October 8, 2006 — 8:23 PM
A Matter of Integrity
Job 1:1; 2:1-10
Psalm 26
Hebrews 1:1-4; 2:5-12
Have you ever heard someone say, "She got what she deserved" when hearing that something bad happened to another person? Or maybe the opposite was true and the comment "He didn't deserve that" was uttered.
We humans like to search for meaning in the good and bad things that happen to us and to the people around us. This isn't anything new - it's at least as old as the Bible. The Israelite people, when faced by suffering or tragedy, routinely looked to their actions as a people to see where they had broken covenant with Yahweh. It was a well-known belief that God would bless the people as long as they remained true to the covenant between God and them. If they did not do so, God was no longer bound by it and bad things were sure to happen.
Most of what we read in the Old Testament reinforces this way of thinking. People are said to prosper because they followed God's laws. Foreign nations who came and conquered the small nations of Israel and Judah were said to be given aid by God - meaning, they were allowed to have success against God's people because the people had not been faithful to the covenant.
But there are some texts that stand up to such black and white reasoning about the causes of suffering.
In the New Testament we find Jesus refusing to say who had sinned to cause a man to be born blind. The blindness is not linked to someone's sin (or infidelity to the covenant). Jesus does not say why the man is blind. It just is how he was born.
In the Old Testament, many psalms plead with God for mercy arguing that the speaker has done no wrong and so the suffering he is experiencing is unjust.
And, by far the most famous text that shows that sometimes suffering cannot be linked to a cause is the book of Job.
Today's lectionary reading gives us just the basics from the prologue where Job goes from being a very prosperous and happy man with a large family and many animals to a man stripped of everything except his wife.
In the interest of time, those who determined the lectionary readings chose to skip over all but the first verse of the first chapter of the book. In that first chapter the character named Satan comes to God, much like he does in the selection we read from the second chapter, and prompts God to test Job's faith to see if Job will stay true to God even when things go poorly for him. And, God agrees to let this test happen.
So in the first chapter, all manner of bad things come Job's way to wipe out his livestock and to kill off his children. But, in spite of these calamities, Job remains faithful to God.
This prompts Satan to come a second time to God to challenge Job's faith. God notes that Job has kept his integrity throughout all of the previous tests. But this does not satisfy Satan. He still believes that Job's faith is based on some desire to profit from it.
Once again, God concedes and allows Satan to test Job further. But God will not let Satan goes so far as to kill Job. Job's life must be spared.
This time, the afflictions that Satan brings affect Job's body directly. He is covered from head to toe with sores. And this time, Job's wife notices how he keeps his integrity. She cannot understand why and so she advises him to give it up and just curse God so that he can die and be done with the whole lousy situation.
But Job does not. Instead he asks, "Shall we receive the good at the hand of God, and not receive the bad?" Satan was sure that Job would cave at the first sign of bad things and when he didn't Satan pushed it to the furthest extreme trying to force Job to renounce his faith in God. Satan failed. Job remained true to his faith in God. Job kept his integrity.
Have you ever wondered how you would have reacted if you were Job? I pray that none of you ever face such extensive suffering as that which Job faced. But any suffering, no matter how big or little, is still suffering - it is not the wholeness, God's shalom, that God wills for us to have.
Losing material possessions, like Job did when he lost his livestock, is difficult because they bring us a sense of security. They represent wealth and position in society. They show our sense of taste and our ability to acquire goods.
Losing family members - whether through death, like Job's children, or through estrangement - is difficult because it takes away people we love; people we hope love us back. These are people who know at least a little bit of our story and who therefore help us remember who we have been and what dreams we have had for our lives.
Losing our health, as Satan so rightly points out, hits us at the very core. Health problems affect our mood and our outlook on life. They can impede our ability to go about daily tasks. Losing our health can force us slow down and make us unable to accomplish even the simplest of tasks. It can make us dependent on others, hampering our attempts to go places or do things for ourselves.
Losing something - having something and then having it taken away - is difficult. No matter what it is that is taken away. And losing something very easily can make us bitter or angry.
But it didn't affect Job that way. Nor did it affect the writer of our psalm that way. Both Job and this writer have kept their integrity in the face of suffering.
How were they able to keep their integrity?
Our passage from Job gives us some insight. Here we find that Job does not look for a cause for his suffering. And in not looking for a cause he does not look for someone or something to blame. He immediately moves beyond the instinct to blame someone and offers another way of understanding how suffering and faith fit together.
The Old Testament theologian Walter Brueggemann explains it this way:
"The book of Job offers no explanation of suffering and does not intend to. Rather the text voices a larger theological vision of the power and mystery of God, who will not be caught in the small circle of human suffering. In the refusal to attend to Job at all, the reader is drawn away from suffering to God's large, even overwhelming reality. The effect is to trump suffering with [God's] reality.
... the Scripture offers a recontextualization, whereby suffering is situated in a relationship with [God] and, in the end, the relationship itself is the be-all and end-all of faith."
When we face suffering, we need to step back and ask ourselves if there is a reason why we are suffering. If there is, then, by all means, we need to work to fix that so that the suffering will stop. But if we are unable to identify a cause for our suffering, we need to be like Job and acknowledge that sometimes we are asked to take the bad as well as the good from God.
Our passage from Hebrews this morning shows that Jesus did exactly that. There, the writer finds it "fitting that God, for whom and through whom all things exist, in bringing many children to glory, should make the pioneer of their salvation perfect through suffering." Jesus, the pioneer of our salvation, suffered death, "so that by the grace of God he might taste death for everyone."
Now we all know that Jesus did not cause this death to be brought upon himself because of some sin or some infidelity to the covenant with God. He suffered so that "he might taste death for everyone." He knows what we face and he understands our suffering precisely because he suffered.
He recontextualized the suffering. He, being God the Son, knew that God's reality is much bigger than creation can behold. He knew the importance of relationship. And so he suffered so that our relationship with God might be restored through salvation.
Richard Rohr in his book "Radical Grace" agrees that we need this recontextualization in the face of suffering and despair. He says:
"Rising and dying are closely related. Despair, I suspect, is another kind of dying and another kind of pain. It is not so much the loss of persons as the loss of ideals, visions, and plans. For people who hitched their future or their hopes to certain stars, the loss of those stars can be bitter and disabling.
"It usually happens slowly as we recognize unfulfilled dreams and as we gradually face our own impotence and the "sin of the world" (John 1:29). We are forced to let go of images: images we built in our youth, images that solidified and energized our own self-image. The crash of images is experienced as a death to the spirit, as a loss of hope, as a darkness almost too much to bear. Many, if not most, become tired or cynical while maintaining the old words that have become clich駸 even to themselves.
"Spiritual growth is the willing surrender of images in favor of True Images. It is a conversation that never stops, a surrender that never ceases. It is a surrender of self-serving and self-created images of self, of others, of God. Those who worship the images instead of living the reality simply stop growing spiritually. In this light, the First Commandment takes on a whole new power and poignancy:
" 'You shall not make for yourself a carved image or any likeness of anything in heaven or on earth or beneath the earth. You shall not bow down before them.' (Exodus 20:4-5)
"It seems that many people, religious people in particular, would sooner relate to images than to the reality where both despair and God lie hidden.
"Until we walk with this despair, we will not know that our hope was hope in ourselves, in our successes, in our power to make a difference, in our image of what perfection and wholeness should be. Until we walk with this despair, we will never uncover the real hope on the other side of human achievement. Until we allow the crash and crush of our images, we will never discover the real life beyond what only seems like death."
What suffering is testing your ability to keep your integrity of faithfulness to God? What difficult situations have come your way that are making it difficult for you to glorify God and enjoy God forever?
I want to end this time of hearing God's Word opened to us this morning in silence. I invite you to take the rock that you selected before worship and hold it in your hands. Look at it and place upon it all the suffering that you are facing today. Name each thing that is weighing you down and grieving your soul. Put it all on this rock, which may be small but can bear the weight of your soul. After several minutes of silent reflection I will lead us in our responsive chant. I know that it is probably unfamiliar to most of you, but it is a simple tune so I encourage you to join in singing it with me as soon as you feel comfortable.
As we sing this chant, I invite each of you to bring your rock forward and to lay it down with all of your suffering at the foot of the cross. God, through Jesus Christ, empowered by the Holy Spirit is waiting to lift those burdens off of you and to call you a good and faithful servant who has kept integrity in relationship to God.
Let us join in silent meditation.
Chant: "Surely God is in this place, holy ground."
