Job 23:1-10, heb. 4:12-16 Sermon October 11 2009

At this point Job's friends have gotten nervous about job complaining that it is not fair that he suffers so. They have defended God by telling him that he must have done something terribly wrong. he insists on his innocence, but he is falling into deep despair. The trial image  keeps a suicidal Job alive is his desire for a trial. He wants to face his accuser. he wants habeus corpus, a face to face encounter. God is ineffable and elusive. How do you serve a legal notice to God? God sees us , but we don't see God. Sometimes prayer seems as if we are talking to the wall. We feel nearsighted in our prayer, unable to focus  through the separating distance. Seeing is different for the hunter and the hunted? In its way, liturgy is a form of trial. Is Ps. 139 being parodied? Is this an accusing eye, a loving eye, a searching eye? Who wants a punishing God to be close? We do want the helping God to be close to our needs and condition.When we lose someone, we have unconscious searching behavior. We think we see that person in someone else.

 

As we said, Hebrews is written to give encouragement to people who are tired of trying so hard to be good. Now they hear that someone is on their side. Hebrews imagines a sympathetic high priest, or a judge who is sympathetic more than objective, or critical and accusing. This high priest sees inside of us.He can slice through our defenses, the layers upon layers of protections and find our core self. This high priest knows intimately what we go through. This high priest knows what we do not or cannot face about ourselves. I would like to imagine that the prayers of Jesus on our behalf are ever bit as potent as Job's challenge. This passage tells us to be bold in our prayer, as bold as Job in his desire for a divine trial.

 

Is Job's complaint bitter or defiant? In the end, it doesn't matter. God supports Job in his fervent desperate prayers for justice. In other words, the relationship between us and God is so strong that our prayers can be full-throated pleas for help, frustrated arguments, as well as songs of praise and adoration. In relationship with us, God is open to our full lives, in ups and downs, in their pleas for making sense of things when they are unravelling.

 

After seeing Bill Smith before his surgery, I went to CTS. I couldn't resist going to the bookstore, and I picked up a new book on  Job by Gerald Janzen who taught there. He had written, 20 years ago, one of the best, if not the best, commentary on the book of Job. The nice lady at the counter said that he had been fighting prostate cancer but was doing well.Then, the new Dan Fogelberg CD came in the mail. It was composed when he was fighting the cancer that took his life. People suffer as did Job for no clear discernible reason. It is part of our common human experience. Hospital doors do not shut out God.  Nursing home locks do not exclude God. God has the distance to see us clearly, and is close enough to know our inmost thoughts.If god didn't keep some distance, we would be engulfed, overwhelmed. At the same time, God is as near as the next breathed, or shouted, prayer.We are never far enough away from God so that God is not much more ready to hear us pray than we are to pray. Whenever we pray, we are heard by someone sympathetic to our plight and our cause, a reliable listening ear.