Sunday, September 27, 2015 | 8:00, 9:30, and 11:00 a.m.

Disruptive Theater

Shannon J. Kershner
Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 104:1–9
Job 3 (selected verses)

Job and his comforters try to define God as present
in ways and places where God is not present,
to define him as moral order, as the best answer
humans can give to the problem of their life.
God is not an answer humans can give, God says.
God himself does not give answers. God gives himself.

Frederick Buechner

As you can tell, we have left the Gospel of Mark today and landed in the book of Job. The original reason was because next month, one of our seminary-trained staff members, Mark Eldred, is going to start teaching an adult Christian formation class on the book of Job. It will be a kind of conversation between Job and a recent New York Times best seller, Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me. Therefore, Mark and I thought it might be useful for us to spend some time with Job in worship before that series begins.

But this week I have also wondered if this decision might be a bit providential, given Pope Francis’s visit to our country and the speeches he has given. So much of what the pope continually lifts up in word and in deed is the suffering of the innocent and how it is our responsibility, as human beings created in God’s image, to respond. If there is one biblical character, other than Jesus, who embodies the suffering of the innocent, it is Job. One scholar quips that Job is the patron saint of moral outrage (Carol O. Newsome, “The Book of Job,” The New Interpreter’s Bible, vol. IV, p. 319). So perhaps it is God’s providence that has led us to sit with Job today.

Walter Brueggemann writes this about the book of Job: “It is dramatic fiction. That is, it does not purport to be history; it is theater designed to voice an alternative reality and to invite a listening Israel to reimagine its explanation of reality, which had gone mostly uncriticized. Like all good theater, it is aimed at self-awareness that invites us to see our lives afresh from a new and different perspective” (Bruce Birch, Walter Brueggemann, Terrence Fretheim, and David Peterson, A Theological Introduction to the Old Testament, p. 394). So taking Dr. Brueggemann’s framing of this book as truthful, disruptive theater, let us now turn our imaginative attention to the stage.

The stage curtain rises, and we meet Job face-to-face. We meet him amongst the ashes. We meet him as he is worn out from feeling like his world is crashing down around him and his shoulders are too weak to hold it up anymore. Job’s oxen, donkeys, and servants have all been slain. His children were killed in a freak accident. Job’s own body betrayed him by breaking out in loathsome sores. Here in this third chapter we see Job as his mind reels from the quick plunge from health and joy into despair and pain. The curtain rises, and we meet Job amongst the ashes, scraping himself with potsherd, cursing the day of his birth.

Before our curtain rose this morning, several other scenes flew by in Job’s life. Had our curtain risen earlier, we would have seen Job in his finest hours. Job as patient Job. Job as blameless and upright. Job as the greatest of all the people in the east. Those scenes stand in the background. But just as quickly as the winds off of Lake Michigan can strip a tree of its leaves, Job is stripped of all that he has: wealth and possessions, the lives of his children, his own health—all of it falls away, leaving only the bare branches of his despair.

Three friends creep up to Job as he sits amongst the ashes. Initially his friends are too stunned by what they see to say anything. They cannot believe that this hollowed-out, empty-eyed man is their friend Job. So his friends sit for seven days and seven nights, rendered mute by Job’s pain. Job sits silently too. Shocked. Stunned. Betrayed.

That brings us back to today’s scene. Our curtain rises, and we meet Job amongst the ashes: tired, weary, and very, very angry. “What have I done to you, God?” he asks, shaking his fist. “What have I done to deserve this? Answer me. I have been nothing but faithful, good, and true to you, O God. And yet you reward me with death and suffering. How I wish I had not been born! How I wish I had not given you the pleasure of creating me. Why have you forsaken me, God? How have I wearied you? Answer me.”

Our curtain rises, and we meet a very angry Job. A Job who has had it with all the pain and suffering he sees, not only in his own life, but also in lives all around him. And as we see him shaking his fist at God, some of us might look at his grotesque drama and find the shape of our own suffering staring back at us. Some of us might, as Margaret Hess puts it, “hear our own worst terrors, fears, losses, and tragedies in the contours and silhouettes of Job’s story” (Margaret Hess, “The Labyrinth of Life,” Christian Century, 4 June 1997).

Our details might be different, but the questions are the same: Why God? Why is war still raging and refugees dying to find a way out? Why has our discourse gotten so toxic that it is national news when the pope speaks of compassion and mercy? Why is violence in our city just the way it is? Why did I lose that job? Why does my mother have dementia? Why am I made fun of at school? Why have you forsaken me, us, others? Some of us look up on stage and see ourselves in Job’s eyes, sitting amongst the ashes, feeling shocked, stunned, betrayed.

And as we watch, an interesting shift begins to take place on stage. Job’s friends start getting nervous as they experience the fiery heat of Job’s angry lament to God. When Job was a silent sufferer, they also sat silently, out of pity and empathy for their friend. But once Job started taking God to trial, they began to put some distance into the friendship. As Job gets angrier and angrier, his friends feel more and more estranged. His naked honesty with God scares them. Perhaps they wonder if that kind of questioning of the Holy is nothing but unfiltered unbelief.

So his three friends decide to take it upon themselves to answer Job’s questions. Each of them launches into a well-intentioned attempt to impose their own meaning and structure onto Job’s experience. “You must have sinned in order for this to make any sense at all. All of this must be your fault,” one concludes. “Just deal with it, move on, repent. That is just the way it is,” speaks another. “Job, the only thing I can figure is that you deserve it. Clearly, you were not as faithful as we thought. If you were, you would not be sitting here today,” declares the third. All of them express some form of a theology of divine retribution: God gives you what you deserve.

We hear their paltry responses and might be shocked at their ignorance. Job does not deserve any of that suffering. But perhaps we could pause before we stand in judgment. Are their answers all that different from the answers to suffering that swirl around us? “She was assaulted? Had she been drinking? What was she wearing?” “People who don’t have jobs don’t want jobs.” “It’s not our responsibility to care for that child. His parents should have come to this country legally.” “We live in a post-racial society. Any discrepancies of opportunity must be caused by something else.” Perhaps their responses to suffering are not all that different from the ones we hear.

But let us turn our attention back to the stage. We see the heat of Job’s anger rising from the ash heap, and we watch as his friends scoot farther and farther away from him. They open their mouths with well-intentioned attempts to provide meaning to his suffering. Yet with every reason they articulate, the power of their own helplessness grows stronger. Nevertheless, they press on, trying their best to stay safely within a world of easy explanations, of cause and effect, of a theology of retribution. Job presses on too. But he presses on with his prosecution of God. He presses on with his curses and his contempt, his honesty and fiercely hot anger. Job hears the paltry excuses of his friends and throws those right back in their faces. He refuses to listen to their lies and digest them. He refuses to let someone else put structure and meaning onto his suffering.

But more than anything else, even as he shakes his fist at God, even as he curses his birth, even as his fiercely hot anger rises off the ash heap, Job absolutely refuses to let go of the very God he claims has abandoned him to this suffering. At that moment on the ashes, Job could not remember who he was and why he had been given life in the first place, but he was not going to forget from Whom he had been given life. Job clings to God with his ragged and dirty fingernails, demanding, expecting something. An answer? Maybe. A response? Definitely.

The stage curtain drops. That scene ends. More scenes pass—more prosecution, more debates, more anger, more questions, more demands. And then the curtain rises again, this time, near the end of the book. Job is still clinging to God with all that he has, with his raggedy fingernails, with every ounce of strength left in his hollowed-out body. And he opens his sunken eyes to see a whirlwind, a tempest. He opens his clogged ears to hear God’s voice.

We, too, hear God’s response as the curtain rises. “Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?” God begins. It would seem God had paid great attention to the cries of his Job, this suffering son of God’s. Job’s mouth closes as God’s mouth opens with God’s own long list of unanswerable questions. In a blustery poetic speech that goes on and on, “God huffs and puffs about the mighty mystery of God, a conundrum Job [or his friends] will never be able to resolve” (Margaret Hess, “The Labyrinth of Life,” Christian Century, 4 June 1997).

As God continues, some things start to become clearer for those of us watching. We realize that apparently, appearances notwithstanding, during all of that time, God was holding on to Job just as tightly as Job was holding on to God. And though Job’s righteous, fiercely hot anger scared his friends, his anger did not scare God. When Job’s cursing and contempt caused his friends to scoot farther and farther away—nervous, fidgety, uncomfortable—it only caused God to move closer, cling more tightly, hold more strongly on to this suffering son of God’s, God’s child Job.

As our vision about what we are seeing gets clearer, we continue to hear God’s blustery response, full of questions such as “Is it by your wisdom the hawk soars and spreads its wings?” and “Is it you who tames the sea monster?” In response to Job’s tenacious questions, God asks God’s own tenacious questions. Perhaps God’s response is merely divine evasion. We could see it that way. God certainly does not respond the way Job’s friends responded. God does not answer to the “why” question of Job’s suffering.

Rather, God chooses to change the question. Through the blustery poetry of the whirlwind, God changes Job’s question from “Why does suffering happen?” to “Where is the presence of God when suffering happens?” And through the blustery, unanswerable poetry of the whirlwind, as we continue to watch what unfolds on the stage, we begin to see that like the question, Job is also being changed. But Job is being changed not because he found the answers to why. Rather, Job is being changed because in his honesty, he has encountered God.

Through the blustery poetry of the whirlwind, God takes Job and lifts him up above his own pain and the pain of the world in order to give Job a larger picture of creation—a creation born, breathed, brought into being by God’s own breath, a creation we also believe redeemed, held, restored by God’s own body, Love Made Flesh. And we realize it is not what God says that changes Job. It is the fact that God is there to say it that changes Job. For through God’s blustery poetry of the whirlwind, Job realizes that as tightly as he had clung to God, even in his fiercely hot anger, God had clung even more tightly on to him, God’s suffering child. Job is restored by that honest encounter with the Holy, and the curtain falls.

But if you don’t mind, I want to raise our curtain one more time, as a kind of encore. This time, though, it is to see a lithograph by Czech artist Oldrich Kulhanek. It is his artistic rendition of the Job story. Allow me to describe it to you: Initially, we notice a man crouched down, on his knees, chest to the ground. He is naked and gaunt, head shaved, face turned away. At first, it seems that he must be the Job we met earlier on the ash heap—forsaken, destroyed, broken. A hollowed-out man.

But when we look closer, we see something else. We see that this man is crouched over something. He is holding something . . . or is it someone? When we look closely we see the faint outlines of another face, another person underneath his chest, being held, being protected, being embraced by this hollowed-out man. And we realize that figure underneath is our Job. Job is the one being held. Job is the one clasped in the embrace. So who, then, is this other one? Who is this other suffering one whom we see naked and gaunt, head shaved, face turned away? Who is he? As we look even closer, we see the very faint outline of a cross standing behind them—tilted down, touching the earth, empty. And the final curtain falls. Amen.