Sunday, October 11, 2015 | 8:00, 9:30, and 11:00 a.m.

A Trust That Makes Sense

Joyce Shin
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 22:1–15
Job 23:1–9, 16–17

Oh, that I knew where I might find him. . . .
If I go forward, he is not there; or backward,
I cannot perceive him; on the left he hides, and I cannot behold him;
I turn to the right, but I cannot see him. . . .
If only I could vanish in darkness,
and thick darkness would cover my face!

Job 23:3–17 (NRSV)

I saw God today. In that band
    of fiery redorangegoldenyellow
    between the blackblack smooth
    horizon line and the ragged edge
    of robineggroyalindigoblue.
He was there—for a long time—
    not fleeting as so often occurs.
“Where are you?” He was asking,
    and I didn’t know.
“Somewhere between Delhi
    and Bombay . . .”
“No,” He said, “where are you—
    really?”
“I don’t know,” I said, “but I think
    I can follow this light wherever
    it might lead.”
“Figure it out,” He said.
“Easy for You to say . . .”

Anonymous

You might not think about it this way, but there is a fine line between pessimism and optimism, between preparing for the worst and hoping for the best. Try as we might to walk this line, each of us probably tends to step on one side more than the other. On which side of the line we tend to walk probably has a lot to do with our upbringing, our life experiences, as well as our hard-wiring. Most of the time, we may not even be aware that we tend to walk on one side more than the other, until we trip over it.

I have become more aware of the need to walk the line since becoming a parent. As a parent I need to equip my daughter with a heavy dose of realism and idealism, with pessimism and optimism, with street smarts and a care-free attitude. She will need all of this to navigate life with resilience.

When we first moved to Chicago, Sophia was just two years old. She wanted, of course, to walk on her own two feet rather than to be carried everywhere, and with the wonder that is typical of a toddler, she found everything along her path absolutely fascinating. As her parent, I was also her protector, and there were times—when we would arrive home and the sun was going down and we had to park on the street some distance from our apartment—that I knew it wouldn’t be in our best interest to dawdle at every dandelion. And yet, not wanting to alarm her, I got into the habit of saying, “Sophia, we have to walk with a purpose, not like a porpoise.”

In a book entitled Raising Resilient Children, leading clinicians in child development and psychology Robert Brooks and Sam Goldstein write on the theme of resilience as the key to helping children cope with everyday challenges, adversity, and trauma. Having worked with many children over the course of their careers, they have concluded that the mindset of resilient children has to do with two things: first, how children view themselves and, second, how they view the world. I think we are all aware of the first: that children must view themselves as having worth. But have you given thought to the second – that children must view the world as benign, not harmful, as friendly, not threatening?

In the book Between the World and Me, a book that some of you have been reading for an Academy for Faith and Life class being offered at the church, the author Ta-Nehisi Coates, whose work some of you may have read in the Atlantic, writes a letter to his fifteen-year-old son. Mr. Coates is a black man who grew up in Baltimore, and in this letter he shares with his son the story of his own awakening to the truth about his place in the world.

Every parent wonders how much and when we should tell our children about the world. We wonder how we should expose them to it. Should we speak of its dangers, or should we speak of it as benign, even benevolent? In the letter to his adolescent son, Ta-Nehisi Coates deals with this dilemma. As a parent of a black child, he knows, on the one hand, that it is a risk not to speak of racism in the world; his child’s survival depends on knowing about it. On the other hand, to speak of racism is also a risk; it risks raising fear, anger, cynicism, pessimism, hopelessness, and defensiveness, emotions that will stand between his child and the world.

To his son he writes, and I quote:

I am afraid. I feel the fear most acutely whenever you leave me. But I was afraid long before you, and in this I was unoriginal. When I was your age the only people I knew were black, and all of them were powerfully, adamantly, dangerously afraid. I had seen this fear all my young life. . . . It was always right in front of me. (Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me, p. 14)

Coates goes on:

The fear was there in the extravagant boys of my neighborhood, in their large rings and medallions, their big puffy coats and full-length fur-collared leathers, which was their armor against their world. . . . I heard the fear in the first music I ever knew, the music that pumped from boom boxes full of grand boast and bluster. . . . I felt the fear in the visits to my Nana’s home in Philadelphia. . . . I barely knew her, but what I remember is her hard manner, her rough voice. And I knew that my father’s father was dead and that my uncle Oscar was dead and that my uncle David was dead. . . . My father was so very afraid. I felt it in the sting of his black leather belt, which he applied with more anxiety than anger . . . as if someone might steal me away, because that is exactly what was happening all around us. . . . I would hear it in Dad’s voice—“Either I can beat him, or the police.” (pp. 15–16)

Because of racism, generations of people have grown up in fear. They have grown up to view the world with suspicion, cynicism, and the resulting defensiveness. That is why racism is not just a social and moral issue that religious communities need to address. Racism is itself a religious issue. It strikes at the core of religion, because racism fundamentally threatens a person’s capacity to trust.

Over the course of his life, American theological ethicist H. Richard Niebuhr wrote extensively about the experience of faith. He distinguished between two fundamental existential orientations to the world: an orientation of fear and an orientation of trust. The latter, he explained, is what we experience as faith. Faith is a basic confidence that the world is ultimately good and therefore trustworthy. Faith allows us to live in hope, even when things are not going well for us, when things do not make sense to us, or when we suffer. In contrast, an orientation of fear toward the world, Niebuhr wrote, leads to defensiveness, which is the source of all evil.

As a theologian, Niebuhr further recognized that how we conceive of God profoundly shapes our existential orientation toward the world. If, for example, we conceive of God as a loving and benevolent parent, we may perceive the world as gracious. If we conceive of God as just, we may perceive the world as governed by justice. In such cases, we would be able to take a trusting stance toward the world. If, however, we conceive of God as vengeful, we may perceive the world as exacting and punitive. If we conceive of God as stingy, we may perceive the world in terms of scarcity. If we conceive of God as capricious, we may perceive the world warily. In all such cases, we would take a defensive stance toward a hostile world.

In the passage we read today from the book of Job, we find that Job is undergoing an existential crisis. He used to be a man who, like his friends, conceived of God as a just God and thought that the world was governed by justice. But when he suffers unjustly, when everything is taken from him—his home, wealth, children, and health—Job can no longer make sense of the world as he used to. Having lived a righteous life, he does not understand why he is now suffering. His former trust in a world that he thought was governed by justice begins to crack. Furthermore, the trust Job once had in God begins to falter, not only because God is not acting justly, but also because he cannot find God. More than anything, Job wants to make his case before God, but God is nowhere to be found. Job complains, “If I go forward, he is not there; or backward, I cannot perceive him; on the left he hides, and I cannot behold him; I turn to the right, but I cannot see him. . . . God has made my heart faint; the Almighty has terrified me.” From trust to fear, Job undergoes a crisis of faith.

Can you imagine no longer being able to say, as the Apostle Paul does, “If God is for us, who can be against us?” and, instead, saying, “with God against you, what hope can you possibly have?”

Job is a man badly in need of consolation, but the conventional wisdom with which his friends try to console him does not suffice. They try to console him by drawing upon the proverbs and formulas that people have been using over the centuries to explain the way the world operates and how human beings fit into the overall order of things. A righteous man like Job would have lived in accordance with such wisdom, and he would have done so expecting that by living wisely he would live well. His suffering is made all the greater precisely because he cannot fall back on the conventional wisdom on which he had always relied and with which his friends now try to console him. The wise know, they say, that a good person will be rewarded with success and a bad person punished with failure. Having no other explanation to fall back on, Job’s friends assume that Job, or his sons, must have done something wrong. But Job maintains that he has lived a righteous life, and we know from the first two chapters of the book of Job that this is in fact true.

Sometimes true consolation has to come in the form of the sublime. By chapter 37, everyone has spoken—that is, everyone except God. The debate over the meaning of Job’s suffering has exhausted explanations and conventional wisdom. At last, in chapter 38, God intervenes. “Out of a whirlwind” God speaks, and though he is angry, God’s speech is no argument. God doesn’t argue with Job. God doesn’t answer Job’s questions or address Job’s charges of injustice. God’s speech is, instead, a parade of questions. “Who is this that darkens counsel by words without knowledge? Gird up your loins like a man, I will question you, and you shall declare to me. Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth? Who determined its measurements? Who laid its cornerstone when the morning stars sang together and all the heavenly beings shouted for joy? . . . Or who shut in the sea with doors when it burst out from the womb?” God gets so caught up marveling at his great cosmic acts and then contemplating the vast variety of creatures he has made that he seems to forget his anger. And we notice that God’s speech leaves the very vocal Job stunned into silence. God has stunned Job with the sublime. With question after question, God silences Job, and God reorients Job.

In the penultimate chapter, when Job does speak again, he has very little to say—just six verses—and yet his brief response makes it all too clear that he is a changed man. The tone, the brevity, and the words of Job’s response portray a man who has been transformed. Not only does Job reengage himself in relationships and in the business of living, but he also reorients his existential quest. Job has been consoled. Not by conventional wisdom. Not by reasoned argument. But by meditation on the multitudinous composition of life!

There are times in life when things are so wrong and conditions are so unjust that we cannot be consoled by conventional answers. But we must nevertheless engage the world and go about the business of living. When the officer who shot Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, was not indicted, Ta-Nehisi Coates observed his son watching the news coverage. Without expressing his own opinion about the guilt or innocence of the officer, Coates writes about that night in his letter. I quote:

It was not my expectation that anyone would ever be punished. But you were young and still believed. You stayed up till 11 p.m. that night, waiting for the announcement of an indictment, and when instead it was announced that there was none you said, “I’ve got to go,” and you went into your room, and I heard you crying. I came in five minutes after, and I didn’t hug you, and I didn’t comfort you, because I thought it would be wrong to comfort you. I did not tell you that it would be OK, because I have never believed it would be OK. What I told you is what your grandparents tried to tell me: that this is your country, that this is your world, that this is your body, and you must find some way to live within all of it. (Between the World and Me, pp. 11–12).

How do we walk the line between planning for the worst and hoping for the best? How do parents raise their children to be resilient—to trust that the world is ultimately a benign place? Conventional wisdom doesn’t always help us to overcome attitudes of fear and suspicion toward the world. Perhaps those are the times when we need more than ever to marvel at, to be struck by, God’s great multitudinous world. Perhaps at those times when fear and suspicion stand between the world and ourselves, and there is nothing anyone can say to make sense of it, the consolation we so badly need can come by way of the sublime. Amen.