Text: Job 42:1-6, 10-17
This morning, I want to tell you a story about little Henry.
Henry walked to school every morning with his grandpa. And along their way, Grandpa would stop at the neighborhood store for a newspaper and a cup of coffee.
At the register, there were bins full of candies and gum and chocolates and every single morning, Henry would ask Grandpa if he could have some.
Every single morning, the answer was no.
Well, after several weeks of watching this, the cashier started to have a soft spot in her heart for the little boy. So one morning, as Grandpa and Henry came up to the register, the cashier said, “Good morning, Henry! How about this morning you reach in and get some of that candy you want… on me!”
Oh, he was SO excited! He reached out his hand to get some candy and then quickly pulled it back.
Instead, he grabbed Grandpa’s hand and shoved it into the bin with all of the sweets.
Grandpa was a bit stunned, and pulled back a whole fist full of candy.
As they kept walking to school, Grandpa was a bit puzzled. “Henry,” he asked, “Every single morning you ask me for candy… this is exactly what you have always wanted… why didn’t you pick out the candy yourself?”
Henry looked back at Grandpa with a grin on his face. “It is, Grandpa… but your hands are so much bigger than mine! My little hand was too small to get everything I wanted!”
There is a sense of Henry’s wisdom in our story of Job.
You and I, we are so small.
Compared with the stars and the oceans and the mountains and the vast diversity of creation, we are tiny specks of dust.
We might want to reach out and grab knowledge and answers and truth and faith… but our little hands are too small to get everything we want.
God’s hands are much bigger.
God’s wisdom is far greater.
God’s power is beyond our comprehension.
Last week, our youth took us through some of the mystery of God’s power and might.
We were reminded through song of just how powerful God is and how through the grace and the love of God, we can walk through the valley of the shadow of death and not be afraid.
When oceans rise, we can rest in God’s embrace.
In our troubled seas, God is our peace and God’s love will lead us through.
When we can’t feel a thing and are falling short, God says that we are loved and that we are held.
These messages of power are so important to the story of Job that we have been following these last few weeks.
At the beginning of November, we began to explore this little morality play in which a perfect, upright man, Job, is tested by God.
The Accuser has this question… will Job continue to be perfect and upright and faithful if things start to go badly for him? Or is he simply a fair-weather friend?
God allows this little experiment to proceed and Job’s flocks and livelihood and children are taken away from him. Even his own bodily health is impacted and he is covered in sores and finds himself in pain all day and night.
But still he refuses to turn his back on God.
The second part of our story involved Job’s friends.
They are convinced that Job must have done something wrong in order to have all of this punishment brought upon him.
They, like Job, firmly believed that good things happen to good people and that bad people get what they deserve. They see God as being the arbiter of retributive justice – where punishment and blessing is given out based upon someone’s faithfulness and goodness.
But for every one of their speeches, Job has one of his own.
He has done nothing wrong. He is innocent. If only he could have his day in court and stand before God, he could make his case and God would have to relent.
Job still believes at this point that God gives people what they deserve… and if he is being punished it is undeserved… and therefore… God is wrong.
Job is actually putting God on trial.
And as Isabel and Olivia reminded us in their message last week… God might be annoyed and a little upset at Job’s whining… maybe even perturbed at Job’s accusations… but the message God speaks out of the chaos and directly to Job’s heart is this: I created this whole world. I made everything in it. I understand how it works and am the very power that sustains it all. And… I love you. I’ve got your back.
For three chapters, God goes on and on and on about “the incomprehensible magnificence and immeasurable power of divine majesty.”
Were you there when I laid the earth’s foundations?
Have death’s gates been revealed to you?
Where’s the road to the place where light dwells?
Can you guide the stars at their proper times?
Do you know when mountain goats give birth?
Did you give strength to the horse?
Is it due to your understanding that the hawk flies?
Can you control the great beasts of the earth like the behemoth and the leviathan?
Job is stunned into silence.
He thought he had God all figured out… that God’s justice was some kind of divine math in which your goodness earned you points and blessings.
It actually reminds me of the television show, The Good Place, a comedy that explores ethics and morality and what we owe each other. The foundation of the afterlife in this universe is that for every good thing you do with selfless intent, you rack up points that allow you to enter “the good place” a place of eternal satisfaction.
But when you cuss, or stiff a waitress, or murder someone, points are deducted and without enough points, you end up in “the bad place.”
Job is living his life in a certain way, following all of the rules, making sacrifices for not only his potential sins but also those of his children, because he thinks that is what faith is about. Trying to earn God’s favor and blessing.
What he didn’t realize is that he already had it.
We all do.
The God who set the stars in motion and who knows about the birth of every mountain goat and how to direct the flight of a hawk also knows you and me intimately.
God knows every hair on our head.
God knows the divine plans in store for each of us.
And God’s justice is not a math equation.
Rather, it is a complicated, holy, grace-filled effort to take every broken, hurting, sinful thing in this world and to redeem and transform it back towards its holy purpose.
Job had only heard about God before… but now Job has seen God.
And God is far bigger, greater, more awesome than he ever imagined and his tiny way of grasping and understanding the world has been torn apart.
I think, if anything, this morality tale we find in the book of Job was an effort by early Jewish theologians to take apart what they believed was a very limited way of seeing God in the world.
So many people think that God is an impersonal judge who tallies right and wrong and who sits on the divine bench handing out punishments and rewards. And with such a calculated understanding of the divine, we can make no sense of that ancient question of why bad things happen to good people or why there is suffering in the lives of innocent people.
But our scriptures of our faith have a vastly different message for us about who God is and how deeply God cares for us.
Our God got down in the dirt and formed the first humans and breathed into them the breath of life.
Our God took imperfect people like Abraham and Noah and Jacob and through them, in spite of them, because of them, set in motion the divine plans for all the people of the world to be blessed.
Our God heard the cries of the people when they were caught in slavery in the land of Egypt and raised up a leader to bring them home.
In the end, what we find in the Book of Job are not easy answers to the question of why there is suffering. In fact, Job gets no answer or explanation for why so much was taken from him.
Instead, Job discovers that we are allowed to cry out when we suffer.
We should protest against injustice.
And we should open our lives and our hearts up to discover the ways that God is far powerful and more holy than we could ever imagine.
Before, Job had only heard about God.
But in the midst of his suffering and his yearning for truth, he encountered the very presence of God.
God reached out to him and in the process, Job found himself having a real, deepened, humble relationship with the Lord.
In our lives, we will face difficulties.
We will encounter diagnosis and questions that we cannot comprehend.
We will find ourselves asking why such awful things are happening in the world.
In these last few weeks, I have heard this very community raising up cries of concern for the death of loved ones, illness, wildfires, mass shootings, war, hunger, and homelessness.
None of these situations are deserved.
Innocent lives are impacted or harmed or taken far too soon.
We want answers and solutions.
And I think what we discover in the Book of Job is that there is no quick fix for the problems of this world. We can’t explain away why these things happen in a few words.
What we find instead is the presence of a God who is with us in the midst of it.
A God who hears every cry.
A God who seeks, in the words of Sharon Lynn Putt, “not to condemn and punish but to reconcile, to redeem, and to restore all of us to each other and to God.”
In the verses that we skipped in our reading for today, God reaches out to Job and invites him to offer up prayers and offerings for those three friends who had such a limited understanding of what was happening in Job’s life.
You see, even in the midst of restoring Job’s possessions, God is also working to redeem those relationships between Job and his friends.
And God is working to help transform and expand their understanding of how this world hangs together, too.
Our task, as we live out the truths of the Book of Job, is to listen to the suffering of others. To listen to our own pain. To not hide it, but hold it up into the light where God can show us that we are loved when we can’t feel a thing. We are strong when we think we are weak. We are held when we think we are falling short. We belong to God even when we think we don’t belong.
In that moment, we, like Job, can relent. We can surrender. We can lay our whole lives at the feet of God… knowing, trusting, believing… that no matter what happens, we are held in the hands of God.
Like Henry, our little hands aren’t big enough to fully grasp and understand the ways of this world. But God’s are.
Thanks be to God. Amen.
- illustration adapted from Discipleship Ministry preaching notes
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