The Paradox of Wisdom

The Paradox of Wisdom (Job 28:12-13, 20-28)

            Tuesday night, it was cold, rainy and windy.  Candy and I were on campus at the symphony.  Walking across campus, bundled in coats, we saw many of the high quality students, students bright enough to be admitted into the celebrated University of North Carolina, and they were walking around in this nasty weather in tee shirts and shorts.  We thought they were crazy.

            We had a good laugh at the insanity of it.  Later though, I thought back on the evening and I had to admit my own stupid, foolish acts.  Sure, I was wise enough to wear a warm coat.  But before leaving the house, I argued with my son, and I was as irrationally angry as he was.  He was bull-headed and I matched him.  Only I am 42 and supposedly mature – mature enough to know better.  I was as a big a fool as anyone that night.

            Humans are fools and our folly is most easily seen when it is time to elect a president. 

Some fear that decadence and immorality are on the rise in our society.  But, there was just as much decadence and hedonism in ancient Rome as today.  I have heard doomsday scenarios regarding our economy.  But, I have friends who have studied this in depth and they tell me not to fear the current recession.  They say the economy has always been cyclical and successful times will always be followed by cycles of recession.  People see the state of the world and fear we are in the “last days” and final judgment is upon us.  Actually would that bad, if it means the return of Christ?  Good or bad, Jesus said not to speculate or worry about such things.

            None of this bothers me, but I am worried and unhappy about the polarizing condition of politics.  I voted early.  I tried to joke a bit with the partisans handing out voter guides.  It’s been so vicious, this campaign, I thought some levity might help.  They couldn’t laugh.  They agreed if I critiqued the other party, but got defensive when I teased theirs.  I was joking but they could not laugh.  They could not see how in politics we refuse to look at our own views critically and we are totally illogical in how we demonize our rival’s views. 

            If I were to say a single good thing about either Romney or Obama, it would erase all else I could say this morning.  Half would get mad at me for liking who you hate.  Half of you would automatically be happy because you’d take the one nice thing I said as an endorsement of “your guy.”  In politics there is no space for balanced, reasoned discussion. 

I began voting for president in 1988, George Bush v. Michael Dukakis.  This is my 7^th opportunity to vote for president.  Every single time, it is ugly.  Every presidential election brings out the worst in us.  I don’t see any improvement.  It feels like it is getting worse. 

Is this what God wants? Some of the ugliest political vitriol I have heard has come in church or from Christians.  God cannot be happy.  We need help.  We need wisdom.  And this need for wisdom is a major problem.

Job says, “Where shall wisdom be found, and where is the place of understanding?  Human beings do not know the way to it” (28:12-13a).  After suffering tremendously and then arguing with friends about the purpose of his suffering, Job concludes that wisdom is completely inaccessible.  “It is,” he says, “hidden from the eyes of all the living” (28:21). 

Someone running for office makes promises about all the things he is going to do if elected.  He chides his opponent for failed policies and empty promises.  He follows up with his own arrogant boasting about how he will bring strong leadership.  Where is his wisdom?  According to Job, wisdom is not “in the land of the living” (v. 13b).  Wisdom cannot be bought; “silver cannot be weighed out as its price” (15b).

Wisdom also cannot be earned.  In the book of Ecclesiastes we are told to be wary of any teaching or study beyond wise sayings.  “Of making many books there is no end, and much study is weariness of the flesh” (13:12).  Wisdom, something we need as much as a need anything as this grinding political cycle comes finally to a conclusion – wisdom is impossibly elusive.  Where is the hope that our narrative could differently, more peacefully, with less evil speech? 

Can Democrats be good Democrats without demonizing Republicans?  Can Republicans be who they are without belittling Democrats?  Can Christ-followers rise above it all and participate in our country’s democracy and at the same time bring glory to God in our word and speech? 

Gerald Janzen of Christian International Seminary notes where Job dismisses human efforts.  In his talk about mining precious metals and then dealing in Ophir and onyx and sapphire, as well as silver and gold, Job observes that neither technology nor commerce can find or produce wisdom.  Science and business both come up short.  Yet in our time, we are so proud of the wealth produced in our capitalist society.  We brag of the gains of our technological advancements.  Where does it lead?  Not to wisdom. 

From Proverbs 8: “Does not wisdom call?  On the heights at the crossroads, she takes her stand” (Proverbs 8:1a, 2).  There, wisdom speaks.  “The Lord created me at the beginning of his work, the first of his acts long ago.”  Turning to the New Testament, we look to James 1:5.  “If any is lacking in wisdom, ask God, who gives to all generously and ungrudgingly, and it will be given to you.”  And again from Job, “Truly the fear of the Lord, that is wisdom” (28:28).

Janzen cites this truth as the centerpiece of Job – it all comes back to the fear of the Lord.  Job’s friends talk about God in time-worn clichés the way politicians talk about their platforms and lampoon their opponents.  Voters mimic the sound bites of their candidate of choice.  Job, too shaken to wax theological, resorts to prayer; it comes in rather abrupt laments that are uncomfortably honest and rash.  But Job does not spend time theologizing or spouting clichés or sound bites.  Job prays.  Janzen sees in this his fear of the Lord.  In declaring the impossibility of wisdom, Job shows the way to wisdom.

Wisdom cannot be found, cannot be bought, and cannot be earned or figured out.  Only God discovers wisdom; wisdom itself is God’s first creative act.  God is the giver of wisdom, something he happily doles out in generous amounts.  And the simplest definition of wisdom is fear of the Lord.  Another way of saying it is wisdom is found when we worship God, revere God’s holy name, and acknowledge God, revealed in Jesus, as Lord and master of our lives.

The essence of truth in Job is ridiculously simple.  And this may be the very essence of truth throughout scripture.  Fear the Lord and turn from evil, for as Job says in the second phrase of verse 28, “to depart from evil is understanding.”  Every good thing that comes from human hands, human speech, and human minds begins in our worship of God and our rejection of evil.

Building on this we add more from James, chapter 3, beginning in verse 13:

Who is wise and understanding among you? Show by your good life that your works are done with gentleness born of wisdom.¹⁴But if you have bitter envy and selfish ambition in your hearts, do not be boastful and false to the truth.¹⁵Such wisdom does not come down from above, but is earthly, unspiritual, devilish.¹⁶For where there is envy and selfish ambition, there will also be disorder and wickedness of every kind.¹⁷But the wisdom from above is first pure, then peaceable, gentle, willing to yield, full of mercy and good fruits, without a trace of partiality or hypocrisy.¹⁸And a harvest of righteousness is sown in peace for those who make peace.

 

            Wisdom is found when we revere the Lord.  A sign of those who have found it is that their works are done with gentleness.  Most who have wisdom don’t know they have it.  They aren’t trying to be the smartest person in the room; they strive for purity and peace.  They are gentle and full of mercy. 

How many candidates in local, state, or national races are gentle and full of mercy?  I have heard it over and over: you can’t run for office and be honest or nice.  You’ve got to be a little dirty because your opponent with surely be underhanded.  But God’s Holy word says wisdom from above, which I believe is far superior to any wisdom humans can concoct, is seen in acting rightly, gently, and mercifully. 

If that is heavenly wisdom and all candidates have to be nasty, given to deceptive exaggeration, and aggressive – all things the opposite of what we read wisdom to be in James chapter 3 – then does it mean all our elected officials are fools?  No.  It means our system has gotten to a point where it rewards foolish behavior and ignores the wisdom of God.  We are ruled by Job’s friends, the only ones our system allows to have power – at least the power of elected office. 

What then do we do as God’s church?  We can’t find wisdom and give it to our president and senators and governor.  Wisdom can’t be found.  We can fear the Lord, which means we revere and worship Him.  We can seek him because, as James says, he gives generously and ungrudgingly.  We have something more powerful than our one vote.  We have prayer. 

The paradox of wisdom is that it is ours when we stop looking for it and begin seeking God.  We possess unlimited power when we empty ourselves, die to self, and silence our own voices, speaking only to God and speaking in tones only God hears. 

What can we do?  Every one of us should vote.   Between now and Tuesday, we pray.  On Tuesday, we pray.  And after Tuesday, we pray.  We might appear as fools to the world, but fear of the Lord, which leads us into prayer, is wisdom.  So we go before the Lord, who through His only Son Jesus invites us as his sons and daughters.  In prayer, we go to him, and we carry in our hearts those who are victims of the foolishness of America.  We pray by name in earnest for Mitt Romney and Barak Obama, for Walter Dalton and Pat McCrory.  We do it because at the end of the book of Job, the salvation of Job’s friends came when Job prayed for them.  Job’s friends rule us now, and they need God’s wisdom.  They’ll only get it if God gives it and they receive it.  We cannot control their responses.  We can only control what we do.  The wise thing is to do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly before the Lord, and to pray.  This is a time of prayer. 

AMEN

 

After the sermon, we will have a time of response where the church is invited to pray for the nation. 

A Creative Response to Suffering (Job 10:1-17)

            In the Bible I find several responses to adversity.  King David, whom we read about in 1^st & 2^nd Samuel and 1^st Chronicles and who is considered the greatest of Israel’s Kings and the “man after God’s own heart,” responded by fighting.  When things got tough, David got his slingshot, prayed, and went to war.

            Fighting was not always an option and even it when it was available, it was not always the right thing to do.  We also hear the lonely voice of the prophet speaking God’s judgment, sometimes against God’s own people Israel, sometimes against Israel’s enemies, and in the New Testament, God’s final judgment against Satan, evil, and sin.  Amos, Jeremiah, Daniel, and John of Patmos are some examples of people who responded to adversity with prophecy.

            A third Biblical response comes from the Apostle Paul.  He responded to everything that came up in life the same way: he shared the gospel. Whether Paul was whipped, kicked out of town, imprisoned, well-received as an honored guest, or respected, he responded by talking the salvation available to all through faith in Jesus Christ.  Suffering and adversity brought opportunity.

            There are other responses in the scriptures, but we narrow our focus to the book of Job.  Satan challenged God, saying that the most righteous man, Job, who was a true worshipper, would turn on God and curse God, if God allowed Job to be harmed.  God took the bait and allowed Satan to destroy all of Job’s property, kill all of Job’s children, and harm Job’s body. 

            Job’s three friends Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar come and sit with him and talk with him.  They insist that Job’s suffering is from God.  Job agrees.  They insist that Job must have sinned terribly to have such pain and loss.  His adversity is his own fault.  His suffering came by way of his mistakes and rebellion. 

The three friends in their speeches insist Job must submit to God.  Submission, they say, is the only acceptable response to pain.  Job must submit to God’s lordship, confess his sin, and repent.  Then, he will be made whole.

            Job will not submit.  He agrees that God brought this on him.  His friends accuse him of rebellion and he does indeed rebel.  But his rebellion is not a sinful rejection of God’s ways.  Rather, he rebels against a shallow theology that responds to real-world suffering by retreating to long-held theological presuppositions.  He rebels against his friends’ insistence that he confess.

            Job’s rebellion produces two responses.  First, he laments.  Lamentation is a form of prayer rarely used or even understood in churches today.  Jeremiah, the prophet, offered lament prayers. 

            Here’s an example of Jeremiah praying lamentation:

Bottom of Form

⁷O Lord, you have enticed me, and I was enticed; you have overpowered me, and you have prevailed. I have become a laughingstock all day long; everyone mocks me.

⁸For whenever I speak, I must cry out, I must shout, “Violence and destruction!” For the word of the Lord has become for me a reproach and derision all day long (Jeremiah 20:7-8).

 

And then here is a sample of Job’s lament prayer.

10“I loathe my life; I will give free utterance to my complaint; I will speak in the bitterness of my soul.

²I will say to God, Do not condemn me; let me know why you contend against me.

³Does it seem good to you to oppress, to despise the work of your hands and favor the schemes of the wicked (Job 10:1-3)?

 

 

Job expends a lot of energy in Lament prayer.  It is not though, his only response. The lament expresses injustice sorrow.  It is spoken by one defeated.  It is the ultimate in honesty before God.  We are so concerned with saying the “right thing” from a religious standpoint, we skip the honesty in lament prayer.  We fear it. 

The Old Testament invites us to enter this world of prayer.  More Psalms are laments than are praises.  Those Psalms along with Jeremiah and Job can be read by people today who suffer.  To read those words from the heart, “Does it seem good to you [O God] to oppress, to despise the work of your hands,” is to say what you feel.  This is not a condemnation of God.  It is the reality that you are hurting so badly, you have to vent.  You have to say it.  The Old Testament gives words for when we have to let it out. 

Job then goes further.  After the Lament, Job will bring protest right to God.  Jobs says to God,

¹²You have granted me life and steadfast love, and your care has preserved my spirit.

¹³Yet these things you hid in your heart; I know that this was your purpose.

¹⁴If I sin, you watch me, and do not acquit me of my iniquity.

¹⁵If I am wicked, woe to me! If I am righteous, I cannot lift up my head, for I am filled with disgrace and look upon my affliction.

¹⁶Bold as a lion you hunt me; you repeat your exploits against me.

 

            This movement from lament into protest leads Job to the language of a legal trial.  Job takes God to court.  His is a refreshing approach, taken by a man in a true relationship with God.  The friends have become people who choose the rules about God over a relationship with God.  They theologize and come up with rules and then stick to those rules no matter what.  Job will not.  He is so committed to the relational nature of God that he is willing to defy convention and challenge God.

            Just as God accepted the Satan’s challenge regarding Job, God accepts Job’s challenge regarding justice.  This matters because when we respond to adversity through lament, God will hear our lament prayers as God heard Job.  When we challenge God, God will accept our challenge.  God may humble us as God humbled Job.  But as hard as that humbling is, we remember that God humbles those whom he loves; those who treat him as one to be worshipped and loved in relationship rather than as a distant deity who can be reduced to a set of rules. 

            In commenting on Job’s protest to God, Old Testament professor Sam Ballentine quotes from Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novel The Brothers Karamazov.  The second brother, Ivan, is an intellectual and an atheist.  Ballentine feels that Ivan Karamazov speaks out the very protest against injustice heard from Job.  Ivan says, “I refuse to accept this world of God’s. …  Please understand, it is not God that I do not accept, but the world he has created.  I do not accept God’s world and I refuse to accept it” (Ballentine 172-3).

            There is a danger in lament and protest.  It leads to us sitting with Ivan the atheist.  The one suffering permanently abandons faith and gives up on God altogether.  Ivan’s words become ours.  “I do not accept God’s world.”

            In tension with this fallout and drift away from faith is a movement toward redemption of God’s world and a claiming of the world for the Kingdom inaugurated by Jesus.  This is a very optimistic worldview that believes in the presence and activity of the Holy Spirit.  Most of the writing in recent years done along these very positive thought lines comes from theologians, pastors, and spiritual directors who are not writing from the perspective of Job’s pain.  I don’t mean all these authors who have such a hopeful outlook have never suffered.  I don’t mean they all have easy lives.  But the hope that Christians can use their talents, skills, and experience to positively provoke transformation from within the world’s systems – education, politics, business – that hope is not coming from people who are currently suffering as Job suffered.

            It is coming from people who live in joy as their very lives are offered to God.  If you are a teacher, your offering is to be an outstanding, compassionate educator.  If you are a waitress – you are diligent in serving your customers, especially the rude ones.  Your equipment in representing Christ through excellence in your craft is patience, friendliness, and a servant’s heart.  If you are a carpenter – one of the ways you acknowledge the rule of God’s kingdom is to build things that are sturdy, that last, and are of high quality.  Doing what we do well and with absolute integrity is an offering to God.  In this we submit our lives to God’s lordship.

            Some of the leaders in this movement of announcing the kingdom and transforming culture are Andy Crouch, N.T. Right, Richard Foster, Gabe Lyons, and Rob Bell.  This hope-filled theology collides with Job’s perspective of suffering, lament, and protest.  How can the church today live out theologically optimism and at the same time respect and love people who are going through Job-type experiences?  We’ve got to hold onto that theological hope because that’s the stuff of Easter. We are resurrection people.  But even as we live in the Kingdom now, we also have to recognize that there is suffering in the world.  This is a fallen world and we have to respect that people have “Job-sized” problems. 

            This is where the church, ours and Christians in churches around the world, can be all that God is calling us and equipping us to be.  In doing what we do best – our experiences, skills, and training - God’s people band together to create a culture of compassion and care.

            Jesus did this.  A woman was caught in adultery.  The law was clear.  She was to be executed by stoning.  Jesus saw beyond the law.  He saw a woman who had no voice, who probably could not have resisted the man with whom she sinned, and who had no hope.  He did not deny the sin.  Instead he saw the big picture.  He invited all those who were sinless to begin the stoning.  No stone was thrown.  Instead of accusing, Jesus created a new paradigm – a community of forgiveness. 

            On another occasion he was faced with 5000 hungry people and only a few fish and loaves, not enough to even feed his twelve disciples.  Yet, he thanked God for the food and broke it and passed it out.  Miraculously all were filled, there were 12 baskets left over.  Conventional wisdom said, send them off.  Jesus did not send them off.  He asked the people to stay.  He had compassion for them.  He instituted a system of provision. In Acts, we see the earliest Christians continuing this practice, not by miracle, but by sharing.

            How can we creatively respond to Job and the pain in the world today?

            I think of my friend Caleb.  He visited about a dozen orphan care points in Africa.  At the time of his trip, he and his brother were running a Christian school and a Christian recording studio in OK.  They had experience taking students on mission trips to Latin America.  Caleb wondered if he could make a career of guiding church and student groups on these mission trips.  There is not much money in that!  But, he believed that God was calling him. God shouted to Caleb through a Job-type cry of pain, the pain of orphans.

            Orphans, especially in places like Guatemala, Rwanda, Russia, and Ethiopia, will end up on the street as addicts.  They will become sex slaves.  There is little hope that a child who grows up with no one to care for him or her in a society where the weak are already stepped on will have any type of positive, meaningful life.  Caleb heard this Joban cry and he knew the answer was provision for these kids from affluent Christ-followers in America.  He just had to do his part – get those affluent Christ-followers to the poor kids. 

            Three years and about a dozen trips later, Caleb is cooperating with God to help kids move from Job-type suffering into the kingdom of God. Start an organization that caters mission trips; that’s your full-time job – who knew that was possible?  Caleb certainly did not.  But, he was following God. 

What skills do you have to care for those who suffer?  If you’re in health care or education you can obviously donate your time to heal or tutor or teach.  If you’re someone who makes a lot of money, you can donate a lot of it, and you should as a part of your life as a disciple.  But what if you don’t have those types of front-line skills or access to financial resources?  What if all you have is time?  God will use it.  What if all you have is energy?  God will put you to work in a creative way, walking with Job.  Caleb did not have anything really except some experience on mission trips, a heart willing to listen to God, and a willingness to step outside the box. 

Some of us may be going through a Job-type of experience right now.  If you need to, turn to Job’s words of lament and protest.  That’s OK.  It is good to be that brutally honest with God.  God can handle it.  That response is better than pretending everything is OK and being theologically dishonest.

Many among us are doing well, not suffering.  We are called to respond to the suffering around us.  From the perspective of Easter, we enter the suffering applying our skills and experience and passion so that through us God creates a culture of care that respects Job and also announces that Jesus has come and there is life in His name.  We are culture makers in the way we reach out to Job.

AMEN

 

Job's Oath of Innocence

Job 27:1-6

 

 

Job again took up his discourse and said:

²“As God lives, who has taken away my right, and the Almighty, who has made my soul bitter,

³as long as my breath is in me and the spirit of God is in my nostrils,

⁴my lips will not speak falsehood, and my tongue will not utter deceit.

⁵Far be it from me to say that you are right; until I die I will not put away my integrity from me.

⁶I hold fast my righteousness, and will not let it go; my heart does not reproach me for any of my days.

 

            “As God lives …” says Job.  Robert Sutherland, a lawyer and student of ancient legal codes describes Job chapter 27 as Job’s “oath of innocence.”  He writes, “The Oath of Innocence was a self-contained lawsuit understood to have been given by God himself and reserved for those most difficult of cases where the defendant … could not be compelled to come to court.” (Putting God on Trial, p.50).  Sutherland’s book is called Putting God on Trial.  A self-contained lawsuit: Sutherland contends that Job was bringing God to trial for imposing unjust suffering.  Job was admired because he lived righteously.  In fact, it was said he was blameless and God confirmed this assessment.  Yet, after Satan and God argued over him, God permitted Satan to inflict horrendous pain and loss on Job.  Job knew nothing of Satan.  He counted God as guilty.

            “[God] has made my soul bitter,” Job laments.  OT scholar Sam Ballentine writes that Job approached God as an equal partner in dialogue (Prayer in the Hebrew Bible, p. 176).  Taking it further, OT scholar Leo Purdue says Job sees himself as a prince and expects God to give him the royal treatment.  Job’s disputation is based on his sense of injustice, with God in the role of offender.

            Ballentine, Perdue, Sutherland are experts in law, the language of Biblical Hebrew, and the theology of the Old Testament.  Are these academics right?  Is Job so audacious as to bring God to trial?  There was a Biblical precedent.  Recall Solomon praying when the temple was completed in 1 Kings 8:31-32:

“If someone sins against a neighbor and is given an oath to swear, and comes and swears before your altar in this house,³²then hear in heaven, and act, and judge your servants, condemning the guilty by bringing their conduct on their own head, and vindicating the righteous by rewarding them according to their righteousness.

 

            Recall God’s words from Deuteronomy 1:17,

You must not be partial in judging: hear out the small and the great alike; you shall not be intimidated by anyone, for the judgment is God’s. Any case that is too hard for you, bring to me, and I will hear it.”

 

            When Job says, “As God lives,” he is swearing on God’s name.  His claim is on God’s promise from Deuteronomy, which King Solomon relied on in establishing terms of justice in the newly constructed temple.  When no other justice is possible, the victim can turn to God and claim by oath his case, and God swears he will hear it.  Job uses this promise of God to bring trial against God and his foundation for the trial is the name and word of God. 

 

            Who cares?  What does this have to do with you and me?  So Job, according the conventions of ancient times, takes out an oath of innocence.  So what?  So Job uses God’s own terms to bring a case of injustice against God.  How is that relevant here and now?  What difference does this make to us as we try to figure out how God relates to our lives in America in the year 2012?

            Ballentine, whom we referenced earlier, puts it this way.  Job staked his life on the belief that God could not deny his plea.  We like to think God is without limits, but Ballentine is saying Job risked his very existence not just on the idea that God would hear his prayer, but on the idea that God would have to agree to the validity of it and would thus have to rectify Job’s situation.  Do we ever pray like our lives are at stake?  Ballentine is saying that is what Job did.

            Sutherland takes it further.  He sums up 27:2-6 this way.  Job is saying, “I’ll be damned if I do anything other than declare my own innocence” (p.51).  In our everyday speech, someone might see something extraordinarily surprising and say, “Well I’ll be damned.”  He doesn’t really mean he’s going to spend eternity in a fiery inferno.  He just means he’s very, very surprised.  In that case, “Well, I’ll be damned” is a crass way of expressing shock.  It is swearing, cussing.

            Sutherland says Job is saying, “I’ll be damned if I do anything other than express my innocence.”  He has been through three exhausting rounds of debates with his so-called friends, all of whom have insisted he confess, repent, and turn away from sin.  Now he’s fed up.  He won’t do it.  Sutherland suggests that he is willing to barter not just life, but his eternal life.  He will declare his innocence and demand that God acquiesce, and he fully believes that if God rejects him, he will either be utterly annihilated or damned for all time. 

            At this point we must remember the story’s beginning.  Chapter 1, verse 1- Job is defined as “blameless.”  After Satan has hit him, taking all his property and killing his children, God declares Job blameless.  After Satan comes again and adds misery to misery, covering Job with loathsome sores, the narrator says through it all, Job did not sin in his speech.  From God and from the storyteller, we have confirmation.  Job is without sin in this story – blameless.  His oath of innocence, his desperate clinging to his own integrity – it is based on truth.  At the end of the book, God declare Job has spoken rightly. 

            Fine.  Here is the problem.  Romans 3:23 – “all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.”   Now, Job’s integrity is not in question.  Ours is.  Can we believe Job and the narrator and God when they say Job is blameless?  Can we believe Paul as he writes to the Roman Christians that all people – every last one – are sinners who fall short of God’s glory?  Do we trust scripture?  If yes, then what do we do with such tension as this?

            For me it all comes together in John 14:6.  Jesus says, “I am the way, the truth, and the life, and no one comes to the Father except through me.”  Job lived centuries before Jesus came.  He couldn’t know what it means to know God through Jesus.  But there are some important lessons we learn from Job and for now we consider two of them.

            First, not all suffering is punishment for sin.  We don’t have to look far to see people going through terrible suffering.  There are individual stories where people have utterly broken lives or are afflicted with excruciatingly painful illnesses.  There are collective stories where people groups suffer enormously; think of women in Afghanistan under the Taliban’s rule; think of the overcrowded impoverished conditions of Palestinians living in Bethlehem; think of children wasting away in Romanian orphanages.  Is all this suffering a result of sin?  Yes, but not necessarily sins of those who suffer.  Job shows us that pain is not a punishment sent from God.  In fact, God loves us and wants to help us face pain and wants to rescue us from it.

            Second, Job approached God with integrity.  That meant declaring his innocence.  I am not certain we can fully reconcile the unflinching assertion that Job is blameless with Paul’s equally firm declaration that all humans sin.  I don’t know that we can get full harmony with those competing claims.  But we can accept that Job prayed so honestly he risked his own eternity.  He was that straightforward with God.

            We must be also.  For Job, honesty meant declaring the Oat of Innocence.  For us, it means signing our statement of guilt.  If we are as honest as Job, even the best among us must be honest about our sin.  If we believe all this God talk, then we believe we’ve already forfeited our eternity by our sins.  By repeating Adam and Eve’s rebellion, by turning away from the ways of God, by hurting other people, we have destined ourselves to an eternity away from God’s love and God’s presence.  We know on our own merit, without help, we are bound for Hell, whatever Hell is.  We don’t say, “I’ll be damned.”  We say, “We are damned.”  In that admission, we are as honest as Job was.

            But we remember Jesus’ words.  “I am the way.”  No one gets to be with the Father in an eternal relationship of peace, love, and joy except by going through Jesus.  But the gospel is this: Jesus has come to us and for us.  Paul writes in 2^nd Corinthians 5, “For our sake, [God] made him [Christ] who knew to sin to become sin, so that in Him we might become the righteousness of God.”

            In him.  The idea of being “in Christ;” it is the most precious notion in all of scripture.  Job couldn’t have it.  He lived before Jesus’ coming.  Job teaches us honesty and perseverance in prayer and in our relationship with God.  In our admission of guilt for all our sins, we realize it is only by faith in Jesus Christ that the relationship with God is possible.  But it is possible because he did come.  God’s plan was to save the world through Jesus. 

            What about poor Job who lived before Christ?  I trust God has a way of working people into His grace even if they lived prior to the Christian narrative or outside of it. 

For us Job exists as a model of integrity.  In living out that integrity, we begin in confession knowing that confession leads to good news: death to the sinful self, complete forgiveness, and new life as sons and daughters of God.  When read alongside the New Testament, Job does not show the Gospel, but subtly anticipates it.  Stepping from Job into Paul’s letters, we move from model to means.  Jesus is the means to make us righteous beyond even blameless Job’s wildest imagination. 

            Today we take the bread and the cup, the communion elements first shared by Jesus and the disciples.  As we do, consider your integrity before God.  Come clean.  Open your heart and invite Him in.  It won’t be easy.  We are humans and we have  messes in our hearts.  But He loves us enough to accept us and clean up our messes.  So this morning, don’t for a second worry about being innocent as Job was innocent.  Be true as Job was true.  The one who is the Way, the Truth, and the Life is reaching welcoming arms to you.  For you, He makes a way.

AMEN

Houses of Clay (Job 4:17-19)

If there is a single Biblical vision for humanity, it is shalom.  Shalom is peace: living in right relationships with neighbors and with God. 

            To have shalom, one must be righteous.  What is ‘righteousness?’  Obedience to God?  Yes.  Is it proper worship?  Yes.  Is righteousness acting justly and being humble toward other people?  Yes.  Yes.  Yes.   Righteousness is hard to obtain and harder still to define.  Yet shalom – the goal of humanity – is impossible without righteousness.

            Job’s friend Eliphaz stands before Job as Job suffers from loss, heartbreak, shock, and physical pain.  No one has suffered like Job.  He maintained that he was suffering unjustly because he had been blameless.  God said exactly that in the gathering of heavenly beings in Job chapter 1. 

            But Job’s friend Eliphaz does not believe he is without fault.  We can dismiss Eliphaz because we know he contradict God, but we shouldn’t write him off too quickly.  “Can mortals be righteous before God?”  Eliphaz asks.  God does not even trust his angels.  How can He trust us, humans who live in houses of clay whose foundation is dust” (4:19)?

           

            Each human being from the president to the guy driving the trash truck; we are houses of clay.

 

            In the days of the prophet Jeremiah, God asked,

            ⁵Then the word of the Lord came to me:

⁶Can I not do with you, O house of Israel, just as this potter has done? says the Lord. Just like the clay in the potter’s hand, so are you in my hand, O house of Israel.

⁷At one moment I may declare concerning a nation or a kingdom, that I will pluck up and break down and destroy it, ⁸but if that nation, concerning which I have spoken, turns from its evil, I will change my mind about the disaster that I intended to bring on it. ⁹And at another moment I may declare concerning a nation or a kingdom that I will build and plant it, ¹⁰but if it does evil in my sight, not listening to my voice, then I will change my mind about the good that I had intended to do to it.

¹¹Now, therefore, say to the people of Judah and the inhabitants of Jerusalem: Thus says the Lord: Look, I am a potter shaping evil against you and devising a plan against you. Turn now, all of you from your evil way, and amend your ways and your doings. (Jeremiah 18:5-11)

 

            “Just like clay … so you are in my hand.”  We can ignore  Eliphaz, but God is the speaker in Jeremiah.  God says to his people, “Now … I am a potter shaping evil against you.”  It was because of sin, but even so, does God do evil?  Well, how we can ask such questions?  We’re clay.

            The Apostle Paul, in Romans:

 

But who indeed are you, a human being, to argue with God? Will what is molded say to the one who molds it, “Why have you made me like this?” ²¹Has the potter no right over the clay, to make out of the same lump one object for special use and another for ordinary use?  (Romans 9:20-21)

 

 

            Are we angry?  The preacher says we’re nothing but clay, mud.  No, not the preacher, the Bible.  Jeremiah, Job, Paul; it seems there’s Biblical consensus that humans aren’t much in the grand scheme of things. 

            We go back to Genesis, back to the beginning; we need some help here.  We’re just clay?  That can’t be right.  What does Genesis offer?  From Genesis chapter 2:

 

“The Lord God formed man from the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and the man became a living being.” (Gen. 2:7)

 

            Eliphaz’s question is blaring now.  Can a mortal, a mere house of clay, be righteous?  We are formed, created.  There was a time when there was no Rob Tennant.  In 1969, no one had ever heard of Rob Tennant.  I had not existed.  I was born in 1970.  If I live 83 years, I’ll in die in 2053.  I am a blip on the screen of history.  I will die and my corpse will be consumed by maggots.  I am dust, clay, earth.  Can a mortal be righteous and enjoy Shalom?  Can Job?  Can I?  You? 

            What does ‘clay’ mean in the book of Job.  Eliphaz says human beings are houses of clay.  Zophar, another friend of Job’s, like Eliphaz and Bildad before him judges Job to be guilty.  He rejects Job’s innocence saying that God’s wisdom is unattainable for humans, and it is by God’s wisdom, Zophar implies, that Job is found guilty.  Job says to Zophar, “Your maxims are proverbs of ashes, your defenses are defenses of clay” (13:12).  Clay when dried crumbles and blows in the wind like dust.  When hardened it is weak and easily smashed.  Dust; nothing; weak. 

What about the young man Elihu?  He says to Job, “Before God I am as you are; I too was formed from a piece of clay.  No fear of me need terrify you” (33:6-7).  Job, I’m clay like you, nothing to fear.  Nothing to be impressed by.  Nothing. 

You and I, church, we are houses of clay.  Can we hope to be righteous?  Can we hope to live in right relationships with God and with each other?  Our best efforts shatter as does a clay pot if it dropped onto concrete from just a few feet in the air. 

Is clay mentioned any more in the book of Job?  Actually, yes, by God.  Knowing Job has no possible answer, God asks,

 

¹²“Have you commanded the morning since your days began, and caused the dawn to know its place, ¹³so that it might take hold of the skirts of the earth, and the wicked be shaken out of it? ¹⁴It is changed like clay under the seal, and it is dyed like a garment.  (Job 38:12-14)

 

            In God’s remark, the feature of clay is different than what we’ve previously heard.  In the mouth of Eliphaz, humans, houses of clay, cannot possibly be righteous.  Whatever shalom we enjoy is a gift from God we should accept.  We also accept any misery that fills our lives because that too is from God.  To Job, clay is fragile, weak, nothing.  To Elihu, clay is unremarkable, unworthy of any reknown.  But God says something different.

            God says clay is something that can be changed.  By who?  By the potter.  Who is the potter?  Obviously there is just one, God.  Why is this important?  When we meet God we change – we become something we were not before the encounter happened.  Lost people are those who resist the influence of God on their lives.  In the book of Job, his friends, the young man Elihu, his wife – they all refuse to change.  They believed certain things about God, humanity, and the world.  As Job goes through his horrendous ordeal, they stubbornly hold onto a theology that does not fit the reality around them. 

            Job realizes his life is in the hands of a dynamic, real, living God.  God is not a far off deity who set things in motion at the dawn of creation, set up the rules, and has been hands off ever since.  God is right here, active in the affairs of humans right now.  Suffering helped Job see that.  And he realized his only hope was to turn to that God in prayer.  Sometimes it was angry prayer.  Some things said would have to be reconsidered.  But Job knew his hope was not in the commonly held beliefs of his day.  In fact his only hope was to disrupt those beliefs and reach out to God because his fate was in God’s hands.  So too is ours.

Again, Genesis 2:  “The Lord God formed man from the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and the man became a living being.” We are not just houses of clay; we are houses of clay filled with the breath, the Spirit, of God.  To be human is to be animated by God’s spirit.  From the very beginning we were made for relationship.

What’s the Biblical goal? Right relationship: peace and love and harmony with God and with others.  How do we attain that?  Through righteousness.  Can humans be righteous Eliphaz asks?   No.  But we can be in relationship with God who is perfectly righteous.  In fact the very reason we exist is to be in relationship with God and each other.  That’s why we are here.

Rick Warren writes, “God was there as an unseen witness, smiling at your birth.  He wanted you alive” (Purpose Driven Life, p.63).  Leonard Sweet says of faith, “Faith is not a problem to be solved or a question to be answered but a mystery to be lived – the mystery of a real, live relationship with God.”  God desired this so much He bridged the gap. 

First God chose a nation – Israel and wed Himself in marriage to His chosen people.  Then God became one of them.  Jesus is a house of clay just like you and me.  God lowered God’s self.  Paul writes in Philippians, “[Jesus] emptied himself taking on the form of a slave, born in human likeness” (2:7).  He did it because previously only remarkable individuals in history became true friends of God – Job, Abraham, Moses, Elijah.  Each one of these was blown away by God.  The house of clay cannot “know” intimately the potter.  So the potter became a house of clay. 

From Job we learn to tenaciously hold onto even the slimmest of hopes in God.  When all else is lost, we, like Job, reach to God.  There is nothing else to do.  But the lesson is incomplete if it ends there.  In our reaching, which includes full acknowledgement of all our mistakes and limitations, full confession of all we’ve done that is wrong and harmful, in our reaching we realize God reached that much farther when he came to us.

We houses of clay, animated by God’s creative spirit, become sons and daughters of God when in Christ, we are redeemed and made new by that same Holy Spirit.  We are changed.  Paul says, “Anyone who is in Christ is a new creation” (2 Corinthians 5:17).  God told Job that clay is moldable, but that’s a good thing.  Job and you and I are molded by God.  God makes something of us.

He does this through Jesus and it is the love and forgiveness of Jesus in us that makes us what we are.  Job was not blessed to live with knowledge of Jesus.  We have that knowledge.  Jesus makes us righteous and through him we have right relationships.  Paul says that as we carry Jesus and share his love and his gospel, we houses of clay become signposts pointing to God’s glory.  “We have this treasure [Jesus] in jars of clay, so it may be made clear that this power [eternal life] belongs to God” (2 Corinthians 4:7).

Can mortals be righteous?  No, Eliphaz, we houses of clay cannot be righteous.  But we are animated by God and saved by God in the flesh, Jesus.  So we can be in relationship with God.  His righteousness is sufficient for us and because of him, we can and will live in shalom forever.

AMEN