Sermon for March 3rd, 2024
Job 12:11-25 (OT p.462)
Scripture passage incorporated into the sermon.
In Pursuit of Wisdom, Part II
A young executive was leaving the office late one evening when he found the CEO standing in front of a paper shredder with a piece of paper in his hand. "Listen," said the CEO, "this is a very sensitive and important document here, and my secretary has gone for the night. Can you make this thing work?" "Certainly," said the young executive. He turned the machine on, inserted the paper, and pressed the start button. "Excellent, excellent!" said the CEO as his paper disappeared inside the machine. "I just need one copy."
Today's sermon is about the shredding of very important things. And I promise, there's a connection with the pursuit of wisdom, too.
Last week, we covered the first half of Job chapter 12, where Job responds to his three friends who have come to comfort him in his grief and loss. They're not doing a great job, at least not in Job's opinion, and so he sarcastically calls them out in verse 2, saying "Surely you are the people, and wisdom will die with you!" Job then goes on to lay out his own philosophy for where wisdom (and comfort in the face of tragedy) can be found--speak to the earth and it will teach you. Look to the birds, the fish, the plants and the animals. For Job, wisdom begins by looking for the creator in his creation. Simple enough...and yet too often we pile on layers and layers of complications. More on that later. For now, let's pick up where we left off, in verse 11. Job is about to make a transition in his speech.
11 Does not the ear test words as the palate tastes food? 12 Is wisdom with the aged and understanding in length of days? 13 “With God are wisdom and strength; he has counsel and understanding.
Job starts with a metaphor--testing words with your ears, the way you taste food with your palate. This is experiential learning, trial and error, very much in keeping with Job's wisdom philosophy. In theory, if you keep trying things and none of them kill you, by the time you are aged, you will also be very experienced. Job poses this as a question, and it might seem at first like he answers in the negative: Is wisdom with the aged? No, with God are wisdom and strength, not with old people. But I think the answer is meant to be superlative rather than negative. In other words, yes--wisdom comes from age and length of days. And who is older than anyone else? God, of course. The aged are wiser, but God is wisest. Of course, this is a setup for all that God DOES in his infinite wisdom. Verse 14:
14 If he tears down, no one can rebuild; if he shuts someone in, no one can open up. 15 If he withholds the waters, they dry up; if he sends them out, they overwhelm the land. 16 With him are strength and wisdom; the deceived and the deceiver are his.
God's strength and wisdom can sometimes appear destructive. Look in particular at verse 15. God withholds the waters and there's a drought. Now, Job could have said that when God sends the waters back out, they water the earth providing nourishment to the plants and animals. But instead, he says they overwhelm the land. In other words, God sends both drought AND floods. Both are destructive. Both come from God. Verse 17:
17 He leads counselors away stripped and makes fools of judges. 18 He looses the sash of kings and binds a waistcloth on their loins. 19 He leads priests away stripped and overthrows the mighty.
Counselors, judges, kings, and priests--all public figures, publicly humiliated by God, who strips from them the symbolic clothing of their office. By the way, all those professions--counselors, judges, kings, and priests--are associated with wisdom (or at least you would hope they might be wise in order to perform their role competently). But it gets worse. Verse 20:
20 He deprives of speech those who are trusted and takes away the discernment of the elders. 21 He pours contempt on princes and looses the belt of the strong. 22 He uncovers deep things from the darkness and brings deep darkness to light.
If you think there was a silver lining in that last verse, you are wrong. The things God uncovers from the darkness are probably intended here to mean scary, frightening things, and what is brought to light (translated as "deep darkness") is literally צַלְמָֽוֶת (tsalmavet) or the "shadow of death." In other words, God brings both the monsters and the shadow of death out of hiding and into the light of your life! Does this sound like a nice, friendly, loving God? Brace yourself for the ending--it's not a happy ending. Verse 23:
23 He makes nations great, then destroys them; he enlarges nations, then leads them away. 24 He strips understanding from the leaders of the earth and makes them wander in a pathless waste. 25 They grope in the dark without light; he makes them stagger like a drunkard.
The end. My sincerest apologies to those of you who came this morning looking for some comforting words of hope and inspiration--this is not your day, and Job is not your guy. What's more, if you're looking for a God who thinks all of your character flaws are cute, who winks at your bad behavior and smiles and your secret sins--well, you probably won't find that God anywhere in the Bible, and certainly not in the Book of Job.
But on the other hand--if what you're looking for today is a little wisdom... and if you're willing to undergo some pain and suffering in order to grow (because that's part of how we learn from experience), then perhaps there is something here in Job's (or God's) angry tirade that's worth paying attention to.
All of the things listed in verse 14 through the end are destructive actions. Or maybe they're "deconstructive" actions. Do you remember the joke I started with? About the CEO who had become so self-important that he could no longer figure out the simple things without the help of his secretary? Like how to tell the difference between a photo-copier and a paper shredder? It's just a joke, of course, but I wonder what happened next in the story, after his very, very sensitive and important document was shredded to bits. Did he learn something valuable from that experience, or did he just yell at the junior executive who was trying to help him?
18 He looses the sash of kings and binds a waistcloth on their loins.
I said earlier that Job's approach to wisdom is simple--seek God's wisdom through God's creation. But the problem is, all the things we create for ourselves--our words, our buildings, our empires, our excuses--those things have a way of hiding or obscuring God's creation, and so we grope in the dark without light, staggering around like drunkards.
Have you ever done a home renovation project where you have to take out your flooring in order to put a new one down? Or maybe it's your roof shingles, or the wallpaper--whatever it is, every time you take off a layer, there's another one beneath it, and another one beneath that. You could just put yours down on top of the old one, but that causes problems in time. The best thing to do--and the hardest thing to do--is to scrape away all those layers and start fresh. And sometimes that's exactly what God wants to do with us. To destroy--or deconstruct--what we have wrongly come to think of as "the most important things" in our lives; all those layers we pile on to cover and conceal God and his creation.
The pursuit of wisdom is not always about gaining more knowledge or adding more things to our experience. Sometimes it's about subtracting or stripping away what distracts us from our Creator, from the simple things that are truly important.
