Tom Lenhart
Sermon October 29, 2006
“Acceptance of the Mystery?” 
Job 42: 1-17

Let us pray.

  In June of 1992 I stood on the tow path of the C& O Canal in suburban Washington DC, talking with a partner and very close personal friend, named Ed, before we went for a jog. He casually mentioned that he had not been feeling very well and was going to have some tests done the next day. I expressed concern and then after a few moments we went on our jog. That conversation drifted from my mind until two days later. That Friday I called his office – he was in our suburban Virginia office and I was in our Downtown office – expecting to speak with Ed only to be told that he was in Baltimore at Johns Hopkins Hospital a far cry from Fairfax hospital where he had gone for his tests. Within hours I learned that he had been diagnosed with liver cancer. And after a courageous battle he died less than eight months later. He left a wife of many years – beset with a terminal genetic illness of her own  -- and two wonderful, multi-racial children 10 and 7, which Ed and his wife had adopted.

In the aftermath of Ed’s death I tried to make sense of it. How could God let such unmerited and unjustified suffering occur to this truly good man, his wife and children? No possible calculation I conjured in those days that followed worked to justify this -- for there was no way that they deserved what happened. I read Rabbi Harold Kushner’s book,   “When Bad Things Happen to Good People” and after some months I thought that I had sorted my way through this challenge of understanding the reality of unmerited suffering and the existence of a loving God who I could worship. Smug in my certainty I proceeded some months later to preach a sermon on that subject at my old church on laity Sunday. The issue was resolved in my mind and I was comfortable. And then when I was doing my student minister in 2003 a strikingly similar circumstance happened to a member of the church where I worked. That member Brian -- a divorced forty-year-old father of two boys, 9 and 6 -- also received an unexpected diagnosis of liver cancer and was gone in six months. My comfortable explanation was put to a new test. At the same time I was taking a course in divinity school, entitled the German Church and the Holocaust. In that course we read, among other things, the writings of some of the Holocaust survivors. Among them was Elie Wiesel’s Trial of God in which he poignantly wrote

                        “He is almighty, isn’t He? He could use His might to

                        save the victims, but He doesn’t! So – on whose side

is He? Could the killer kill without His blessing –

without His Complicity?”[1]

The horror of the Holocaust plus the then recent genocides in the Balkans and Africa along with the loss of these two good men revealed my earlier comfort at having made sense of this question of suffering to have been an illusion.  So it was that I decided to write my Senior Paper at Harvard on the subject “What do you say about God to the Suffering?” and a spent nearly a year thinking and writing about how to understand God and the existence of innocent suffering. I was also drawn to the subject because on many occasions I saw this question in the eyes, if not on the lips, of those who I offered pastoral care to in the hospital and else where.  The fact is that either directly or indirectly we all experience unmerited suffering and many of us struggle to make sense of that reality and the existence of God.

            Like so many things that we face and that perplex us, this issue – namely the problem of unmerited suffering and a belief in a loving and powerful God-- has vexed those that have come before us and is addressed in the scriptures. The book of Job -- a beautifully written yet extremely difficult piece of wisdom literature -- is in significant part a discussion of this very issue. And today’s text that Jonny just read is the final chapter in that book. To understand what Job is telling us we need to take a very quick journey through the structure of the book. It begins with a heavenly counsel – a kind of divine board of director’ s meeting -- in which Job’s virtue is lauded by God but questioned by others. The suggestion is that Job is virtuous because he has everything. A test is devised. The decision is made to rain upon him a torrent of suffering and woe, including the death of his beloved ten children and then to see what he really is like.  When that fails to undermine his virtue, he is plagued with a loathsome and extremely painful skin disease. Despite his wife’s urging he does not reject God even then.

At this point he is joined by friends.  These friends in various ways represent the orthodox view of suffering – namely, that God is exquisitely just -- so that if we are virtuous we are rewarded and if we are sinful we are punished. Like those misguided folks who suggest modern day plagues and disasters are punishment for some

sin -- often the embracing and affirmation of those who are different -- these friends thought that Job had some how brought his trials on himself by something that he had done. Over many chapters they press Job to think about his actions and then to confess and seek God’s mercy. And with increasing passion -- this proverbially most patient of men --quite impatiently proclaims his virtue and steadfastly denies that he has done anything to kindle God’s judgment and wraith.  Finally, exasperated Job demands the opportunity to confront and cross-exam God about what has befallen him.  And so it is that God famously speaks to Job out of the whirlwind.  What God essentially says to Job, is who are you to question. “Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth … and shut in the sea with doors.” (Job 38: 4, 8, 11)  Not once does God directly answer Job’s question about why Job has suffered.

            So it is that we come to today’s reading especially the first 6 verses, which are Job’s final response to God:

Then Job answered the Lord: ²“I know that you can do all things, and that no purpose of yours can be thwarted. ³‘Who is this that hides counsel without knowledge?’ Therefore I have uttered what I did not understand, things too wonderful for me, which I did not know. ⁴‘Hear, and I will speak; I will question you, and you declare to me.’ ⁵I had heard of you by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees you; ⁶therefore I despise myself, and repent in dust and ashes.”     

What is Job saying? Or perhaps better what are we to understand from this response? First, it quite clearly contains none of the clever explanations theologians have developed to answer the question of the existence of both God and suffering. David Hume, the 18^th Scottish Philosopher, framed the theological question many centuries ago this way:

Is He [God] willing to prevent [suffering], but not able? Then he is impotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Whence then is   [suffering]? [2]

In other words how can an all-powerful and all loving God permit suffering by the innocent? It will not surprise you that the explanations have often turned on challenging God’s power – that is the suggestion that God is able to do everything—or on challenging God’s love -- in Hume’s words God ‘s willingness. But that is not where Job ends up. No Job’s response is “I [have] heard of you by the hearing of the ear but now my eyes see you…” When Job says I have heard, he is talking about his efforts and those of his friends to understand God and God’s actions through human knowledge. They have sought to understand and judge God’s actions in allowing Job to suffer so against a human sense of justice. People are punished for misdeeds and rewarded for good deeds in our world. Life is a structure of cause and effects that we place into a human constructed moral framework. 

Except that in does not work. What Job realizes is that in a fundamental sense he cannot know why he has suffered? God’s ways are in the end beyond his and our ability fully to know them. As one observer put it, the problem is that we seek to bring God to us – that is to describe and understand and, yes, judge God against our knowledge and our experience. What we should be doing is going to God, not the other way around. Let us be clear here. This is not a lesson that eschews knowledge and reason and rejects the scientific method. Indeed, I do not think it even counsels us not to wonder way suffering occurs and to try and understand how God can be loving and powerful and yet for suffering to be an ever present reality in our world. But what it is saying is that in the end we must be prepared not to have final answers.

In last Sunday’s New York Times Book review section there was a review of Richard Dawkins new book, The God Delusion. In this book Dawkins, a famous British scientist apparently urges, as the title states, that religion is simply delusion. The review suggests that in this book he forcefully takes on the major arguments for religion and a belief in God and attempts to debunk them. I have not yet read the book so take my comments accordingly but it does seem to me that there is not likely much new to his arguments. Great atheist philosophers have taken strong issue with religion in the past and seemingly based on similar arguments. What it does seem to me is that Dawkins perhaps like some others steeped in the biological sciences in the end place ultimate faith in human knowledge, unlike Job who recognizes limits. While the amount that we know increases every moment, I am not sure that the amount that we don’t know does not equally grow and more importantly that we do not get any closer to answering the fundamental why questions of existence. In some sense it continues to come down to a choice between an answer that there is purpose namely God behind creation versus randomness.  When I contemplate limits on our understanding I am reminded of the Heisenberg uncertainty or indeterminacy principle. This is a principle, articulated by Werner Heisenberg -- one of the founders of modern quantum physics and head of the Nazi atomic bomb program, which states that the more precisely the position is determined of say an electron the less precisely its momentum is known in that instant and vice versa. It is a fundament limit on human knowledge. The very act of determining the location of a sub-atomic particle interferes with our ability to know at the same time its momentum, i.e. its speed and mass.  What Job was saying is that we can not know or understand every aspect of creation and of God’s actions, including the existence of suffering and of evil at every moment in time. Some things are mystery -- some are not. 

            There is, I believe, a second important point for us in our Job text -- found in the words “but now my eyes see you”. Stanley Hauerwas, a Professor at Duke and one of the great Christian Ethicists of our era, has for many years argued that the question that Rabbi Kushner sought to ask and answer is the wrong one.   Hauerwas wrote 

“I am profoundly suspicious of all attempts such as Kushner’s to explain why God allows us to experience pain and suffering…”[3]

For Hauerwas the existence of suffering is not to be explained but to be met “as integral to a Christian life.” The key is not explanations but the assurance that through history God has not abandoned those who have suffered. In the famous words of assurance we sometimes use in our service “God has loved us, loves us now and God will always love us.”  And if we look closely we will see that this is what Job recognized. What changed Job’s view – what brought him to acceptance of the mystery? It was not God’s answer for God did not give one. No, it was God’s presence. Despite Job’s suffering and his anger at God, God did not ignore Job or abandon him. God spoke to Job out of the whirlwind. God loved Job even when Job was unlovable. And that is profoundly assuring. 

I entered a hospital room three years ago with great trepidation. The woman in the room had just finished meeting with her doctor. He had told her the lung tumor was malignant and her prognosis was guarded. What was I going to say?  What I met was extraordinary. This woman said you know I just got some bad news. And so we talked about how she was feeling and then she said “you know I am going to pursue with my doctor all possible treatments but I am also going to put my future in Gods hands; I always have and God has always been with me and I will cherish every day that I have.” What a faith -- not a faith that said I have been good so God will get me out of this – no, it was a  faith that knew the outcome could be bad but that no matter what she was not alone. That, of course, was Hauerwas’s point. The key point when we think about suffering -- the point Job finally recognized is that we may not make logical sense of suffering -- of the human condition at any moment --but that as we face the reality of it we should be mindful that we are loved and held in the palm of God’s hand. Richard Dawkins says this is an illusion.  Perhaps but he can’t prove his assertion any more than the obverse argument that God exists can be.

And yet Job is also telling us that in some non-analytical way we are aware of God’s existence. It is not simply a hypothesis. I mentioned earlier Brian that member of my student church who died leaving two young sons. Three weeks before his death, I attended a service of the Outdoor Church in Cambridge. It was a raw, rainy fall Sunday. The service was moved from outside on Cambridge Common to the portico of Christ Church which while open to the outside at least kept the rain off our heads. The service was to be lead by the minister to the Outdoor Church, Jed Mannis, who was here at my installation and Communion was to be celebrated by Scott, the minister of the United Methodist Church in Harvard Square.   As we were about to start –the three ministers and a dozen homeless men and women -- who appears but this terminally ill man and his two sons. Jed began the service and after a few moments asked the two boys if they would like to read a portion of the liturgy. The older son declined but the 7 year old agreed. And he begins with his father looking over his shoulder helping him sound out the big words. It was touching and then we came to the Communion service that Scott was to lead. But the son and the father continued and so it was that a seven year old led communion for three ministers and the homeless.

Scott, the Methodist minister has described this in a wonderful article he wrote. He described his initial discomfort as the boy with the help of the father lead communion. His discomfort arose because in most denominations presiding over the sacrament of communion is the province of the clergy. And then as the pieces came together and he learned that the father had weeks to live and that this might be one of the last things father and son shared -- it was he said evident that God was present in that Communion -- in that moment when boy and the father sounded out the big words of Communion. Having been there I can only add my Amen to that. So it is that Job has reminded us that we can not bring God to us, can not judge God by our understandings and thus can not fully explain innocent suffering. Yet equally, Job proclaims that if we will only look we will see that God is always with us even when we least expect.

Even in the celebration of communion by a seven –year old boy.

The Scots Congregationalist, P.T. Forsyth wrote

If Life is a problem, its solution is faith…

We do not see the answer: we trust the Answer…

We do not gain the victory; we are united with

the Victor.[4]                                                                  

Acceptance of the mystery is simply nothing more than faith.

Amen