“Demanding Answers from the Universe”   Oct. 14, 2018   Dr. Roger Ray    

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Job 23:1-9, 16-17       1 Then Job answered:
2 "Today also my complaint is bitter; his hand is heavy despite my groaning.
3 Oh, that I knew where I might find him, that I might come even to his dwelling!
4 I would lay my case before him, and fill my mouth with arguments.
5 I would learn what he would answer me, and understand what he would say to me.
6 Would he contend with me in the greatness of his power? No; but he would give heed to me. 
7 There an upright person could reason with him, and I should be acquitted forever by my judge.
8 "If I go forward, he is not there; or backward, I cannot perceive him;
9 on the left he hides, and I cannot behold him; I turn to the right, but I cannot see him.

16 God has made my heart faint; the Almighty has terrified me;
17 If only I could vanish in darkness, and thick darkness would cover my face!

In my starting class in seminary, there was a woman, let’s call her Melissa, who was one of the most intelligent grad students on campus. She had emerged from a crushingly conservative and repressed childhood in a Church of Christ in which both her innate intellect and her gender were counted as liabilities. But in the academically competitive environment at Vanderbilt, she was finally free to flourish.

But, even there, Melissa had some social issues. She had never dated, never had close friends, in part because of her oppressive religious background but also, and there is no kind way to say this, but she was one of the most unattractive people I have ever seen. Her appearance also betrayed the fact that she had evidently, just given up years before.

But as sometimes happens at that stage of life, a miracle happened. She met someone. I don’t know how it happened but I do know that for the first time in our class, we saw Melissa smilling, in fact, she seemed to smile all of the time, so much so, that she actually started to look attractive. . . and I know how sexist that probably sounds but trust me, if you had been there you would know what I mean.

In between classes, in casual bits of conversation, she talked about wedding plans . . . they wanted to serve champagne at the reception but if she did her parents wouldn’t come . . . and they wouldn’t come if they used a piano in the service . . . but even her family’s evident disfunction, her happiness shined through. The non-instrumental Churches of Christ worship a mean and petty god. Theirs is a religion that keeps therapists in business. In spite of all of the family issues, they were to be wed immediately after the end of that first grueling year of seminary.

The next fall, when we all came back to class, I saw her in the hallway and I asked about how married life was going. She looked as if I had shot her and she said, “You haven’t heard.” We sat down in a meeting room and she told me, they had gotten married in May and they went to Florida for their honeymoon and spent their wedding night in a hotel on the beach. The next morning, her husband volunteered to get up and go to the store to get some breakfast for them. He didn’t return. It took hours for her to find out what had happened. He had crossed the street, with only some cash in his pocket, no wallet, no identification, and a truck with failed brakes hit him and killed him instantly. 

Faced with this horrifying news, I reached deep into my young minister’s bag of tricks and I quoted Romans 8.28, “We know that all things work together for good for those who love God, who are called according to his purpose.” I was just 23 years old. I had only been a minister for a few months. But, honestly, even then I knew better. And, you know, in a moment like that, I don’t know if I was trying to help to minister to her grief, or if I was trying to reassure myself, or, and this is probably really it, I was trying to defend God’s reputation. 

 

I know that you guys already know this, but sometimes religious people watch these videos so for the sake of our more traditionally religious viewers, allow me to make this statement of the obvious: Any God that needs you to defend their honor is not much of a God. 

 

Melissa wept a little, but she was the bigger person that day. She shook her head and took my hand and patiently explained to me that God didn’t kill her husband and that there was nothing good about his death. She had come back to school because she didn’t know what else to do and she thought she needed to be around her friends. I trust that the rest of our peers were better and smarter friends to her than I was on that day, but I learned a lot and I am grateful to her for straightening me out. 

 

Things don’t always work out. We live in a capricious universe. I’m not saying that things happen randomly. There are laws of physics. There are predictable and logical interactions in chemistry, in evolutionary biology, in the formation and explosion of stars. Even in that run-away truck, there was inertia, there was gravity, there was the force of an internal combustion engine. . . but what there was not was a puppet-master up in the clouds who made the truck’s brakes go out just as Melissa’s husband set out across the street on his first day as a married man. There was no meaning, no divine intent, no sacred plan working itself out in history. It was just sad. Horrifying. The worst. 

 

The universe is not random, but it is capricious. Stuff just happens. It always has and it always will. There may be a cause but that doesn’t mean that there is a reason. Religious people will tell themselves that God is in heaven and all is right with the world. Even non-religious people will firmly announce their personal belief that everything happens for a reason. 

 

We are afraid to allow ourselves to accept that we live in a universe in which some kids are born HIV positive in a country defined by poverty, hunger, and violence, and others are born healthy to loving parents who will indulge their every desire. There is not a reason, there is just the “isness” of the universe. 

 

I wish that the people who love the Bible so much would love it a little less and read it a little more. I would be the first to confess that the book of Job is not easy to understand if you just read it without any preparation for it. It is a very ancient piece of philosophy, originally written in Hebrew poetry. 

 

At its core, it is a narrative about a man who has suffered horrible tragedies. His children have been killed. His crops have died. His flocks have been stolen, and his own health has deteriorated to the point that he is just left sitting in the dust, scrapping his boils with a broken piece of pottery. 

 

And in that narrative, Job shakes his fist at heaven and demands an answer. Why did this happen to me? Three friends, poetic interloculars, show up to comfort him but, sort of like me telling Melissa that “all things work together for the good of those who love God,” it becomes evident that they are not really there to comfort Job. They are there to comfort themselves, and, like many of us who feel that we are ordained to speak spiritual truths, they sought to exonerate God. 

 

His friends told him that there is a divine plan, a reason, that is just beyond his ability to understand. When that fails they try to tell him that he is being punished for some sin, though no one seems to even be able to imagine what the offense might have been. The give and take goes on for hours . . . more than 40 chapters. And then, in the end, somehow, God actually shows up to answer the charge, but it is a singularly unsatisfactory answer.

 

It does go on a bit but by and large it is little more than a statement of fact that the universe is huge, complex and incomprehensible. Which is to say, not just that the truth is more than you can comprehend, it isn’t that the truth is more than you can handle. It is that truth is found in the “isness” of existence and it doesn’t have to mean anything at all. It just is. 

 

Now, truly inferior hands tried to made additions to Job through the centuries, trying to soften the blow a bit, perhaps, or to offer more of a defense of God. 

It isn’t hard to spot most of the additions. They are in prose and they are theologically silly. I won’t even dignify the ignorant fake introduction that describes a betting contest between God and Satan to explain Job’s fate, and all of the stuff at the end after the first verses of chapter 42 can be ignored. However, there is one mildly satisfying gesture to be found there when God tells the friends of Job that they were totally wrong in all of the religious gyrations they had been pillorying Job with for 40 chapters. God dismisses them to go sacrifice seven bulls and seven rams, just for saying stupid stuff. 

I know that might seem unlikely, but it is right there in chapter 42 of Job. I miss the good old days when you could give someone a hefty fine for saying stupid things about God, but it is somewhat comforting to think that it happened way back when. 

 

Religious people have used supernatural theism as a way of abdicating any moral responsibility for what happens in the world. As Scott Peck observed, a hurricane is not an act of God, it is an accident of nature. However, when volunteers come from hundreds of miles away to help rebuild; when people open their wallets and checkbooks and donate to help the victims of disaster, I am willing to give license to say that is an act of God, because it is love inspired by compassion and that is as close as we get to godliness. 

 

God is not pulling strings from above the clouds, healing one child’s cancer while, at the same time, sending a truck careening out of control to kill Melissa’s husband. 

You may think that I am being excessively cynical in saying that there is no one in charge of the universe and that things happen for no reason but it was the 16^thcentury Spanish Saint, Teresa of Avila, who said it first.

I’m not saying that I believe in determinism. The world is not just a bunch of chemicals and forces of physics that have been set in motion and that we have no will to change the course of events. Smoking cigarettes is a causative agent for lung cancer. Sugar consumption is related to obesity. Driving while drunk can have lethal consequences. Our choices do matter: 

Take this inquisitive kid for example. He’s going places . . . not Princeton, or Yale, but . . . places. I’m just saying, our choices have consequences. Some choices are better than others. 

We are not big biblicists here, even if that is our heritage. What the churches of our youth failed to point out to us is that the Bible does not represent one world or even one theological perspective. There are passages written by people who did believe that God was a puppet-master who lived in the clouds. There are parts of the Bible that assure us that God is in charge. . . That things happen according to God’s divine plan. . . that God answers prayers, heals us, protects us, finds us jobs, and parking places at the mall during the Christmas shopping season. . . but there is also Job . . . good ol’ Job who stands up in the middle of the pages of the Old Testament to say, “It just ain’t so.” 

 

Kind of like the religious horizon in our area, it might even be fair to say that most of the Bible echoes Paul’s insistence that all things work out for the good of those who love God, even AIDS babies in Africa, war refugees from Syria, and toddler prisons on the American border with Mexico. Most of the Bible sings with the Psalmist that God is our protector, defender, savior and deliverer. And some people who have heard me disparage the notion of God as being a 12 month-out-of-the-year Santa Claus who grants our wishes if only we really really really believe in fairies will say, “how do you know.” And, honestly, I know in exactly the same way that I know that there is no Santa Claus, Tooth Fairy, or Easter Bunny. There may be some slight chance that I am mistaken but there is no evidence to suggest that I am. 

 

In the same way, Job, and a lot of the Proverbs and most of Ecclesiastes, offers the minority opinion in the same way that we offer an alternative spiritual view of reality here, and like Job, Proverbs, and Ecclesiastes, we may be the minority view but it just so happens that reason and evidence are on our side. 

 

A healthy spirituality can never be achieved through denial of reality. The mysterious spirit of the universe that seems to be in all places and a part of all things, does not feed the hungry, heal the sick, visit the imprisoned, clothe the naked, or welcome the stranger. That’s our job, that is our part of being the hands and feet of God. It is, as St Teresa said, only through our eyes that God looks compassion into the world. 

 

That’s not a lack of religious faith nor is it caving into cynicism. It is an orientation to reality that I wish we could share with our sister congregations because, since it is true that God has no hands but our hands, no feet but our feet, it sure would be helpful if they would get up out of those pews and give God a hand.