Sermon for March 19th, 2017

Job 10:1-22

1“I loathe my life;
   I will give free utterance to my complaint;
   I will speak in the bitterness of my soul.
2 I will say to God, Do not condemn me;
   let me know why you contend against me.
3 Does it seem good to you to oppress,
   to despise the work of your hands
   and favor the schemes of the wicked?
4 Do you have eyes of flesh?
   Do you see as humans see?
5 Are your days like the days of mortals,
   or your years like human years,
6 that you seek out my iniquity
   and search for my sin,
7 although you know that I am not guilty,
   and there is no one to deliver out of your hand?
8 Your hands fashioned and made me;
   and now you turn and destroy me.
9 Remember that you fashioned me like clay;
   and will you turn me to dust again?
10 Did you not pour me out like milk
   and curdle me like cheese?
11 You clothed me with skin and flesh,
   and knit me together with bones and sinews.
12 You have granted me life and steadfast love,
   and your care has preserved my spirit.
13 Yet these things you hid in your heart;
   I know that this was your purpose.
14 If I sin, you watch me,
   and do not acquit me of my iniquity.
15 If 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.
16 Bold as a lion you hunt me;
   you repeat your exploits against me.
17 You renew your witnesses against me,
   and increase your vexation toward me;
   you bring fresh troops against me.
18 “Why did you bring me forth from the womb?
   Would that I had died before any eye had seen me,
19 and were as though I had not been,
   carried from the womb to the grave.
20 Are not the days of my life few?
   Let me alone, that I may find a little comfort
21 before I go, never to return,
   to the land of gloom and deep darkness,
22 the land of gloom and chaos,
   where light is like darkness.”

Job's Prayer of Despair

There are three categories of "desperate prayers" that we are prone to resort to at least at some point in our lives, if not more often.

The first category, which is not nearly so desperate as the other two, is what I call the "slot machine prayer." Basically, you put in your imaginary prayer quarter, pull the lever, and hope that God will give you something you desperately want, something you don't currently have: God, please help me to win the lottery, or get that promotion, or find the love of my life. Or maybe just a puppy.

I don't call them slot machine prayers in a derogatory sense--God certainly hears all kinds of prayers--but rather because they express a hopefullness against the odds that we might gain something worth a whole lot more than what we deserve, and certainly more than the quarter we put in the machine.

In a slot machine prayer, sometimes the "quarter" might be a promise on your end: God, if you help me get a good grade on this test, I promise I'll go to church every Sunday for a month. Or sometimes the quarter is just the act of praying itself.

Obviously, not all slot machine prayers are desperate, but some are. God, help me to find a job so I can take care of my family. Or Hannah's prayer in the Old Testament: Lord, please give me a son. I also refer to them as slot machine prayers because, while sometimes (as in Hannah's case) we actually get what we ask for, if we're being honest, a lot of the time these prayers (no matter how desperate) go unanswered.

The second category of desperate prayers is what I call the "status quo prayer." Whereas the slot machine prayer is a prayer that God will give us something we don't already have, the status quo prayer is a prayer that God will help us keep something we already do have, but don't want to lose: God, please keep my children safe. Lord, please don't let my mother die. God, please save my marriage. Status Quo prayers are decidedly more desperate.

Once again, I don't label them this way in order to belittle them--the Psalms are full of this kind of prayer (Lord, my enemies are at the gate, please deliver me!)--and God hears all prayer. I call them status quo prayers to help put things into perspective: Half the time we're asking God to intervene in our situation and drastically change things, while the other half of the time we're asking God to keep things exactly the way they are right now!

It's worth noting that in the case of a status quo prayer, no one ever says "God, don't let my mother die...ever!" Just "don't let my mother die...right now." And the prayer "keep my children safe" doesn't mean "keep them from ever falling down or crying or experiencing any pain from now until they're in their late 90s." It usually means "don't let anything happen to them that isn't normal, that isn't status quo."

Slot machine prayers are the opposite--God, please intervene in my life in a special way above and beyond what you're doing with the majority of other people. If everyone won the lottery, it would cause immediate devaluation of currency and inflation, meaning that winning the lottery wouldn't actually help your situation at all. If everyone got a promotion, that would mean no one actually got promoted. If everyone got an "A" on the test without actually studying, then an "A" would no longer mean much. So even though we may not realize it, the subtle slot machine prayer is really, "Lord, intervene just in my life, but not anyone else's."

So even though slot machine prayers and status quo prayers are heartfelt and sincere, perhaps God can be forgiven for being a little confused about how and when to best answer our prayers for him to change some things in our lives (but not anyone else's), while keeping other things in our lives exactly the same as the things in everyone else's. Maybe we need to pray for God.

I don't know if Job, the hero of our story this season, ever prayed slot machine prayers. By the time we meet him, he's already pretty blessed. He does pray a status quo prayer for the well-being of his children every morning, but this prayer doesn't seem to prevent their tragic deaths.

And so that brings us to the third category of desperate prayers: The kind of prayer Job began last week in chapter seven, and continues today in chapter ten. I call this the "walking away from God" prayer. It is a prayer of ultimate desperation.

The word "desperation" comes from the Latin word "desperare," which in turn is made up of two parts. The "de" as usual, negates something (deform, deemphasize, deconstruct). What's left is "spero" (spanish esperanza / french esperer), which means "hope." So despair (and desperate) literally means "without hope." No hope. Devoid of hope.

Slot machine prayers and status quo prayers both have at their heart the hope that God will do something. Change something. Protect something. But sometimes, especially in the face of tragedy, loss, or even just the overwhelming realization that in this world, bad things happen to good people...in the face of that, sometimes, some of us lose all hope that God is listening, that God cares, that God has the ability to help us, or even that God exists at all.

This is the point at which many who had once hoped in God, walk away from God--sometimes for a season, but all too often, forever. This is the last prayer of the struggling Christian, and the first prayer of the hopeless athiest.

Very few athiests I know of started off as athiests. Most, including some of the most famous ones, began their lives in religious families, or as devout believers themselves. That's not surprising. Neurologists have noted that our brains are "hard wired" or pre-disposed to belief in the transcendent. Whether one takes that as evidence for God or evidence of evolution in this case doesn't matter too much. The question we're concerned with today is what makes believing people walk away from their belief, from their hope, from their God? What makes a person utter this final, desperate prayer?

I believe that if Job lived among us today, and experienced all that he experienced, that in this moment (chapter 10) he would be declaring himself an athiest. He doesn't actually do that, not out of any great faith in God or love for God, but simply because the idea of God (or gods) was so woven into the fabric of ancient middle eastern understanding (and almost all ancient cultures) that there wasn't any category for atheism. It just wasn't an option.

In fact, the Book of Job is classified as Wisdom Literature, which is part of the ancient middle eastern wisdom tradition. This was the closest thing to science that existed at the time. Wisdom teaching, like modern science, emphasized observation of natural phenomenon, rigourous debate, and testing of a hypothesis. That's why the book of Job is framed as an extended debate between Job and his equally intelligent friends, each one putting forth a hypothesis, and all of them drawing on frequent citations and observations of nature, plant and animal life to support their theories.

Job, then, is a scientist. But disputing the existence of God in Job's time would be like disputing the existence of gravity in our own time. It just wouldn't make sense. So Job does the next best thing. Since he can't conceive of a functioning world where God doesn't exist, he decides that God is broken, God is corrupt, God is no better than a human being. And this has the same effect as believing there is no God. It means there is no hope for divine intervention or divine protection in our lives, and without that hope, we might as well walk away from the whole idea of God.

ob is a scientist.