World Communion Sunday
October 6, 2024

Sermon

Rocky Supinger
Associate Pastor

Psalm 8
Job 2:1–10

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Faith found me when I was in college, and pretty quickly I was all-in on Jesus and church and Bible study, trying to discern what God wanted me to do with my life.

Including my dating life. And so I read this book that some of my peers were reading called Dating with Integrity. The author of that book put forward the counterintuitive thesis that, for Christians, it’s wrong to give preferential treatment to a person just because you are interested in them romantically.

This was based on a (mis)reading of a verse in the New Testament epistle of James that instructs the church to not give preferential treatment to people based on their wealth.

In any case, the book argued that young Christians should not go out on dates together but should instead socialize in groups, for the sake of accountability, of course (you can figure that out for yourself), and also for the sake of not treating one another preferentially based on romantic attraction.

So don’t hold hands, because would you do that with your other friends you’re not dating? Don’t open the door for someone you’re flirting with if you would not also hold the door for your buddy on the baseball team.

It leaned heavily on an understanding of integrity that meant you treat everyone the same way; you don’t extend special kindness or do special favors for someone just because he or she makes your heart go pitter patter. You do it because it’s a good thing to do.

That’s integrity.

Three times in all this it is said of Job in these verses we just heard that he is of “absolute integrity,” and by the end of the prologue there can be no doubt of that. The Adversary predicted with such confidence that Job would abandon his integrity and would curse God to God’s face.

His wife, who is with him in all this, wants him to do what the Adversary predicted he would do. But he doesn’t. He won’t. The Adversary is wrong, and Job’s wife is denounced as foolish.

In all this, Job didn’t sin. All of this.

Let’s review briefly: Oxen and donkeys killed by the sword along with the herdsmen. Sheep and shepherd devoured by fire from the sky; camels and their caretakers raided and put to the sword; children — sons and daughters — killed by a freak storm that toppled the tent they were partying in.

Yet in all this, Job did not sin. In all this Job did not blame God.

Not even in the throes of burning sores covering his entire body, scraping himself with a potsherd on a heap of ash. Even in all this, Job didn’t sin with his lips.

This is what we have in Job: A figure whose integrity is absolute. A model of faith who cannot be enticed or beaten into abandoning his conviction, a person whose faithfulness is really, truly, for nothing.

Isn’t this what it means to have integrity? To do the right thing for no other reason than that it is the right thing? Not because it’ll get you likes and shares on Instagram. Integrity is doing the just and right thing, and that goes well beyond hanging a banner or a flag.

There’s a line in a poem that I love that says “To do what is difficult all one’s days as if it were easy, that is faith.” For me, that rhymes with integrity. In all of this, to do a difficult thing — and some days there’s nothing more difficult than maintaining faith — for the sake of the thing itself, that is faith. That is integrity.

It’s pretty easy to have faith on the good side of a hip replacement or a cancer diagnosis, isn’t it? When your skin is clear, the kids are thriving in their careers and families, and the camels are all watered.

Anybody can be faithful when everything’s going your way, right? But when it’s difficult? When it’s awful? Head-shaved, clothes-torn, face-to-the-ash-heap?

Job is an emblem of faith when everything comes undone. Job’s integrity is absolute.

But Job wants something, too. Job is searching and scratching for something here on this ash heap.

Faith that has integrity can also question, perhaps must also question; one theologian said that faith without doubt isn’t really faith.

The faith of the Bible asks questions: “What is truth?” Pilate asked Jesus. “Who do people say that I am?” Jesus asked his disciples. “Who may abide on your holy hill?” the psalmist asks God. Even God asks questions: “Who told you that you were naked?” God asks the first humans in the garden.

When we find ourselves on some ash heap, deprived of our health or well-being, out of a job or out on the street, victimized, abandoned, or otherwise done dirty, our faith calls on us to ask, what in the holy hell is going on here?

Job’s question is rhetorical, and rhetorical questions are tricky. A rhetorical question isn’t really a question, but it is.

“Will we receive good from God but not also receive bad?”

Do you hear the question underneath the question? Is all this bad actually from God? What a faithful question.

We should pay attention to what changes for Job as his story unfolds. After all this about his oxen and sheep and camels and children (!), Job does not respond with a question at all. He issues an affirmation of faith: The Lord has given; the Lord has taken.

But now all this with the sores and the ash heap, and Job’s wife has a question of her own: Are you still clinging to your integrity? Her question lands, I think, because Job is all out of affirmations now. Now all he has is this question: Will we receive bad . . . from God?

The question, I believe, is as faithful as the affirmation.

I believe that because I believe in the ancient phrase of St. Anselm of Canterbury that faith seeks understanding.

And Job’s experience defies understanding, because it is the experience of innocent suffering, and when we see suffering and misery and death visited upon people who did nothing to deserve it, we should have questions about that.

We should not content ourselves with “religious” answers about everything being part of God’s perfect plan or “original sin” or anything else like that. Doctrine doesn’t play on the ash heap, you know?

I asked my friends about innocent suffering when I was younger and new to the faith. My friends had grown up in church and spoke very confidently about God and the ways of God in the world. You could see that they were inspired people. They were full of hope, because their faith gave them a way to understand themselves and the world they lived in.

But on this question they had an answer, and their faith had stopped seeking for another one. I didn’t understand what the Christian understanding of sin and its consequences (they loved to quote that verse from Romans that “the wages of sin is death”) had to do with people who suffered for no reason.

Like, all those people who died and who lost loved ones in Florida and North Carolina last week from a hurricane and floods, people whose houses were swept down the river so they lost everything — what sin caused that?

Their answer was that Adam and Eve’s sin caused that. Sin entered into the world through the first people we meet in the Bible, and that sin has turned everything bad, including natural disasters.

Now, we have become very well attuned this past, say, quarter century to the influence of human decisions and human actions upon the climate, and, therefore, the weather.

But it still begs for an answer from God why innocent people die in hurricanes and floods and earthquakes and tornadoes and fires — and I don’t like my friends’ answer today any more than I did back then.

Job has friends too, and for the rest of his story they will insist on their answer to his question: Yes, this calamity is from God, and it’s your fault.

No matter what Job says about his blamelessness and his integrity, his friends’ understanding of how good and bad circumstances relate to good and bad people just can’t be shaken.

To them, since Job is suffering, he clearly did something to deserve it. Their faith long ago stopped seeking understanding about this, and they certainly aren’t trying to understand Job’s situation.

What a shame. What a shame that we can deploy our faith in the service of looking away from innocent suffering. I think Job begs us instead to look right at it, to look right at that malnourished child, to linger awhile over images of a flooded town and its bereft residents, to account for all the evidence we see every day of people suffering for no reason — to look at it and listen to it with eyes and ears of faith in order to understand rather than to explain.

When we do that, as a community of faith, I believe we end up holding more questions than answers.

I want to say that there are answers. I want to believe that there are. I mean, it’s not a mystery to the author of Job, right? All this is from God. God couldn’t stand to lose a bet with his Adversary, so God handed Job over to be tortured. The narrator is very clear about that, aren’t they?

The answers we need to seek, then, seem to be about God.

Who is this God who is so proud of his servant Job, who dotes on him and gloats about him like an adoring parent one minute but then in the next minute allows himself to be incited to torture him?

How well do we actually know God? We hear the scriptures say over and over again that God is “merciful and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love.” Yet those same scriptures say more than once that God is “jealous,” a “devouring fire,” who “punishes children for the iniquity of their parents.” The Bible says a few times that God is love, but then it also says that God is capable of hate — of those who pay regard to worthless idols, of robbery and wrongdoing, the peoples’ festivals and solemn assemblies, even God’s own people themselves God is said to hate.

The life of faith is a questioning life, and the ultimate subject of our questioning must be God. And God’s ways are mysterious. God’s behavior in the story of Job is downright puzzling, mystifying.

Job’s absolute integrity derives from his relationship with God. Even now, on the ash heap, that relationship remains; you can hear it in his question — Will we receive good from God but not also bad?

The question testifies to an ongoing relationship of trust in God, even as it admits that Job doesn’t know God as well as he thought he did.

This is how it is with relationships, isn’t it? If you let them, if you stay in relationship with them, people will reveal themselves to you. That revelation is always a gift, and in the best relationships, it’s also kind of mysterious.

I learned when I was in my early twenties that my grandfather had two birthdays. Yeah, he went to the Social Security Administration when he was sixty-two and presented his birth certificate so he could start collecting benefits, and the person there pointed out to him something he’d never noticed: that the date of birth had been tampered with.

The story that unfolded from that discovery was that his parents in Toledo, Ohio, had become pregnant before they were married. So they got married quickly without telling anyone about the pregnancy, then moved to San Diego, California, where my grandfather was born about six months later. Three months after he was born, his parents sent the joyous news home to Toledo about the birth of their new baby boy.

Relationships are a mystery, and we don’t quite know what to do with every revelation they produce. But faithfulness requires we stay in relationship, stay in the mystery.

That’s where Job is at the end of this prologue: on the ash heap, but still in relationship with God.

Job will have a lot to say to God over the rest of his story. A lot. And before it’s all over, God will answer Job. That’s the good news for us in this ancient fable: that God will speak yet. What we hear may overwhelm us or confound us or reduce us to nothing, but there will be grace in God’s word to us. It is good news that God is still speaking to us.

And so as we prepare to receive our offering, as we do each week, I hope we can think of our giving of ourselves to the ministry of the church as an expression of the integrity of our relationships — with God, yes, and also with one another, and with all who are in need in the world around us.

Let us receive our offering.

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Sermon © Fourth Presbyterian Church