God Talks Back!

Job 38:1-7, 34-41
Then YHWH answered Job from out of the tempest,
“Who is this who darkens counsel by words without knowledge?
Let's see if you are man enough to face me.
I will ask the questions now
and you will declare what you know to me.
Where were you when I established the earth?
Let me know if you have the understanding.
Who set its measurements?
For you certainly know!
Or who stretched the measuring line on it?
On what were its bases sunk,
or who laid its cornerstone
when the morning stars sang out together
and all the children of Elohim shouted out in triumph?…
"Can you lift up your voice to the clouds,
so that a flood of waters may cover you?
Can you send forth lightnings,
so that they may go and say to you, 'Here we are'?
Who has put wisdom in the inward parts,
or given understanding to the mind?
Who has the wisdom to number the clouds?
Or who can tilt the waterskins of the heavens,
when the dust runs into a mass and the clods cling together?
"Can you hunt the prey for the lion,
or satisfy the appetite of the young lions,
when they crouch in their dens, or lie in wait in their covert?
Who provides for the raven its prey,
when its young ones cry to God, and wander about for lack of food?

There were folks who said Bill Fitchett was never the same after the last nor’easter. When he brought his last goat back from the island in his Adirondack guideboat, a swift little canoe-like racer he’d bought off a New York steamer, folks in Oyster thought it was an admission of abject failure and defeat. There was a reason old Bill had earned the nickname “Hardtime.” It seemed like his whole life had been a series of reverses. Call it bad luck. Call it a curse. Call it the wrath of a fickle God. Folks on the Eastern Shore called it all three.

In 1839 Hardtime Fitchett finally quit the shifting strip of land that was sometimes one long stretch of barrier island, sometimes two. Prout’s Island the northern end was called. Great Sand Shoal was the name of the southern. But the names changed as quickly as the island itself in those days, migrating between the names of locals and the most prominent features discerned by frequent visitors.

Folks said Hardtime’s sale of the island was as much a sign of his consistent misfortune as any other example one might draw from his beleaguered life. He finally sold out to a Yankee merchant by the name of Nathan Cobb who had been running a store in Oyster for a couple of years but who really made his living from salvaging cargo and more from wrecks along the coast. Cobb bought the island for $100 and 100 bags of salt. The suspicion among the locals was that the salt came from the very island he was buying from Hardtime.

Cobb seemed as blessed as Fitchett was cursed. Though residents thought him strange to head out eight miles from port with a wife and three sons to make a home on the hostile strip of marsh and sand, he made it work for over sixty years, transforming the island, which he renamed Cobb Island, into a premier hunt and beach resort that welcomed the rich and famous from all along the Eastern seaboard. It was only another great storm in 1896 that ended the Cobbs run of good fortune.

Hardtime Fitchett knew all about the destructive power of storms. His own efforts at scratching a profitable existence from the island were frequently mocked by storms that spit sand into grazing land and salt ponds, that wrenched the timbers from the small structures he had occasionally built for barns and short sojourns, that sucked his cattle out to sea and split the island with new inlets. Each time the land changed, Hardtime would rebuild, restock, and recover what he could.

But the neighbors noticed the toll it was taking on him. One time his cousin, Elijah, helped him out in transporting five new sheep out to the island on his sloop. It was a miserably hot, August day in the middle of what the locals called “the sick season”. The wind was calm as they pulled ashore at the head of a creek that wound through the marsh on the back side of the island. Black flies swarmed around the sheep. Elijah was swatting furiously at biting insects he couldn’t see. But Hardtime seemed not even to have the will to resist the noxious mix of flies, mosquitoes and no-see-ums. Elijah wondered if he felt he didn’t deserve better. As Fitchett drove the sheep past the foundation of a ruined barn, Elijah spoke his nickname for the first time. Out loud, to no one in particular, he said, “God knows, that’s a man who knows hard times. Hardtime Fitchett must be your name.”

There were other maladies to add to the aura. The smallpox had attacked him as a child and left Hardtime permanently scarred. He’d lost two children in childbirth and his wife on the birth of the third. That child survived to adulthood, then died herself when the cholera came to the Shore. Hardtime never lost his religion through the trials. Each Sunday he went to church to sing of God’s amazing grace and prayed that a thousand tongues might sing his great redeemer’s praise. But there were times when his own tongue stuck in his mouth, when his own praise was choked by tears. He was an upright man, but the sheep on Hardtime’s island knew that he could also raise his voice to challenge God, to ask the vast Atlantic Ocean and its maker why he should suffer such hurt.

It was the nor’easter that changed things. There were signs that it was going to be a bad one. The winds had shifted dramatically in the night before the storm and Hardtime knew it was going to be bad. He was out on the island for a few days tending to his cattle, staying in a small shack he had constructed behind a dune just at the thin line of pines.

He got up and pulled his heavy cloth jacket up around his ears. After making some coffee on the small stove he had pulled from a wrecked ship, he sat in the drafty shack in silence wondering what this storm would bring. He briefly considered launching his guideboat to cross the bay, but decided to take his chances with the wind. He pulled his coat to and climbed the small dune to look out at the storm.

Already the beach had disappeared though it wasn’t close to high tide. The waves close in were roiling white while further out it looked like a blanket tossed on top of writhing snakes. There was menace in this storm. It could take his cattle. It could take his land. It could take his life. But Hardtime didn’t care.

He let loose with his strongest argument yet against the injustices of this world. “Just why is it that I have been permitted to see such calamities, God? All that I have set my hand to has been like sand. All the dear attachments of my life have been taken from me. I know that there is nothing substantial in this world and no place that I can go to escape these woes.

“And you, O God, where are you? I know that my redeemer lives. I know that you would come to me in my aid and rebuke the devil and his torments. Even when Jonah went out into the sea, you found him in the storm and threw him back up on the land to begin again. But to me, O Lord? When will you come to me?”

As Hardtime looked around him, the land began to disappear beneath small lakes of water. The marsh beyond the trees began to infiltrate from behind and the waves before him crashed closer to the dune. The shack strained in the wind. The storm was fierce and mighty. And whether it was in the air or in his head, Hardtime couldn’t tell, but he heard God speak.

It wasn’t a comforting voice. It did not tell him that he would be vindicated or that the world would be put right for him. In fact the voice seemed a little mocking. “So, you wanted me to show did you? Let’s see what kind of a man you are, Hardtime. You think yourself brave enough to question me. Answer me this: Where were you when I made this roaring sea? Where were you when I set this earth in place? Who laid the cornerstone while the angels sang?

“Who holds the sea in place? Who set the stars in the sky? Who sends forth lightning? Who rolls the clouds across the heavens like unfurled sails and who sends forth rain like torrents? Who does all this, Bill Fitchett? You’re being awfully quiet.”

It was all so unfair. What could he say? Of course he wasn’t there when the story all began. And of course he would be dust before the consummation of all things. Of course, he spoke out of turn, out of proportion, out of all common sense. Who can stand before such a God? In the end, when the God of all Creation speaks from the tempest, there is no word that anyone can say to justify themselves.

Hardtime felt, though, that he had at least forced God’s hand. God was no longer hidden in some heavenly council, lost to history because he was so far removed from the slings and arrows we all suffer. Hardtime had demanded a hearing, and though he didn’t speak, he was rewarded with the knowledge that God had not left this world…that though the wrong seems oft so strong, God was the ruler yet…that God was working a purpose through the broken storylines of this earthly pageant. When it seemed that all hope was gone and that God was gone, the cry of a wounded man on a lonely dune at the edge of the world had not gone unheard or unnoticed. God was flushed from the spartina grass and lassoed from the winds to face him down.

The next day, Hardtime loaded a goat into the guideboat and began to row back to the mainland. The eel grass brushed lightly against the keel of the boat as he moved away from the island. Light from the rising sun broke through the thin tree line. Oyster reefs scraped along the side. The goat shifted its weight as it watched the shoreline recede.

Hardtime knew he would not go back to the island again. He would sell it for whatever price it would command. The world was fierce and vast and devastating and beautiful and God was everywhere within. It was a time for another hand to tend the island. There was something new for him ashore. Whether it meant hard times or good, he didn’t know. But he could no longer pretend that it was a world God had forsaken.

Many people, reading Job’s story in the Bible, think that it comes to a very unsatisfying end. After all, Job is such a sympathetic figure. We identify with his sufferings and we want to see justice win out for him in the end. We want an explanation of his pain that is equal to the challenge he has thrown out to God. We want God to engage in a point by point debate as to why it had to be that Satan would be unleashed on Job and his family to do his worst and to take away the good that had come to a very good man.

But God comes and seems to kick a good man when he’s down. He insults Job’s manhood and peppers him with questions that he knows Job can’t answer. “Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?” God knows where Job was. He was not around and wouldn’t be for centuries. God comes in the whirlwind to remind Job of how limited his vision is when he can only see God’s purposes from the perspective of the ashheap.

Job needs something more. Job needs a wider lens. Job needs to see the world, not as it is in its broken state, but as God sees it, in its redeemed state.

The theologian David Bentley Hart says that we are limited in our vision because the time we live in is “only a shadow of true time, and this world only a shadow of the fuller, richer, more substantial, more glorious creation that God intends.” In this time before the end of all time, “all of nature is a shattered mirror of divine beauty, still full of light, but riven by darkness.”[i] It is a world of broken things and broken people. It is a world of terrifying storms and quakings of the earth. But it is also a world of remarkable beauty and heartbreaking love. It is a world where periwinkle snails and laughing gulls sing with equal testimony to the redeeming work of God. And it is a world where evidence abounds that God is not tearing the world apart, but pulling it together – despite the resistance of evil and our own sin.

Of course, it takes a believer to see this. It takes a believer to see the injustice of a world with a moral center that operates as it so often does. It takes a believer to see how something as empty as a tomb can change the world. As Hart says, “When…we learn in Christ the nature of our first estate, and the divine destiny to which we are called, we begin to see—more clearly the more we are able to look upon the world with the eye of charity—that there is in all the things of earth a hidden glory waiting to be revealed, more radiant than a million suns, more beautiful than the most generous imagination or most ardent desire can now conceive.”[ii]

I don’t know if that’s what Hardtime Fitchett saw as he left his island behind and sold it to Nathan Cobb. Actually, I don’t know anything about Hardtime Fitchett except his name. But I can imagine this man because I know that there are still people like him here on the Eastern Shore. There are people here who have known such sorrow and heartbreak that they must have been tempted to doubt God’s goodness. There are people here who have known storms, and floods, and perils on the sea who must have been tempted to doubt God’s power over the wind and wave. There are people who are so lonely that they must be tempted to doubt even God’s love. Some of those people are here in this sanctuary.

But there are also people who have seen how God has lifted us up time and again from despair into life. There are people who know the beauty of the earth and the glory of God’s grace. There are people who have been forgiven, healed and freed for new life. And there are people who have seen that even here on the Eastern Shore, perhaps especially here, the kingdom of God is coming and is at hand and is among us.

They know all this because Christ has transformed their lives. Christ is transforming the world. Christ can transform your life. And in the vision that comes from seeing the world as God sees it in Christ, we can see how it will be at the end of all things when hard times come again no more.
Thanks be to God.

[i] David Bentley Hart, The Doors of the Sea, Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2005, p. 102.
[ii] Ibid.

Job Speaks Out!

Job 23:1-9, 16-17
Because of this, Job said:“Even today my thought is defiant;
his hand is heavy despite my groaning.
If only I knew where I might find him;
if I could come to his dwelling!
I would set out before him justice
and my mouth I would fill with arguments.
I would learn what he would answer me,
and understand what he would say to me.
Would he contend with me in the greatness of his power?
No, but he would set himself with me.
There an upright person could present a case before him,
and I could escape forever from my judge.
If I go eastward, then he is not there;
if I go westward, then I do not find him.
To the north, he hides and I cannot see him;
when I turn to the south, I catch no glimpse of him…
God has mde my heart faint;
Shaddai has terrified me.
But I will not be extinguished in the face of darkness,
when my face is covered by thick darkness.

When we last saw Job he was sitting on an ash heap. His world had come crashing down around him, the result of forces that he could not control and that were actually actively working against him. We sometimes say, when a series of unfortunate events happen to a person, that God or the devil had it in for that one. When we say that, we don’t really mean it. It’s just a dramatic way of saying, “Wow! You really are bad off.” But this was true for Job. Somebody really did have it in for him. Satan was the agent but God was the accomplice. It may just be a fanciful story told as a test case in the persistence of faith in the face of suffering, but when we stop to consider Job’s condition, whether he’s fictional or real, we can’t help but be overwhelmed by what happens to him. Here’s a good man – a perfectly upright man! – who suffers unjustly. We’re supposed to be scandalized by that.

There he sits on a pile of ashes. His camels and sheep and donkeys lost to theft and fire. His servants and children dead or carried off into slavery. His wealth gone. His health reduced by running sores. And there he sits, scraping his skin with the remnants of his former life – broken pieces of pottery.

But he maintains his integrity. That’s what God knew would happen. When God was talking to Satan in the heavenly courts he boasted about Job’s integrity. It’s what Satan thought he could wrest from him with a series of plagues. It’s what Job’s wife told him to give up so that he could die and be done with it. “Just curse God and die,” she says. But Job refuses.
You might call this steadfastness patience. It’s what the New Testament book of James calls it. “You have heard of the patience of Job,” James says, and he urges us to endure suffering in the same way. But the patience of Job does not endure past the first two chapters of the book of Job. By the beginning of chapter 3, Job, who has really held back and not done what most of us have done, which is to rail and scream at the injustice of it all…at this point Job begins to rail and scream at the injustice of it all. He doesn’t curse God, but he curses the day that he was born. “Why didn’t I die at birth because then it would be over and I would be at rest and would not have to face this loss?”

Fortunately, or unfortunately as the case may be, Job had someone close by to answer this question, which was probably just meant rhetorically. His friends had shown up. Eliphaz the Temanite, Bildad the Shuhite, and Zophar the Naamathite. You can see that it was a pretty diverse group of folks. A sampling of wisdom from the peoples of the region. If you’re going to have a philosophical or theological discussion about the nature of suffering it’s good to have a Shuhite or two in the mix. And nobody knows more about sanctimonious blabbering than the Naamathites. Job was well-stocked for the debates that follow over the next twenty-some chapters of the book.

What the friends tell him are variations on a theme. In an effort to protect God from any blame in this whole messy affair they offer every excuse they can come up. Job must have sinned. His children must have sinned. Somebody must have sinned. Or maybe you just think a little too much of yourself, Job. Who do you think you are to escape the pain that comes to every human being? These are the sorts of things they say.

But Job is having none of it. He sounds a little arrogant, but he knows that he has been upright. We know that, too, because God has told us, in the first chapter of the story, that Job is an upright kind of guy, fearing God and turning away from evil. That’s why he gets center stage. No, Job knows that it’s too easy to blame the victim in this case. There are times when suffering comes to the sinner, but there are also times when suffering comes for no discernable reason and this is one of those times.

By the time we get to chapter 23 Job has decided that what he wants is a trial. He wants to declare his case before God. He won’t accept the easy answers on offer from the likes of the Shuhites and Naamathites. He won’t accept that God has some purpose in sending evil. What he thinks is that, if he could find God, God would agree with him.

Here’s my loose translation of what he says: “I’ve still got it God. I may be sitting on an ash heap doing skin care with a potsherd but I’ve still got my integrity. Just let me find you and I’ll prove it to you. I can lay out the case. I can make the argument. I can take whatever you throw at me by way of explanation because I’m convinced that you will agree with me. Even you would agree that what has happened to me is unjust. Even you, holy and terrible as your name is, must take my side. So now all I have to do is find you. I’m weary. I’m terrified because of what has happened to me. But I will not be extinguished in the face of the darkness.”

There’s a lot of dispute about that last verse. The text is so old and corrupted that it’s hard to make out what the Hebrew means. Some translations say that Job is saying “If only I could vanish in the darkness.” But it seems to me that the tone of Job’s speech here is one of defiance. He is not trying to vanish. He is anguished because it seems that God has vanished and he wants to make his case. This Job will not “go gentle into that good night,” to coin a phrase from Dylan Thomas.

So if we are looking to this story for a model for dealing with hard times then there is a lot more here than the patience of Job. Part of what Job’s integrity means is that he holds on to a belief in a universe where there is justice at work, where there is a moral center and God is in control and Job trusts that, were he able to explain his situation before God, God would side with him. The darkness will not reduce him to silence.

That’s why it really is inadequate and an error to say, in the face of evil, that God must have a plan and a purpose in sending the evil. Job, in his fiery stage, wouldn’t accept that argument. It’s not that God doesn’t have plan and purpose. There is purpose written through the whole of creation. And it’s not that God can’t and doesn’t bring good in the face of evil. You know from your own life how often good has come from the worst of situations. But the important point is that the evil doesn’t serve the purposes of God. One of the things that characterizes evil is that it is something that sets itself against God, resisting all efforts to tame it or to bring it under the umbrella of providence.

I remember one of the hardest times in my ministry was right before I left my last church in Unionville. I was in the midst of the grief of leaving a ministry I enjoyed and saying goodbye to people who had become very important to me. It would have been a hard time anyway. But I had two very difficult funerals that really tested my faith and trust in God.

The first was for a youth who was killed in a car accident as he went to his senior prom. He was driving into the sun, going a little too fast, making a turn on a small country road. His parents were away at the time in another state and I went to the family home to find his younger brother there all alone in a dark and empty house. We sat together and waited for his parents. I don’t remember much of what we said, but it wasn’t much.

Then a month later there was another accident. Another teenager - this one a young girl who had been adopted by the whole community. She had been diagnosed with a kidney ailment as a baby and had spent most of her life on dialysis. When she got to be a teenager we celebrated when we found out that she could live a more normal life with a kidney transplant and the person who had a kidney that would work was her mother. The surgery was successful and the girl was just starting to enjoy what this new gift would mean for her. Then there was the accident.

At the funeral service the funeral home was packed. Cars were lined up in Fredericksburg for over a half-mile. All of her friends were there. All of the community was there. And what could I say to this group? That God’s purpose for the world included this girl’s death? No. I did not believe that. Job would not have believed that either.

The most faithful response to suffering is not to try to protect God and God’s sovereignty over all creation by attributing evil to God. A properly formed moral conscience is properly outraged by the injustice of suffering. It rightfully demands a trial. It forcefully argues the case of the sufferer and refuses to be silenced by the dark. In doing this it bears witness to God’s intentions for good and looks forward to a day of vindication that may yet be hidden from natural sight.

What I offered that day was an angry sermon because it felt that anger was the most faithful thing any of us had to offer. Not that God could not redeem even that situation, because God does overcome even death. But someone had to say, “No more. One day there will be no more funerals like this. One day we will all see tombs emptied of the dead and the defeat of the forces that would bring death upon us.

I think that what we are doing when we try to claim that bad things are part of God’s purpose, even when it is done innocently and sincerely, is that we are trying to cover over the madness. When hard times come it is always senseless and it threatens to make a mockery of our beliefs about how the world works. When we try to establish a reason for tsunamis or murders or illnesses like AIDS we are desperately seeking to assure ourselves that, even though the world seems unhinged, someone, somewhere is still in control and can master evil even if this puppeteer god is somehow the source of evil. But we shouldn’t seek to tame the evil by making it a subcontractors working for God. We shouldn’t downgrade its darkness by making it something we can comprehend.

The evil thing about evil is that it doesn’t make sense, shouldn’t make sense, refuses to make sense. And our response to it shouldn’t be to domesticate it but to spit in its face, to defy its pretenses to ultimate power, to laugh at its absurdity and to recognize the stakes because they are high. If God is not the opponent and vanquisher of evil then the universe as the realm of God’s glory and reconciliation falls apart. If God doesn’t reject evil as alien to God’s nature and purposes then there is no point to the struggle and the language laced throughout the scriptures that urges believers to take up the armor of God and to stand firm in the face of the tempter’s snares. If God is not unalterably set against hard times, then what is Jesus doing in this world?

Yes, what about Jesus? We’ve talked about Job as a model, but what more do we learn from Christ? The theologian David Bentley Hart says that “if it is from Christ that we are to learn how God relates himself to sin, suffering, evil, and death, it would seem that he provides us little evidence of anything other than a regal, relentless, and miraculous enmity: sin he forgives, suffering he heals, evil he casts out, and death he conquers. And absolutely nowhere does Christ act as if any of these things are part of the eternal work or purposes of God.”[i]

But doesn’t this make God less powerful than we want to believe? If God is strong enough to bring the universe into being and loving enough to claim us as children of God, what explains the persistence of bad things happening to good and bad people? Don’t we have to believe, for the sake of God’s love and power, that all this evil must be serving a greater good?

All things ultimately will serve this God. God is reconciling all things in Christ Jesus. But God’s reconciling work takes place in a broken world fragmented in so many ways and operating in ruptured time.

There’s a new movie coming out this month about the battle of Iwo Jima and the famous picture that was taken of American soldiers raising a flag in the midst of that fierce fighting. It was clear in the spring of 1945 that the war was going to be decided in favor of the Allies. Germany had fallen. Japan was in retreat. There was no way they had the resources to win. But though the end was clear, there was still death and suffering to come. There was fierce resistance. And even years after the war ended there were occasional stories about Japanese soldiers who continued to live in isolated caves believing that their nation would still emerge victorious.

For Christians, the course of history is clear. In the end, love does win the day. The tomb is empty and all the wounded are made whole. Our calling is to see the world as God sees it at the end of all things. Next week we’ll listen again as God talks back to Job and to us. God is making all things new, even in the darkness and we shall not be extinguished by the dark. Thanks be to God.

[i] David Bentley Hart, The Doors of the Sea, Grand Rapids, MI: Eeerdmans, 2005, pp. 85-6.

Satan's Plaything

Job 1:1, 2:1-10
There was a man in the land of Uz whose name was Job. He was a perfectly upright man, fearing Elohim and turning away from evil...One day the children of Elohim came in to stand before YHWH. The Satan also came in to stand before YHWH. YHWH said to Satan, "Where have you come from?"
The Satan answered YHWH, "From walking to and fro upon the earth."
YHWH said to Satan, "Have you taken note of my servant Job? There is no one like him on the earth, a perfectly upright man, fearing Elohim and turning away from evil. Moreover, he has maintained his integrity even though you incited me against him, to swallow him up for no reason."
The Satan answered YHWH, "Skin for skin! All that mortals have they will give to save their lives. But stretch out your hand and strike his flesh and bone and see if he does not turn from you and curse you to your face."
YHWH said to the Satan, "O, very well! He is in your hands; only guard his life."
So the Satan went out from the presence of YHWH and afflicted Job with evil sores from the sole of his foot to the top of his head.
Job took a shard of pottery to scrape himself amidst the ashes. His wife said to him, "Will you still retain your integrity? Bless Elohim and die."
He said to her, "You speak like a foolish woman would speak. Should we accept the good things from Elohim and not accept the evil?" In all this, Job did not sin with his lips.

Once upon a time there was a man named Job. Job was a good man. In fact, the Bible says, he was a perfectly upright man – the kind of guy you could count on to do just the right thing in every situation. If you needed someone to be a witness in a case down at the city gate, Job was your man. If you needed a representative for the Board of Trustees at church, Job was the guy. If you needed a solid citizen for the Board of Supervisors, well, you just might look to Job to do that. He was a man who feared God and turned away from evil. A pillar of the community, you might say.

Did I mention that he was also rich? Now that shouldn’t make a difference in whether or not Job was a good man, but you know how people are. As irrational as it is, we sometimes get the impression that because people are rich they have been specially blessed by God. You would have been forgiven for thinking that about Job because he was as wealthy as a man could be in his day. Seven sons and three daughters. 7,000 sheep. 3,000 camels. 500 yoke of oxen. 500 donkeys. Now five hundred donkeys might not sound like a blessing to you, but believe me, this was big stuff in Job’s time. Bling looked a little different back in the day.

But you also know that riches can often cover up a multitude of sins. And even though the rich sometimes seem more blessed we often suspect that there is something rotten at the core of their lives. But this was not true of Job. He prayed for his children every day and offered burnt sacrifices on their behalf on the off chance that they might have cursed God, even inadvertently. He was a good guy.

He was so good that God even started pointing him out to others from the heavenly courts. Once the Satan came in to the courts. Have you heard of the Satan? Maybe you’re thinking red tail, horns, and pitchfork. Or maybe you’re thinking about Dana Carvey and his Church Lady sketch. But you’d be wrong. The Satan in this story was the one of God’s heavenly beings whose job it was to wander the earth looking for creatures that weren’t living up to their potential. You might call the Satan the prosecuting attorney of the heavenly court. Or perhaps the devil’s advocate. Or maybe just the devil. But at any rate, he was just doing his job.

The Satan showed up in God’s presence and God says, “Hey, where have you been?”

The Satan said, “Oh, the usual. I’ve been wandering the earth here and yon, walking to and fro.” It’s a restless life being the accuser.

God said to the Satan, “Hey, did you happen to check out my servant, Job, while you were out there? I know there are some pretty poor specimens out there, but there is nobody like Job. A perfectly upright man. Fears me. Turns away from evil. You’d have a hard time making a case against him.”

Well, this was a challenge to the old Satan and he took it up with God. “Are you telling me that Job doesn’t have any weaknesses? Looks to me like he doesn’t have much reason to curse you since he’s set up so fine. I bet if you took away some of that stuff he enjoys he’d be singing a different tune.”

Now this part of the story is a little disturbing. We don’t like to think of God taking up a bet with the devil, especially when it’s us humans who hang in the balance. But we do know that even the best of folks sometimes end up singing “Hard Times” because of calamities that have befallen them. And when we try to understand the suffering that hangs around our cabin doors…when we try to make sense of it all, we sometimes suspect that even if God doesn’t send those hard times our way, God must allow for it happen. It’s a disturbing thought, but there you have it. And it’s not much of a jump from the confoundedness of our lives in the face of evil to the moral quandary we find ourselves in when God makes Job an unwilling guinea pig for a laboratory test on the effects of suffering. Job gets the attention here, but you could fill in the name of any good person you want and the niggling doubt would be still be there. When you get right down to it, evil doesn’t make sense within the bounds of our God-created cosmos.

At any rate, the Satan is given a free hand and within a matter of hours Job’s blessed life is ruined. Fire falls from heaven and burns up the sheep and attending servants. Chaldean raiders took the camels and slaughtered the servants with them. A tornado hits a tent where all of his children are feasting and every one of them is killed. Even the donkeys are wiped out by a band of marauding Sabeans. Not even the donkeys are spared.

But Job’s response is to tear his clothes, shave his head and fall down to worship God. Did you catch that? He fell down to worship God. He says, “I didn’t have anything when I came into this world and I won’t have anything when I leave it. God gives. God takes away. Blessed be the name of the Lord.” That’s it! No wailing and gnashing of teeth. No lawsuits demanding compensatory damages. No tearful tirades against the injustice of the universe and God in particular broadcast internationally on CNN. Just “I was naked at birth, and I’ll be naked at death. Blessed be the Lord.”

So a few days later the Satan showed up in the heavenly courts again. God said, “Hey, where have you been?”

The Satan said, “Oh, the usual. I’ve been wandering the earth here and yon, walking to and fro.”

God said to the Satan, “Hey, did you happen to check out my servant, Job, while you were out there? There is nobody like Job. A perfectly upright man. Fears me. Turns away from evil. And even now, after all that he’s lost, he still maintains his integrity. Not bad, huh?”

Well, this irked the Satan, so he said, “Well, of course! You wouldn’t let me touch him. People can let go of a lot of stuff as long as it doesn’t get to their own skin. You let me afflict him personally and we’ll see how much longer he ‘maintains his integrity.’” Once again, God agreed to the terms with the restriction that the Satan could not kill Job.

Within minutes Job was suffering with evil sores over his entire body. What do you think Job did then? He took a piece of an old broken pot, probably one broken in the disasters that had befallen him, and he went to sit on a heap of ashes, probably one left over from the feast tent that had burned, and he scraped his skin with the broken pottery.

Job’s wife came over to him. Now I really don’t know anything about Job’s wife and I hesitate to say anything ill about people I don’t know, but it sounds to me like she must have been possessed by…I don’t know…Satan because she talks just like him. She looks at Job in his misery and says, “When will you give it up? How long will you maintain your integrity?” (Where have we heard those words before?) “Why don’t you just curse God and die?”

But Job is made of different stuff than most folks. He tells his wife that she’s talking like a fool and then he says, “God sends us good things and we receive them gladly. When God sends us evil how should we react?” Now the Bible says Job didn’t sin in any of this, but that last question really sticks. When God sends us evil, how should we react? That’s really the question that dominates the whole rest of the book of Job. Job’s friends come over to be with him in his desolation and for about a week they get it right. They just sit there with him in silence. But then they start talking and what they talk about is what I want to spend the next three weeks talking about – Why do hard times come and what do we do when they do come our way?

If we end the Job story right here, we’ve got some very disturbing answers to that question. Hard times come because there is something working actively against us. It’s worse than fate or chance. If bad things happened just because the universe is made in such a way that bad things are an inevitable part of life, well, that’s scary but it’s understandable. That’s how deists and rationalists see the world. It runs according to some grand physical laws which ensure that the system as a whole survives, but along the way individuals sometimes suffer loss and ruin and all of us eventually suffer death. You can’t complain about the moral injustice of a world created like this. You can’t cry out against the death of an infant or the flooding of a nor’easter because those are just part of the grand scheme of things. If we didn’t believe in a God who cares for and is intimately involved in the universe, we wouldn’t have any reason to ask the question of why hard times come. Hard times come because that’s the way of the world.

Fate is a little easier to swallow, too. Fate says that what happens is in some sense foreordained. Hard times happen because it was determined beforehand and the proper response to them is to accept your fate grimly and perhaps with some dignity. But God is far in the background in the workings of fate. In fact, fate is a kind of god – an uncaring, unconcerned force that we can condemn with loud, righteous anger, but to what effect? No one ever said that fate cared about us.

But we, we Christians, do say that God cares about us and the question of suffering is one that only people who believe in God must seriously struggle with. Those who don’t believe in God have no grounds to question the injustice of suffering because in their worldview there is no moral agent at the center of the universe. When they cry to the heavens, to whom are they calling out? All that they can do is to taunt believers for their naïveté in holding to a world where God still lives. And what are they left with but a disenchanted world that offers no ultimate reconciliation, no comfort, and no redemption for the sufferer? It is for believers to struggle with a universe where suffering matters and where hard times point to the deepest questions of life and death.

Job offers a chilling introduction to that struggle. It suggests that the world is not just a neutral sort of sphere in which bad things happen and good things happen and there is some kind of cosmic equilibrium to the whole thing. In Job’s world there are agents afoot, wandering the earth here and yon, walking to and fro, and seeking to do us ill. We could end up Satan’s playthings because that is what he seeks. God has intentions for us, as God had intentions for Job. God seeks human beings who will be perfectly upright, fearing God and turning away from evil. But even those who live God-fearing, evil-despising lives are not immune from the forces that work against God’s intentions. We will be battered, but the question is whether or not we can see, in the shadows and deaths of this world, the world God is bringing to birth.

I have to admit, that I am one of those fingernail Christians. There are times when I feel like I am holding on to my faith by my fingernails. Does that ever happen to you? Thank God my relationship with God is not determined by how well I am able to hold onto my theology on a given day because there are times when it is shaken.

We could pick up the newspaper on any day and find something that would shake us to our cores but this week provided a particularly horrible example. A man in Pennsylvania, Charles Carl Roberts, who was haunted by who knows what demons, went into an Amish schoolhouse and sent out the adults and the boys and then shot the ten girls. It’s such an unspeakable act I find it hard to even say it out loud. It’s the kind of thing that makes you reach for your children and pull them in close.

It’s also the kind of thing, that had it happened in another community with other people might have looked like all of our other modern America tragedy sites. There would be televised funeral services with speakers from across the country. There would be chain-link fences covered in ribbons and teddy bears and reporters trying to wrench every bit of anguish they could from the traumatized survivors.

But that sort of spectacle was on the sidelines this week because the Amish are a different sort of community. Deeply religious, they have their own ways. On Thursday they began the burials. 34 buggies drawn by horses made their way through the farmland for the first of the funerals. They held them in homes, which is where the Amish hold their ceremonies. Two ministers presided at each service and at one of them they told the story of the earth’s creation from the book of Genesis. Not much was said about the deceased because the focus was on God – how God’s love filled the whole world, how God’s love created this beautiful yet tragically scarred earth and all its peoples, and how God was continuing to do the work of creation until all the work is done and all the children brought home. They buried little Naomi Rose Ebersol, 7 years old, in a plain, handmade white dress and a very simple coffin. Then they went to funerals for Marian and Mary Liz and Lena. On Friday they buried Anna Mae. Hard times. They don’t come any harder.

But in the midst of their grief these folks did something else that didn’t fit the pattern. As families made food to take to those who grieved, something that is just so natural that it’s a nearly universal custom, as they made food they took some to Marie Roberts, the husband of the man who killed the children before killing himself. They took her food, because they knew she had suffered a loss, too. And they invited her to attend one of the funerals. And they offered their forgiveness because it is what Christians are told to do. Told to do because it doesn’t come naturally. What’s natural is to hate and to strike out and to flail against a world in which such funerals have to take place. But even in such darkness, when the forces of death threaten to overcome us, God is willing life and we know that because people whose lives are formed by the savior who submitted even to death on a cross brought food and forgiveness instead of bitterness and more darkness.

David Bentley Hart, whom I will quote over the next two weeks, says that the Christian vision of the world is not an easy one. It is, he says, a “moral and spiritual labor. The Christian eye sees (or should see) a deeper truth in the world than mere ‘nature,’ and it is a truth that gives rise not to optimism but to joy.” [i] In the valley of the shadow of death, it is not easy to see the joy, and we are right to believe when hard times come that things are not as they should be, that the evil is not what God intends, and that there are forces afoot in the universe that would resist God’s will even though they cannot have ultimate victory. But we should not cover over the moral and spiritual labor of struggling with the meaning of suffering by saying that God somehow gives us evil so as to bring about a greater good. Evil is never the will of God. God does not need the death of a child to be great or to reveal God’s greatness. God is making all things new and God will not lose anything or anyone in bringing this to be.

So Stephen Foster’s song is one that God sings with us as we glimpse the inbreaking of the kingdom and await the day of Satan’s final defeat. “Tis the song, the sigh of the weary/Hard times, hard times, come again no more/Many days you have lingered around my cabin door/Oh hard times come again no more.” And there is more yet to come. Much more to be said about God’s victory and the end of hard times. Next week, Job talks back. Thanks be to God.

[i] David Bentley Hart, The Doors of the Sea, [Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2005], p. 58.