What do you require of God?
Job 1.1, 2.1-10
Mark 10.2-16
Preached Canberra Baptist Church 8th October 2006
“What does the Lord require of you?” This question posed by the prophet Micah was engaged in the sermon by Jeanette last week. But what of the question in reverse? “What do you require of God?” This may seem almost a blasphemous question, as if one were writing a job advertisement or position description for the Almighty. In something as central to life as our interactions with God is it not reasonable to examine what expectations you have of God? What are the intellectual or moral parameters of dealings with the Divine? What do you think a relationship with God should involve? What is your minimum requirement for a Being worthy of worship? I asked a theological educator this question recently and he said: I don’t want a God I can understand: if I understand it I can do it myself. I need a God who will surprise me, confound me, challenge me! What do you require of God? What expectations do you bring to the Lord?
Such questions run the terrible risk of idolatry, of fashioning Gods for ourselves according to the fashion of the day or the shape of our own interests, forcing the eternal God into tidy boxes of our own making and dimension. Yet Jesus asked those who called on him, “What do you want me to do for you?” It is a reasonable question and a responsible undertaking to think about the framing of our relationship with God from our perspective, our expectations, our standards. During October we’re asking the questions What does God require of us? and What do we require of God? The Biblical touchstone of our reflections will be the Book of Job.
Job is an example of Wisdom literature, that theological framework of reward for the good and punishment for the wicked. Job’s experience is very different to the theory of this theological system: he is an upright and good man – even God holds him up as an example – and yet he suffers reversals of fortune and appears to be cursed rather than blessed. In chapter one he loses his children and then his assets, property and livelihood, but his health is preserved. Then in a second stage even his health is handed over to the tester, although his life protected. The book is about how people respond to this kind of suffering: undeserved, random, inexplicable suffering (and isn’t that most of the suffering we experience?)
In the book of Job we have various models of how we can engage with God. Let us look at the different attitudes to God: those of the narrator, of Job’s wife, of Job’s friends, and finally of Job himself.
Let’s start by looking very briefly at the God of the narrator. The opening and closing chapters of Job reveal a God holding court amongst the heavenly beings. He is the ruler of the spiritual powers that ‘walk to and fro upon the earth’. But as this book presents the scene God behaves in ways that may well give us pause: God is presented as the powerful one whose permissive will governs human destiny, human lives. The book presents us with a contest between God and Satan in which Job is but an innocent pawn. Does God toy with us? Is human fate and fortune but a game of the gods? These are very significant issues and we will return to them in weeks ahead. For now we should note that this early narrative is there to set the scene for the real action of the book of Job – the human response to these heavenly initiatives, how Job his wife and his friends respond to Job’s suffering.
The response of Job’s wife to the disasters is to encourage him to “curse God and die”. I’ve often wondered what sort of woman Mrs Job was. Most spouses I have met have been wonderfully supportive of partners in deep trouble. Job’s wife seems to function as a mouthpiece for particular view of God: When the God hypothesis doesn’t work for you any more throw it away! God will be honoured to the extent that he functions to make life better. You meet people like this all the time. Many commentators point to a modern faith where the self is constructed, assembled from various consumer meanings available to us. When one of the pieces of the self no longer works – throw it away! When some disaster has occurred that God should have prevented, they cease to believe, reject God. Job’s wife goes even further: give up on life!
She demands very specific things of God: when the idol will not serve her purposes it must be rejected even if it means that life is forsaken. When things don’t meet your expectations, you let go, go looking for another option. In contrast to this stands Job’s steadfast faith: “shall we take the good and not the bad from the hand of God?” Job’s faith is so strong that later goes so far as to say, “Though God slay me, yet will I trust him!” But Mrs Job will have none of this: “It’s not working, dear: curse God and dies!”
Then Job’s friends arrive on the scene: Eliphaz the Temanite, Bildad the Shuhite, and Zophar the Naamathite. When they saw his distress they kept a respectful silence for seven days and seven nights. Perhaps they should have remained silent, for once they start to speak the conversation runs for the next 30 chapters! They reinforce the conventional morality and theology of suffering. They defend God (as seen in the light of their theology) and say to Job “You are in the wrong, God is punishing you for your sin!” According to them God doesn’t make mistakes; there must be some secret sin in Job’s life. These men have made an idol of conventional religion, of the theological truths of the day. Nothing must be allowed to challenge our view of God.
If Job’s wife demanded too much of God and wants to throw God away unless he delivers according to her expectation, these men are not going to allow any question to be asked of God. Sometimes the most devout and warm-hearted religious people don’t require very much of God at all: faith doesn’t have to make sense, our view of God doesn’t have to be particularly moral: it just has to accord with accepted wisdom and, above all, not change.
Between these positions stands the position of Job himself. After Job has a good lament in Chapter 3 his three friends start in on him, trying to justify his suffering and make him accept it his fault. As he dialogues with them, Job seems to find his voice, gradually growing in confidence to make a complaint against God.
I will say to God do not condemn me: let me know why you contend against me (10.2)
I would speak to the Almighty, and I desire to argue my case with God. (13.3)
Oh that I knew where I might find him, that I might come even to his dwelling!
I would lay my case before him, and fill my mouth with arguments. (23. 4-5)
Job wants answers, he wants to engage with God, and get to the bottom of what has happened in his life. God is not a lucky charm to be discarded when things turn sour. Nor is God some inscrutable distant deity that is beyond us, uninterested in and disconnected from, our lives. For Job, God is to be engaged, questioned, even challenged, held to account for what has happened in his life. Of course, to his friends this is terrible, a blasphemy that anyone should blame God or seek to question the divine action.
Job understands the truth that God is big enough to deal with our questions. Some of my favourite people are what I call ‘believing atheists’: they can’t believe in God because they have never been given a picture of God big enough to win their faith! I say to them “Tell me the God you don’t believe in, and you might just find that I don’t believe in him either!” They have often been talking with Christians fearful of asking questions, of making intellectual or existential claims on God.
But many of the great Christian saints have always had a robust relationship with the Lord. St Theresa of Avila, the Carmelite mystic, was once traveling by ox cart when it became bogged in a ditch, apparently in a rain storm. While her companions tried to dig the cart out of the mud St Theresa looked up to heaven and called out “God, if this is the way you treat your friends, its no wonder you have so few of them.” Believing in God does not always mean having to be polite to him. In the movie ‘The Apostle’ Robert Duval plays a simple and flawed but genuinely spiritual American preacher. One night a phone call is received at the Manse. His wife says: “He’s not available. He’s busy with the Lord. Sometimes he talks with the Lord, sometimes he shouts at him. Tonight it’s mostly shoutin’!”
HA Williams telling God to ‘rack off’ – the idols finally will – the true God never does!
These themes are found more grimly in the poems of Jennifer Meyers an Australia poet. Her two collections “A Winter’s Prayers” and “Songs of Death” were written after a period of intense suffering. Her mother had died of cancer and then her sister’s baby boy died suddenly. Her own health failed. After four operations in one year she discontinued her beloved studies and then her marriage failed and she was divorced. In the preface to the poems she says:
I offer these poems, the testimony of much personal struggle and anger, as an encouragement to rant and rave – at God if [that] is who you talk to – when life is too much. I always felt so much better having got it said. The poem that shocked me as I wrote it was ‘The Cheated’! Despite my supposedly sophisticated theological education I was sure God would strike me dead. Instead I felt that God had come back in my life and was on my side! And in fact he had urged me to write it.
Here is the poem:
The Cheated
Nothing could ever show
how much I hate you,
God; you who promise
and never deliver;
Nothing could ever tell
how much I could kill
you, God; a thousand times
over, and still not tired;
No one could ever count
the pieces I would chop
you into, if I had
but one infernal axe;
Nobody knows the trouble I’ve
seen, but you, God, and
what do you do about it?
Laugh, have a picnic, go on
holiday;
I would murder you, God,
if I had the chance, but
you cheat me of even that,
my final revenge, for you
are already hanging up there in
agony – somebody
got in before me.
I don’t think even Job ever went that far. And yet she felt that God had come back in her life and was on her side and had even urged her to write it.
What do require of God? How closely and passionately do you seek to engage with God? Do you dare to share your hope, and your love or even your rage with God? And what do you expect him to do with it?
The gospel lesson is that Jesus welcomes little children and loves them, which is just as well, for in our expectations we are often childish and demanding of God. We can be imperious and intellectually questioning, using our minds to keep God at bay and setting him little tests to pass. We can be sullen and sulky – failing to respond to what we know are invitations and overtures to relationship and intimacy. We can be angry and project all our bitterness and pain onto God.
And God deals with that, with all of that. This is the heart of the Cross, that human indifference and apathy, rejection and anger, not just from people long ago, but from people now, is taken into God’s love, is endured, and engaged, and accepted and ultimately, if we will permit it, transformed.
What do you require of God? Whatever the answer God in Christ is equal to the expectation and will answer - as Job discovered, out of the whirlwind and the storm, or as Elijah discovered, in the soft whisper of a voice. However it comes, the answer comes: “You are loved more than you will ever know. You are held, and I will never let you go. Come to me, with all the burden of your questions and your expectations and I will give you rest. Let the little children come to me and forbid them not; for it is to such as these that the kingdom of heaven belongs.”
Call to Worship
From the bright world with its baubles:
Honours, travel, gifts and joys -
We come to God!
Form the dark night with its terrors:
Sickness, fear, betrayal, loss -
We come to God!
We come to God who shines brighter than any earthly day
His glory humbling earthly pride.
We come to God in whom there is no darkness at all
The deepest night is clear as the day.
We come to God the source of life
Where light and dark, life and death,
Joy and sorrow find their true end.
Let us worship him.
PRAYER
Eternal God,
We have praised you in creation
And acknowledged the mystery of your Being
hidden and glorious, yet abounding in
justice, goodness and love.
And we have confessed our limited sight,
Our fleeting days, our need of grace
Our hunger for truth in Jesus Christ.
King of glory, Lord of grace
Open our minds by your Word
Touch our hearts through your Spirit
Fill our lives with your praise! Amen.
Prayers of Intercession
God of Love,
We are bold in approaching you, bold enough to bring our sins and failures, confident you will forgive and send us grace.
We are bold enough to bring our doubts and our questions, confident that you will not snuff out our flickering faith but hold us, and love us until we come to understanding.
We are bold enough to bring you even our anger and our grief, confident that in the Cross you have carried and will carry all that humankind can fling at God, and we confess some of that is ours.
We pray for those who are not so bold
Lord, the guilty and the angry and the confused are all around us, we live among them, sometimes we are them. They use drugs or alcohol or violence or sex or cynicism or money to deal with confusion and grief and rage. Lord save them, we pray, and save us. Help us all to know that whether we are young and silly or old and jaded, none of is too big for the lap of Jesus, none of us is outside the love of God, none of us is so little and insignificant that we are not infinitely worth saving. In this experience, send us in faith and love to others who struggle on life’s sea in the name of Jesus who taught us to pray:
Our Father in heaven
Hallowed be your name
Your kingdom come your will be done
On earth as it is in heaven.
Give us today our daily bread
And forgive us our sins
As we forgive those who sin against us.
Lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil
For the kingdom the power and the glory are yours
Now and forever.
Amen.
Benediction
You are loved from the heart of creation and you are safe in the everlasting arms of God. Go forth in joy and confidence, in gratitude and expectation. May the grace of the Lord, the love of God and the fellowship of the Spirit go with you in all your journeying. Amen.