July 12, 2009 Sermon

Walking Our Faith Together (Job 2: 1-9; Romans 8: 31-39; John 14: 25-27)

Rev. Sally Harris

Giver of Life and love this I pray:
for stillness to hear the song of Your Spirit.
For the wisdom to see the shape of Your vision.
For the courage to see from the margins so we may touch the depths of Your caring. Amen

“Then Job’s wife says, Do you still hold fast to your integrity? Curse God and die!" (Job 2:9) For generations, the cry of Mrs. Job has been contrasted with the "patience" of Mr. Job. Her crisis of faith in the face of her anguish has been held up as a negative example and her one line has condemned her to the role of the "faithless one" down through the ages. Perhaps we do Mrs. Job an injustice, and I would propose that not only was her crisis of faith normal, but necessary to her spiritual growth.

Mrs. Job has suffered a tremendous loss, seven sons and three daughters have died along with her servant; let alone 500 oxen, 70,000 sheep. 3,000 camels. Yet even in the midst of what must have been mind-numbing grief, there is no record of her questioning or objecting to the theology, the wisdom tradition of her time. A tradition, based on the assumption that fairness is the ordering principle of the universe. God has given us the information we need to live upright lives - to be pious and obedient to the Law. When we stay on the straight and narrow path, we are rewarded. When we stray, we are punished. The God of the Wisdom tradition is something of a bookkeeper. Credits, debits, rewards and punishments are all part of a life with very simple rules.

As peers of Abraham and Sarah, Job and Mrs. Job would see the world and their relationship to God based on a predictable cause-and-effect formula: goodness results in goodness and wickedness deserves wickedness. Each had their role in this exchange, and it imposed a comforting sense of order on what is essentially too vast and mysterious for human comprehension. The danger, of course, in this Wisdom tradition is that we know life is not always as predictable as this cause-and-effect formula suggests. And I believe that Mrs. Job confronted the instability of this supposed predictable formula. For it is when Job is struck with what appears to be leprosy and becomes an untouchable that we see evidence of Mrs. Job's primal anger that the God she has worshipped and honored is no longer operating under the same rules. Despite Job's stated "righteousness", despite his public and private goodness he has lost everything. In essence she says to Job, "We don't really know this God like we thought we did. Your "integrity" no longer appears to matter".

In an article called “Curse God and Live: What Job's Wife Would Have Said If She Had Been Given More Than One Line”, a theologian wrote that Job's wife is really saying:

What we have before us is all the evidence we need to conclude that everything we have been taught about God and life is untrue. Goodness is not rewarded. Piety and uprightness do not guarantee one a good life. Justice and fairness are clearly not the ordering principles of the universe. We didn’t cause these misfortunes, we didn't deserve these misfortunes. We now know how many people on earth live their entire lives - people who are born into poverty, who are infertile, who are alone. We now know about the lives of people we used to consider to be below contempt - people who by their very existence were invisible to us. Our wisdom was incredibly elite. We have been humbled. Now, what are we going to do about it?

Job's wife urges him to curse God because she has already learned the most important lesson of her life: that cause and effect are not predictable. Cursing God will not bring Job to his death, but to his life. The struggle as she sees it is not a struggle for faith - not the struggle to believe in something that no longer makes sense. The struggle is not to define God or figure out what is right and wrong. Job's wife is not urging him to or from faith or piety; she is urging him towards hope. Her wisdom comes from the role she was assigned by that society - to bear and raise children, to learn not from books or teachers but from her own experience, to listen and look and smell and feel the reality that life surges all around us even at the most desperate moments, pushing us on, moving us off our dung heaps and back into the business of unfolding creation. She knows the wisdom of ancient women - name your despair, cry your hurt, scream your outrage. Then live. You walk in good company

Job, she says, your theology of retributive justice has you trapped. Let’s not look for a way to get even, or to set the record straight. Let's give up the search for an advocate who will eloquently argue your case before God, forget about anybody appearing out of a whirlwind and declaring you innocent. Look not for justice but for grace - grace as evidenced in the fundamental reliability of nature - the cycles of the seasons, day following night, death following life following death. Look for grace in the love of your friends - though their words were inadequate, clumsy, even insulting - the bottom line is they cared. They came and sat with you, they listened to your rantings and ravings, they were present. Look at me. I'm still here - keeping the house ready for you to come home. [© 1997 Roberta Finkelstein]

No easy answers, no tidy endings. Just persistence in the face of difficulty, and the sure knowledge that the human capacity to love is sufficient. In the end, Job and his wife do not stop believing in God, but the God they end up believing in is different. Perhaps a God who is less Other and more present. A God who asks not for offerings and sacrifices, but for each of us to turn a loving face to the world. A God who is not in charge, but walks with us through our lives. A God that calls a community to walk their faith together; urging one another to hope.

For… Our care of each other
challenges and supports the spiritual development
and ministry of children and adults,
and creates a place of respect and support
for people living through difficult transitions.

We are invited to walk our faith together today and everyday,
Urging each other toward hope
through prayer and study and being together
through caring for the community, by offering our time and gifts
through the grapevine and by keeping connected with one another,
through walking the labyrinth and walking justly in the church and world
through gathering together on Sundays for worship and coffee and conversation
through growing together in the heart of Kitsilano
so that we may grow in our care of the world

For together we walk in good company!

Unfolding of the Labyrinth


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