The final note emanates from flesh and bone, a product of tissues contracted and sinews vibrated in synchronicity. Out of the mouths of saints and into the ears of sinners, out of the mouths of the lukewarm and into the ears of disciples, the final note sojourns. The C travels outward, taking an acoustical survey and hurtling at velocities not reached by ordinary projectiles. Sinusoidal waves carom around the apse overhead. The harmonized sound skims the Casavant organ with its dozens of switches, pedals, and pulls. It propagates around the hornbeam altar carved by a long-dead craftsman and into the expansive crossing. It ricochets off limestone archways and expands into the cavernous transept wings. It pings off chiseled corbels and bounces off the maple framing. It marches down the empty aisles, bounding among the radiator coils and candlesticks. It rolls up and around the lunettes. It cascades through the nave, pelting cloth and varnish indiscriminately. It strikes the congregants with glancing blows. Select few waves are captured and funneled through helix, scapha, and concha, channeled through canal, and absorbed by stirrup, hammer, and drum. The rest smack into quatrefoils of scarlet and ultramarine or flirt with spandrels. Past the throng of souls incarnate, the remainder collide with the plastered wall separating the narthex. Tenacious, it reverberates off doors’ leaded glass and wriggles through uninsulated gaps.
By the time it dissipates a world away, the muffled C is heard only by a late-coming couple who frets with their one year-old. Within the sanctuary, the pastor has already begun disturbing the air with his preparatory remarks.
***
“Good morning, everyone. Greetings and salutations. It is good to be with you all on this pleasant Sunday morning, good to be together worshiping the Lord. What a choir we have! It’s hard to imagine a chorus of angels praising God more sweetly. I’m ever grateful for my being placed so close to those melodious voices. My view is privileged, too, facing the pews as I do during the liturgy. It’s a delight having before me the spectrum of ages and walks of life. I love seeing your mouths opening and closing in unison, lifting your voices up in praise as one.
I see some unfamiliar faces surrounding those mouths this morning. It pleases me. It does. I hope I’m not the first but, instead, the sixth or seventh to extend a special welcome to you today. We are glad you’re here. I speak for all of us when I say I hope you will continue to grace us with your presence and make yourselves more familiar.
To our members and regular attendees, don’t fret. You aren’t chopped liver. I’m glad to see you, too. Perhaps I’m even more glad to see you than some of you are to see me.
If you are new here, you picked an opportune time to visit. It is my delight and my charge to bring to you God’s word—in this instance, even direct quotations from the Father Himself—as we bring to a close our study of the Book of Job. The Book of Job, as I remarked some weeks back, is one of a grouping of Old Testament books collectively referred to as wisdom literature. With that in mind, are you ready to be made wiser?
What an uninspired response! It is only going on nine o’clock. Maybe you’re not ready. I see some of you newcomers starting to squirm. A handful of you are fidgeting in your seats. You’re wondering what you’ve gotten yourself into. Not Job! Anything but Job! Job’s depressing! The most desperate among you may be plotting to make your escape through one of the back doors. Let me warn you. We keep the hinges squeaky back there to deter such would-be fugitives. You’ll be caught, I promise.
But, in all seriousness, fear not. Fear not. Were you aware that more than any other command, Jesus Christ implored his contemporaries to fear not? I repeat our Savior, then, when I ask you to remain calm. Yes, the Book of Job has a certain melancholic reputation. Job’s very name connotes an unfairly persecuted individual. No one wants to be Job, so why would we consult him for how to live the good life? That’s a fair question.
I do my utmost to be honest before you, so I will not soft pedal what follows. It is a hard book, a bitter pill. But bitterness alone is no reason to flee. Most of us remember from childhood that bitter pills can benefit us. Bitter pills can cure what ails us. Yes, we have memories of gagging down those nasty antibiotics and drinking glass after glass of milk to wash away the taste. Or maybe your mother buried the capsule in a heap of applesauce. Whatever the sugar to make the medicine go down, the medicine itself was no fun. But neither was the infection. Do you recall that aching and lethargy that preceded the prescription? Thanks to those bitter pills, we recuperated. We recovered.
Bitter pills were good for us then, and they can be good for us now. We stand in need of hard books of the Bible because we are in need of hard truths. Naturally enough, left to our own devices, we grow soft and mushy in body. Those of you over the age of thirty know what I’m talking about. There’s a mushiness that sets into regions once firm. We are equally susceptible to atrophying in the mind and soul. We need to be fortified with the truth, rigid though it may be. So, let’s consider your being here this fine day the Lord has made your fortifying effort. Let’s undertake our restoration with the best material we have, that God-sent girder we call Scripture.
But before we move ahead to the book’s conclusion, allow me to briefly survey where we’ve been.”
***
A line up. A line down. The pencil spins to make a crude gray circle. A set of diagonal lines pointing to the top of the page. A set of diagonal lines pointing to the bottom of the page. Curly Qs swirl atop of the circle. Dots, an angle, and an arc are added to the middle of the circle. The process is repeated with the central lines decreasing in height. Everyone receives his or her own special hair.
This is our family.
A square as big as the paper will fit. A triangle on top. A line like a spotlight rises out of the roofline to be cut in half by a short perpendicular line.
This is our family inside God’s house.
God’s house is like grandma’s house but much bigger and taller and smellier. Don’t touch anything. Be quiet. Whispers only unless you’re in the playroom downstairs. Put your head down when everybody else does. Close your eyes when someone is talking to God. We do this because we’re scared of God, grandma said. God is scary but he loves us, too. He loves us even more than even our mommys and daddys, Miss Marcia said. God’s not a boy but we call him a him. He’s confusing. He’s in control of everything like the thunder and doggies. His real house is bigger than this house, but you can’t see it. It doesn’t take up any room. He wants us to talk to him, but he knows what we’re doing always. He like Santa like that.
He has a son who has long brown hair and loves kids especially. He and his son are the same as a ghost somehow. He’s confusing.
Elisa shows her mommy what she’s made. Her mommy sees and smiles at her. “Very nice,” she whispers.
Elisa goes back to drawing. She wants to fill the page.
Jagged lines, zig zagging from left to right. She draws draws little lollipops in the grass and put arcs all around them. A fence comes next. Doggies are the hardest. Their ears are like 7s frontwards and backwards. Lower case Ms fly in the sky just below the lone puffy cloud. The sun is a faceless circle in the upper right corner. It’s rimmed with rays of gray.
When she’s finished, she gets to color. Her mommy has the crayons in her bag. When the man stops talking, it’s lunchtime. If Elisa gets hungry, she can eat graham crackers in her mommy’s bag. Her mommy and daddy eat snacks sometimes, too, but they’re special. Jesus is in them like how sugar is in cookies. When she’s older, she can have them but for now she needs to stay still please. Graham crackers are her favorite anyway.
Elisa turns to her left. An old lady watches straight ahead. Skin hangs under her chin like a turkey gobble. It jiggles funny. Sensing the eyes on her, the stranger returns the glance and smiles so big her eyes squint.
Struck bashful, Elisa returns to her drawing. It’s almost done.
***
The space within the walls is governed by codified regulations like the space outside the walls. Each body is political: church, city, state, and country. There are rules and protocols, succession planning, and budgets. Campaigns are launched. Votes are taken. Representatives are elected. Staff is managed. Workers are hired, fired, or laid off.
Although different authorities are recognized, different jurisdictions established, different oaths taken and allegiances pledged, a similarity creeps into behavior, motivations, and relationships. Ambition is called ardor. Posturing is called piety. Discord is called discipline. Regardless of nomenclature, there’s an essential weakness, infernal wherever it arises, that animates humanity regardless of locale.
The Spirit, purported to dwell where two or more are gathered in His name, is tormented by this infestation. In effect, it has been summoned to animate the members of this hallowed institution only to be crowded out, to become a passenger in these vehicles that have already been commandeered by a sickness as common as it is nefarious.
***
“If we think back to the beginning of the Book of Job, we recall that Job was introduced as a blameless man. We clarified that his blamelessness was not a product of his unassailable character and behavior—which, although they were surely as good as we flatter all our characters and behaviors to be—fell short of perfection. No, we saw his blamelessness flowed from his ever-repentant heart. That contrite heart of his, fueled by reverence for God, was quick to make amends with his fellows and his Lord.
Job was a man who at every turn—though being acquainted with evil, having come across its snares and affronts like we all do—shunned evil and its lures to retort with still more evil. No, he did not fall into a heinous, vengeful trap. He did what we should all do when we hurt. He turned toward the Lord in prayer—be it prayerful lament or prayerful worship. Yes, even in pain he sought to praise God somehow.
Job lost his prosperity and nearly all of what he treasured, not because of his faithlessness but because of his faithfulness. Job’s plight, we read, was prompted by Satan’s unfounded accusations. Satan desired to make an example of Job and a fool of God by enticing a believer to disavow his Maker. If Satan could bring Job down, then he would demonstrate allegiance to the Lord is a consequence of divine bribery. But the Father cannot be tricked any more than He can be surprised. Satan would only confirm his own culpable ignorance of his Maker. In perfect foreknowledge of all that would transpire, God allowed Satan to try God’s faithful servant Job with increasingly horrific horrors to prove that God’s relationship with his people is built on more than indebtedness.
The Devil and his minions set about their maniacal work. After Job’s losses mount, after his material possessions had been waylaid and his offspring have been crushed, after his very body was riddled with festering boils, after his own wife invited him to curse God and quit the whole business of faith—we thought that perhaps Job had reached the nadir of his trials. What more could possibly befall him? Do you remember what happens next?
Mercifully, a reprieve came in the form of friends. Having heard the news, Job’s friends traveled from far and wide to accompany him through his bereavement. After days spent mourning with him in rituals and tears, Job’s three companions broke the silence. The same question that gnaws at the sufferer every waking moment had begun to gnaw at them. Seeing a once great man laid so low, they too wondered how could this be. What did he do?
But rather than soothe his weary soul and comfort the distressed, his so-called friends engaged in a discussion that took an increasingly adversarial tone. They had simplified the matter. In their view, either God was wrong or Job was wrong. The former option being blasphemous, they placed the blame for Job’s terrible circumstances squarely on Job already laden shoulders. He had been wicked and God was justly punishing him. Even if his good name was unimpeachable, he must have been privately sinful and was, therefore, reaping his just desserts. We previously discussed this interpretation of events as applying the theory of retributive justice, where an infraction against the law is swiftly punished to balance the scales.
To fast forward a bit: last Sunday we reviewed the prosecution and defense, the charges and the counterclaims. Back and forth Job went with his visitors, trying to discover why this fate had befallen him. We marked the book’s turning point with the entrance of a supposedly neutral third-party, Elihu, a nephew and self-identified wise man. Elihu, fed up as we no doubt were at the thousands of words spilled in the disputation, promised to resolve the conflict.
But, as we saw, it was not a man who settled the score. That responsibility was thankfully reserved for God alone. The Lord was the One who spoke the truth—a hard truth—aloud into a situation seething with offensive speech, betrayal, and slander stated as fact. Which brings us to today’s passage. If you would open your Bibles or read the text on the screen over my shoulder, our excerpt is from the forty-second and final chapter of Job, verses one through six.”
***
The best times to txt are during prayers or during worship. Kristen’s mom has memorized every worship song in existence thanks to the Christian radio she’s never not playing, so she’s usually making eyes with the pastor in the hopes he’ll smile at her like he’s a pop star. Or she’s watching the choir. She likes to tilt her head back and lift her hands during her favorites, when she’s really full of the spirit, so that everyone can see she’s so awesome. It’s awks but at least Kristen can thumb away in peace then.
Really, though, she can txt whenev. The only thing is that eventually her mom will whisper to her about “coming up for air,” or “giving her fingers a break.” Those little barbs piss Kristen off something fierce. In church, she can’t yell. Or shouldn’t. She has to take it and she doesn’t like having to do anything. Her mom’s been jabbing a lot lately, which is actually the topic of convo this Sunday morning. Kristen and her bestie, Alicia, have been mssgng about how cray their moms are.
Next weekend, Kristen’ll be with her dad, which means that this time next Sunday she’ll be slurping down the orangish milk left over from her Lucky Charms and watching X-Files reruns. Her dad’s total chillness is why Kristen could keep her nose to her phone for the whole sermon if she wanted to. That’s what her mom has to compete with. That and her mom can’t push too far because Kristen is knocking on 16’s door. If her mom gets too uptight, in a few short months she can make herself scarce via the ‘98 Cavalier her dad’s got waiting for her under a tarp in his storage unit. Kristen’s mom lets herself be played this way, so Kristen takes advantage.
This morning’s txts are focused on their moms’ random “discipline” patterns. Most bogus is a curfew for Kristen that came out of nowhere yesterday. She made her case that she shouldn’t be punished for getting home “late” because there had never been a line establishing Late from Not Late, and so how could sneaking in a little after midnight possibly be “late”? How can she be punished for breaking a rule when there were no rules? Dad’s cool with Kristen staying out until whenev so long as she doesn’t have school the next day. But no matter. Her mom majorly threw down. Now 10 PM was a line drawn in the sand. Threats ensued about ending certain data plan privileges.
Kristen, BTW, hadn’t yet decided one way or the other to risk staying out all hours. She was going to call Verizon to ask about the cancellation fee, which was prob big enough to guarantee her mom would fold since cash was tight as it was and her mom wasn’t stupid enough to waste $100 to prove a point.
Kristen told Alicia she was pretty sure her dad wouldn’t stand for it, FWIW. Ultimatums were typical Linda, he’d say. He’d talk to Linda about laying off Kristen. Lowell, of all people, knew that good things could happen post 10 PM. Parties basically start getting good around then precisely because all the prudes and uptight-types have already left to obey the very sort of lame rules that Kristen herself wasn’t made to obey.
But so Kristen’s mom added last night that what Lowell did or didn’t do had nothing to do with the rules in this house. She was like, “This string of disrespectful behavior is childish! This acting out has got to stop.” Kristen asked what that even meant. She asked her mom to please explain exactly how anybody could act in. Her mother told her she’s going to end up like her father. Kristen said good just before she slammed her door.
Lowell, if he were asked, wouldn’t be so quick to take the prediction as a compliment. Things have not turned out to be peaches and cream for Lowell. Life’s more dreary than he dreamed it’d be at his age. The child support is bleeding him dry. The more he earns, the more he forks over to Linda—which is a disincentive if he ever met one. It was never his plan to have children, which makes this 35th year of his life all the more unbelievable because he babysits a 15 year-old girl every other weekend and third holiday.
Of course it’s not all bad. Lowell has found that the miserable love company, too. When he loads their matching highballs into the dishwasher, days after Kristen’s left, he shakes his head and nearly laughs. This is what passes for his bi-weekly bright spot.
For the first six months or so of the divorce settlement, they’d pass the time watching cartoons. Lowell kept a bottle nearby to make it pass faster. Out of the blue one night, Kristen asked for a glass of her own. A few drinks in, he didn’t see the harm in the request. He was younger than she was when his older brother introduced Lowell to his friend Jim Beam.
“Okay. But you don’t want this crap.”
Rising with practiced equilibrium from his recliner, it hit him he was Kristen’s father. “And let’s get some things straight. First, don’t tell your mother. Second, don’t drink without me... And third, just one. ‘Till you’re old and gray—just one. Ladies shouldn’t ever accept more’n one drink from a man a night. More’n that leads to no good. Specially for a little lady like you.”
He returned to the family room with a tumbler for his daughter containing less than a shot of the Johnnie Walker Black he kept for special occasions and cut with enough water to keep her from retching. He poured himself another and screwed the lid back on. He held out her drink. Of the scattered bits from that night, he remembers her hand the clearest. The nails on Kristen’s delicate fingers were a shade of green so fresh and bright it put a lump in his throat.
She smiled at him. He grinned at her.
She brought the tumbler up to her lips. Lowell put out his hand. “Wait!” The liquid sloshed back and forth when Kristen jerked it back. “We gotta toast. What’ll we toast to?”
Kristen paused and bit her lip like she did even as a toddler whenever she was deep in thought.
“To fun!”
Lowell’s eye twitched. He almost told his daughter that fun’s never fun for long. But some lessons a kid has got to figure out for herself. So he raised his glass.
“To fun.”
Ever since, Kristen worships at the Church of Fun. Kristen doesn’t need peer pressure to do something odee cray. Ask anybody. She knows how to have a good time. She Robotripped before Homecoming. She scored a 12 pack of Natty Light by letting a bro feel her up outside a Shell station. Who else has patiently nabbed two Xanax at a time since March so she and her closest five BFFs could have a legit end-of-summer party? Even though Snapchat destroyed the evidence, her legend grew. And so Kristen will be damned if she’s going to give up so easy.
***
Some summer mornings, the way the sun slices through the eastern windows, the faithful swear the very face of God is taking its turn beaming on their humble place of worship. The light and warmth enter in unison and bathe subject and object alike.
On these mornings, when the Father greets a house full of His children, it seems to them that Eden was not obliterated, only broken up and cordoned off for safe keeping, to be briefly displayed like crown jewels touring among its empire.
What the devout called common grace, the disbelievers called weather.
***
“Like us, Job desperately yearns to know why these travails have befallen him. Mercifully, after the pages and pages of increasingly contentious dialogue, God intercedes. He speaks out of the whirlwind. He tells Job what’s what with firm but protective, preserving parental love. So, what do we learn from their exchange?
First, God does not answer Job directly. Notice He does not say, “This is why I’ve done this to you.” He doesn’t even divulge that Job’s tribulation came at Satan’s behest. Although He could do so, God doesn’t offer a rationale, doesn’t defend Himself. God isn’t interested in getting Himself off the hook because no man or group of men can ever really put Him on the hook. Even atop that hill in Calvary, the God-man consented to being put on the cross by men rather than men putting Him there against his will. So, in this moment in history, our Heavenly Father descends from His throne to to address Job instead of answer him. Lovingly but sternly, he puts Job in his place.
Where is that place? We must ask because Job’s place is our place. Job is our brother and we all share the same familial plot of exiled land. Most of you know the answer to where we are, but in case you’re new or in case you’ve forgotten: we are relational beings. We exist in relationship with others. I’m hard pressed to preach a sermon without referencing our relationship to God because that message is so central to the Gospel. I hardly need to tell you our place, our home, is well beneath the Father. That’s old hat. But the old truths, the hard truths, the bitter truths are all one and the same.
As God Himself declares, He is the Being who creates and sustains the universe. He is the Author of cosmic laws, both physical and moral. Complete wisdom is God’s alone. And Job? Job is a human. Job is a tiny speck who creates nothing new and, only through the utmost toil, may manage to sustain what God has already lent him. Job is a being who possesses a fraction of wisdom instilled in those who fear the Lord. Can we claim even that meagre speck of understanding for ourselves?
Here is an opportune juncture to take a brief detour. Job wants reasons and he isn’t explicitly given any. Job is like us in that way. We all want reasons for why we suffer, for why things go wrong, why tragedies happen, but we’re rarely if ever given any explicitly. From God’s address to Job, it’s clear that what we need most when we’re afflicted isn’t an explanation—even if that’s what we think we want. Reasons don’t suffice. When the doctor tells you that stabbing in your side is appendicitis, you may experience momentary relief, but this information doesn’t heal you. Despite what the culture suggests, information won’t heal us. Fundamentally, it’s not about reasons. It’s about more than that.
Job is reassured in the midst of his trials by the Lord’s audible words, the mere sound of His heavenly voice booming from the tempest. Yes, Job wants to know why he’s been brought to ruin. Sure, he wants to be validated, to be exonerated before his persecutors. But that’s not all he wants, or rather, that’s not what he wants most. Job is a man who has his priorities straight. Like Mary, his spiritual heiress and the sister of Lazarus, Job knows one thing is necessary: a reconciled relationship with God. In the end, he wants to maintain his faith more than he wants an accounting. He wants to continue his relationship with God more than he wants to be vindicated. In his infirmities and afflictions, he felt alienated from God. His protector was no where to be found. If only He’d return, even as a comforter, even as an authority! Just return! If only He’d grace Job again with his presence... Job’s ailments would pale in importance. And they did, sure enough. When God spoke, the afflictions did pale.
I should stress Job does not leave his conversation with the Lord with a greater grasp of intricacies of God’s providence. He does not know why God has done what He has done. He leaves with a greater confidence in God’s providence. He’s convinced God is overseeing all of creation—all of time throughout all of space—and is constantly working out His good purposes. The thrust is clear: absolute knowledge is not a prerequisite for faith.
But lest you conclude we have to jettison rationality altogether, lest you impugn our Sovereign Lord with capriciousness, there are justifications. I can offer you justifications even though God doesn’t spell them out to Job because elsewhere God, His prophets, His Son, and His Son’s apostles do enlighten us concerning evil. I should add that I’m not necessarily agreeing with each of the following and that some of them are inductively concluded rather than Scripturally deduced. But the list I’m about to share with you is a fair sampling on the topic.
Are you ready? I’m going go over them quickly because we don’t have all day and, as I mentioned, this is a brief detour from the ultimate message. If you'd like these reasons qualified or explained, find me after the service today or any day. The church’s main line is on the back of your bulletins. I do my best to promptly returning phone calls. If you’d like to reflect upon the list as a whole, I’ll make sure a copy is put on our website. Well, I won’t do that personally. I’ll make sure our resident computer whizzes takes care of that for us. Even better, I encourage you to investigate for yourselves. If ever you have doubts or questions, pursue them immediately. Consult the available literature. I’ll give you a tip, a little searching shortcut. Google the word ‘theodicy’. T-H-E-O-D-I-C-Y.
So without further ado, here goes:
- God uses evil instrumentally to bring about greater, more complex goods such as compassion.
- God uses suffering to retributively punish sinners.
- God uses evil to draw us near to Him by showing us how inadequate we are by ourselves
- God uses evil to build trust between Himself and His people.
- Evil exists only in relation to good, so it doesn’t properly exist on its own.
- Natural evil, like tornadoes and earthquakes, exist as a necessary consequence of habitability.
- Natural evil exists as a necessary consequence of causality.
- Natural evil exists to make moral responsibility possible.
- Lesser natural evils, like physical pain, exist to prevent greater natural evils, like death.
- Natural evil exists as a consequence of humanity’s abuse of free will in the Fall.
- Moral evil exists as a necessary consequence of free will.
- God allows evil to test and refine our faith.
- God allows earthly suffering to make His mercy for His people known.
- God allows evil to make vicarious suffering possible.
- Lastly, God allows His loved ones to occasionally suffer rather than be pleased in bad ways.
Phew! Did you get all that? Is your head spinning? There you have a survey of explanations. Although it is exhausting, I promise you the list is not exhaustive. There are others for your consideration, and I urge you to seek them out. Be aware, too, that there are reasons beyond your comprehension because omniscience is beyond your comprehension. But I warn you not to rely on the list alone when comforting a grieving mother or a disconsolate friend. Reasons by themselves will not do. They will not suffice because we are more than rational even if we are at times less than rational. What we require is personal because we are persons. It follows that the Word and the Way is a person not a thing, a subject not an object.”
***
Once a month, when he’s home from school, Adam goes to church to prove the liberal professors haven’t brainwashed him. It’s important to Adam that he establishes to everyone—parents included—that he’s his own man. He goes his own way, does his own thing. An independent individual like himself has to be wary, has to filter stimuli very selectively, lest he inadvertently drink the Kool-Aid being poured into everyone’s cups at all times. If there’s one principle he’s learned in four semesters, it’s that everyone’s invincibly biased.
He’s been honing his own Spidey-sense, actually, in terms of bias detection. People emit thousands of signals that indicate where they come down on, say, gay marriage or income redistribution. Once you become adept at picking up on these subtle cues, it’s a cinch figuring out what to accept as open-minded and what to reject as retrograde.
You can imagine what a trip it is for Adam to hang out with some Christians for a couple hours. It’s sort of a treat, seeing now what he was blind to for so long. He’s able to attend church and be among the herd, but now he’s above it all. Not like he could be blamed for his juvenile gullibility. It’s just that some people don’t grow up and most of these people end up frequenting places like this for seventy years, week in and week out, unaware of the facts. Measurable, quantifiable, empirical facts—the only kind there is. Facts like the speed of light and the uniform decaying of carbon molecules. Facts like neanderthals and the Spanish Inquisition. Facts like the Gospel of Thomas.
Adam keeps these certainties to himself when he’s home. He’d waste his breath talking to his parents. They’re too far gone, which is understandable. They have a cushy set-up. In his darker moments, when Adam struggles against his better judgment to discern any idea or value that isn’t objectively senseless, Adam wishes he could go back to living in ignorance like they do. An illusionless life isn’t exactly fulfilling. But it’s not in him to shut off these enlightened faculties of his.
Instead, he quietly observes. He listens intently to the sermons, noting to self all the inconsistencies and superstitions. Or, more accurately, he listens intently in two minute increments. He runs the transcript through his BS scanner. Words like “sin” and “grace” set if off. The terms don’t actually mean what the speaker wants you to think they mean. They’re rife with unfounded fears and hopes, carefully crafted over millennia to control people’s lives so they don’t have to think or choose for themselves.
Two minutes is all it takes for Adam to grow bored of scanning loaded language. His eyes start to wander, desirous as they are for a little amusement. He surveys the group, analyzing the backs of heads. He peruses the starched collars (conservatives) and the T-shirts (evangelicals). He gazes at the sloppy ponytails (moms) and bobs (aspirant moms), guessing ages and incomes, picturing the matching faces. He hypothesizes what they’re thinking, some scrambling to take notes while others are consumed by visions of lunchtime fare.
In the row in front of him, towards the center aisle, is a young woman with glossy brown hair. Adam can see most of her profile. She’s attractive. Her skin is taut and uniform except for the little darker circle by her temple that conceals a zit. She’s made up quite nicely. A bra strap is exposed just beyond her top’s neckline. He stares at that expanse of flesh for some time. Assuming she’s unaware of his attention, Adam will focus on a woman’s body for spans greater than two minutes. He’s terribly shy around three dimensional women, which is why he prefers their representations in two dimensional media or the flattening of space that voyeurism renders.
When a word like ‘salvation’ draws him back into the disinformation being simulcast over the net, Adam’s arousal butts up against his pity. He recognizes the utility in these myths. He’s cognizant of the needs they serve, psychologically. As recently as five or six years ago, he was right there with them, comfortably indoctrinated. He sang the songs and raised his hand to answer the pastor’s Biblical quizzing.
In between then and now, he’d heard some things, read some books, and posed some questions of his own. How, for instance, could an ancestor’s sin impute guilt upon him? How can a thing exist without taking up space? Basically, he did some soul-searching and discovered he had no soul. He had memories and feelings, instincts and consciousness, but never an experience of anything separate and distinct apart from them.
That was how his education really began—not through closet Marxists propaganda like his dad suspected—but through some honest doubting, through some inadvertent self-awareness. He’d brought the pesky questions up in his youth pastor’s SUV once as it idled in Adam’s parent’s driveway after one of those meals a pastor buys with money that isn’t his in the name of fellowship. The pastor assured him, without souring milkshake on his breath, that he’d been down the road that Adam had started on. He told Adam to take it from him that it was a dead-end. Literally. He said “literally” and then he laughed in a haughty way that made Adam feel distinctly separate and alone, made him feel he hadn’t been taken seriously.
In this act of soulless soul-bearing, Adam had that first tingle of Spidey-sense for bullshit. Of course, the youth pastor would say that. He supported the institution that paid his bills, that fed him all the comped meals he cared to schedule with all the cool kids he’d wished he could’ve hung out with back when he was actually their age. The lesson was sinking in to the soundtrack of Top 50 pop music the youth pastor had playing in his speakers to signal he could relate to the sheep he was employed to shepherd: everyone has an angle.
***
The multi-panelled doors, with hinges and handles fit for giants, opened onto the sacred or the profane depending on which direction the pedestrian was going. Pull the door to enter a consecrated place. Push the door to exit into a temporal place.
The border is more permeable than the hulking portals suggest. The world is imported on boots, loafers, and pumps, on sport coats’ lapels and wedged in dresses’ darts. The world is smuggled in by way of ideas, vocabulary, and preoccupations. The holy is exported by church bells clanging, in exhaust fans spinning, and candles glowing. The holy is snuck out in charity, mirth, and invitations.
The carriers, for good and for ill, are the people, gracing and disgracing, hoping and resigning, on both sides of the boundary. More than placards, more than soundbites, more than bumper stickers, tattoos, or jewelry, they are the mediums for messages orthodox and heretical.
***
“We come to the Book of Job in need of an education. Through millennia, God has protected for us the transmission of the wisdom He imparted to Job. His instruction isn’t, of course, the only instruction available on the topic. People draw their own conclusions about the universe and whether any justice can be found therein. A man wise by the world’s standards—and not infrequently wise by even God’s standards, I would add—Albert Camus, espoused an secular philosophy defined by injustice and the absurd confounding of human dignity. In his 1947 novel, The Plague, a member of my profession gave two sermons that marked the evolving beliefs of a character confronted with the reality of evil. In the first sermon, bolstered like Job’s friends by a self-righteousness unbecoming a man of the cloth, Father Paneloux insisted the town’s circumstance was a result of the townspeople’s character. Materialistic Oran, besieged by a ravenous bubonic plague, was getting its come-uppance. Like Eliphaz before him, Paneloux reduced God’s justice to pure retribution.
But he learns from a little first hand experience. Months into the epidemic, having himself entered the fray and fought in the pestilential trenches, Father Paneloux takes to the pulpit again. How his tune has changed! This time, he describes God’s justice as ineluctable, unsearchable, wholly, radically distinct from any of our notions of justice. What is right for God has become antithetical to what is right for us. Whatever happens is what God wants to happen. That sounds accurate, doesn’t it? If a town is decimated by an infection disease, God wants their ruin. Simple.
Because of a child’s death, Paneloux became convinced that faith is universal assent or universal dissent, all or nothing. Either you must believe our Heavenly Father desires the innocent to suffer or you must quit theistic belief altogether. Must it be so? I ask again. Must it be so? Must we be either complicit in cruelty or faithless?
I hope our answers are the same. No, it mustn’t. Of course it must not. We must not. The proposition is not bivalent, is not an either/or. Job offers us a third alternative. Not abandoning his conviction in the unacceptability of injustice, not whitewashing what is cracked and decaying, not reimagining desserts into what is patently undeserved, he continues to trust. Job endures. He knows the limitations of his knowledge. He learns that there is more to God’s perfect will than he can fathom. But despite the inadequacy of his understanding, Job does not abandon the core of what he can and does know. He knows God is good, even when—from his limited perspective—all Job can see is chaos. He knows God is just, even when—from his skewed vantage—all Job can sense is sorrow. The lesson Job imparts on us is clear: God is with us, providentially guiding the course of history, able to give a full accounting of whatever transpires but in no way obligated to do so.
Ultimately, Job wants to hear God more than he wants to be heard by God. Ultimately, Job believed that God can act to set the wrong aright contrary to the available evidence. Ultimately, his protestations fell away because they paled in comparison to God’s powerful love. He knew this love because he personally encountered it. God so loved Job that He spoke into this world so as to teach Job proper perspective.
God does not rebuke Job for his questioning and frustration. He rebukes the friends—the supposedly wise ones—for their foolish council. Although they correctly ascribe righteousness to God’s character, they mistake a portion of justice for the whole. They oversimplify. This should be a warning to all of us to not indulge our reductive appetite for straightforwardness.
Those of you who are struggling now, who are mired in pains you know to be undeserved, pains that come from desiring something good and holy, pains that come from enacting God’s plan for this broken earth the best you can, may be drafting a defense. You may be pleading your case to God night and day. You may want nothing more than to hear from the Lord Himself why your situation is the way that it is. There is nothing wrong with that. God is not displeased by your displeasure. I cannot stress enough that God does not rebuke His servant Job for his frustration. This illustrates incontrovertibly that there’s no sin in lamentation. Sadness, even anger, are permissible up to a point. They are permissible on the condition that they’re tempered with faith.
Mourn your loss, but don’t mourn the loss of your God. Rage against the corruption before your eyes, but don’t rage against God’s economy. Job’s perturbation grew to the intensity that it did because, like his companions, he believed in the goodness of the Lord’s will. Unlike his companions, he was not so arrogant as to believe he could countenance God’s wisdom when it had been hidden.”
***
Even though she usually picks a spot towards the back, Meredith often feels like the pastor is talking specifically to her. He’s such a gifted speaker, which is why she made the push to become members. She and Jeff had been putting down various kinds of roots, then: applying for jobs, buying a house, planting a garden, and trying to start a family. Shouldn’t they be rooted to a church?
Dr. Edward Ponser—who preferred to go by Dr. Ed because, as he liked to say, Mr. Ed was taken—was her kind of preacher. He was very scripturally-centered. He knew the Greek and wasn’t afraid of splitting linguistic hairs. Meredith never studied Greek, but she knows her French. She used to love quibbling over the best translations of Flaubert in college—not like that’s of much relevance to her life these days.
More than his precision, though, she loved the way he’d cut to the heart of the matter. A lot of pastors try to make their sermons funny, as though the Gospel was fodder for stand-up. Others try to make the message way too grave and miss the mark with all their doom and gloom. Dr. Ed, though, tapped into the marrow of all the subjects he discussed. He knew what mattered.
Granted, sometimes Dr. Ed’s illustrations didn’t resonate with her personally. He spoke of temptations she’s not susceptible to, little asides on gambling addiction or examples of alcoholic tendencies. On the whole, though, all of his encouragement, all of his accusations, all of his silly quips were as though catered to her specifically. But before Meredith sounds like she’s idolizing, she realizes It’s not about him. He’s the conduit. The point is that the convictions she feels listening to him confirms she’s where she belongs.
Meredith is hesitant to open up about this sense of belonging to others. Beyond Jeff and her parents, she doesn’t have many people to discuss it with anyway. Her friends don’t normally discuss heavy stuff. They prefer trending topics and workplace drama, which is nice enough and definitely has its place. Everyone’s so busy and stressed, it’s a relief to gab about new restaurants and TV shows. But on the stray occasion when they do touch tangentially on religion because a fundy group disrupted a funeral or a priest is arrested, they look at her funny when she tries to muster a defense. The group doesn’t get what she’s saying. A couple of her more opinionated friends have insinuated that Meredith was basically brainwashed. It’s true that Meredith had been raised in a Christian home, but what did that even mean? Everyone grew up in a home. Did the slight go both ways? Did it mean that when their kids grew up to be humanists or materialists that their beliefs would be discounted?
Just because her parents went to church more often than not certainly didn’t mean that her faith had never been shaken. She’s not stupid or a pollyanna. She’d been through dry spells, gone months without giving God a thought beyond thanking Him for nothing. Middle school was three hellish years in which God didn’t spare her from a single cliched test. If she was made fun of because of her cross necklace, if she was persecuted for her Savior’s sake, the dark night of Meredith’s pubescent soul would have been a lot easier to handle. As it was, she was afflicted with the humdrum ignominies of frizzy hair, snaggle teeth, and very poor fashion sense.
High school was okay, but then college was yet another blow. Meredith played it straight. She studied unto the Lord. She passed on invites for road trips and hook ups, abstained from the cheap booze. She was a nearly a valedictorian. What did she receive for her conscientious commitment? An embossed sheet of paper, underemployment, and an extra six month stay in her childhood room. God’s timing had not proven to be favorable. The collapse of Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers bookended her graduation day.
When Dr. Ed speaks of iniquity, Meredith remembers how patently unfair those years were. She remembers how aggravatingly slow the prescription blemish cream was to allay her acne. She remembers the interminable evenings working retail, weighing which of her two majors qualified her to refold sweaters more. But those are the challenges, the conflicts no amount of brainwashing could clean up. She’d been through the muck. Honestly, she probably did stop believing for a while or believed so little it didn’t register. But God didn’t stop pursuing her. Either she kept the faith by God’s grace or He helped her picked it up a little after she dropped it. Here, on the other side or the turmoil, Meredith could see how she’d matured as a result. She’d finally rid herself of the childish naivete that presumed piety would suffice for an easy life. The Lord never made promises to that effect, yet somewhere along the way she’d picked up the misconception. She couldn’t be certain, but it sounded like the sort of thing the devil would do. He is the great deceiver, afterall.
Provided she opens her eyes to see it, that saving grace is continuously being revealed to her. It’s revealed in funny little ways more often than the grandiose ones she’d expect. For instance, hardly a sermon went by without a mention of some obscure tidbit or recent happening that gave Meredith the heebee-jeebees in a good way. Last week, the pastor brought up a movie Jeff and she had just talked about. The weird thing—and what made it fit within this uncanny pattern—was that the movie wasn’t playing in theaters anymore. It was at least ten years old and not even popular when it came out. She didn’t always know what God was trying to tell her by these unexpected connections. Even when the fluke didn’t have an obvious meaning, it pointed to the smallness of the world. She was reminded of the interconnectivity of things and God’s working behind the scenes, just beyond the grasp of her reasoning abilities, at the very least making himself felt if not undoubtedly known.
Strangely enough, Meredith also intuits this sacred intimacy in the midst of stupendous fights or adversities. Without warning, she discovers her own emotions or interests are overtaken by a spirit of compassion that couldn’t possibly be her own. The closest she’s come to speaking in tongues isn’t uttering gibberish with her eyes rolled up in the back of her head. It’s speaking a language that doesn’t communicate thoughts as much as it communicates love, as in transmits love like data through a wireless connection. These comments don’t explain it all or make it all better. It’s more like they lay on a hand of solace or extend something far more substantial than an olive branch because it transcends matter altogether.
She’s not such a wonderful person, doesn’t ever have it together, so how is it that these acts of unalloyed, selfless concern could be coming from her? Not that she notices at the time, so absorbed is she in the act of healing. Only afterwards, when the tears have been wiped away and whatever needed mending had been mended, does she realize that she had been commandeered by a spirit that was not her own. In those moments, she had somehow gotten out of the way and let the light shine through her. It was, obviously, really hard for Meredith to articulate it—let alone explain it—but she lived for these gracious moments.
***
Although the sight lines vary, every seat in the house has access to the same resources. A Holy Bible, Hymnal, and Supplementary Worship Guide in the form of a three ring binder are all within reach. Each of these artifacts has been in circulation long enough that most are defiled. Toddlers have scrawled down spines before their parents could snatch them away. Zealots have underlined certain words or dog-eared certain pages. A stray rebel has sought to break the spell by proving they can be graffitied like any other book.
The bench cushions, added in 1988 as a concession to comfort, are worn and intermittently stained but not torn. The carpet, a commercial grade of pileless maroon, bears the spills of contraband coffees and colas smuggled in to ward of the evil spirits of drowsiness and headaches. Dull stubby pencils bereft of erasers flank donation envelopes and prayer cards.
Every fourth Sunday, additional supplies are dispersed. The bread that is said to become, in one way or another, Christ’s body was kneaded by a machine and baked en masse on a conveyor belt three hundred miles away. The wine that was said to become, in one way or another, Christ’s blood is shipped in plasticine bladders within boxes that can otherwise be found on the lowest shelf of grocery stores.
***
“None of us can regard another’s plight and rightly infer they did something to deserve it. Every affliction doesn’t have a neatly corresponding transgression that precedes it. We cannot so easily connect the dots. We’re not gods. As harrowing as that is sometimes, it’s for the best. How terrible and chaotic our world would be if we were able to bend it fully to our individual wills!
Since we have our limits, let’s recognize them. Let’s never engage in groundless speculation to plug our mental holes. Moreover, when we have reasonable grounds to indict a person, let’s extend them mercy first out of deference to our fallibility. One of the many principles Job teaches us is that the connection between sin and suffering is general, not specific.
It’s general because we are essentially related. You know how the doings of one family member affects the others. It’s the same for us as humans. We are members of the human family, dignified together by our Father’s endowment and degraded by our ancestral heritage. That goes for everyone everywhere, great grandparents, grandparents, parents, and children.
While we’re back on the topic, I’d like to expand upon a point of contention between Scripture’s wisdom and the secular wisdom I brought up earlier. For Camus, the suffering of children was an unconquerable impediment to faith. That little ones can contract plague is enough to reject God’s existence. What does the Bible have to say about children’s suffering? Predictably, it says too much for me to adequately address with our remaining time. I’ll settle for drawing at least one lesson out of our text. In the Book of Job, children come up twice—once in the beginning and once in the end. We’ve already covered the beginning, so the end bears reviewing.
In the final paragraph, after Job has reconciled with God, and after Job is reconciled with his well-intended but misguided friends, and after God assigns Job with the task of reconciling these misguided friends to Himself—only after all these relationships are set straight—does God restore our protagonist.
Almost as an afterthought, like loose ends tied up before the credits roll, we are informed the Lord restores Job. Indeed, Job’s blessings miraculously surpass their previous height. His wealth doubles. He fathers more children. With that happy ending, the curtain falls. As we say, all is well that ends well. A common refrain: all is well that ends well. Have you ever pondered that phrase? Do you agree? Is all well that ends well?
When I revisit this book we have ventured to comprehend, I oftentimes wonder about Job’s first set of children. I’m not sure if any of you have taken much notice of them in your reading, but they always preoccupy me. Is all well for them? Can all be well when it isn’t well for some of us?
We don’t learn much about Job’s children besides they are a group of committed, vigorous partiers. They live in a perpetual rotation of feasts, at the very least relishing—if not indulging—in their family’s bounty. We don’t know the likelihood any of them blasphemed in these gatherings, but we do know their father Job was concerned enough to preemptively prepare intercessory burnt offerings on their behalf. That is all we can say about these ten young men and women. Because of the constraints of the narrative, because this is the Book of Job and not the Book of Job’s Offspring, they’re consigned the role of minor characters in the play. They are collateral damage, unnamed casualties of the Accuser’s campaign to reduce Job to apostasy.
Despite their abbreviated parts, I still do wonder about the children. Like Camus, I want to know what we are to make of these bystanders murdered by a rampaging evil agent. They intrigue me as they do because they’re flesh and blood manifestations of the same riddle that tortures our protagonist. As Job asks, “Why me?” when calamities befall him, I ask, “Why them?”
This existential provocation is as old as our human lineage. There’s a challenge in it, a definitive confrontation in these distressing scenarios. To illuminate, let me provide a further illustration so that we can pick out the trait common to Job, his progeny, and indeed all who are lamentable.”
***
Roger sticks out in the crowd. His shirt, bought in a decade quickly fading from collective memory, tugs uncomfortably on areas that have since expanded. Church was obviously Diana’s idea. O’Reiley’s Pub was Roger’s, and they went there every Friday. So for fairness’s sake, he reached deep into his closet.
Roger isn’t what he’d call religious—or spiritual for that matter. He has no particular interest in what happens in these buildings. He doesn’t have an axe to grind on the topic one way or the other. He’s more of a Live and Let Live kind of guy. Spare him the picket signs and hullabaloo surrounding pro-life rallies and all that. He’s heard churchy folks say some crazy things over the years. In Roger’s opinion, a good number of them were no doubt kooks. As for the rest, most of them were as harmless as a flyer underneath your windshield wiper.
Roger’s parents certainly didn’t act like there was a higher power. Sure, they’d told each other—and their kids every now and then—to go to hell. His dad explained once it was a figure of speech, going to hell. You can forgive Roger for thinking religion was the sort of hereditary. You’ve got to believe a man can be god from day one because that’s not going to pop into your head on your own. No offense. Sometimes, sitting there, listening to the reverend talk about long gone folks, Roger was struck by how crazy the whole racket was. Who’d ever think they needed to be saved unless they were told ahead of time they were doomed to be kicked to the curb?
Aside from the outlandish views, people were people. The folks with him here this morning were maybe only a tad more on the up and up than the folks with him in, say, a movie theater on a Friday night. He’s positive there’re some bad apples and hypocrites around here, too. Stories about them had pretty much sealed the deal for Roger as far as god not really affecting people either way.
Take for instance what happens at work. When bad news travels through the grapevine, Peggy, Bill, and Kevin would say they’d be praying for whatever. On the other hand Jim, Eileen, and Roger himself would say they hoped whatever it was got better. Praying or hoping or wishing good luck amounted to the same thing. Something nice to say. Whoever was left over wouldn’t speak a word about whatever it was that was wrong. So whether you went to church—or temple or whathaveyou—or didn’t didn’t make as much of a difference as whether or not you were the type to give a care about a coworker’s daughter’s hospitalization. That’s Roger’s two cents on the matter.
He did have a particular interest in Diana, though. He reached over and placed his hand on her warm thigh. She put her own hand on his. Diana was one of the sweethearts. If setting the alarm on Sunday mornings was what it took to date her, it was a price he was willing to pay. He thought of going to church as kind of like sitting through a timeshare spiel. He nodded his head every now and again and tried to seem impressed.
So far, she hadn’t asked him much about religion beyond whether or not he was a believer—to which he answered yes. What he did not get into at the time was what he a believer of. That would be the subject of another conversation he’d put off as a far as he could. “It’s hard to say, really,” would be a good start. She was easygoing, all in all. The two Sundays before that they’d gone together, they’d both agreed the service was nice and left it at that. So long as he didn’t doze off, Roger figured he was in the clear. Diana wasn’t the type to quiz him or anything like that.
Beliefs never really came up between them, which was just as well. The religious had a whole other vocabulary that made Roger feel dumb. He’s learned to give short, affirmative answers whenever it comes up. “Have you heard the good news?” “Yes.” “Are you saved, Mr. Billings?” “I think so.” “It may be none of my business, Roger, but have you ever asked the Lord Jesus Christ into your heart?” “Of course.” Roger isn’t keen on lying, but if he answered honestly the situation would get so awfully uncomfortable he was liable to hurt somebody’s feelings.
Like he said, though, they’re not all bad. Back when Deb—his first wife—was laid up on chemo, they’d been given a ton of lasagna and more pots of soup than’d fit in the fridge from people like the Goltermans down the street. Once word got out she was sick, it was like a whole troop of Christians fired up their ovens and lit their stove tops. Roger never did figure out how they knew something was wrong aside from Deb’s car staying in the garage. Maybe they really do spy between their blinds like in movies. Whatever the case, he and Deb were well fed for more than two months.
That wasn’t the last time Roger accepted food from a Christian. He wasn’t exactly proud of taking communion, but staying put while everyone else lined up was out of the question. What would Diana do? Guys like Roger don’t snag ladies like Diana every day. It’d probably be the end of them. So he stood up and he waited his turn. He tore off a piece of the bread, dipped it in the wine, and accepted the blessing like everyone else. He was relieved, having swallowed it, that he hadn’t tipped anyone off about his being uninitiated. Sitting in the pew, bowing his head like they do, he was nervous of accruing bad karma or whatnot to his account. He quickly got over it. He nearly snickered to himself about getting worked up for nothing. It was a fancy snack, was what he concluded when he didn’t get so much as a stomach ache afterwards.
Every now and then, Roger catches a snippet of the reverend's speeches. It surprises him how open the man was to put god’s mean streak out there. Like this whole deal about god letting the devil screw with Job. Roger doesn’t get how this is supposed to convince him god wants to hear from Roger personally, let alone throw some bucks into the offering plate. He guesses it could be a tactic on the reverend’s part, being frank about how god screws with us every so often—or lets the devil screw with us every so often. Whichever. Better the devil than god himself, but why god would let the devil mess around like that was lost on Roger. It seems to him the story had more holes than swiss cheese, but that’s stories for you.
Admittedly more and more is lost on Roger with age. Why, for instance, does the woman sitting next to him treat him so good? There is no telling. He is fine with that. He isn’t one of those guys who has to make up reasons for everything. Roger stopped having to have reasons when Deb walked out on him after he did his level best by her through two years of cancer. Shit happens, as they say. Get over it, as he tells himself.
***
This place, one instantiation of millions, is alive and moving. It has the centripetal cohesion of a tornado, a pendant descended from the clouds. Like a funnel, it gathers and directs energy from above. Each member, guest, and staff is a separate current, an individual vector with varying temperatures and speeds, some aloft near the heavens, and others scraped along the earth. All circulate together in the vortex, dragging and being drug along.
The cyclonic rotation spurs eddies, harnessing nearby winds to be whipped up sympathetically. With the force of solid objects, it alters the topography. Its life is precarious, at times threatening to disperse and at times threatening to destroy whatever would impede the Holy Light that beckons it onward, pierces through the maelstrom, and shines forth behind its cleared course.
***
“By now, I’ve been your pastor for going on twelve years. As you’d expect, those years have imparted me with certain skills. Though I don’t claim the gift of prophecy, I’ve been known to dabble in mind-reading. I can surmise what many of you are thinking. You’re asking yourselves the same question I’d be asking if I’d heard this sermon instead of written it. Why, pastor, have you told us that dreadful story?
I’ll tell you why. I promise you I have a good reason. I have a good reason because the Lord our God sowed deep into my soul the seed of a hard but ever so crucial truth. In these stories—these old, new, and daily renewed stories we call our own lives—in these stories are the fault lines of faith.
In these stories of seemingly senseless depravity, the whole of our beings are engaged if we are awake and alert enough to fully experience them. We’ve all had these episodes where reality confounds us with its abhorrence. They leave their marks. I’ve spoken with countless people over the course of my pastorate and, as soon as my office door closes, they open up. It’s clear to me people have a short list of tragic times—be they instances, weeks, or years—on the ready. A valiant son killed in war. A selfless parent condemned to dementia. A dear-but-troubled brother hooked on dope. A beloved husband with wandering eyes. A sweet dog run over by a pickup truck. We all harbor within us a scroll of heartaches to stretch to the floor. They need not be personal, either. The heart has a way of personalizing. Who among us hasn’t been dismayed by the nightly news saturated nightly with evildoing, by scandalous headlines scandalizing even the self-identifying cynics, or by the fiction we’ve read which, though not verifiable fact, never the less strikes us as all too real? Whatever their origins, these lists are connected to our cores, to our deepest defining depths and heart of hearts.
Now, perk your ears up because I’m going to share with you one of the profoundest observations I have made in the course of my vocation. Listen. I have found that which way a person will break, whether or not they will hold fast to the faith they’ve already been imbued with or whether they’ll ever accept the offer Jesus holds out to us constantly, depends on what a person thinks God can do in these moments.
Those of you who know me know that, away from the pulpit, I am a slow-talker. To state in in musical terms, my tempo is more largo than allegro. I choose my words carefully. I’m no different when I mount these steps. I think the question each of us spend our lives formulating an answer to is what can God do in these moments?
I happen to know that the mother of the tormented child in my illustration earlier thought that God could do nothing—which is another way of saying that God does not exist since the God we meet in the Scriptures claims for Himself all excellence and power. To be unable to effectively act in tragic moments is surely a deficiency in character and capacity. If that’s the case, God wouldn’t be who He says He is. He wouldn’t be anything at all on that account. So yes, the mother thought that way for months, many of them spent in bed, under the covers, with the shades drawn. For months, she was plunged into a deep depression. She replayed the events ceaselessly. All that happened was all that she saw. There could be nothing else beyond her experience. She brought an innocent soul into the world and it left the world in irredeemable suffering. Her child was a pockmark, a scar on the face of reality, and God could do nothing with her child or for her child.
I have known souls—lost souls—who would not allow God the ability to mend wounds. Often from an otherwise godly well of compassion for the victim, a person will keep vigil long after the season of mourning has come and gone. They hold onto the pain quite literally with a death grip, and refuse to grant God the ability to do anything with the catastrophe. They worry that if they release their resentment, the victim will be forgotten. The bereaved cannot stand allowing the departed to slip away a second time, and so they bear witness until their own deaths.
Now I can’t speak for them, these constant grievers, but I can speak for myself. When I search my own heart and reflect upon how it was that in a period of doubt I was overwhelmed, I know that in my desolation I turned away from the Cross. I turned away, not because I couldn’t brave confronting still more senselessness—for surely the conviction of Jesus was ultimate senselessness. No. I turned away because I couldn’t stomach redemption. I couldn’t fathom how God could reach into that dark pit of utter, complete, total, absolute woe...how God could recover even the godforsaken. But He can. He can!
Job knew God could because, although he predated the Cross, he trusted in the God who could bring off the fathomless feat of the Cross. Job knew because he trusted. Job was re-assured because he had been assured once before. He was assured that God can do all things, including those things of which he could not perceive or could not conceive.
If I am to be fully forthright with you, my brothers and sisters, I must assert that, like Job, I am not aware of any good that came to that sweet little baby while she was with us in that flicker of a lifespan save for the merciful peace that was the end of her agony. Moreover, like Job, I cannot countenance how God can bring good out of that unquestionably real trauma of hers. And most crucially like Job, I swear to you that just like him, I confess that in these moments and along these fault lines, we come in contact with the places where God can do, and indeed does do, deeds too wonderful for us to comprehend.
And so we trust. We must trust. We must trust in the God we know and as He has wisely made himself known to us. He has manifest Himself to his image-bearing creatures as a God who is involved. He is a God who enters into suffering and takes that suffering upon Himself in an intensity so concentrated our frail nerve-endings and deteriorating synapses could not handle. He is here with us, distressed by our distress and distressed moreover by our faulty senses of pleasure. His Spirit is with us, mourning as we mourn and mourning when we are oblivious to the fatal wounds we’ve wrought to our spirits with a twisted sense of obligation to grieve.
In First Peter, the Apostle promises God will restore those who suffer. Do you believe him? Do you believe that God can? More than any reasons we can discover on our own or we can extrapolate from the Bible, we need to lay hold of the same conviction that saved our forefather, Job. ”
***
Given William Obermueller’s reputation, his peers would never guess he’d like to test how noisy the back doors really are. William is a reliable, stolid member of the church family. A man of few words, to be certain, but as steady as a rock. He’s not one to make waves or take issue with the church leadership. Underneath his superficial stability, a torrent rages. “The mind has a mind of its own,” he would say when Becky asked him what he’s thinking, staring off into space like that.
William doesn’t consider himself highly distractible. How could a man with deficient attention be an upper manager in a Fortune 500 Company? Impossible! Instead, observant is the word he would use. So observant is he that entire bullet points from meeting agendas have been lost to him in a single riff spurred innocently enough by a waggle of the CFO’s pen. William noticed how the instrument exuded clout with its glossy finish and tapered heft. He thought he should buy a pen like that, something distinguished he could proudly clip in his pocket after signing an internal memo. Sitting there gripping the nondescript rollerball he requested from procurement, he was shamefaced. Yes, the rollerball showed he was humble, a person who oversaw matters far too pressing to dither with Mont Blanc catalogues, who knew the value of a dollar or hundred. Contrarily, he didn’t want anyone suspecting he raided the supply closet like some shifty secretary. While this vine of thought grew, curled, and tangled, quarterly projections and proposed divisional reorganizations cycled past. The minutes would be disseminated by close of business the following day, so the cost of diversion was low. The cost is not always so low.
Because of his hypertrophic powers of observation, William could relate with Eve. He could sympathize with a person who lost all track of God’s imperatives when a serpent starting speaking to her. That amnesia was momentary, the observant person recalling what God had said about illicit produce as soon as the juice trickled down the chin. In the moment, though, nothing was easier than taking a detour. The fork right here and now had a sign advertising it.
While a theologian would say sin and all its consequent ills entered the world through rebelliousness, William would be more comfortable attributing it to a certain kind of concentration. A short-sighted kind, granted, but concentration none the less. Eve’s mistake never struck William as outright intentional. She was merely too absorbed with the pitch to consider the fine print. Although that sounds better than flagrant disregard, in some ways it’s not. William should know.
It is a terrible affliction, not being the captain of your own ship. He’d been predisposed to flights of fancy since birth and never outgrew it. He thrives in action rather than repose. The only way William was able to stay on a single track was to open his mouth and talk. He could string words together with the best of them, which is why he made a good salesman and why he now makes a good Director of Business Development. He inspires confidence. He’s been described as charismatic by experts on the topic. He’s assertive in what he says, even though he’s not infrequently clueless about what he’s saying. By that, William means that he hasn’t plotted his point out ahead of time. Neither is he a rambler, though. He brings his comments to a close once he utters his first convincing proposition. Elaboration only dilutes the emphasis.
Quiet time, like the allotment for corporate confession every Sunday morning intimidates him. Prayer, too, is a discomfiting exercise. Confession and prayer being linchpins of the faith he professes, William does his best to muddle through. He bows his head and says with a voice only his Maker can hear that he’s sorry for being short this morning with Jennifer, his eldest daughter, whose hair dryer and makeup kit weren’t such an inconvenience in the spare bathroom, it being an amply large bathroom with a vanity that could stand to be updated but isn’t a high priority because it’s hardly used, Becky and himself rarely having house guests anymore and the main floor already containing one and a half tastefully appointed bathrooms as it is, their house slated to be paid off in barely over three years thanks to William staying the course and not taking the bait and refinancing ten years in for a paltry 1.75 points off the loan plus closing costs, their monthly savings soon to be more than enough to cover that 700 Series BMW he’s pined for for so long, black interior and exterior with 18” alloy wheels and a sunroof through which to peek at the canopy of autumn foliage when the two of them head down to the lake on the weekends the timeshare is theirs.
Likewise when he prays, William prays for world peace, for His Kingdom to come, for Jim two doors down the street to have a speedy recovery from his lumbar surgery, and thanks God his own back hasn’t collapsed like that, which could qualify as a miracle given the three years of high school varsity football and what passed for padding back then, himself being a proud member of the Class of ‘74, a class that tossed its caps into the air nearly 40 years ago, the number being so large its impossible to avoid the conclusion he’s almost old now, lurching into his golden years, in another six, it’s all aboard the pension and Social Security gravy train for him, but he’ll cross that bridge when he gets to it and not a day before, if only AARP would leave him alone, which must require an act of Congress to be removed from AARP’s mailing list, it being a marvel the association has any funds left over to lobby for fogeys given their postage outlays, whatever a stamp runs anymore, it’s a waste, non-profit or not.
When William is attentive enough to hear Dr. Ed’s exhortation to believe God can do anything to make right an evil that seems to us unrightable, William wants to assent. He wants to say yes God can because that’s obviously the correct answer, but how can he be sure of what he believes? William isn’t 100% sure he believes anything, except that he wants to believe that God can, or wants to want. Then again, sometimes he doesn’t frankly care. When he’s mired in some preoccupation, he’d be tempted to say it’s a moot point and that what matters at the moment is whether or not he should throw his lot in with the contingent that rallying to acquire a particular Texan holding company so as to make inroads into a burgeoning refinery market. It’s risky business, refining, but so too is belief generally.
When a vision of an oil derrick pops into his head, William realizes how far he has strayed. Immediately after awakening to his mental waywardness, he is able to pray most fervently a concise prayer of pure repentance. All the while, his face doesn’t betray any interior disturbance whatsoever.
***
The church presents less and less like a place set apart. What was once a beacon on the hill has become another speck of light on a crowded skyline. The wider world has developed and sophisticated, has encroached upon its once hallowed ground. The abutting roads have been paved and widened. The surrounding land has been churned and the trees felled. Hulking structures of brick and stone, roofs of terra cotta and slate, chimneys rivalling the steeple’s supremacy have laid siege.
Modernity has even infiltrated the church itself. Fixtures and bulbs have replaced candle holders and wicks. Speakers augment God-given voices and projectors eliminate the need to riffle through musty books. Flatscreens herald messages that formerly were the carried by paper and ink and word of mouth before that.
Whether these changes were the products of felicitous adaptation or effects of malignant mutation is a matter of debate. What is agreed is that everyone and everything progresses inevitably toward apocalypse, apotheosis, or somewhere in between.
***
“To close, I’d like to leave you with a final observation, a detail that is easy to miss because it’s hidden. Although it’s an absence or negation, it is very much a positive for us. Recall the Book of Job’s literary structure. It contains a prologue, body, and epilogue. Despite the elegant symmetry in this form, there is one key asymmetrical irregularity—an irregularity that I would contend is prophetic.
In the beginning, Job was righteous. In the end, Job was righteous. In the beginning, Job was prosperous. In the end, Job was prosperous. In the beginning, God was actively involved in His creation. In the end, God was actively involved in His creation. In the beginning, Satan plotted to undermine Job’s faith. In the end…
In the end, the devil isn’t so much as mentioned. The author doesn’t give him an oblique allusion. So resounding was his failure, so absolute was his defeat, the author doesn’t deign to cite his loss. There’s no need to highlight what is already written in bold.
This outcome is in keeping with the rest of Scripture. We have been promised elsewhere that the head of the serpent will be absolutely crushed. We know that because of the steadfast perseverance of another righteous man, the God-man whose obedience never wavered and whose innocence was complete, thorough, and perfect—in sum, we know that because Jesus Christ suffered for us who causes the very God of the universe to suffer by our hateful, vengeful, or ignorant transgressions—all evil will be obliterated, wiped out, extinguished. It won’t even be a distant memory.
This paradisical culmination will not be retribution for any suffering of ours but will be mysteriously, miraculously retribution for the infinite suffering of His, the suffering of Him who on our behalf bore the Father’s just punishment we deserved so that we might have redemption instead of deserts and joy instead of gratification. Our Savior intervened on our behalf. Can’t you see: Jesus Christ is the arbiter for whom Job plead?
As stupefyingly gracious as this happy ending is, please don’t walk out those doors interpreting salvation as in any way “making-up” for our losses. To think that way would be to understand God as Job’s friends did. Salvation is not compensation. God does not trade you bad for good or good for bad. He does not pay you pleasure for pain or ecstasy for woe. Compensation is a consequence of work, for what you do. The Apostle Paul tells us the wages of sin is death. When you work iniquity, you die. That is your punishment. Death is your payment.
But redemption is different and until we stop seeing the world as a workplace or some board game where every spot you land on is the outcome of a dice you previously rolled, until we stop seeing every situation as remuneration, we are in the same dark pit that swallowed Job’s friends whole. Our universe is not karmic. Thank the Lord that it isn’t for we wouldn’t want what we deserve. A moment’s reflection shows our universe is presided over by a personal being, not a formula. Is the love of your spouse sitting at your side this morning compensation for the lies you’ve told? Is the care and guidance of your parents an advance for your secret addictions? Where’s the justice in your blessings?
Salvation doesn’t make up for our losses because the universe is not a scale. Reality is not a grand instrument. Life cannot be reduced to some sort of balance with God playing the role of a divine adjuster—adding a little here and subtracting a little there so that it all evens out. God is better than that. He is more than that. He is Good. He is Love. He is our truest lover who suffers for us and that… that is more than enough.”
***
To keep her right hand from shaking, Agnes rests her left on it. The palsy itself doesn’t bother her as much as the jangling of her bracelet. She can’t stand to be a nuisance, but she treasures her charm bracelet. All told, It holds quite a few memories. Posing like this is a compromise.
Agnes’s hands being occupied keeps her from taking the meticulous notes she was wont to take for the better part of fifty years. It’s just as well. Summarizing isn’t her strong suit anymore. If she tries to jot a sentence, she has trouble squaring the beginning with the end or how the line relates to what was being said now. Besides, she supposes that the Lord who had let her reach this ripe age and had given her these shakes wouldn’t begrudge her this late-coming loosening of strictures.
Truth be told, Agnes welcomes the respite. It takes the lion’s share of her energy to focus. More than anything, she is spent. Her chief aspirations consist of staying awake and alert for the hours between sunrise and sunset. That may not sound like much, but it is for Agnes. She’s still eager to live even though she’s tuckered out. She’s found the parade of sights to see and sounds to hear never ceases.
Hunched slightly forward, she has reverted to a stage of life preceding the sundry complications of adult responsibilities. There isn’t much for Agnes to do. She retired in 1983. Her driver’s license expired in 2010. Her income is automatically deposited and her expenses are on automatic bill pay thanks to her grandson. The remaining agenda may be paltry, but Agnes is quick to clarify it’s not boring. So much implores a person to speed up, to accelerate, to take on more, it was a relief to learn that slowing down could be rejuvenating. The infantile occupations of looking and listening have taken on renewed allure these days.
What there is to do, she does alone. She dresses by herself, makes coffee for one, watches for birds on her feeder outside, gives a crossword her best shot, has a bite to eat, and undresses by herself. On Sunday mornings, she dabs perfume on her wrists and neck and consults the mirror that hasn’t reflected someone else in more than a decade. She hobbles the five blocks to church, rain or shine. When she arrives, she accepts a bulletin and takes a seat. No one sits with Agnes anymore. Strangers keep to themselves. The assistant pastors don’t know her name. The deacons pass her by en route to more important patrons. The elders are all her junior.
Even still, she’s not lonesome. She’s too connected for that. She feels herself a teensy part of a larger whole. Even if men are islands, they’re not isolated. Islands are surrounded by water that connects each one with all other land masses eventually.
Although she is forgetful, she is not forgotten. This is the serenity she knows, the rest she’s finally been granted after so much toil. The abuse, the betrayal, the lies, even now the tumor pressing itself against her spine and being nourished as with the rest of her body by the very Bread of Life—it has all been worth it. Stationed here, trying to follow the tale of her forbearing ancestor, Agnes agrees with him that it has been worth it. She echoes his admission that in his protestations, he knew not what he was speaking.
Agnes is sure that the best things began in her pains. Even though her pains lasted for seasons on end, the best things outlasted the pains. Peace, mercy, forgiveness and love endured beyond the stings and lashes, the disappointments and disrespect.
In all her 84 years, Agnes never did have what she would call a second chance. Many, many times, however—times too numerous for her failing faculties to retrieve and assess—she had been invited to repeat the motions. The stage was never identical, the actors varied, but the roles were reprised with uncanny similitude.
And so here she is again, for the four-thousandth time, sitting in a pew, being taught about her Heavenly Father. In her senescence, Agnes has required less effort to keep the Spirit from stagnating. It’s one of the perks of being drawn near to the grave. Agnes embrace the repetitions as revelations even though she has an inkling she’s heard this before. She takes it as grace that even in the four-thousandth hearing, the Gospel strikes her as Good News, as in a headline, as in an old verity freshly burst forth into the world before her.
Agnes is becoming ever more of a historical reality than a living being. She is more akin to the plaques on the wall memorializing departed stalwarts than these ewes and lambs hemming her in. She’s becoming an accomplished end, a story brought to its conclusion by an Author both completely perfect and perfectly complete. He is her consolation. He is the self-sustaining Sustainer of all things. She is a creature created out of nothing to become a someone who would relinquish her life to be incorporated ultimately into her loving Maker.
What began as and has been a ‘taking away’ is being sanctified into a ‘letting go’. All that she has felt and seen, all that she has been bludgeoned by and passed through, down to the statement she heard a minute ago and struggles to parse, is eternally vouchsafed by her Creator. What is lost, finally and ultimately, are the souls that wish to be. Everything else is preserved in the perpetuating renewal of a love that swells and unites like the sea that is Living Water.
***
There is an instant, after the benediction and the chorus of amens but before people turn to pick up their programs and purses, when motion is suspended. In stillness, the hidden comes into its starkest relief. A force, lighter than perceptual thresholds, weighs on the assembled shoulders. Metaphysical or imaginary, it does not distort the closed circuit camera’s view. It wraps around the sculpted cross and drapes over the wrought iron chandeliers. It fills the dry baptismal font and is compressed within the fifty two gleaming, leaden pipes. It inhabits the folds among the chrysanthemum and carnation petals in the memorializing floral arrangements. It binds the oak buttresses and beams. It is no respecter of privacy, enveloping as it does the buffer zones parishioners establish to remain distant. Billions of alveoli house it, to be diffused across cellular walls and absorbed into cytoplasm in the proceeding split second, but it is not air. It permeates the impenetrable.
Ether or paraclete, the intangible is referred to by many names. This ineffable being, elusive and alluring, is what knits the rest together. Unlike light, its presence is not altered by observation. Like oxygen, it makes life possible. Veiled as it invisibly veils, it remains a mystery.
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