(Preached on Sunday, October 11, 2009)
If I knew where on earth to find him, I’d go straight to him. -Job 23:3
While working in Iraq, journalist and avowed atheist Spencer Case felt an impulse to pray on two separate occasions. One time is easily explainable, he claims, writing in the Humanist – it was when his camp was under attack by enemy mortars. As the old saying goes, “there are no atheists in foxholes.” The other occasion, though, was when he slept under the stars in a desolate part of western Iraq and was struck by the contrast between the human-made chaos in Iraq and the beauty and order in the cosmos. It prompted him to pray this prayer: “Dear God, I have come to the conclusion that you probably don’t exist, but I’ve also come to the conclusion that any one view I hold may turn out to be mistaken, however unlikely the odds seem. So if you are there, if I am wrong, you know where to find me.”
It seems to be true, that at the core of our human experience we are searching for something. Even the atheist gives voice to that search. Whether it is meaning, purpose, fulfillment, God, companionship, love – we live our lives striving to fill a void, a hole, an emptiness inside our beings. For some of us we have never quite identified that for which we search. For others of us, we are searching for something we “imagine” is out there. And for still others, we are looking for something which we seem to have lost. Spencer Case represents that first group. The young man who runs up to Jesus represents that second group. And Job represents the third group.
Let’s begin with Job. Job’s faith in God was not a casual, fair-weather sort of thing. It was intense and personal. It was vigorous and strong. When life fell apart for him, Job clung desperately to his faith, like a drowning man clutches onto a life preserver. Nevertheless, in his pain and confusion, Job had a hard time getting a handle on that faith. The very thing he needed to clutch he couldn’t grasp. He had trouble finding God!
This might surprise you, after all Job seems to have all manner of things he might be asking of God: relief from pain, a cure for ailments, even compensation for loss. Yet, while he laments all he has lost, his primary struggle is a spiritual one: a faith crisis. Job wants an explanation. He wants to be justified. He believes God owes him his day in court. One problem: he cannot find God. In a mirror echo of Psalm 139 where the Psalmist recites how he could not get away from God’s presence, but found it everywhere he went, Job laments just the opposite experience: “If I knew where on earth to find him, I’d go straight to him. … I travel East looking for him – I find no one; then West, but not a trace; I go North, but he’s hidden his tracks; then South, but not even a glimpse.”
This is not an uncommon experience for modern people. Many today count themselves religious or spiritual, yet many feel a great gulf between themselves and God. Especially in our modern world we wonder how down to earth is God? What does God know about what it is like to be a nurse in an ER on a Saturday night? Or how it is to be a teenager in this open society, where drugs and wild and noisy diversions constantly bombard the young? Can God appreciate how it feels to be 48 years old and lost your job in middle management, where you have worked your guts out for years? Only to find that in the job market people of your age are regarded as “over the hill;” unemployable in the field in which you are skilled? What does God know about being a police officer these days? To feel constantly at risk, or to be confronted with corruption, or find yourself being trapped into a small compromise by an unscrupulous colleague, to be muzzled from exposing greater ills? Or how can God comprehend what it is to keep a level head within our money-manic culture? To be tempted by “big bucks” which pretend to offer so much? Of course God seems distant and removed from us! How can God be on our human wave length? It seems most unlikely. Job is honest enough to voice this feeling for us.
Yet that is not the only witness we have from scripture. Jesus came to teach us about a loving God who was near at hand. Jesus himself was a common person and common people listened to him and were drawn to him. He taught them, and all of us, about a God who treasured the name of each vineyard laborer or woman toiling in the home; a caring God who numbered the hairs on the head of even the lepers, prostitutes, and the unpatriotic tax collectors. Not only did Jesus teach them that there was no gap, his life embodied that teaching. After his death and resurrection his followers grasped the full and shocking yet marvelous understanding: This Jesus was filled with God. God was not remote; God was in Christ reconciling the world unto himself. In Jesus his early followers came to understand the gulf between humanity and God was bridged forever.
And yet, even now, we do not always experience and know for ourselves the close presence of God. Often, even though we are sincerely searching for God’s presence, there is something within us that is blocking that bridge. The young man who sought out Jesus was very sincere in his desire to be close to God. He earnestly sought out Jesus; he had tried to be faithful to his understanding of what God wanted of him as he had learned in his faith tradition, in the law of Moses; he was a good man and he wanted to be better, to be closer to God. Jesus saw this in him. The story says Jesus looked at him and he loved him. Jesus also saw the one thing that was getting in the way of his complete union with God: his riches.
We usually make two mistakes with this story. Either we take it too literally and say it is only and always about money, or we take it too spiritually and say it is not really about money. Either way, we tend to dismiss it. Truly, I believe it is primarily about the difficulty for us of bridging that gulf between ourselves and God and finding that intimate relationship with God which brings constant meaning and purpose and love into our lives. As Jesus tells his followers, we cannot do it ourselves, but only God can bring us close.
Many things can block our awareness of God’s presence. For we who are deeply enmeshed in a culture of consumerism where our society relentlessly tells us to measure who we are by what we own, money and possessions often do get in the way. For some of us it would be “easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle” than for us to forgive those who have harmed us. Well-nurtured anger and bitterness can settle into our hearts for so long that we cannot imagine ourselves without them, even for the sake of life with God. Pride, jealousy or envy prevent some of us from knowing the life God wants to share with us; for others its excessive ambition, relentless self-promotion or an obsession with success. Like the young man who came to Jesus, we can cling to things which make it impossible for us to know the powerful, loving presence of God.
One of the largest obstacles for all of us is our desire to understand. We want to know “WHY?” That desire grows from our sense that it shouldn’t happen to us. Part of what Job came to understand – part of what the life and death of Jesus teaches us – is the truth that being faithful to God does not mean we will avoid suffering. We do not have immunity. At the same time, when we suffer, it does not mean we have done something terrible to deserve it. Suffering is not God’s punishment on us. Suffering is clearly part of life. Ernest Hemingway wrote in A Farewell to Arms, “The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong in the broken places.” Jesus was clearly broken by the world and three days afterward he showed himself, truly, to be strong at the broken places. Because of his resurrection we know we are not alone in the universe, contrary to what life often does to us and what we often feel. In his desolation on the cross, Jesus shows us that even when we feel totally abandoned, in truth we are not. Even when we feel farthest from God, God is always right by our side. And God never abandons us.
Ultimately, what we might discover is that God’s apparent absence, is really God’s silence, and that silence is God’s gift to us. Contrary to our human tendency to fill up silence with words, which far too often are poor rationalizations or unhelpful clichés and meaningless “chestnuts,” God is instead silently walking with us, present in a quiet manner. Perhaps that quiet present is in truth what we most need – someone to listen to us, who will let us ramble on, rant and rave, question and howl – until we grow quiet ourselves to the point where we can truly begin to sense that we are not alone in the struggle, but a quiet, gentle, loving and powerful presence is right there with us. Then we may be able to pray that honest prayer, “Dear God if you are there…” and discover that God is right there, listening with love, compassion and acceptance. Even more, we may hear God whispering, as did Elijah when he heard God in the silence and in a whisper on the mountain, offering divine questions in exchange for our human ones: Will you still love me? Will you trust me? Will the brokenness before you and within you cause you to despair or to seek me? For if you seek me with your whole heart, you will find me, I promise!