Sermon – God’s presence is enough
Job 42:1-10
Mark 10:46-52
Jeanette Mathews
29 October 2006

Last weekend I was at a music seminar at Wesley and Robin Mann, the composer of the song we have just sung, was singing the song with us. He sang some verses that are not in the Together in Song hymnbook and someone asked where the verses had come from. He said he had rewritten part of the song after the Beslan school massacre in 2004 when nearly 200 children were killed by gunmen.  The new verses include these words: “bodies are broken/ twisted and scarred/ blaming is easy/ questions are hard/ who made it happen/ what was the plan/ why don’t you answer/ God if you can.”

At the beginning of  this series I preached a sermon entitled “What God requires of us”. Today I want to reverse the topic and ask some questions of God – as I think the bible invites us to. The words are there in the mouth of Jesus in our New Testament reading today – “what do you want me to do for you?” And as we have seen over the last few weeks, the whole book of Job is an invitation to ask some of the hard questions of life, questions about suffering, and the nature of evil, and the question of where God is in all of that. Jim took this topic in one of his sermons in the series too and I was very struck by poem that he read by an Australian woman who was angry with God. He told us that her very powerfully worded poem was prefaced by a comment that although she felt God would strike her dead for writing such words, instead she felt that after writing the poem God had come back into her life and had in fact urged her to write it.

Whenever I teach from the Old Testament I am aware of the range of experience and emotion contained in it. I have been teaching Worship in the OT at St Mark’s this semester, and again have become aware of just how much lament there is in the Old Testament, and how much freedom there is to express anger and hurt and frustration. One of the aspects I’ve tried to grapple with in the course is to ask whether there are challenges for our worship today in what we find in the Old Testament. And I feel that two of the biggest challenges are, firstly, the communal aspect of worship, where we tend to have the attitude that worship is primarily concerned with my own connection with God while in the Old Testament it is always in the context of community, and secondly, the expression of lament which is so often missing in our worship. In the book of Psalms, often called Israel’s book of Praise, there are in fact many more psalms of lament than psalms of praise. Kathleen Norris who has written about the paradox of the psalms says she rediscovered the psalms as an adult after giving away her childhood expereicne of church where she felt she had to be a firm and cheerful believer before daring to show her face there. By taking up the Benedictine practice of praying one psalm a day right through the book of psalms she discovered “you come to the bible’s great book of priases through all the moods and conditions of life, and while you may feel like hell, you sing anyway. To your surprise you find that the psalms do not submerge or deny your true feelings, but allow you to reflect on them, right in front of God.”

After I came back from the Mae La Refugee camp I shared with you one of the Lament Psalms written by the Karen students. I want to read part of another to you now – a psalm about the Karen homeland:

How wealthy on my eyes
Once a very famous time
Now the poorest in the world
Now full of fighting and the curse

I search for peace where I went
Can no one answer me?
Yes, some people had answers
which does not really fulfil what I need.

Justice, peace, love and kindness
Should be in everyone’s mind
The most important way to build peace
Is the time when we really forgive!

Most people wandered all over the world
For this generation to survive
But some stay on this ‘Land’
Persecution to be their friend.

And the question still goes on
Why have we been born to this fate!

Another Benedictine monk says the great thing about the Psalms is that “God behaves in the psalms in ways he is not allowed to behave in systematic theology”. And this could be extended to the other books in the OT known as the wisdom books, or Writings. I think it could be argued that God does not behave well in the book of Job either. God appears only at the beginning and the end of the book, and in between leaves Job in his suffering, and leaves Job’s so called friends to get on with the questions that suffering brings that have no satisfactory answers. When God does finally respond to Job’s questions there are no real answers given either. Job might expect explanations, but more questions come instead. “Who is this? Where were you? What do you know? Can you do the things I can do? Gird up your loins and I will question YOU.”

I have a cartoon by Michael Leunig stuck up on my office door. It appeals to me because in it God defies our expectations. We often come to God confident that if we try hard enough, we will find the answers. And so this cartoon has a man in a suit standing in an attitude of prayer saying “Oh great and glorious God, almighty powerful father of heaven and earth, grant us your everlasting strength and wisdom in our fight against evil...” In the next frame a tiny figure says “OK I’ll grant it to you”. The man in the suit looks very taken aback and says “Eh, who are you?” “I’m God”. “You can’t be God. You’re too small.” The little figure says “sorry to disappoint you but I am God.” The man puts his hands on his hips and says “You’re so little! This is totally ridiculous! To which God replies “You’re so big. It’s completely mad.” By contrast the God in the last chapters of Job seems, if anything, too big. The vast and intricate universe is laid out before Job and there seems to be a challenge to re think the experience of suffering set against the perspective of the whole universe over which God has charge. But too big, or too little, both images have God refusing to fit into our perceptions and expectations.

In today’s set lectionary reading some of the verses of Chapter 42 in Job are left out. We are supposed to read the first six verses, in my bible entitled “Job is humbled”, and then the section from verse 10 which describes Job’s fortunes being restored. But I wanted to include the middle verses which describes Job praying, and finishes with the words “the Lord accepted Job’s prayer”. What do these words mean in the light of the chapters that have come before? I want to see a connection between them. Because in the first thirty one chapters of Job before God speaks Job curses and laments, protests against God and rejects the pious explanations of others who try to make sense of his suffering. When God finally speaks he twice challenges Job to “gird up your loins like a man” – although the word is better translated “like a warrior”. Job is being invited to prepare himself for a valient encounter with a strong opponent. An eighth century painted image of Job portrays this well – in it Job’s robes and belt are being blown sideways by the force of God’s hurricane like speech, and yet his feet are firmly planted, his hands are clasped firmly on his belt, a posture that suggests he is contemplating not humble retreat in the face of God’s powerful argument but instead combat. Another clue to this suggestion is that when Job says he repents in dust and ashes, he is using a phrase tht is only used two other times in the Old Testament, once in Genesis where Abraham is courageously interceding on behalf of the doomed cities of Sodom and Gomorrah, daring to push God the limits of his mercy by asking if God will spare the cities if only 50 righteous men are found, then 45, then 40, 30, 20, and even if only 10 righteous people are found. It’s an amazing interchange. The other time the phrase is used is earlier in Job – as part of a protest by Job that God does not answer even when humans cry out for justice. There is a sense of defiance in the phrase. I think it is possible to find in this picture of Job a new vision of humanity, so that Job has discovered in his experience that to be fully human, and therefore in the image of God, is not to submit unquestioningly to innocent suffering but to protest it, contend with it, and if all else fails take the fight directly to God. Another illustration of Job, this time from the twelfth century, shows a figure standing face to fac with God, eyes fixed on God’s, and hands raised not in prayer but being shook in God’s direction with an upturned index finger. When I think of the purpose of prayer I struggle with the idea that we are asking for God’s intervention – I am not convinced that things will change for the better if enough people pray, nor am I convinced that good things will not happen if no-one prays. But I find the image of prayer in these illustrations of Job strangely liberating, they suggest that we can come before God in honest and courageous protest at the seeming absence of Love and justice in the world God made and should care for. I like a rabbinic teaching which says “A man should carry two stones in his pocket. One should be inscribed ‘I am but dust and ashes.’ The other should say ‘for my sake the world was created.’ And he should use each stone as needed.” I interpret this saying as giving us the freedom to either use our stones as a reminder that we are grounded in earthly experience, or as something to hurl at God when that experience becomes too much to bear. To be fully human is to question. To not be too easily satisfied. To not rest on the answers and experience of the past, although that may be an important part of our reflection, but to let our new situation inform us, and maybe even change us. At the end of the book not many of Job’s questions have been answered, but he has become wiser in the Old Testament sense of wisdom where insight is gained from attentiveness to experience and to the world around us. Job says “I had heard of you by the ear, but now my eyes have seen you, therefore I repent”. This is not repentance from sin, but repentance in the sense of changing one’s mind. Hearsay – false expectations or perceptions of God - have been replaced by a new vision and experience of God’s presence.

There is an interesting echo in today’s gospel story from the one we heard last week. When Jesus says to the blind man “what do you want me to do for you?” the words are almost identical to those of James and John in the previous story. There they said to Jesus “we want you to do for us whatever we ask of you”. I imagine Jesus was checking that the blind man’s expectations were not the same as those of his disciples – that his request was to do with being restored to life, and not to do with being elevated to a new level of power. God’s presence will change us, but not always the way we expect.

One of my commentaries puts it like this: “We want answers, but God wants to talk about the Pleiades and the wild horses and storehouses of the hail. We want a road map, but God hands us a musical score instead.” At the beginning of the service we sang another song I heard at Wesley last week and I was captivated by the imagery of God as our song. Because music touches us at the place which may defy explanation, sometimes words can’t express the way music moves us. But I also love the affirmation that God is our silence, because there are times when neither words nor music can be found. Even the melody of Jesus that was God’s gift to humankind was silenced for a time, but the power of the resurrection message is that even in the experience of deep suffering, even in the experience of death, God is still present. Even when we don’t have all the answers, God’s presence can be enough. And God’s presence is big enough, and small enough, to hear our questions, our raging, our cursing, and our silence. And in that presence is a sense of peace.

The Psalm I read you earlier that was written in Mae La, like many of the bible’s psalms, ends on a note of hope. I didn’t read the last two lines which come after
And the question still goes on
Why have we been born to this fate!

It goes on:

Not by human strength could I answer
For only in God comes the PEACE to all life’s questions.

(Khu Pwo, Mae La Camp, September 2006)

Notice that in the peace there are no answers, but there is an ability to live with the questions. And this, I suggest, is what it is to have faith.

Amen.