Sermon Job 2:1-10 and Heb. 2:1-10 October 4, 2009

 

No theological issue captures me as much as the issue of God and human suffering. Job is the most sustained piece in the Bible on this topic. Our prose beginning is a way of framing the issue, of getting us started, but I certainly don't take it to be a transcript of a heavenly conversation. I do not recognize this arbitrary God as the God we see in Jesus Christ. In the same way, one can hardly see the cruel response of Mrs. Job as a loving response. Still, I will give some leeway to her for she has lot property and children the same as her husband. She cannot face another problem; the straw has broken the camel's back, and she lashes out in anger at her ill husband. As Hebrews quotes Ps. 8, we are a little lower than the angels, so I cannot imagine God treating us as mere playthings for a wager. It is set up to see that Job cannot possibly deserve suffering. How will he respond to unjust, arbitrary suffering? It is a way of setting up Rabbi Kushner's great question about when bad things happen to good people. 

 

Jesus is comparable to Job in suffering, but at least Jesus grasps the meaning and import of his suffering. Job is left out in the cold. If anything should tells us that no one is immune from suffering, Job and Jesus show us that. To cry out why and find only silence or poor answers is hard to bear.

 

In Communion we take in, receive,the life, death,and resurrection of Jesus. It is more than a mere recitation of the first Lord's Supper. In Hebrew to remember, zakar, has the sense of the past coming alive in the present.That life included suffering. We are in communion in joy, but also in sorrow; this we share with all of our fellow human beings, just as in the marriage vows. In baptism, Paul says that we carry the death and resurrection within us. In Communion we carry the life of Jesus within. Communion joins us to the emblem of the cross so that it  lives within. Jesus is in communion with us in sorrow and joy, want and plenty, sickness and health. Sometimes i wonder that our hymns sound too mournful for communion. this Sunday, they have the right feel, as I am wondering if the lament, that biblical cry of pain and protest is a Communion song as well. Brothers and sisters in Christ gather around the family table this morning. Our entire lives are joined to the life of Christ in this sacrament.

 

so communion gives us one aid in suffering: we are not alone. Second, the examples of Job and Jesus tell us that god is not about the business of hurling divine thunderbolts at us to gt our moral attention. We can and do learn through suffering, but the lesson is not that we are unworthy wretches who deserve punishments for sins, real or imagined. Third, we are not above other people, but as Jesus said the rain falls on the just and unjust alike. Suffering is part of the human condition. finally, may we act on the sources of lament after communion. We who are fed to the brim in this spiritual feast should shake our fist at the thought of hungry in this country. We who receive the sacrament of healing should sit dumbfounded at a system that consigns one in five of our citizens to poor health care and more if we include dental and mental health services. Suffering is not the last word in our faith, healing and restoration are. Know that as you receive bread and cup, we get a taste of the heaven where suffering at long last is ended.