Today is the Sunday on which I am recognizing Reformation Sunday. Some churches may recognize this next Sunday, some in the middle of this week. But it is a week in the life of Protestant churches when we remember and give thanks for the gifts of the Reformation. The expressions of the Protestant tradition that so underlie the foundations of our gathering here today.

 

So the service lifts up hymns that were written by the Reformers: Martin Luther and John Calvin. The liturgy lifts up great moments of that time five hundred years ago when we return to the roots of the Christian faith that reformed and reshaped the church, to draw ourselves closer to the scriptural counsel and standards.

 

I want to thank those of you who, on the first hymn, broke into the descant on the final verse. I heard you out there singing that beautiful descant on “A Mighty Fortress is Our God.” And I look forward to hearing the choir sing it at eleven o’clock.

 

In music, a descant, seems kind of counterpoint to me. A counterpoint is a melody that is added above or below the given melody. The counterpoint contains in its melody a combination of some theme out of the melody, or some kind of movement of the music that accentuates or embellishes, hopefully in a positive way, the steady melody that is progressing throughout.

 

The steady melody plays throughout the whole and the counterpoint moves around it, adding to it and embellishing it, like the descant on the opening hymn, in its responses and its variations to the dominating melody.

 

Today, the Lectionary brings us scripture text about humans singing the counterpoint, these concluding passages from the book of Job. Job is a book that deals with the deep human questions about why there is suffering in the world. In the story, Job, a good man, faithfully seeks to serve God with his entire life.

 

So many of you know this story, but some of you may be hearing it new for the first time today. This is an ancient and dear story in the life of the community of faith.

 

Job is a good man, faithfully serving God his entire life. In the story, he is inflicted with one disaster after another, until he has lost everything: his health, his home, his finances, his family. It is simply a total and utter loss.

 

His friends come by to visit and say to him, “Job, you must have done something very wrong.” If suffering can always be based on someone else’s fault, you see, then perhaps it can’t be avoided.”

 

But Job answers, “No. No, I have been completely faithful. I have done nothing to merit this loss.” And then Job, in the eloquent poetry of lament, asks God the classic question, “Why? Why is there this kind of suffering in the world?”

 

Of course the question is only more relevant today. And that’s a part of why the Book of Job has been so dear to the community of faith across the centuries. We keep encountering the unfairness of suffering, and we keep asking, “Why?” Why did God create a world where mudslides can suddenly wipe out a whole village – men, women, and children. Why did the fire in California turn and end the lives of four brave heroes? Why is there disease at all? Why do so many children in the world have to spend their lives, seven days a week, in forced labor, while other children know the benefits of a community like this one.

 

Job asks about suffering: “Why, God? Why?”

 

That’s a part of why the book has been precious to us. And why the Lectionary says at least once every three years, you should read this and work through it. Pray about it and think about it. We should read Job. It has much to spiritually teach us.

 

It helps us to know that suffering doesn’t have to bring people into a heightened sense or awareness of the presence of God, the movement of God. But it often does. It certainly seems to for Job.

 

It lifts up for us the validity of the cry of lament out of the faithful person. The cry of lament is a way of saying that faithfulness is not the same thing as stoicism. Sometimes in faithfulness, we do cry. And we can cry. Jesus wept, and Job’s spouse agonized.

 

Job laments. But all persist in their faithfulness. Weeping, agonizing, and lamentation are not acts of unfaithfulness. Indeed, they can be the voice of the faithful as they walk through the experience of suffering.

 

Anna Quinlan, the American novelist, kept as a memento of 9/11 three e-mails from her son. She was in New York when the terrorists struck. For three days and three nights afterwards, he was not able to get in touch with his mother. And so he wrote. He sent her e-mails. And each e-mail begins with the heading, in capital letters, “I really need to hear your voice.”

 

That’s what Job, I think, is saying to God. I really need to hear your voice.

 

Sometimes we can say, “The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away. Blessed be the name of the Lord.” But sometimes we must say more than that. Sometimes we must speak the indicting question, “Where are you?”

 

The Book of Job gives voice to that question for the community of faith.

 

This is a way of persisting in integrity, at least the integrity of faith, to not only acknowledge God in our suffering, but to have a heightened sense of the acknowledgement of God in our suffering. At one point Job says to his spouse, “We take the good days from God; shouldn’t we take the bad days?”

 

We are called into faith not simply for good times. Faith is a call to walk through many things – some good, but some the valley of the shadow of death. And that’s an alternative to the prosperity theology we hear so often today. We walk through the valley of the shadow of death. Not around it – we walk through it. We find that Christ joins us not just on the other side of our suffering, but Christ joins people walking through the experience of suffering. And every time we let the Book of Job give voice to our sufferings, there is some gain in human dignity and human understanding, as we reject the quick-fix answers and the success theology of those who ignore human suffering. Or seeing it, like Job’s so-called friends, are quick to blame it on the faults of others.

 

Therefore, reading Job prayerfully and with meditation, and in worship, helps us to face the questions that come to us in the midst of suffering. The questions that occur when life does not turn out as we would expect it or would choose it.

 

And Job receives an answer. The scripture reading this morning gives us a part of that answer out of chapters thirty-eight and forty-two. The Book of Job remembers the answer God gave to Job. It is the poetry of God’s statement that God is God, and not Job. The Lord speaks out of the storm. From out of the storm the Lord said to Job, “Why do you talk so much when you know so little, Job? Now get ready to face me. Can you answer the questions I ask? How did I lay the foundation of the earth? Were you there? Doubtless, you who have decided its length and width can answer. What supports the foundations of the world? Who placed the cornerstone while Morningstar sang and angels rejoiced? When the ocean was born, I set its boundaries and wrapped it in blankets of thickest fog. Then I built a wall around it and locked the gates, and I said, “Your powerful waves stop here. They can go no farther.” Did you tell the sun to rise, Job? Did you ever tell the sun to rise, and did it obey?

 

It is as if the Lord is saying, “Sometimes, Job, you are not going to be able to know. Sometimes your very best answers will fall short.”

 

It feels to me like a sort of supreme legal moment, here in the Book of Job at the end. A moment where God seems to come forward to the bar like Perry Mason, or Thomas Moore in “A Man for All Seasons,” or Jack Nicholson: “You can’t handle the answer, Job.”

 

It’s a clear statement and in a confrontational fashion, that God is going to be God, and Job cannot be God.

 

But there is also a beautiful moment of poetry here. A moment in Job where God speaks the answer of the work of creation. It may be amongst the most beautiful poetry in all of the world. God here refuses to try and justify the fact that Job, though and upright man, suffers. But God does say all of our human answers are inadequate. We can’t know. It’s not necessarily a comforting argument.

 

But there is a sort of care that comes from the recognition on the part of humans that we can not know all things. And it may a particularly important recognition for preachers. And maybe for doctors. And teachers. And scientists. And anyone else who has attempted to answer as if they always do know.

 

Think of the doctors who, in honesty, have had to come out to patients and say, “You know, the truth is, we just don’t know.”

 

Or teachers who have had to say to a parent in the face of the question why can’t Johnny read?, “We’ve used our best methods, and we still don’t know.”

 

Or why did Joe suddenly become a scholar when he entered his freshman year of college? We don’t know?

 

Or an engineer who says, “This is just my most accurate guess,” or their own construction vernacular for that.

 

The answer that comes to Job out of the storm says, “You are not God. And the truth is that in this life at times you will have to live without knowing.”

 

So the apostle Paul says, “The creation waits with eager longing to encounter the redemption that will come from God.”

 

And in First Corinthians he writes, and we often recite, “Now we see in a mirror dimly. Now we know in part that the time will come when we will know fully, even as we are fully known.”

 

Every time Job’s lament in question is allowed to give voice to our sufferings, there is some gain in humanity and dignity. We deepen our availability, our openness, to the revelation that comes out of the tempest. And we are brought a step closer to the threshold of the voice and the mystery of God.

 

At first, the Scripture says, Job heard the Lord answer in the whirlwind. But after the answer, Job says, “Now, now my eyes see you as well. I have heard of you by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees you.”

 

What does this mean? I think in part it means that Job is acknowledging that now he realizes that God alone is God, and Job is not. Perhaps he begins to gain a proper perspective on himself, and this may be a way of saying that as long as human beings understand when we are in God’s order, and where we are in God’s order, where we are in the scheme of things, then we are better able to go out and do as God is calling us.

 

What does Job end up with? A satisfactory answer as to why he suffered? No. But he does find a close encounter between the creature and the Creator, and out of that an awareness of who he is in relationship to God. That God is God and we are not (thanks be to God!).

 

There is a place for the reading of Job in Christian worship. There is an important place for hearing and acknowledging the cry of lament and the questions about human suffering. But in the Christian faith, we never read Job without also hearing the melody of the New Testament, and the answer that God has brought us in Jesus Christ.

 

We can never hear the end of Job without also hearing the ringing of the eighth chapter of the Letter to the Romans. “What then are we to say about these things? If God is for us, who can be against us? He who did not withhold his own son, but gave him up for all of us, will he not with him also give us everything else? For I am convinced that neither death nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all of creation will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus, our Lord.

And Job answered the Lord, “I know that you can do all things, and that no purpose of yours can be thwarted. You ask, O Lord, Who is this that obscures my counsel without knowledge?  Therefore I have uttered what I did not understand. Things too wonderful for me, which I did not know. I have heard you by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees you.

 

O you preachers and you teachers. You engineers and you builders. You poets and you musicians. Don’t you know? Haven’t you heard? We are always only singing the counterpoint.

 

 

©John T. DeBevoise 2006