By Gregory Mobley
Guest Preacher at Christ Church, February 13, 2000
Job 1: 1-12 and Psalm 8 / Job 7 and Mark 9: 16-24
e Book of Job begins by introducing us to Job. Job was blameless and
upright. Job had seven sons and three daughters. In order to show how
righteous Job was, the Bible explains how Job treated his children. Job
would rise early in the morning, before they awoke, and on their behalf
he would make good ritual. With cultic mortar and pestle he would mix
good medicine, dose by dose, to protect them against bad karma, against
divine punishment.
He would rise early in the morning and offer burnt offerings, according
to the number of them all; for Job said, "It may be that my
children have sinned, and cursed God in their hearts." This is
what Job always did.
Job was an ethical hero. Job's credit with the Almighty was so good
that his children could draw on it.
Who was Job? How do we translate Job? I see the parent of a
chronically ill child at home; the parent who, daily, administers the
medicine, the injection, the physical therapy, the nursing with tender
discipline.
Job was a saint. God said as much.
The Adversary--in Hebrew,
hassatan,
in English, Satan--hardly the first prosecutor to go off the deep end,
hears God brag on Job.
The LORD said to the Adversary: "Have you considered my servant
Job?"
Satan replies: "Yeah, so what if he is your poster child for
Righteous Living. He leads a charmed life. You've put a fence around
him. Let me at him; we'll see how long before he cancels his
subscription to
Guideposts."
God allows Satan to take all that Job has, even to kill those 10
children.
Still Job does not sin, it says.
God then brags on Job again. Satan hears the challenge, the dare, in
God's voice, and replies, "He did all right, I'll grant you,
but let me get at his physical body, and I'll turn him."
Skin for skin," is how Satan puts it. God allows Satan to
afflict Job with a skin disease. And the flesh starts peeling.
The next thirty or so chapters of the Book of Job consist of a series
of speeches by Job and four friends. You know about all that, don't
you?
This section consists of amazing material. Twisty, muddy, elusive
sentences of complaint and protest.
You heard some of it as our first reading in this service where Job,
betrayed, flayed, soured by experience and resentful of the psalmist's
happiness, mocks the words of Psalm 8.
What is humanity, that you notice us?" said the psalmist.
What is humanity, that you spy on us?" says Job.
The main thing here in these chapters, and it is not obvious, is that
Job uses legal language to build a case against God. Job decides to
bring a lawsuit against God. The Old Testament prophets thought they
had a cute gimmick. It was very effective and dramatic. They would
deliver a speech, as if they were in court, reading an indictment in
the case of the LORD versus God's people. That's arithmetic and Job
is doing algebra. Job draws up a lawsuit, all right, but not for God
against the people but on behalf of us poor slobs, humanity versus
God.
This is so important. We must pause here. Here in the middle of Job
is the Bible's own self-critique. Here is the asterisk, the exception,
the antidote.
What is the significance of this? You do not have to deny your life
experience, or round off its rough edges, and tiptoe, kowtowing with
false deference to an Almighty Potentate. Biblical faith allows for
this release, this reversal. Authentic faith after Job means that you
can be honest
and
faithful. Do not deny your life experience. Most days, you might want
to bow down--that's what the primary biblical words for worship
literally mean--before God in worship. There are other days when you
must stand up.
That's why I love that story from Mark's Gospel (Mk 16.9-24) and
those words of the father of a chronically ill child. "I believe;
help my unbelief." Belief and unbelief; faith and doubt; praise
and complaint; these are not alternatives; they are complementary
clauses in a single confession of faith.
Another sentence I treasure from this middle section of Job is Job 13.7
where Job, angry that his friends keep defending God and blaming Job
for his misfortune, says to them,
Will you lie for God?
Will you commit perjury in order to defend God's reputation?"
This verse is one I use to begin every course I teach at seminary. To
women and men, good people preparing for ministry, salt of the earth
people, people who deserve better than wise-acre professors, I pose the
question: will you lie for God?
You see, this is one of the things we do at seminary. This is part of
the job, to lead people where Job went. To lead them to interrogate
their own religious experience, their own faith tradition, to
interrogate God. You must open the whole thing up and look at it, as
if you had never seen it before.
Job lampoons the piety of the Psalmist. Job denies the assumption of
the mainstream Wisdom tradition, that there is a pattern, a direction,
encoded into creation and you can follow it and prosper. Job counters
the prophets and their covenant lawsuits. Job, in the words of Robert
Frost, "stultif[ies] the Deuteronomist."
1
What's left of biblical faith when Job gets through? He has critiqued
every genre, every theology, every trajectory. Well, wisdom and
prophecy and covenant and liturgy remain. Job doesn't replace them.
But they have been challenged.
At seminary we tell the students: you may have to do this. This is
part of our job in theological education. To deflate, and
demythologize, and deconstruct, but some of us try to crack jokes so
that at least we do not depress.
But we do not want to negate or destroy, just to challenge and
interrogate -- because the Book of Job isn't over, and our journey
isn't over with this stage.
At any rate, you do not have to pay seminary tuition in order to have
your faith challenged, to discover a discrepancy between your life
experience and the party line at church.
Again, however, let me repeat: the Book of Job is not over, and our
journey is not over with this stage.
At the end of Job, God appears to settle matters. If you want to know
what God says, read it yourself. If you want to know what the divine
speeches mean, take a course or read a commentary or, at the least,
stay after church this morning so we can sort it out together. It is
more than I could say in these brief remarks. Really, it's more than I
understand.
I want to concentrate on one line, the first, the description of God's
arrival.
Then the LORD answered Job out of the whirlwind.
This is amazing. We thought God's whirlwind days were over. Remember
back in Kings, where Elijah went to God's mountain, where bushes had
burned, where Jehovah had risen up to march out to do battle with
Pharaoh at the Red Sea and with the enemies of Israel in the days of
Deborah. In the olden days, in Numbers and Judges and Samuel, they
call them the Songs of the Wars of Yahweh, these hymns celebrating the
God who appears in the thunderstorm.
Elijah, so the story goes, made a discovery. God was no linger in the
wind and earthquake and thunderstorm; God came in the sound of a still,
small voice; in Hebrew, in the sound of a thin whisper; the sound you
hear when you put a shell to your ear.
Just when the prophets had reformed religion; just when we had clearly
separated our ethical monotheism from Canaanite myths about Divine
Warriors battling Dragons; just when we had arrived at a new and
improved religion, here comes God in the old style, riding clouds,
speaking thunder, snorting zephyrs.
Maybe you have heard the phrase, "progressive revelation,"
the idea that, as we move through the Bible, the portrayal of God
evolves, and becomes progressively clearer. Well, here in Job 38, we
do not have progressive revelation. We have regressive revelation.
This is having your theological consciousness lowered, not raised.
Why? What's going on? Who knows? Sometimes I think that, like Huck
Finn, Jehovah was tired of attempts by Widow Douglas theologians to
"sivilize" him so God "lits out." Huck "lits
out" for the Mississippi. The LORD "lits out," in Job
38-41, for the depths of the sea, the haunts of beasts, the desert, the
aeries of birds of prey.
I can only say one thing. Once you are in the middle of Job, once you
have stood up and protested, once you have looked at your own faith
with the same discrimination you look at the faith of other people, do
not forget your first faith. Do not forget the old songs. You may
still need them.
A French philosopher, Paul Ricoeur, calls this "the second
naiveté"
2
The first naiveté represents our initial openness to scripture
and to God. Without question, without second thought, without feeling
the least friction between our life experience and what the religious
tradition tells us, we take it in.
Then, often, contradictions emerge: the random tragedy, the undeserved
injustice, the thousand heartaches to which mortal flesh is heir.
Let's call it the Joban stuff. The God who once felt so close, seems
distant, remote, silent. Sometimes the first naiveté gets shed
through second thoughts about our faith. Some folks get angry at God
or at the church, and you hear complaints about hypocrisy. You can
stay in this mode a long time.
The second naiveté, if we're lucky, comes after that. It is a
return to those same traditions though they do not look quite the
same. It is a renewed commitment to faith, still with the questions,
still with the friction.
With what can I compare it? Maybe it's like getting a second wind in a
marriage. After the honeymoon, after all the twists and turns and
revelations; you face that person and say, "I know you. I know
your strengths. I know your weaknesses. I no longer see my romantic
projections. I now see you. But you are my reality. You are my
fantasy. You are my commitment."
O, for a second wind in relationships, a second wind in our work, a
second naiveté in our faith. Regarding the latter, that same
Paul Ricoeur reportedly said, "I wouldn't give anything for the
first naiveté [perhaps an overstatement]; but for the second,
I'd give everything."
At any rate, this is how it works in Job. At the end of all the
protest and anger and confusion, he unexpectedly hears the strains of
an old-time religion, an old song, an ancient song about a God who
comes in hail-fire rather than a whisper.
This is also how it has worked for me. Now the old songs don't sound
the same. There are things I used to take literally that I now take
metaphorically. There are things I used to take metaphorically that I
now take literally. It is always and ever, "Lord, I believe; help
my unbelief." But I need the religion I left behind me as much as
I need the religion I worked so hard to reach.
In the South, there are things they don't have in New England, where I
now find myself exiled. Things such as harmonizing Gospel quartet
music. I can remember as a child wanting to watch cartoons on Sunday
morning before church but my parents insisted on a weekly television
program, the Gospel Music Jubilee, where such music was heard. This
was spiritual music of the Anglo-American kind where the names of
groups nostalgically reflected fading allegiances to clan and home
place in rural areas: the Blackwood
Brothers,
the Happy Goodman
Family,
the
Swanee River
Boys. We would also find ourselves in high school auditoriums on
Saturday nights for concerts which we, as children, bore for the sake
of our grandmother, who had left those hills and those clans for life
in the city. She deeply loved that music. We came to love those old
songs too.
I can remember a particular group with the stuttering tenor. The man
could hardly get a sentence out. And for dramatic effect, early in the
concert, the group would have him introduce a song, just so the
audience could hear him struggle to speak.
But then he would sing. And when he sang, he was free; free as a bird,
he sang like a bird.
I think of him, that stuttering Gospel tenor, because I now have that
stutter. There are traditional sentences of faith that I choke on.
There are things I can no longer
say
about God. But, you know what I've discovered? What I can no longer
say, I can still sing.
T. S. Eliot put it this way,
We shall not cease from exploration
and the end of all our exploring
will be to arrive where we started
and know the place for the first time.
A poet closer to my native dialect and culture, Katherine Hankey, put
it another way, but it all adds tip to the same thing.
And when, in scenes of glory,
I sing the new, new song,
'Twill be the old, old story
That I have loved so long.
Amen.
1
Robert Frost,
A Masque of Reason
(New York: Henry Holt, 1945),
p
.
4.
2
Paul Ricoeur,
The Symbolism of Evil
(Boston: Beacon Press, 1967),
p.
351.
