where does evil come from? Is God responsible for it, or is God only responsible for good? What control do we have over it? Can we beat it? And what about me and my faithfulness? If I am a faithful believer, with everything in my life going as well as it possibly could, and one day all of those good things started to disappear, would I still believe in God, or would the suffering cause me to give up? Are we all here because we love God, or are we just here because we want God to do good things for us?

These are the questions that are going to be debated in the book of Job. Already in the opening verses we see the beginnings of the debate. Job’s fortunes begin to fail. His family turns against him. He loses his health. He becomes covered with sores, open wounds that ooze and itch, so he takes a sharp piece of a broken clay pot, and he sits in the yard and scrapes his sores. Job’s wife, who serves in the story as a dramatic foil to Job’s faithfulness, witnesses her fallen man, as pathetic as he has ever looked, and weighs in saying, “Do you still persist in your integrity? Curse God and die.” Job responds, introducing one of those big philosophical questions of the story in his own words: “Shall we receive the good at the hand of God and not receive the bad,” he asks?

Is God responsible for this? Even for us, having heard the conversation between God and Satan, we are not sure if we should assign responsibility to God, but for Job, who didn’t hear that conversation, it’s impossible to know. And these big questions beg for debate.

Soon Job’s three friends will arrive, and here is where we see the debate really get underway. Here we see again that the purpose of this book really is to struggle with these difficult questions. Most of the book is devoted to the debate between Job and his friends. The book of Job is forty-two chapters long, and for thirty-five of them, these three friends—Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar—will sit at Job’s side and argue with one another, and with him, about why all of this is happening to Job. It’s a panel discussion, an academic seminar on the nature of evil. The three friends figuratively sit down around the campfire or belly up to the bar or light up cigars and try to figure out the meaning of what has happened to their friend Job, who once seemed so put-together, so perfect, so untouchable. Now he sits on the ash heap and scrapes his wounds. Once he was so perfect, so untouchable, but now his friends just don’t want to touch him!

We’ll look more closely at the debate of the friends next week; for now let’s talk about Job a little more.

One thing that occurs to me that is important for us to remember is that Job is not privy to God’s conversations, and in that way he is just like us. We as readers hear God setting up this wager with Satan, but real life doesn’t work like that. Job never heard that conversation, and when we face suffering, we, like Job, wonder what God is up to. Just like us, Job is unable to explain what role God is playing, and he’ll have to struggle with that. It’s almost as if we’re let in on that conversation as readers in an act of irony—the story demonstrates for us how foolish and far-fetched it would be to think we would ever know exactly what God is up to.

It also occurs to me that in Job’s initial response to his wife, we learn something about him. When he asks, “Shall we take the good and not the bad from God” but then persists in his faithfulness, we see what is probably Job’s most exemplary character trait: Job is faithful to God not because of what he thinks he deserves or can get out of his relationship with God, but because he simply loves God. Job has never seen his relationship with God as a transactional one. God is not there to reward him for good or punish him for evil. God is there to be praised.

And again in this kind of ironic twist we are faced with the reality that most of us aren’t faithful enough to live like that. Of course, we would all like to think that we would behave like Job, that no matter how we suffer we would hold fast to our faith. We would like to think our relationship to God is not a transactional one, but it’s so hard not to think that way. When we have been good, we expect to be rewarded; when we’re bad, we expect judgment. And one of the things that is so unsettling about Job’s story is the way that logic collapses. Job, who has done all the right things, loses everything, and that just doesn’t make any sense. If flawless Job can’t succeed, what is going to become of regular people like us? And how can Job keep his faith?

I noticed something else about Job. It was pointed out by a biblical scholar I was reading this week. God says, “Have you considered my servant Job? There is no one like him on the earth, a blameless and upright man who fears God and turns away from evil.” The thing I noticed is when God says, “There is no one like him on earth—no one; he is a blameless and upright man; he turns away from evil,” God admits: There is no one like him, past or present. So it seems clear that, in some ways, the narrator is giving us a bit of a cautionary note: you’re not perfect; nobody is. So this is not a story about following in Job’s footsteps and becoming a person who makes no mistakes. Somebody is telling this tale for a reason (Mark Throntviet).

We do not need Job to show us how to be a saint. We need him because the way his story is told stops us in our tracks and forces us to talk about questions human beings need to ask. Job invites you to contribute to the conversation. We’re invited to sit down in the ash heap and contribute to the discussion. We’re invited to hear Job’s complaints about the suffering in life that doesn’t seem fair, and we’re invited to ask our own questions. We’re invited to learn to be present with other people who ask them. To be present to the suffering people of our world, those who had everything and lost it—for they are out there—and those who had nothing to begin with and struggle even to this day. We are invited to be present with other people as they struggle, to mourn when it is time to mourn, and at times when there has been too much suffering, to stand up against suffering and to ask for a better life and a fairer world—and you can’t get those things if you don’t ask for them.

I have a poem that is one of my favorites, and it is good for stories that are just getting started. It’s called “O Me, O Life” and was written by Walt Whitman. I’ve always imagined Whitman writing this poem in a bit of a Job moment. Suffering, or witnessing the suffering of another, feeling a bit helpless, but finding in the midst of it all the power of his voice and the importance of asking his questions even when the answers do not come easily. It’s a short poem so I’ll read you the whole thing:

“O ME! O life! . . . of the questions of these recurring;
Of the endless trains of the faithless—of cities fill’d with the foolish;
Of myself forever reproaching myself, (for who more foolish than I, and who more faithless?)
Of eyes that vainly crave the light—of the objects mean—of the struggle ever renew’d;
Of the poor results of all—of the plodding and sordid crowds I see around me;
Of the empty and useless years of the rest—with the rest me intertwined;
The question, O me! so sad, recurring—What good amid these, O me, O life?

Answer.
That you are here—that life exists, and identity;
That the powerful play goes on, and you will contribute a verse.”

The powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse. Come with me on this journey with Job. Let us ask these questions together. Amen.