* This Sermon was written by a dear friend of mine, Barbara Groote, Intern Pastor, Bethel Lutheran Medsted

Job 1:1, 2:1-10

On Friday, Gladys and I went to the cemetery, and I learned the story of each grave. And each story is what makes our community today. One thing we noticed was that a great number of people died between 1943 and 1945, and of these people there is a disproportionally large number of young children and babies.

(Pause)

Each grave in the cemetery tells of grief, loss, pain and suffering. Suffering and death are part of this world. We all have been touched by it. Each one of us as an individual and collectively as a community we have faced suffering and pain. Life is good one moment, the next it comes crushing down on us: the unexpected death of a loved one, the diagnosis of a potentially life-threatening illness, a messy divorce,  struggles with mental illness, dreams and hopes for our children drowned in alcohol or poisoned beyond recognition by drugs. The list is long. The list is as long as the existence of humanity.

As we hear today, Job is the prime example of what suffering is all about. As the story tells us, Job and his wife lost 500 oxen, 70,000 sheep, 3,000 camels, their servants, and 7 sons and 3 daughters - all of this in one day. ONE DAY! And to add insult to injury Job is now left with nothing but a terrible skin disease. He has gone through one agonizing ordeal after another because God and one of his heavenly advisors, the Shatan had struck a deal. They had made a bet. They had gambled. And Job is the guinea pig for God and the Shatan to see who is right. The story of Job made it into the Bible because it touches profoundly on the dark side of human existence. It is a well-crafted piece that boldly addresses suffering and our struggling with it. The author of this story wrestles with the question: why do bad things happen to good people? Are we just puppets in a cosmic battle? How can God allow us to experience suffering and pain? Ultimately, this eloquent narrative is about God’s relationship with us and our response.

To us suffering doesn’t seem to fit into our world, tragedy is not what we think life should be about. After all, like Mr. and Mrs Job, we are law-abiding upright citizens, and we believe that God should bless us when life is good. Or we even believe that we are entitled to a good life because we are holding up our side of the bargain by doing the right things. But when misfortune strikes we, like Mrs. Job, often waver and stumble into a faith crisis. We wonder what we have done to deserve suffering and pain. We wonder if we have done something wrong, and we wonder if it is God punishing us when we are faced with life’s unfairness. The newest hype in much of popular Christianity today works on this very premise: that God rewards the successful with great riches. However, this view isn’t new after all! Job, we learned, was upright and faithful and successful and rich, too.

Like Job’s wife we tend to base our world-view and our relationship to God on the mechanisms of cause and effect. It seems to make life somewhat predictable: goodness results in goodness, and wickedness deserves wickedness. In this understanding of God the roles are very clearly laid out for each of us, and thus life becomes manageable. God has become a mechanical god, predictable, and manipulable. Job was a good and faithful man with integrity. His wealth and success are signs of God’s blessing.

But the equation doesn’t make sense anymore when we are hit with all kinds of hurts and pains, when we suffer… Like Job was hit with all kinds of cruel tragedies … like he suffered. And his suffering doesn’t make sense at all. It is then that Mrs. Job realizes that she actually doesn’t know God.

It is when we are struck by disaster and pain, by suffering and hardships that we, too, begin to ask ourselves if we have done SOMEthing that has displeased God. We must have done SOMEthing that deserves punishment. Because when bad things happen to people it must be as a consequence of something evil that they have done. Any suffering that happens to people is a consequence of their sin. It is either their sin, or the sin of their parents or the sin of their children. 

Over time we learn that life is unpredictable. Life is uncontrollable. And most of all life is unfair. We painfully come to realize that God is by no means what we expected God to be. God doesn’t fit in any of the boxes we try to make for him. In a sense God has failed us, and God doesn’t stick to the rules that we thought applied in this relationship, and God can’t be controlled as we had thought. Such a God is difficult, impossible to worship. At this point we feel that we have to reevaluate our relationship to God. Mrs. Job’s suggestion to Job is to no longer stand up for this unknown God and rather curse God and die.

The movie Defiance is based on the true story of the three Bielski brothers. During the occupation of Poland and Belorussia in WW II the three brothers are on the run from the invading German troops, and hide in the deep forests. They are faced with the impossible task of foraging for food and weapons for their survival. They live, not only with the fear of discovery, contending with neighboring Soviet partisans and knowing whom to trust but also take the responsibility of looking after a large mass of fleeing Polish Jews from the German war machine. Women, men, children, the elderly and the young alike are all hiding in makeshift homes in the dark, cold and unforgiving forests. At first the spirits are high. But the war drags on and the enthusiasm and hope of the people to free themselves from their hardships soon turns into great suffering. The inadequate huts don’t offer protection against a cold winter. The food supply is running short, and people are malnourished and starving. Many become very sick, some die.

At one of the funerals Shamon Haretz, the old school teacher exhausted and overcome, laments in prayer:

“Merciful God, we commit our friends - Ben Zion and Krensky - to You. We have no more prayers, no more tears; we have run out of blood. Choose another people. We have paid for each of Your commandments; we have covered every stone and field with ashes. Sanctify another land. Choose another people. Teach them the deeds and the prophesies. Grant us but one more blessing: take back the gift of our holiness. Amen.”

Fear, anguish, grief, and despair isolate us. Suffering forces us to turn in on ourselves. We feel alone – forsaken by God and the world. Seemingly endless suffering often drives us to blame God. To blame God for everything that goes wrong in our lives. And we cry out “This is all your fault, God!”  “What have I done to deserve this? Why me? Why now?”

The answer to our cry is unsatisfactory. In fact as long as we keep looking at ourselves first, we don’t really have an answer at all. We only know that suffering is a part of our life in this broken world. And the answer that God gives to Job’s suffering at the end of Job’s story is unsatisfactory, too. Job judges God harshly by telling God that he doesn’t know what it is like to be human, to have to live with suffering. And God responds by telling Job that he doesn’t understand what it is like to be God.

This answer leaves us wanting God to know what it’s like to suffer, wanting God to understand us better.

But maybe the answer to Job’s question lies somewhere else. Maybe the answer to our question of why bad things happen to good people is outside of ourselves. In fact, the answer cannot be found until we hurl our questions and our cries onto the cross. When Jesus hung on the cross, broken and bleeding he felt all our hurt, all our pain, all our tears, our agony, our emptiness, our loneliness. Jesus knows our pain. In our brokenness we fail to see that God is right here beside us. We can curse God, and God is still with us. God is willing to hear the old school teacher’s prayer. Even when we feel completely alone and abandoned God stays with us. And God keeps on forgiving us when we realize that it is the brokenness of this world that makes us suffer.  

Because Jesus takes our blame and hurt unto himself when it is not his fault. He endured the cross, and had been locked up tight in the grave, And then Jesus is raised up to new life. The cross has been a symbol of great suffering and Jesus turns it into a sign of hope. The cross has been a symbol of death, and Jesus turns it into life. It is in Christ’s death and resurrection that God answers Job and the old school teacher and us.

It is God’s promise that restores Job in the end. By turning death into life God promises that suffering is not all there is. But that after our suffering will still be life. So, suffering does not define us. It is God’s promise of life that defines us. That restores us to new life in Christ. On God’s terms, in God’s time.

Amen.