My First Sermon: Job Moments

Job Speaks by AKMA

I just delivered my first sermon, titled "Job Moments." Here is what I said:

In my early 20s, I went on a road trip to Las Vegas with my friend, Mike. It's kind of a rite of passage, I guess. We didn't have a lot of money, but we stayed at my sister's house, so we didn't have a lot of other expenses beside cheap buffets and cheap gasoline. The gambling didn't go well for either of us. We just lost, and lost, and lost that whole weekend. We stopped at the border and figured we each could spare $10 and still have enough to get home.

I bought a roll of quarters and, on the first one, got 6 out of 6 in a Keno machine. That was a $250 jackpot. While I waited for an attendant to come and pay me, I dropped my second quarter into a different machine and won $300. I felt lucky, but more than that I felt selected by God to win. It was a mystical realization.

Mike found me after he ran through his ten dollars and was astonished by the two flashing machines on either side of me. I took pity on him and, sending him away with half my quarters, I decided to cheer him up by winning the Harley Davidson motorcycle that sat atop a bank of poker machines. I was already doing good works with God's gift.

I lost the rest of the quarters trying to win that bike, the spell wore off, and I left the casino with a lot more cash than I walked in with.

It's easy to think of God when the amazing happens to us. Baseball player genuflect after a home run and rappers give props to God for their success. It's humble to say, no, it wasn't years of training and discipline or even dumb luck that got me here, but rather, it was God. All praise be to God.

But we also think of God when disaster strikes. I call this a "Job moment." It comes with compounding losses, statistically improbably losses, or maybe just a single loss that eclipses our comprehension. A Job Moments makes you look up, with hands out, and say, "Why me, Lord? What did I do to deserve this?"

All I knew about Job before I started studying the Book of Job this spring was that he was someone who endured great strife with patience. It is a difficult and fascinating work that wrestles with the question of why bad things happen. For those of you unfamiliar with the story, it basically unfolds this way:

Job is wealthy and pious. God is proud of Job and points out the qualities of this "good and blameless man" to Satan. Satan tells God that the only reason Job is so good is because he has a large flock, healthy crops, and many sons. Then Satan proposes a little experiment to God. If he could take everything away from the man, Job would surely curse God to his face. God permits Satan to kill Job's sons, steal his flock, and inflict him head-to-toe with sores.

Job then wails in agony, laments his fate, and curses the day he was ever born, but refuses to curse God. Job's friends sit with him and argue that he should repent, but Job rightly counters that he hasn't done anything wrong and that he would like to make his case before God. He desperately cries out, asking to know what he did to receive such punishment in every aspect of his life. Then God comes to him as a whirlwind and chastises him for questioning the moral authority of the Supreme Being who created the world and everything in it. Job, awed and humbled in His presense, repents for calling God to account. God replaces what was taken from him in the form of a new and bigger flock, more wealth, a long life, and more sons.

On its face, this story is absurd and thick with contradictions. Job got what we all ask for in those moments--namely an answer from God, even if that answer was essentially a "no comment." And yet we get the answer Job seeks. The reason for his punishment was that he stood out. If only he were a little less pious, maybe God wouldn't have pointed him out to Satan. A belief in an all-knowing, all-seeing God who would wager with Satan over Job's reaction to torment is difficult to resolve.

As illogical as the book seems to us today, it marks an evolution in theology. According to the Talmud, the Book of Job was written by Moses himself, but others believe it was written during the time of King Solomon. We know it was written after Leviticus, the Jewish legal code, which explicitly promises blessings for obedience to God's law and punishment for disobedience. Job's friends naturally jumped to the conclusion that disaster was proof of some heavy-duty disobedience on Job's part. The story of Job is a small step for mankind toward the notion that things happen without regard to any Universal justice. Babies die in their cribs. Killers walk undiscovered among us. Life is not fair.

I say it's a small step because it still clings to the consequence of God's power. Essentially, bad things happen because He makes them happen, or lets them happen, and no one is fit to question why. We're all subjects of the same fickle ruler, which is a relief, since we no longer have to endure the scorn of our friends when tragedy darkens our door. This new way of thinking that the Book of Job provides is embodied in the phrase, "God moves in mysterious ways."

But there are colder, perhaps more frightening possibilities that must have occurred to these ancient minds. One is that God doesn't care. Another is that God is unwilling--or even unable--to do anything about our day-to-day lives. The third, of course, is that God just isn't there.

In choosing between a capricious, destructive God and an absent One, why did the Hebrews pick the former? I suppose the same could be asked of any religion throughout the world and its history. C.S. Lewis in his book "The Problem of Pain" says that religion springs from numinous experience, the fear mixed with awe that leads us to believe that we're not entirely alone. We all experience the spiritual in some form at some times. If we believe that this spiritual presense is connected to a power massive enough to form mountains and set orbits, surely it is one that also can giveth and taketh away. Or is that just how we want it to be?

When I was a little kid, I would often get lost in the supermarket. Typically, I would get distracted by a magazine rack or the toy section. My mom, with groceries to buy and things to do, would keep moving through the store. The awareness of my situation would eventually blossom into panic as I searched for her aisle by aisle. I would sense time running out, that I could somehow lose her among the carts and cans, and that she might forget me. It seemed to me then that I could somehow be abandoned forever in the supermarket.

Of course, I never was. Neither she nor my father would ever let me become truly, permanently lost. I would find them or they would find me and though they might be angry at me for wandering away, I was always relieved at having found them again. I would stick close by, at least for the rest of that day's shopping. It was reassuring to know that they were looking out for me.

It is likewise reassuring to believe that God, our father, is the universal, eternal parent who watches over us at every turn. He is the loving parent, even angry or violent parent, the parent that keeps us from wandering astray. To believe otherwise is to be abandoned, forever, in the supermarket.

I think we are lost in that supermarket because I find it difficult to imagine an interceding God that sometimes bends the rules, tilts the table, fixes the game. Jackpots, crop failures, and exploding stars don't have inherent positive or negative values outside the values and expectations we place on those events.

To paraphrase a bumper sticker, "Stuff Happens." It is we who apply the good and the bad. It's up to us to manage the disastrous as best we can when it happens. When there's something that can be done, it is up to us to do it, but when it comes to the unforeseen, unavoidable, life-changing events that happen out of the blue, all we can do is gawk, slack-jawed, at the mystery of the Universe of which we are a part and not waste our energy wondering what we did to deserve it.

If we stay mindful of the present moment and remember that we are connected to and a constituent part of that mystery, we won't feel lost and afraid in the supermarket. We will feel at home in the Universe.

It times of great hardship and difficulty, let us remember to pray--not for changed outcomes, but for strength to meet those outcomes, peace to resolve them, and love so that we may continue to say yes to life.

May it be so. Amen.