The Rev. Dayle Casey
The Chapel of Our Saviour
Colorado Springs, Colorado
November 11, 2007

Proper 27-C
Job 19:23-27a
2 Thessalonians 2:13––3:5
Luke 20:27-38

The comedian Jerry Lewis once said that the best wedding gift he and his wife received was a movie of their wedding. It was a really great gift, Lewis said, because when things get difficult at home now, he can play the movie backwards and jump out a free man!

Wouldn’t life be simple if life really worked that way, if life had an “undo” command. If, whenever something goes wrong, or whenever something happens that we don’t understand, we could just run life backwards until we reach the good parts again, and start all over. Perhaps Job indulged in that fantasy once or twice!

At the beginning of the Book of Job, we are told that the angels and all the members of the heavenly council “came to present themselves before the Lord,”and that Satan was among them. And God asks Satan where he has come from and what he is up to these days. And Satan says, ”O, nuthin’ much. I’m just hangin’ out, just roamin’ around the creation.”

“Well, Satan” asks God, ”in all your roaming have you considered my servant Job, what a just and righteous man he is?” “Oh, yeah, I have,” answers Satan. “Job’s a good man, all right. But that’s nuthin’ for him to brag about, given his circumstances. After all, Job has a great life. Look at all the good things you’ve given him. But if you took all those good things away from Job,” challenges Satan, ”I’ll bet he wouldn’t be so faithful and righteous.”

“All right,” says God, ”I’ll take that bet. Job is in your power, Satan. Take away all the wealth and possessions of Job you want to, and let’s see what happens. Only don’t touch Job himself; don’t harm his body.”

And the next thing we hear is that Job is getting reports that all his cattle have died, and that all his servants have been killed, and that even his children have died. And everything Job has is taken away from him. He loses it all!

But Job is a righteous man. He knows that everything he enjoyed in life, even his children, belong to God anyway. Everything in life is a gift from God in the first place, and therefore, since they belong to God, God has a right to them. So Job continues to be faithful and righteous, and he does not curse God.

So one day Satan sidles up to the Almighty again, and God asks him if he has considered his servant Job lately, how Job continues to be a faithful and upright man. “Yes, I have,” says Satan, ”but he is still healthy. I’ll bet that if Job were to lose his health as well as all the other things he has lost, then he wouldn’t be so faithful and righteous. “OK,” God says, ”Job is in your power. Take away his health and let’s see what happens. But spare his life. Don’t take his life itself.”

So Satan goes to work again, and the next thing we hear is that Job is sick, desperately sick, with open sores all over his body. Job is so disfigured, in fact, that his friends don’t even recognize him. And still Job does not curse God, although one day he does wish that he’d never been born. And he does wonder why. He does wonder why God let all these bad things happen to him.

Three of Job’s friends enter the story at this point. They appear to help Job try to figure it out. They offer their help at great length, for thirty-four more long chapters! “Job,” they say, ”it’s simple. It’s because you’ve sinned. Bad things don’t happen to good people, because God is a just God. If bad things happen to someone, it’s because God is punishing him for his sins.”

But Job knew that wasn’t true. He had been faithful. That was a fact! Justice, Job knew, could not explain his present life of misery and diminished circumstances. There had to be another explanation.

Job deserves to be more than a modern synonym for misfortune and misery. Job’s is a magnificent story, a story that needs to be read from beginning to end. And there is nothing finer than the thirty-eighth chapter, where God finally enters the conversation on earth and speaks to Job directly and tells Job and his friends to stop all their quibbling about sin and righteousness and justice and to stand up and face life as it is! Tells them to face the facts of life. And the bottom line fact of life is that God is God, and they are not. Tells them to face the fact that all their attempts to run life backwards in order to try to find some reason, some justification, for the way things are, all their attempts to try to find some justification for themselves and for Job – all this is vain and hopeless, because God is as God is, and life is as life is, and one of the facts of life is that life has to be lived forward, not backwards, lived in the present and in the future, not in the past.

Oh, the past is important. No doubt about that. That’s where we came from! But it’s not where we live. And the present and the future is where Job insists on living, so that even in the depths of his misery, even staggering from pain and grief and losses he could not understand, Job was always able to say: "This I know and understand: that my Redeemer lives. The One who will defend me lives; and in the end, he will take his stand on the earth and redeem me. And after my awaking, he will set me close to him. And from my very flesh itself, I will look upon God, who will take my part, and I will not find him aloof or distant or a stranger.”

Job, like Jacob, wrestled with God. He wrestled with all the great problems and questions of life: Why do the good suffer? How can I understand the vicissitudes of life? What did I do wrong that made life go sour? Why do some die so young? Why do bad things happen to good people?

And in the end Job’s answer was: “I don’t know. I can’t understand it. But this I know: that despite the lousy circumstances and in the absence of my understanding, there is One who stands, and that is God, God my Redeemer, who calls me not to the past, but into the future, even in the midst of my distress.”

Years ago Frederick Borsch, an Episcopal priest at the time and later the bishop of Los Angeles, was invited to preach at Memorial Chapel at Harvard University. And when Borsch’s DC-10 landed at Logan Airport, it skidded off the end of an icy runway into Boston Harbor.

Two people were killed. And later Father Borsch wrote about the crash for The Christian Century in an article entitled “Where Was God When the Plan Crashed?” Borsch says that as he and the other survivors made their way safely to the terminal, several told him that God has answered the prayers they had offered as the plane was skidding down the runway out of control and that God had obviously been their co-pilot, and Borsch added that later friends of his had assured him that God obviously had rescued him and the others because God had not wanted them to die.

Borsch deals with some of the same questions Job asked centuries earlier: Did God guard over and protect the lives of those who survived the crash? Did God keep the plane from exploding, so that all but two people could wade to shore safely?

There are serious problems with the kind of theology suggested by these questions, says Borsch, serious problems with the idea that God is a kind of stage manager of history who protects from harm the righteous – those whom God favors – while he punishes or allows bad things to happen to sinners – those whom God does not favor.

The problem with that theology is that it works best when things turn out well. But what about when things don’t turn out well? What then? If God protected Frederick Borsch and the other survivors, did God also also direct and manage the deaths of the two who died?

And if God guarded me the other night as I drove home from a meeting, seeing to it that I was not injured or killed in an accident, then did God also direct the fact that some others did not get home safely that night? And what about all the other questions people ask every day? Questions such as: Where was God when the tower of Siloam fell and eighteen people died? Where was God when my little girl got cancer? Where was God when Peter got AIDS? Or, where was God when my business failed? Or where was God when Joe’s and Mary’s marriage came apart? Or, where was God when the brakes failed on the school bus and thirty-nine children were killed?

Borsch responds this way: “When the airplane skidded into Boston Harbor, God was not present to intervene and protect me and others from the crash, but God nonetheless was not absent either. Rather, God was and is mysteriously and powerfully with us deep in the heart of life as it is, participating in what happens with us and through us, even in the midst of our tragedies.”

God is not present to us in some magical way, here to pull the strings of events and the levers of history in favor of some and not others. Rather, God is somehow present to us in mystery, willing to share all the consequences of his creation, including even our suffering and pain and death.

That’s what it means to say that God loves the world. To say that God loves his magnificent but mortal world is to say that God is mysteriously and powerfully present to weep with the world in its suffering and pain, and present to weep with us and to lift us from bitterness and despair. It is to say that God is with us to offer faith and courage in the midst of things we don’t understand, so that it might be possible for us to live on into the future with hope and love.

Or, as someone else who addressed the same questions once said: There is Theology A and there is Theology B. Theology A is dead and wooden and mechanical. Theology A reasons this way about life: it quibbles about sin and righteousness and justice and calculates the possible rewards for righteous living. “If a man marries a woman and then dies, leaving her childless, and if his six brothers all do the same, all of them obeying the law by marrying their brothers’ childless widow in succession,” Theology A asks, ”then tell us, Jesus, after the resurrection, whose wife will she be?”

Theology B, on the other hand, is alive and full of vitality and mystery, and responds: “That’s a silly question. Those who live resurrection lives know that they are God’s children, and that when resurrection occurs God will be with them then just as now, because God is God, not of the dead, but of the living.”

Theology A bargains: “If the children survive, and if my doctor gives me a good report, and if my business thrives and I make a lot of money this year, then I will pay my pledge and give thanks to God and trust him.”

But Theology B, the theology of Job and Jesus, responds with life: “Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for You, O Lord, are with me.”

So the question the Bible has for us today is: Who is God for us? Is God, for us, a kind of lucky charm to rub with prayers and good works in hopes that we might maneuver God toward a favorable outcome among the vicissitudes and challenges of this mortal life? Or is God, for us, the One who gives direction and purpose to life regardless of circumstance, the God of all life, the God of the future as well as the past, the One who loves and welcomes and forgives and raises us when we fall?

This – resurrection faith – is the faith of Job, the faith of Paul, the faith of Jesus, the faith that even in the midst of suffering and pain, even in the face of death itself, there is One who stands, One who lives with us and walks beside us, who blesses us and raises us up, and who calls us to live life forward, not backwards, the God of the living who calls us to that trust and confidence in Him which can lead us into life that is larger than we have yet seen, into life where we know, by faith, we will find Him no matter the circumstances.

And that, you see, is why we celebrate the Eucharist week after week. We gather here to remember the past, to remember the time when God lived among us on earth in the flesh. But we do this not out of nostalgia for a return “to the good old days” or as a kind of bargaining for what we think is due us after the resurrection. In the Eucharist we remember the past as part of an ongoing story – as part of Job’s story and Paul’s story and our story – the story of Jesus, the Crucified One, who is with us even now, in the present, and not as a stranger, the story of God’s promise to lead us beyond our present perplexity and pain and grief, and even beyond our present pleasures and joys, into a future that is larger still for those who, with Job, will see Him face to face and find him not aloof, but as God, as Friend and Redeemer.

In the Name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.