“FROM DESPAIR TO HOPE”
FOUR-PART SERIES ON JOB
JOB, Part 4: "Mine eyes have seen the glory"
Sermon Preached by
The Rev. Dr. Andrew Stirling
Sunday, February 25, 2001
Text: Job XLII: 1 - 6
At this time of the year, on the island of Bermuda, there is usually a great scent in the air. The Easter lilies that are distributed throughout Easter are being prepared; the oleander has a particularly sharp, pink hue; the hibiscus bushes are starting to bloom; and there is a faint smell of cedar in the air after the moisture of winter. I used to love Bermuda at the end of February and, when I woke up this morning here in Toronto, I loved it all the more! It seemed that the winter was dying and everything was bursting into life. Bermuda, at the end of February is well nigh a paradise. I remembered going to school at this time of the year. The school that I went to was similarly a little patch of paradise. I attended Warwick Academy on Middle Road, an ivy-covered school with large porticos and a magnificent quadrangle with a fountain in the middle. Along the side of the building going down to the ocean there was a field on which we played sports. Lining it were oleander bushes and poinsettias. At the very end, the soccer field dropped off to a road and a beach where, after school, we could go swimming in the harbour. It was paradise.
But I remember one particular day, early in the morning. As was normal my colleagues and I, in uniform had gone up the front steps and entered our classroom. We opened the windows in order that the particularly warm February breezes could blow into our room. The shutters were open, the windows were open and our text-books were open to the study of Latin. All of a sudden there was the most terrible sound. It is not a sound, thank God, that I have heard before or since, but, upon hearing it, it was unforgettable. All the students and our teacher ran out of our Latin class and down the steps to the front of the school. There we realized what had caused the thud: A beautiful pink bus had struck one of our class-mates and killed him instantly. A few days later there was a memorial service. I certainly don't remember any of the hymns that were sung. I do remember that we sang our school hymn, Gaudeamus igitur, iuvenes dum sumus. I know that our principal said some kind words and a local clergyman gave a message. The only thing that I remember on that day was the sound of his brother's voice. His brother had flown in from Tufts University in Boston where he was studying. I don't even remember half of what he said about Brian, but this I do, he said: "I will never lead my life in the same way again." In the midst of paradise, the inexpressible had occurred. In the midst of paradise, the inexplicable had occurred. The only response that Brian's brother had was that his life was now forever changed. He would never again live it in the same way. This sums up for me the expressions that we find in the Book of Job.
Job has gone through the full gamut of life: He has gone from a man who had success, who had it all, who had a wife, a family, children, farms, wealth and health, to a man who was to lose it all; a man who in the midst of it had questioned God's sovereignty and divine purpose and will. Now finally, Job comes to the reality of what he should have learned all along. Through this suffering he would never live his life in the same way again; for indeed Job had reached the point where, after he had been instructed by his friends, after he had wrestled and debated with God, he realized that in fact God, in the midst of all of this, is still sovereign; that there is an immediacy to God's presence, even in the midst of that suffering; that as a result of it he must repent in dust and in ashes.
In many ways the story of Job is the story that all of us need to go through in order to mature so that we do not live our lives in the same way; so that when we face our own suffering, or the suffering of others, or whether we are simply asking about the nature of suffering in the world, if we go through it as Job went through it at the end we never live life in the same way. So I want to look then at how Job's suffering changed Job's life, irrevocably and forever.
It changed three things in Job The first is that it changed his view of faith. There is a wonderful moment at the very beginning of the Book in Chapter I, Verse 9, where Satan comes to God and baits Him. He says: "I wonder if Job will still worship you if he has nothing to gain." Now, in this, Satan had put his finger on one of the Achilles' heels of the faith of many people; namely, that we enter into a relationship with God with a quid pro quo. We enter a relationship with God on the assumption that, if we do so, everything in our lives from that moment on will run smoothly. I hear this every day in some of the TV evangelists. They are selling a bill of goods to people. Once you strip away all the hype, once you strip away all the verbiage and the quotes from scripture, there is one thing that is often underlying it all. They believe that faith is a guarantee to, for example, financial security, or it's a guarantee that a marriage, that was formerly on the rocks, will now be full of sunshine and light and peace; that the children that you formerly had that were rambunctious, rude and irreverent, will now be submissive, kind and holy; that your body will never experience pain again; and that you will live in paradise with a beautiful waft of oleander leaves coming over your head. If you buy into this faith, and if you subscribe to this faith, just think of the great panoply of blessings that lie before your very eyes. My friends, is it any wonder that, with that degree of false teaching, when people who have committed themselves to Christ find in fact that their marriages require work; that their children are not always holy and blessed; that their body is not always strong; that their bank account is not always overflowing; that paradise is not always before their eyes; they actually then begin to question the sovereignty of God?
Indeed, there are many people all around us who are the victims of that false teaching. It pervades every day when people say to me time and time again: "Why is it that although I believe in God these things are happening to me and I must suffer."
I once ran into a young man who was telling the story of a minister who was trying to grab the attention of his congregation. He did so by issuing the following challenge in a sermon. He said: "Do you know that every single member of this congregation is eventually going to die?" And for extra impact, he repeated the question: "Do you realize that every single member of this congregation sooner or later is going to die?" Well, there was an old man sitting in the front pew. He began to giggle and laugh. So the preacher looked down at him and said: "Excuse me, why do find this funny?" The man looked up and said: "Hey, I'm not a member of this congregation."
Slightly selfish, don't you think? But that's exactly how the view of God often is. It's selfish, it's self-centred, it's What can I get out of this God? not the commitment that I have to this God who will forever be with me. And that kind of false view of faith is so often prevalent; that feeling, that self-centred core that many of us have that treats God as if God is somehow a commodity on the shelf to make our life sweet. Job had to learn as he traveled with God through his sufferings that that is actually an erroneous view of faith. Faith is much deeper than that. That was born out of his understanding, I believe, of the second thing: He developed a new view of God.
Job, you see, had been listening to his friends. We visited them the first week: Eliphaz, Bildad and Zophar, the great philosophers and theological thinkers. They had only one formula, remember: the formula that if you are a good person, good things will happen to you and if you are a bad person, bad things will happen to you. And so, when Job has bad things happening to him, he has a crisis, not of faith in God, but he wonders about himself. He wonders, therefore, if God is just. He wonders whether or not he is righteous. He enters into this great period of introspection and guilt and eventually anger. Because ultimately, what Job wanted to do in response to those friends was to fully understand God and to have a package deal that would allow him to understand everything that would ever happen to him.
I am reminded of a man who was in a former congregation of mine and who was a voracious reader and a spiritual seeker. He spent most of his time reading books about God and he was always charging around trying to get people to tell him what he should believe and do. Nearly every week he was in my office wanting some new book from the shelves in order that he might be able to finally understand God. In fact, for hour after hour, week after week, he spent most of his time behind the desk, reading, absorbing. And one admired him on one level: He was really trying to understand God; to grasp Him at the very depths of intellect, and at the very depths of theology. The only problem was that the more he continued on his search, the more depressed he became, until finally one day I intervened. I said: "You know, isn't it about time that you just put your books away; maybe even stopped going to church and listening to me for a while? (Not, by the way, that I am recommending that here, let it be understood.) I challenged him: "You know, in our church, there is a Food Bank, maybe you should go and work there. Our church supports a homeless shelter, maybe you should volunteer there. Our church has a pastoral care committee: Why don't you go and hold someone's hand and sit beside him on a bed?" Unfortunately, the young man did not want to do that and I suspect somewhere in that town, even to this day, he is sitting behind the desk, trying to figure God out from the books.
That is not the way that God is known. God is known in the concrete nature of human existence. God is known by an act of trust. God is known by an act of faith, like Abraham who steps out into the unknown. God is known and revealed in our encounters with one another. God is known and seen through the power of the Holy Spirit who goes forward in our daily lives. But too many people want to try and figure God out first and then live a life of faith, rather than live a life of faith and then find out Who God is. The problem with Job's friends was that they had a philosophy and a theosophy, but they did not have a theology which is predicated on the revelation of God. Job finally learns that.
The great Old Testament scholar, Gerhard von Rad, in his great work on the Old Testament, once said that the greatest and most dangerous words that are in the whole Book of Job are when Job says God must do this. And Job realized, and Job woke up, not when he had determined God's place in the world, but when Job was determined to understand that his place in the world was determined by God. He changed from being egocentric, full of himself, wrapped up in his own definitions of God, to becoming theocentric, understanding the central place that God's sovereignty has in his life. That is why, at the end of it all, he wrote the following: "In the past, I knew only what others had told me, but now I have seen You with my own eyes." When Job broke out of his obsession with himself, he finally could see Who God truly was.
But that was the result of a third thing: that Job had a new view of suffering. Job suffered greatly: He had lost everything; he was shattered. But in the midst of all that, he changed. He changed from someone who, at the very beginning, was quite certain about things; who had a faith wrapped up; who knew what he was going to do: a man who had everything, including a sense of his own righteousness. But when he faced suffering, he changed. There was a mystery to it all and, in that mystery, he became full of faith. He had been certain, all right, in the beginning. He had a package deal. It all seemed very nice and neat, but suffering caused him to turn to faith, because suffering ultimately leads to fiducia, trust. What Job didn't have in the beginning, Job had at the end. What Job had at the beginning was a self-sufficiency. What Job had at the end was trust, trust in God.
There are many places throughout the Bible where a similar view is expressed over and over again. It is there in the Book of Isaiah; it is there in Psalm XXXVII: When people face the fact that the formula that Job's friends had is changed; when it seems that those who are the oppressors are succeeding and those who are the innocent are suffering; then, in the midst of that, something else is learned about God. It is summed up beautifully in Psalm XXXVII: "Don't be worried on account of the wicked; don't be jealous of those who do wrong." "Be patient and wait for the Lord to act; don't be worried about those who prosper or those who succeed in their evil plans. Don't give in to worry or anger; it only leads to trouble. Those who trust in the Lord will possess the land." You see, my friends, Job was not known for his patience so much as he was for his sense of endurance. Job was not a godly man in a true manifestation of the word. He became a faithful man who understood that, even in the midst of his sufferings, God went with him.
Just recently I picked up again the book on Mother Theresa entitled No Greater Love. This is one of the books that maybe my friend should have read right from the word go and maybe stopped reading any more. It's a wonderful expression of suffering. Listen to these words of Mother Theresa: "In twenty-five years in Calcutta, we have picked up more that thirty-six thousand people from the streets and more than eighteen thousand have died a most beautiful death. When we pick them up from the street, we give them a plate of rice. In no time, we revive them. A few nights ago we picked up four people. One was in a most horrible, terrible condition, covered with wounds full of maggots. I told the sisters that I would take care of her while they attended to the other three. I really did all that my love could do for her. I put her in bed, then she took hold of my hand. She had such a beautiful smile on her face and she said only: Thank you. Then she died. There was a greatness of love. She was hungry for love and she received that love before she died. She spoke only two words, but her understanding love was expressed in those two words. In a New York home we have have a home for AIDS patients who are dying from what I call the leprosy of the west. On Christmas Eve I opened this house as a gift to Jesus for his birthday. We started with fifteen beds for some poor AIDS patients and four young men I brought out of jail because they did not want to die there. They were our first guests I made a little chapel for them. There these young people who had not been near Jesus could come back to him if they wanted to. Thanks to God's blessing and His love their hearts completely changed. Once, when I went there, one of them had to go to the hospital and he said to me:" (and I want you to listen to these words) "Mother Theresa, you are my friend and I want to speak to you alone. So the sisters went out and he spoke. And what did this man say? This was someone who hadn't been to confession or received communion and in all those years he had nothing to do with Jesus, but he told me this: You know, Mother Theresa, when I get a terrible headache I compare it with the pain that Jesus had when they crowned him with thorns; when I get that terrible pain in my back, I compare it with Jesus when he was scourged; when I get the terrible pain in my hands and feet, I compare it with the pain Jesus had when they crucified him. I ask you to take me back home, for I want to die with you. I got permission from the doctor to take him back home. I took him to the chapel. I have never seen anybody talk to God the way that that young man talked to Him. There was such an understanding love between Jesus and him. After three days, he died."
This leads me to our final point: That the book of the story of the suffering of Job teaches us the nature of discipleship. I know that it is always dangerous to read back into a text in the Old Testament something from the New. But I do not think it is spurious, or wrong, to read into the Book of Job the story of the life of Jesus of Nazareth. For when you look at the story of Job, a man who had everything, who gave it up, who lost it and who gained it back because of his trust in God, surely we see an archetype of Jesus of Nazareth. But Jesus of Nazareth is not just like a Job. Jesus of Nazareth is God who goes through life just like Job, a God who gives up everything for the sake of humanity; a God who does not remain distant from human suffering but goes through it; a God who gives up things in order that He might bear the stripes and the wounds of human suffering and pain; a God who endures with us; a God who endures for us, not because God has to, not because God has to prove His justice, but because of God's love. The message of the Christian gospel is the message of the faith of Job: that our faith is not predicated on what we can get out of it, that our faith is not based on an insurance policy that guarantees that we experience paradise all the time. The faith that we have is that in this life and in the next God goes with us; that through that suffering, we often see God more clearly and more poignantly that we would otherwise see Him; that in the midst of paradise, when the unspeakable happens, our lives are forever changed when we have encountered God.
John, bless him, loves to give me books. I think he does so in the hope that I will become wiser. Is that not the case, John? Not long ago, he gave me one book by Frederick Buechner, entitled The Longing for Home. I have read this book so carefully over the last few weeks. At the end of the book, Frederick Buechner (who, I found out, went to my school in Bermuda, Warwick Academy - amazing) quotes Albert Schweitzer, and I leave you with these prophetic words: God comes to us as one unknown, without a name, as of old, by the Lakeside. He came to those who knew Him not. He speaks to us the same word, follow thou Me, and sets us to the task which He has to fulfil for our time. He commands. And to those who obey Him whether they be wise or simple, He will reveal Himself in the toils, the conflicts, the sufferings which they shall pass through in His fellowship. And, as an ineffable mystery, they shall learn in their own experience Who God is.
My friends, in the midst of paradise, the inexpressible often happens, but when we go through it with God - with Jesus Christ, our lives are never the same, for God goes with us. That was the lesson for Job. Amen.
This is a verbatim transcription of the original sermon.