WHERE IS GOD WHEN YOU NEED HER?

(Preached on Sunday, October 12, 2003)

O that I knew where I might find him, that I might come even to his dwelling!                                                                         -Job 23:3

 

Dianne and I had one of those weeks.

Monday she takes her car into the dealership because it has begun making a strange noise.  When she drops it off, she discovers there were two recalls issued for that particular make of Nissan.  When she picks it up, she discovers it needs 4 new tires, new brakes, and an alignment — for $900.

On Tuesday, I return to my car from visiting two parishioners in Baptist hospital, only to discover it is dead, turn the key, nothing happens.  So, I call AAA.

The last time I called them, about 4 months ago, was from the exact same parking spot at Baptist hospital for a flat tire.

This time, it needed a new battery.

The copier ran out of toner in the office this week, and it appears the copy salesman we purchased the machine from has gone out of business.

Dianne had two of her hospice patients with whom she was especially close die this week.

And on top of all that we went to the Marlins-Cubs playoff game Friday night and the Marlins lost!

Ever have a week like that?

 

Job was beginning to feel like he had an entire life like that!

And he was not afraid to say so.

In fact, his words in today’s passage are a bit shocking in their honesty and depth of emotion.

No longer are we witnessing the famous “patience of Job.”

No longer are we humbled by his apparent deep faith.

It has been 21 chapters since the statement we heard him make to Mrs. Job last week, “Shall we receive the good at the hand of God and not the bad?”

What has happened in the meantime?

 

Job was “comforted” by three of his friends.

If you have been sick, or suffered some misfortune, then you know firsthand what it’s like to have people try to comfort you. 

And people, wanting to say something helpful, sometimes say the wrong things.

In an attempt to offer some comforting word, they say something that makes you feel worse rather than better.

Job suffered from the worst series of would-be comforters who ever tried to say something helpful to a friend in need.

Listen to the comfort his friends try to bring.

 

Think, Job, what did you do to deserve this trouble?

Nobody ever suffered innocently.

You are suffering?  You must have done something wrong.

There is a kind of moral arithmetic in the world.

If you do right, right will be done to you.

If you do wrong, wrong will be done to you.

Think now, what did you do wrong?

 

But Job knew that his suffering was not because of some wrong he had committed.  He had done nothing to deserve the calamities that had come one after another upon him.

And here, in these verses, he pleads his innocence.

In fact, Job is bold enough to proclaim his own complaint against God and to declare his willingness to argue his case before the Almighty, if he can but find God for an audience.

“Oh, that I knew where I might find him!” cries Job.

God appears to have moved and left no forwarding address.

In Chapter one, Job knew where to find God: He prayed and made all the required burnt-offerings, confident that God was listening and responding the way we would expect God to respond. 

But now Job wonders whether he had been naive to think God was listening, or whether God has broken faith with him.

 

It’s a common complaint of people who suffer: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

The writer of Psalm 22 and Jesus on the cross both felt as though God had turned away from them.

Elie Wiesel, the Nobel Prize-winning author and concentration camp survivor, has written of how Jews in World War II often felt that God had abandoned them.

Many, many people, both those who were personally touched by the loss of a loved one, and just those whose sense of security was snatched away by the event, struggle with God’s seeming absence on September 11, 2001.

And when we truly look closely at the state of the world today: I recently read that every 3.5 seconds somewhere in the world a child dies due to either starvation or lack of basic medical care.  Such a fact is almost impossible to comprehend.  This means every minute over 17 children are perishing.  Can you get a picture of over 1,020 children dying every hour of every single day?

We look at this and wonder, where is God?

 

Job has eloquently and honestly spoken the thoughts that so many of us struggle with.

Where is God when you need her?

We cannot find God.  God is silent.

God apparently has withdrawn his presence from us.

She hears not pleading prayer, sees no desperate suffering, answers not a word.

And we are left staring into a void of an empty heaven.

 

And like Job, we know it is not due to our sinfulness.

Those people to claimed God allowed those planes to fly into the World Trade Center towers because of the sinfulness of the United States were just plain wrong.

Even if that were true, it makes no sense that God destroyed all those people, many, many who were undoubtedly good, righteous, even holy people.

 

Far too often we babble on in the face of tragedy and God’s silence, filling the space with words.

Especially in the church, I fear, we are too often guilty of responding to people’s pain with words, words from Scripture, words from our tradition, slogans, sermons.

If you have been in pain and have been the recipient of this sort of concern, you can probably testify that words alone really don’t speak to the depth of the questions, the threatening questions that trouble makes us ask.

Nor do they adequately fill the silence of God.

But we are desperate to keep the moral world together.

One reason why lots of us find it difficult to be with people who have experienced some terrible calamity is that the misfortune of others threatens us by threatening our simplistic explanations for what’s going on in the world.

 

So, why can we not find God and do we think God is absent?

Is it possible we are looking for God in the wrong places?

After all, God in her mercy has provided all of us the “means of grace,” as the church calls them the avenues through which God comes to us and speaks to us and works in our lives. 

God gives us God’s word, written in the Scriptures — but how often do we read those words, and how often do we attend to hear them interpreted and expanded in sermons? 

God promises to be with us in the Spirit through the sacraments, but we may never understand them or open ourselves to the communion with God that they afford.

Maybe God seems silent to us because we seek God in the wrong places.  But once again, that is not Job’s problem.

Job searches desperately for some avenue to God.

He even says that he would be willing to enter a courtroom with God and lay his case before God.

Then, Job asserts, God would surely listen!

Nor is that always our problem.

Many, many, many of the Jews and Christians murdered in the holocaust were faithful, pious folk who regularly read scripture, prayed and attended worship.

Many of us seek God in those ways.

No, the problem is still there, far too often.

 

Job also hints at a hesitance in his, and our, complaint.

In verse 15 Job admits to being terrified in God’s presence.

He actually begins to rethink his demand for an audience.

Much like Dorothy and her three companions as they approach the “Great and Terrible, Mighty Wizard of Oz.”

It is as if Job suddenly stops and cries out, “What have I said?  Do I really want to face God?” 

Job begins to realize the foolishness of his demands to speak directly to God.

Job well knows who God is, and he realizes that he could not possibly contend with God.

God is too awesome, too overwhelming in her glory, too dreadful in his might for anyone to stand up before her.

Job is not fooling with the sentimental little godlets that we sometimes imagine for ourselves. 

Job knows the character of God, because he has lived in God’s presence all of his life.

This reality of sheer power and energy that is so deeply hidden from us is captured in the biblical metaphors for God as abyss, chasm, chaos, even horror and fear.

Job acknowledges what smolders in each of us, that understanding that perhaps it is best for us that God is hidden and distant, for otherwise we might be overwhelmed and consumed by God’s power, much like the sun would overwhelm the earth were it any closer.

 

While this passage from Job does not provide any powerful answers to the problem of God it does offer some more hints.