Difference between revisions of "Sermon for March 19th, 2017"

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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

Let's dive right in to some things I want to point out in today's text. I'm going to read a few scattered verses throughout this chapter, and I want you to listen to the type of language that Job is using and see if you can connect the dots:

Verse2: "I will say to God, Do not condemn me"

Verse 7: "although you know that I am not guilty,"

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

Verse 17: "You renew your witnesses against me"

Job is using the language of the courtroom, of a legal trial. This is one of the reasons some scholars suspect the Book of Job is not as old as is sometimes supposed: The complex legal vocabulary, which reflects complex legal systems, didn't develop until much later in Ancient middle eastern societies.

In any case, Job seems to think that God has put him on trial. And there is some truth to this, if you read the first two chapters--All heaven is watching as jury, God has commissioned Satan as a sort of prosecuting attorney, and God himself will be the judge.

But Job does something unusual, something bold and gutsy. Rather than defending himself (why bother with that, if God sees everything and knows everything?) Job goes on the attack. He attacks God, the judge. He turns the entire trial motif upside down and puts God on trial.

Verse 3: "Does it seem good to you to oppress, to despise the work of your hands and favor the schemes of the wicked?

Then he (sarcastically) compares God to a flawed, limited, mortal: 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? In other words, we would expect that kind of behavior from a person, not from God.

Then Job's accusation in verse 8: "Your hands fashioned and made me; and now you turn and destroy me." You're the one who is doing all this, without provocation or cause. You're the one who is guilty, not me.

As witnesses in verses 9, 10, and 11 he calls out common household crafts: pottery, cheesemaking, and knitting. The idea is that no skilled craftsman makes these things just for the sake of destroying them.

Then Job's concluding argument in verse 14: "If I sin, you watch me, and do not acquit me of my iniquity, (therefore) if I am wicked, woe to me!" But...(even) if I am righteous, I (still) cannot lift up my head, for I am filled with disgrace and look upon my affliction."

Either way, whether I'm innocent or guilty, I am punished. The system is broken. Justice is broken. God is broken.

So just leave 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.”

In this bitter prayer, Job--having exhausted every attempt to understand what is happening to him and why--decides that it's just not worth it anymore. And so he resolves to walk away from God.

I think Job is not alone in this sentiment. Many of us, in the face of tragedy or sufffering, have put God on trial in our minds. Many of us have, at some point or another, resolved to walk away from God. And many have gone through with it, as Job says, "never to return."

This kind of prayer, a prayer of desperation, is usually the last prayer of the struggling Christian and the first prayer of the athiest or agnostic.

Today I want to speak for awhile to the atheists and agnostics in our midst. And no, I don't presume that just because you're sitting in a church Sunday morning that you are a Christian...any more than sitting in a coffee shop would make you a cup of coffee. Hopefully we produce good Christians, the same way a coffee shop produces good coffee...but stumbling through the door doesn't guarantee anything. Whether you are a Christian, an agnostic, an atheist, something in between, all of the above or none of the above...we're glad you're here.

So for the next few minutes, I want to speak to the atheists and agnostics. If that's not you, if you consider yourself a Christian, then you can mentally check out for a while, but while you're doing that I want you to consider what exactly it is about the way you spend your time and your resources--not your words or the bumper sticker on your car, but your actual time and resources--what is it about the way you spend those things that distinguishes you from an atheist or an agnostic in a visible way for all the world to see? Think about that, and if you can't answer the question, then come back and hang out with us in the agnostic/atheist group for awhile.

To my fellow atheists: And yes, I said fellow. That's because the very earliest Christians were labeled atheists by everyone else in the 1st through 5th century world. They rejected the mainstream gods of Greek and Roman civilization, and what they called "God" didn't make sense to anyone, so people assumed they were atheists. And by the definitions of "acceptable theism" at the time, they were.

If you are an atheist because, like Job and the early Christians, you walked away from the mainstream understanding of God in your time--

Maybe it was the God of your childhood religion that no longer made sense in a grown up world;

Maybe it was the Santa Claus God who is supposed to give us everything we want and protect us from all pain, suffering, danger, and loss, and who is quite obviously fictitious;

Maybe it was the angry and spiteful God of judgment and wrath and selected political causes that someone in some other church tried to sell you as the true God of Christianity, but who looked all too human at the end of the day;

If you gave up on that God and walked away, good for you! Better to be an atheist than to keep pretending that God is real.

But if you're an atheist because you

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.

What does any of this have to do with the Book of Job? Well, I don't know if Job 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.