“The Only Answer”

Sermon Preached By Jeff Seaton
October 15, 2006
Job 23:1-9, 16-17    Psalm 22:1-15

When I took a first look at the readings for today, I thought to myself, ‘I can’t preach on this; it’s all about suffering.  Who is going to want to hear a sermon about suffering?’  I could have preached on the gospel reading, the one about the camel and the eye of the needle, and how hard it is for those who have wealth to enter the kingdom of God.  Suffering, or rich people not getting into heaven—what do I do?  And yet, somehow, these texts of lament kept calling me back. 

On the one hand, I worried that preaching about suffering would lead to us feeling depressed, or just feeling uncomfortable and awkward, that sense of embarrassment we might feel at bringing up experiences that are deep, and usually quite private.  I don’t know about you, but I think in our culture we generally like to stay pretty optimistic, pretty upbeat, especially in public, especially in groups.  And yet, on the other hand, probably every one of us here, or at least most of us, knows what it is like to cry out to God with bitter complaint; most of us know what ‘Godforsakenness’ feels like. 

So I thought it would be okay, and maybe even a little bit helpful, to spend some time today exploring lament.  The book of Job and many of the psalms form part of our Bible’s rich literature of lament.  These texts wrestle with the reality of profound suffering in human life.  Directed to God, they are uttered in language that is raw, and aching; angry, and desperate.  They are cries of the human heart that demand an answer, that long for some relief. 

Turning first to the book of Job, then, I’d like to begin with setting some of the background.  I think it is important to point out that the Bible presents this story as a ‘tale’ or legend; that is to say that it is not presented as a literal depiction of a real historical person, but as a story which nonetheless conveys some truth about human life, and about our relationship with God.  

The story begins with Job being described as ‘blameless and upright’, in other words a very virtuous man; we are also told that he was a very rich man, blessed with herds and flocks, and servants, a devoted wife, and ten wonderful children.  And yet, up in heaven, there is a conversation between God and what is described as ‘an adversary’, in which the adversary challenges God.  He suggests that maybe, just maybe, Job is so virtuous because he has been richly rewarded by God with wealth and the blessings of family.  Take those away, the adversary says, and see how virtuous Job will be. 

Then, in one of the more difficult passages in the Bible, God gives the adversary permission to do just what he suggests.  First, Job’s flocks and herds and his servants are carried of by raiders or destroyed by a fire from heaven; then the house in which his children are gathered collapses, killing all of them.  Finally, Job’s body is afflicted with sores, from head to foot.  This is where it is important to remember that this is a tale – and not to get carried away with the implications of God doing this.  In the logic of the tale, this is the setup for the main part of the story, which focuses on Job’s response to this incredibly unjust set of circumstances. 

Throughout the story, Job is counselled by a group of friends who attempt to console him with the very best that conventional wisdom has to offer.  When Job protests his innocence, his friends challenge him:  surely he must have done something wrong, something to offend God, and thus to deserve such punishment.  And if it wasn’t Job that offended God, then perhaps it was one of his dear, dead children that provoked God’s anger.  When I was preparing this sermon, I came across a comment that said something like, ‘in the midst of his distress, when Job needed friends, what he got were theologians.’  He gets people who draw a connection between his suffering and God’s judgment.  According to their conventional wisdom, there is simply no other way about it:  suffering is always related to sin.  Everybody knows – God punishes the wicked and rewards the righteous.  That’s just the way it is.

Whoever it was that wrote the book of Job knew differently.  That person knew what you and I know.  That life just isn’t that simple.  That very, very often, bad things do happen to good people.  We all know of someone who didn’t deserve to have their life cut short, or didn’t deserve the tragedies that life brought them.  I think back to the 1980’s when a lot of apparently religious people responded to the ravages of the AIDS epidemic by saying that it was God’s punishment of sinful homosexual practices.  Well, I can tell you that the world today is a lesser place, the world we live in is diminished by the absence of those who died too soon.  People that I knew that died weren’t wicked; granted they weren’t all angels, either.  But then neither are we.  I can tell you that some of them were finer people than I am. 

Jesus put it like this, ‘God makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous.’  In others words, it just isn’t as simple as the old conventional wisdom would suggest.  Life is a mystery, and suffering is a part of life in a way that is often completely unrelated to our behaviour, or to God’s judgement. 

Yes, deep suffering is a part of life, part of the mystery of life that we struggle to understand.  We try to understand it because we are looking for some relief from the experience of it.  We think, if we can just understand this, we can get some control over it.  In the face of his friends’ dull insistence that he is to blame for his predicament, Job courageously persists in declaring his innocence, and the injustice of his suffering.  He decides to seek justice, to seek a fair hearing, which he is confident will vindicate him:

I would lay my case before him,
   and fill my mouth with arguments …
... There an upright person could reason with him,
   and I should be acquitted for ever by my judge.

This is a common enough approach in our culture, to seek some kind of fair hearing, some process that we think will vindicate us.  It is one of the ways we try to get some control over the experience of suffering, by doing something about it.  Now, the justice system, and arbitration processes are an important part of how we work through disputes.  The trouble is that such systems are not terribly good at responding to the pain and suffering that we experience in life.  My husband is a lawyer, and when I asked him about this point, his comment was that going to court is a ‘clunky, lengthy, expensive way to resolve disputes.’  Going to court may bring the litigant vindication, but there is also the possibility that he might lose the case.  He may, or may not, feel that he has received justice in the end.  The legal process is designed to bring finality to a dispute, to make a determination of who is right and who is wrong.  There is no guarantee that that will bring relief from suffering, even if you win the case. 

In Job’s case, he expresses the belief that if only God would show up and contend with him, he would experience some relief.  God’s apparent absence and silence adds enormously to Job’s suffering.  Perhaps there is no more heart-rending expression of that emotion than in the opening verse of Psalm 22:  “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why are you so far from helping me, from the words of my groaning?”  We know this psalm, of course; it is familiar to us from the story of Jesus’ passion that we read each year on Good Friday.  And many of us know this psalm from our own personal experience:  “my God, my God, why have you forsaken me?  where are you God, in the middle of my distress?”

It is a call from the depths of human suffering, exclaimed perhaps in bitterness, perhaps in sorrow, perhaps in despair.  It is a howl that rises up from the core of our being, and shatters the peace of anyone within earshot.  It is a cry that demands an answer, but will not settle for shallow platitudes. 

Think of the way babies scream sometimes – their whole bodies proclaiming that something is just not right in their being.  And a parent tries to shush them, tries to distract them, offers a soother – but nothing works.  Nothing will stop this full throated wail of complaint.  Except maybe one thing:  a bottle or, even better, mother’s breast.  That is perhaps the one thing that provides sufficient answer to a baby’s howl of dissatisfaction. 

I think it’s no accident that this image – the mother’s breast – is at the heart of this psalm reading today.  In some way it is the only answer to the anguished cry of the psalmist.  In the depths of suffering, there is a memory of when things were well, when life made sense.  A memory of a time of complete safety and wholeness and rightness.

Yet it was you who took me from the womb;
               you kept me safe on my mother’s breast.
                On you I was cast from my birth,
               and since my mother bore me you have been my God.

I love the way this psalm interlaces the images of mother and God:  God took me from the womb and placed me at my mother’s breast; I was cast upon God, my mother placed me in God’s care. 

But how does this help us with the problem of suffering?  I recall reading, when the Dalai Lama was last in Vancouver, an interview he gave in which he said that his own recollection of his mother’s care for him as an infant gives him an immediate sense of inner peace and inner calmness.  I remember thinking at the time, but what about those of us who didn’t have that experience, or don’t have the recollection of such an experience?  Where do we find a healing balm in our times of distress and disjointedness?

This text from Psalm 22 points me in the direction of an answer.  In this psalm, the mother’s breast, the mother’s womb, are metaphors for God’s love and God’s sustenance of us throughout our lives.  Just as the love of our human mothers can’t prevent us from experiencing pain and suffering, so God’s love and care do not ensure that we will have trouble free lives.  But the promise of a text like this is that, even more than our own human mothers, God accompanies us even in the darkest places of our lives, and reaches out to us to hold us close and offer us new life.  And this is the only answer that can truly satisfy our longing, our pain, our need. 

The challenge then becomes one of finding those places in our lives – those experiences, and those people – that remind us, that connect us back to our source in God, the nurturing and loving source of our lives. 

This is a Communion Sunday, and in a few moments you will be invited to participate in this meal.  A meal in which we the simple fruits of the earth – bread and wine – become for us, sacraments of God’s love for us.  This meal is one opportunity for you to know and experience God’s mothering love.  In the bread and wine, God comes to us, so that we may come to God.  In the words of the hymn, “come from wilderness and wandering; come from restlessness and roaming; come from loneliness and longing; taste and see the grace eternal; taste and see that God is good.”[1]