(Photo: Not of Leviathan)
How would you fancy being God for a week? Just think of what you could do! Just think of the responsibility and the vastness and awesomeness of the task.
Is that an easier question than me asking How would you fancy being the PM for a week, or how about being Putin for a week, ruling Russia? Just think of what you could do!
It might be that you see those two invitations differently –
to be God sounds fun and exciting but
to be King for a week actually sounds exhausting. Why?
The book of Job is an astonishing piece of literature, very ancient, quite possibly written before the book of Genesis is completed. I preached on Job last week and you can read my sermon on the blog on our website ‘Springs of the Sea’.
Job tells the story of a rich decent fella who receives the bad news that some raiders have come over the hills and taken away the animals from his farm, the camels, the oxen, the donkeys, all stolen – the sheep have all died in a freak fire – and a house has collapsed killing all his children and their wives and husbands. That’s chapter 1. Chapter 2 has Job break out in an allergic rash skin disease.
Sort of what I was trying to head in last week’s sermon was to explore what is the foundation of your faith?
The Satan, the accuser, comes to God and says Job is only in it for the money, its cupboard love, he only comes to Church because you give him lots of sheep and camels. Take away his stuff and then we’ll see what his faith is really made of.
And note that it is God, not the Accuser, the accuser is quite powerless, it is God who stretches out His hand and removes the stuff.
I’ve had some interesting conversations with people this week – one said to me – I’m an atheist – I cannot believe that God would have allowed me to go through what I went through. So for her, suffering broke her faith.
Derreck’s sermon on Job last week that you heard, read into Mrs Job – and there’s so little to go on here – but maybe – read into her remark to her husband – why don’t you curse God and die – this idea that maybe Mrs Job had a similar sort of faith to Mr Job but this suffering has been too much for her and this has broken her faith.
My take is different so you’ll have to read my blog for that.
And that made me think of the woman who had a near death experience when she was in hospital and that gave her the faith that she needed to get baptized and worship until she died about a year later.
Another lady told me how her grandmother was one of 16 children – I was talking to her about how Mrs Job had 10 children who died and then at the end of the book of Job, she has another 10 children and I thought that ridiculous and she said, well, no.
And another conversation where a woman told me that the visiting midwife had given her up for dead and told her mother not to worry, her daughter is too weak, she won’t make it, and how she’d been put by the fire, and then she says “Well here I am now”!
Astonishing how what we go through in life, and how we react and respond to it, shapes our thoughts and feelings and our faith and understanding of God.
Derreck’s sermon last week took this into a challenge – and I think it really helps if as you hear his sermon – on YouTube if you need a recap – through his trip to Sudan.
So, his challenge to us was to think of faith as a muscle if you don’t use it, it will weaken.
He quoted Cliff Richard: the more you depend on Jesus, the more dependable he becomes.
I do not like the ending of the book of Job. It has a happy ending. Job is given twice as much as he had before – he started the book with 7k sheep, he ends the book with 14k sheep – he has another 10 children. It almost seems to say – that this is a reward for hanging on in there. If you would like to be as successful as Job then follow the Job ‘book of how to be successful’ and you’ll be rewarded.
But that’s really not what’s being said by this last chapter – I think its trying to make the point that God’s gifts are God’s gifts.
The last chapter is not somehow or other making right what happened earlier, this is not recompense, this is not reward, this is God’s gift.
Much better would have been to turn to the book of Ruth, and to see it through the eyes of the mother in law who at one stage says Do not call me Naomi, meaning Happy, but call me Mara, meaning bitter because God has made my life bitter. That’s good. She doesn’t give up on God but she is angry at God.
Or some of the angry Psalms, or the heavy melancholic book of Lamentations which explores the emotions around the destruction of Jerusalem.
Job sits in the dust and mourns the loss of his farm and animals, mourns the loss of his children, and scrapes away at his skin.
He has three friends who join him and sit with him in silence for a week. And that’s good – we’re never sure what to say, how to help, when a friend goes through a disaster and mostly what we want is to know that you’re there.
We don’t want you trying to get us to pick ourselves up and re-evaluate our lives and work out where we went wrong – we just want you to be with us.
But the ensuing discussion gets more and more heated over the next 40 chapters about whether Job has sinned, Job is in the wrong, he must have done something that has angered God, it must be his fault somehow or other.
So there’s an important call on us to keep developing our faith, to keep growing in our understanding of life and meaning and pain and trouble and where God sits in all of that.
So when God comes on to the scene Job 38 and begins to speak – it seems that God has also misunderstood the plot –
God starts talking about the mountains and the stars and the seas and the dawn and the darkness before moving onto little things like goats and ostriches and hawks.
But what God is trying to do is to explain to Job the vast complexity that makes up for the Life in the universe. And so, comes the challenge – Would you like to try your hand at being God?
I split the question at the beginning between being God and being King. With the question – would you like to be King, be Putin to rule Russia or China, America, all the countries of the world?, for a while –
Perhaps you instantly feel that there’s some easy answers to some of your issues, but you’re also aware that any of that might back fire, there might be unexpected reactions and dangers –
nonetheless you’ve enough moral fibre in you to go for it and give it a go. At least to begin with.
With the God question we tend to view it as a being equivalent to being Aladdin’s genie, to being a fairy godmother, and we fail to remember why Jesus says No no no to the Devil’s temptations in the wilderness.
One of those temptations is to allow the Devil to prove to the world that you really are the messiah, the chosen one – and so much could be done with that short cut – and yet the cost of that decision would also be the loss of freewill and so the loss of love.
So, if God were to say ‘Would you like to be King for a week’
I’d say Yes, I’d give it a go and make a bunch of decisions that would seem obviously brilliant, especially from my point of view. I accept that not everyone would agree and it would likely result in people calling for my abdication long before we got to the end of the week!
So, the book of Job ends with God saying it is really complicated being God. Its about trying to see all perspectives at once, throughout all time. That’s not a very satisfying answer – it turns out that the answer to the problem of suffering is never going to be satisfying.
There are little answers – such as Yes sometimes my suffering has been caused by my sin. I do do stupid stuff. That happens. Yes sometimes my suffering has been caused by you doing stupid stuff, your sin causes me pain. Sometimes pain is caused by us as a community – think Pollution – one the one hand that’s no one person’s fault, on the other hand we’re all contributing to it. So, there’s a corporate sin, a systemic sin. And yet no matter how accurate any of these answers are they do not help.
CS Lewis added a bit of an answer to seeing Pain as God’s megaphone to the world – what will it take for us to pause our own busy selfish lives and to look up and see the pain of others and react and respond with love, empathy, charity –
We don’t have an answer to the earthquakes – but we do have an opportunity to respond – in prayer, in money, and so on.
A number of you have spoken to me about being shocked and upset about the death of Rosemary Heasman – quite right – I don’t have an answer to that – but God’s approach invites us to value each other, to treat each other generously and kindly, in how we support each other and the whole Church family.
This morning you are sitting next to someone who is carrying a heap load of worry and pain, much of which they may be unable, unwilling, to express. If they were God for a week they know exactly where they would start.
But in the meantime, what we are called to is a life of Being with each other, perhaps lightening the load, carrying each other burdens and practicing the spiritual discipline of being Kind.
God doesn’t give Job an intellectual answer to his suffering.
We need an answer that helps. And that’s what we have in Ch40- we have Job reacting to an encounter with the Living God. Job has his day in court and he doesn’t really get a proper academic answer – instead he gets an encounter – so perhaps this is the prayer to be praying – that in the midst of our suffering we might encounter the Living God, and come to see that God has come alongside you in Jesus, and that Jesus weeps with you.
And so our pilgrimage through this troublous life can be one where we together hold onto the God who has come to us, died for us, and lives with us. Amen.