This sermon was preached on the 6th of October 2024, the Twentieth Sunday after Pentecost, in the Anglican Parish of Kalamunda-Lesmurdie
Texts:
The Book of Job takes a person blameless and upright, and puts them through the loss of almost everything.
It’s a huge book, forty-two chapters, one of the largest texts within the Bible, so I need to do a little bit of retelling.
We didn’t hear in our reading today of the first losses that Job suffers. And at first, the losses happen at a distance: he hears of them one by one, through a series of messengers.
First, his herds of oxen are killed. Next, fire from heaven consumes his sheep… and the shepherds. Then go the camels, and their keepers. Then, the house in which his children are eating a meal collapses, blown down by the wind, and all are killed.
Job reacts to these first losses with grief. And of course these losses are losses for his wife, as well. Job shaves his head, he tears his robes, …. and he utters those famous words:
“The Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away, blessed be the name of the LORD.”
And then comes a second round of losses, a second trial, the torment that we hear of in today’s reading from the book. Job’s very health is taken away. And with it goes his social position. Job is a great patriarch, a great person of his community. And now he sits on what is probably the town’s rubbish tip - friendless, and alone.
The difficult truth of the Book of Job is that it captures something fundamental to our experience of life. To suffer losses: the loss of family, of friends, of mentors, of people that we love, this is part of the human experience. We don’t have the control that we might seek. I have met many people who have made me think of Job in aged care, and other places.
And so how we respond to this very difficult book? How do we interpret the story of Job? It clearly speaks to important issues.
Many of us have been taught an interpretation of the book, maybe in Bible study, or in Sunday school. But I want to say today that this isn’t a book with a fixed interpretation. Instead, it is a book that reads the reader: a book to which we bring ourselves in our current season. A book that we wrestle with, a book that wrestles with us.
So let’s continue with the story. Job sits atop the town tip – and here is the part of the story that always makes me cry when I read it alone. His three friends hear what has happened… his three closest friends in the world. They rush to his side, and at first they don’t even recognise him, because his affliction is so great.
And like Job, they cry out in their distress, they tear their robes, and they cast dust over their heads. And in so doing, they do what we so often don’t dare to do. They enter into Job’s desolation, his experience of grief and pain. And then they sit with him - they sit with him in this place of iniquity, the town rubbish tip. These are great and powerful men too, and they sit there for seven days and seven nights in silence.
This is witness. This is love.
And then Job speaks: he speaks of his pain, his distress, his anguish, eventually even his anger. And then, one by one, the friends reply.
There’s no way I can retell the whole of the book. But I can speak to the character of what his friends say. They don’t really listen to him, they don’t enter into his interpretation of his experience… they put up a wall because what Job says challenges their understanding of God, their understanding of God’s justice, of the meaning and purpose of the world.
Job makes the case that he has done nothing wrong, and so in a just world, the world that God promises, he would not have been harmed in these ways. But his friends can’t handle that critique of their religious tradition, their understanding of who God is. And so they begin to allege that Job must have done something wrong, after all.
We ourselves might feel drawn into this argument: is Job right? Are the friends right? Do we have a different view entirely? And that’s the point! The argument of the text is an argument that we are invited to join: we are to wrestle with these questions, just as Job and his friends do.
This conflict between Job and his friends eventually kindles a thought, an idea. Job decides to bring a kind of lawsuit against God. And, as you will see in our readings over the next two weeks, that happens, and God does respond to Job.
Whatever you think right now, if you feel pulled into the debate around questions, then great, ancient, and holy text has done its job.
We ourselves have had losses recently. The sudden and tragic death of Father John weighs heavily on me, as I’m sure it does upon all of you. And I know that some of us have had other losses.
Job’s story dares us to ask the question: why? We can ask where the justice is in suffering; we can ask where the justice is when chaos enters into our lives, and leaves us hurt, bereft. We don’t have to all have the same view, or the same response. We’re called instead to look for God in all of this, and to enter into that search together. Where is God all of this, in the good, and the bad? Blessed be the Lord.
When I’m out and about, I often meet people who say that they are spiritual, but I’m not religious. And those folks that I meet and talk to are often quite fascinated by what the Bible says, how we interpret it, how we live it – fascinated by how we understand the Holy Spirit to be at work on our lives. And yet, there’s a barrier.
I find myself wondering, why can’t you take the leap? Why can’t you profess a faith? Why can’t you become a Christian? Why does this fascination not turn into discipleship?
There’s a freedom in saying “I’m spiritual, not religious”, in being able to reflect freely, drawing on many sources to assemble a way to understand the world. But I think a the same time it must be something of a lonely task.
The Book of Job tells us that to be religious isn’t to all to be of the same view, to all be at the same point in our lives. It shows us the folly of that very clearly. And it shows us that we aren’t people all made in one shape; we’re not formed all in one mould, as a rigid, inflexible community.
It speaks to us of the strength and the hope for transformation that comes when we engage with each other, wrestling with our understanding of the world, and of God… and the transformation that follows when we bear to God our griefs and our joys.
God will meet us in that, for that is the character of God. God who chooses not domination, but love. God who offers us freedom, and the grace to choose to use it wisely, to serve one another, and to serve God.
So I offer you each a challenge – a question that I don’t know the answer to. How do we speak to those people who say they are not religious, but do have a sense of spirit and life and meaning in the world?
How do we share that we’re not a community of people who are stamped with one mould? How do we say to people that we don’t seek to cram them into a mould? How can we instead proclaim the character of this community: a community of people who together, like Job and his friends, dare to seek meaning in the world together?
So let us prayerfully ask this question: how are we to invite those who are spiritual, but afraid, or turned away from religion, to be with us here, as Christians?