October 21, 2012 | 4:00 p.m.

A Sermon Series on Job: Part 3

Adam H. Fronczek
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 63
Job 38:1–7, 34–41

Rainer Maria Rilke was a German poet who lived about 100 years ago. People who love his work often talk of its deeply personal nature, the feeling that when you read his writing it is as if he is speaking directly to you. This week as I thought about Job, I remembered one of Rilke’s most famous quotes and wondered how Job might have felt if it was written to him in the midst of his suffering and the questions he has about it. Rilke writes:

Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer. (Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet)

What might Job have thought, in the midst of his unanswered questions? How do Rilke’s words sound to any of you? I hope at least some of you love questions, because the ones we left off with last week are deeply difficult. And this week, truth be told, what God offers in this week’s passage isn’t really an “answer” in the sense that it doesn’t directly address what Job has been asking. Job wants to know why he has been suffering; God’s answer is not a direct explanation.

For centuries, readers have offered ways of trying to make sense of what God says to Job. Some people argue the answer is that “our ways are not God’s ways.” But if that’s the case, why has Job had it so rough? Shouldn’t God’s ways be better than ours? Shouldn’t God do something to fix the injustice that Job can’t seem to do anything about?

Others interpret God’s answer as a kind of “father knows best” approach to Job. At one time or another, we’ve all been on the receiving end of that kind of explanation and probably know how frustrating it can be. Do any of us, in the midst of a struggle we cannot understand, really want to hear, “You’ll understand when you’re older” or “Because I said so”? Hearing those things may be a part of growing up, but they don’t endear us to the person who says them, and in this case, those statements don’t endear us to God; they don’t make God seem like a very warm or comforting presence, but more like an arbitrary authority who just wants to withhold information.

I’m not satisfied with any of these traditional explanations, but I do believe that there is value in what Job has done in asking his questions of God head-on. When questions are difficult, we have to approach them squarely, and I think in God’s reply there are some things we can take away. I’m going to talk about some of those things this week. Next week as we wrap up the story, we’ll see what Job has to say on the other side of God’s reply and perhaps get a glimpse of whether Job, in Rilke’s words, “gradually, without noticing it, lives along some distant day into the answer.”

I read an article this week called “Visualizing Vastness” about the idea that there are a lot of things in the world that are simply too big for us to conceptualize, so they require a comparison that is more on our level. The federal budget is one example. It means little to most of us to talk about the government collecting or spending $100 million, but the author argued that it might help to know that for the average middle-class family, the equivalent budgetary decision would be whether or not to buy a latte for $3. That’s how big the federal budget is.

Another example this mathematician used is the solar system. It means almost nothing to most of us that the earth is 8,000 miles in diameter and is 93 million miles from the sun. So in Ithaca, New York, a group of scientists built a scale model called the (Carl) Sagan Planet Walk, which maps out the solar system scaled down to walkable size. Spread out around the downtown area, the model shows the first four planets, Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars—these four are just a few steps from one another, Mercury sized as small as a grain of rice and Earth, the size of a pea, when they are steps from one another. In order to get to Jupiter, which is about the size of a doughnut hole, you have to walk about two minutes down the block, and it then takes another ten to fifteen minutes to get all the way to Pluto, which is out at the edge of town. The sun, back in the town square, is about the size of a dinner plate. That’s the world in which we live, scaled down about 5 billion times (Steven Strogatz, “Visualizing Vastness,” New York Times, 15 October 2012).

Steven Strogatz, the author of the article, makes the point that the whole exercise of laying out the solar system like this is a very human-centered way to look at the solar system—it’s all scaled for us to see. At the same time, I can only imagine that a stroll along the Sagan Planet Walk can only make a human being feel very, very small in the context of the truly immense world we inhabit.

I think God is making something of the same point when God speaks to Job. “Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?” In terms of size, power, or time, really, who is Job? Who are any of us? This has been one of the key points made by a number of people who have written commentaries on Job. God’s answer demonstrates God’s power, and Job is humbled by his smallness.

But if we are to understand what is going on in Job, it’s important that we not stop the conversation there, for Job’s smallness isn’t the only thing going on here. The thing that should be even more shocking than our smallness is that, in spite of how incredibly small Job is, God speaks to Job. God does something a little like the Sagan Planet Walk insofar as God speaks of the vastness of the created world, but he lays it all out so that little Job can see it. As God speaks of the animals and the plants, the heavens and the oceans, he puts Job at the middle of it all, because Job is the one to whom God speaks and gives an answer. As one scholar has written, we have to remember that “God speaks about all of creation, but God speaks to Job.” And as readers of the story, then, we believe that God speaks to us.

I can only understand the point of that to be that in the midst of this amazing, wide world in which we live, God considers us to be incredibly important. God values Job and values the questions that he has been asking; God values the debate Job has been having with his friends, and that leads me back to talk about something that people often forget to talk about when they read the Book of Job—the debate itself.

Last week we talked about how the narrator spends thirty-five chapters of the Book of Job on a debate between Job and his friends: they’re trying to figure out why he is suffering. For the average Bible reader, that thirty-five chapters of text is tedious, to say the least. Most of us are satisfied to know that they are arguing about Job’s suffering and leave it at that. But there’s an important discovery when we look at the content of those thirty-five chapters: Job and his friends aren’t talking in abstractions; they are talking about real things Job has done and not done, real examples of suffering in the world. Job and his friends debate about things that are going on in the world—things we can see. They talk about justice for the poor and the needy. They talk about taking care of widows and orphans and living peacefully among our human brothers and sisters. They talk about justice, freedom, and peace. This is the setup for the passage we read today. Here, near the end, God may be pointing out all of the many things in the world that are beyond Job’s control, but most of the book is spent debating things that are very much within the control of people like Job.

I’ve been reading a book called Learning from My Father, which is a collection a man named David Johnson put together based on letters he exchanged with his dad when he was in college. One chapter of the book deals with human suffering, and in it, Johnson made what I found to be a challenging observation. Most of the time we talk about the suffering of the world as if it is all up to God and totally beyond our control, but often the facts show that we may have more control and responsibility than we think.

Take the example of an earthquake, says Johnson—an “act of God,” even according to the insurance companies. Well, maybe not. We can call it an act of God, we can surrender it to God’s will, say that “God’s ways are not our ways,” or that we’ll understand better when we’re older. But consider this: in 2010, the earthquake that struck Haiti utterly destroyed Port-au-Prince, rendered the government basically helpless, killed 200,000 people, and has left in its path a legacy of disease, looting, and instability.

Less than a month later, a quake of basically equal magnitude struck Chile, but there the death toll was less than one-half of one percent what it was in Haiti, and the immediate and ongoing physical damages were equally incomparable. It wasn’t because the quake was weaker, but because in Chile the human surroundings were entirely different in an ongoing way. In Chile, the poverty level is much lower, government is more stable, buildings are designed to handle the destruction. There are extremely complicated reasons why the living situation in Chile is so vastly different than it is in Haiti, and I don’t mean to oversimplify that. But the incredible difference between these two situations and the suffering that each situation allowed demonstrates that we may not be as helpless as we sometimes claim to be. It is difficult to hear, but sometimes, we just throw up our hands and say, “God’s ways are not our ways,” because it’s easier to say that than to deal with the incredible inequality that exists in our world.

Thinking about that earthquake illustration made me consider God’s answer to Job in a very different way. God does not directly answer the questions being asked by Job and his friends, but neither are those questions deleted from the book. There is no doubt in my mind that there are earthquakes that we cannot prevent; there is no doubt that Job is speechless when God asks, “Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?” But Job’s questions remain. In the midst of this great wide world, God speaks directly to Job, and I believe that is because God cares deeply about how good of a job we do caring for the elements of God’s creation that are within our power. God cares about poverty and injustice, grief and loss, heartbreak and loneliness, and when we as human beings have an opportunity to do something about it, we should. In the midst of this great wide world in which God has laid the foundations, God cares enough to speak to us. And we should not be satisfied to explain God by saying that “God’s ways are not our ways.” That answer is not enough for me.

David Johnson’s father, who was a minister, struggled throughout his life to adequately express some of the wisdom he found in stories like Job. At one point, he wrote a letter to his son with these words:

God has given us the essential ingredients of life and matter, but creation is an ongoing thing. And in this continuing labor of creation, God insists that people join with him. Imagine! God calls us to share as partners in this unbelievable and overwhelming plan to bring, as Paul says in his letter to the Ephesians, “Everything together with Christ as head.” Meanwhile, ours remains an adolescent world, undergoing the pain and torment, the frustration and agony of maturing. Maybe, just maybe, it’s true that we will share in the work and then share in the glory when God’s will is finally done, on earth as it is in heaven.

For now, perhaps, with Job, we are still in our adolescence. And perhaps Rilke was right:

Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.

Sermon © Fourth Presbyterian Church