October 14, 2012 | 4:00 p.m.

A Sermon Series on Job: Part 2

Adam H. Fronczek
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Job 23:1–9, 16–17

In the 1860s, Horatio Alger wrote a novel that became possibly the best-known children’s story of the 19th century.

The main character is a fourteen-year-old boot black—a shoe-shiner. He smokes, drinks, and sleeps on the streets, but, as the story goes, he is eager “to turn over a new leaf, and try to grow up respectable.” He won’t steal under any circumstances, and gentlemen impressed with this virtue and his determination to succeed offer him their help. A Mr. Greyson, for example, invites him to church, and a Mr. Whitney gives him $5 for performing a service, and he uses that money to open a bank account and to rent his first apartment. He fattens his bank account by practicing frugality and is tutored by his roommate, Fosdick, in the three Rs: reading, writing, and arithmetic. When he rescues a drowning child, the grateful father rewards him with a new suit and a job in his mercantile firm, and with this final event, he is “cut off from the old vagabond life which he hoped never to resume” (Horatio Alger, Ragged Dick, 1868).

Horatio Alger went on to become famous for writing more than 100 stories with this very same kind of plot line. He repeated it so many times it came to be known as the Horatio Alger myth, more broadly known as the American rags-to-riches story. In all of these stories we see a main character, poor and down on his luck, who makes good moral decisions, refuses to lie or cheat in order to get ahead, works hard, avoids alcohol, and inevitably has a good stroke of luck. As a result of all this, he makes something of himself, becoming financially stable and “successful,” at least according to the set of criteria that suggests financial well-being and working a lot are the key to happiness.

A lot of folks, including historians, sociologists, and a good number of ministers have taken issue with Alger’s storylines for being unrealistic or even harmful. One commentary stated it this way: “as a holistic point of view, [Alger’s model for the good life] simply does not work.” This person went on to say,

A case in point is the real Horatio Alger. Alger himself was graduated from Harvard Divinity School and for a while served as a Unitarian minister. But despite the fact that his popular success stories brought him wealth and fame, his own life was little short of tragic. He never married or experienced the fulfillments of genuine mutuality with men or women, though he seems to have wanted these relationships desperately. He had two affairs with women who remained married to their spouses; he eventually suffered serious mental illness and spent his last days in the kind of boarding house which Ragged Dick and the other successful heroes of his novels had forever left behind. For Horatio Alger wealth and social prestige were hardly the marrow of salvation.

His real life did not mirror the ideals of his stories. (See Harold Vanderpool, “The American Success Syndrome,” Christian Century, 1975).

The reason I’ve started with this lengthy illustration is because it’s the argument being made by Job’s friends, an argument that consumes most of the book of Job. The Horatio Alger myth, as it’s known, might also be associated with the Protestant work ethic, which originated in the work of theologians like John Calvin and Martin Luther and was developed by the Puritans in colonial America. Whether those names or ideas are familiar to you or not, this idea of hard work and right decisions always leading to advancement and happiness is the way most of us probably understand Christianity. It’s probably common to our understanding of most of other religions as well. Though it’s an oversimplification, our culture has adopted the notion of karma as the idea that you get what you deserve. Eventually, good deeds are rewarded and bad deeds are punished. That’s karma, we say, and most of us believe that’s biblical Christianity too—the idea that you come to church to learn to be good and that doing so leads to success. I believe this perception is oversimplified and, essentially, wrong.

As your minister, I will openly admit that this perception is no one’s fault but the church’s; it’s the fault of people like me. It is what “religion” has most often taught the world, particularly during the time when Horatio Alger was selling so many books. To be fair, this way of living works out a good amount of the time. It’s certainly true that doing the right thing should be encouraged and even has its payoffs.

The problem, as Horatio Alger’s life story clearly points out, is that real life is not always as simple as storytelling; life is not always fair. As it turns out, the Bible—which I consider to be a very “real” collection of good thinking about the human situation—frequently raises the question of what happens when life does not conform to our expectations about what is fair or right, and that’s exactly what’s going on in Job. Job has done everything right; he is Horatio Alger’s good and upright character. God calls him “a blameless and upright man . . . who turns away from evil.” But suddenly everything has come crashing down for Job. This book challenges us to ask why.

Thirty-five chapters of the book of Job are devoted to an argument about why all of this is happening to Job. As we talked about last week, Job loses everything, including his health. He is covered with sores from head to foot, and he takes a piece of broken pottery from the ruins of his house and goes out to sit on a heap of ashes in the yard, where he uses the pottery to scrape at his scabs. At this point, his three friends arrive—Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar—and they begin to talk with him about what has happened. Each from a different perspective, they argue for what we’ve been calling the Protestant work ethic or the Horatio Alger myth, but in reverse. Job’s friends say, if hard work and morality lead to the good life, and laziness and evil lead to suffering, then Job, who is suffering horribly, must have done something wrong, and they keep trying to find out what it is.

The interesting thing is that Job doesn’t buy the myth; he doesn’t believe his friends. Job knows he’s lived a good life. He knows he doesn’t deserve what has happened. So he chooses to argue. He believes that what is happening to him is wrong, and he decides to say so out loud rather than accepting the situation. Job’s friends want him to admit that there must be some logical explanation for what is going on, accept it and move on, but Job won’t do it.

An argument like the one Job’s friends are making is something I confront regularly in my ministry. It’s common, when I visit people in the hospital who are sick or talk with people who have lost a job or a loved one or are suffering for reasons they cannot understand—it’s common for people in these situations to say things like “It must be the Lord’s will; I guess we will simply have to accept it.” For many people, I think, that seems like the “right” thing to say or the “faithful” thing to say; maybe they think it’s the kind of thing they should say to their minister. But I want to go on record as saying that I don’t think that’s always the most helpful way to think about these things, and that’s what I take from Job’s response to his friends.

Job doesn’t just accept the reality of suffering and assume that he must have done something to deserve it; Job asks the question, “Why?” Job protests against the situation. He says, “Oh, that I knew where I might find God. . . . I would lay my case before him.” Job believes that if only he could make his case to God, God would make him understand, but he will not cave in the face of his friends’ “logical” explanations. So it’s clear that Job believes faith means that when life’s justice and fairness break down, as it inevitably does, we don’t need to resign ourselves to the assumption that it is God’s will or force ourselves to say that it’s fair when we don’t really believe that; we will probably grow more in our faith by going to the trouble of wrestling with why. Along with Job, our faith will mean more to us if we see it not as a transactional story in which we always get what we deserve, but as a real human story in which people have to struggle with the fact that sometimes the fairness transaction doesn’t work.

Mature faith means that we don’t remain silent or accept platitudes; faith means we ask why. We make our criticisms in order to move beyond them and look for more constructive ways to build a life. We build a mature life of faith out of an understanding that unfair suffering will always be with us.

It’s hard to explain that or know what that looks like, but one way to get a handle on it has to do with looking beyond storybooks and to other people who have suffered and to consider their real lives. One model I’ve found to be particularly helpful is C. S. Lewis, a Christian theologian and the author of a powerful story called A Grief Observed. Lewis, who was a confirmed bachelor, met and married poet Joy Davidman in 1956. They were incredibly happy for four short years, and then she became sick and died, and Lewis was alone again and was inconsolable. He started journaling about this experience of loss, and those journal entries eventually became the book A Grief Observed. One of his editors wrote about his book: “To defend himself against the loss of belief in God, Lewis wrote this journal, an eloquent statement of rediscovered faith. In it he freely confesses his doubts, his rage, and his awareness of human frailty. In it he finds again the way back to life” (from the cover of C .S. Lewis, A Grief Observed, 1961).

“To defend himself against the loss of belief in God . . . he freely confesses his doubts, his rage, and his awareness of human frailty.” Many would consider C. S. Lewis a giant of the faith, but it is not because he had a simplistic, transactional view of his relationship with God, but because he had a faith that was willing to ask “why” when the fairness transaction broke down.

The book of Job, which totals forty-two chapters, spends thirty-five of those chapters on Job’s argument with his friends in the midst of his suffering. It is my hunch that in order to learn from our sufferings we must live with them for a little while. We have not yet come to the end of the journey through the book of Job, but taking a cue from its narrator, I am going to resist the temptation to rush through the suffering and tie up the story today and instead am going to leave you in the middle of the story, with Job and with his questions and yours.

I’ve asked Lucy today to sing an extended post-sermon reflection, one from a song by Leonard Cohen, “Hallelujah,” who wrote as authentically as anyone I’ve ever heard, about what it is to sit in a place of suffering and ask why, to ponder the imponderables of life and wonder what it means when we authentically praise God, when we struggle to say “Hallelujah” . . .