“Curse God, and Live”

Sermon by the Rev. Caela Simmons Wood at First Congregational UCC, Manhattan, KS

October 18, 2015

Sermon Text: Job 1: 1; 2: 1-10

There’s something strange that happens to my watch when I go inside a hospital. It always seems to stop working.

I find that when I sit in hospitals and ask questions like, “What time did the doctor come by earlier today?” or “What time did you eat lunch?” no one really knows the answer. We all sort of look at the clock, think hard, and then shrug and admit that we just can’t remember.

In a hospital, minutes drag on or rush by. Days and nights get all mixed up. You get discharged on a Sunday morning and are shocked to see people walking into a church as you drive home. Is it a Sunday? You had no idea. You’ve completely lost track of the days.

Outside the hospital, the world keeps spinning. People get up and make their coffee and head out the door to work. Presidential hopefuls participate in scheduled debates.  Hometown teams continue their march through the playoffs. Life just keeps ticking.

But for folks in a hospital waiting room, none of this seems to matter much any more. They are consumed with matters of life and death – either for themselves or someone they love dearly. It’s hard to imagine making coffee or caring about the debates or the playoffs.

The ash heap where Job sat, scratching himself with a broken piece of pottery seems to exist out of time, too.

I doubt that Job could have told you what day of the week it was as he sat there amidst the total destruction of his life, mourning. He started to feel a strange itchiness on his skin and absentmindedly reached for something to scratch himself, scarcely realizing that this tiny itch was the beginning of a physical malady that would take him to death’s door and back again.

The best stories are the ones that seem to exist outside of time, and Job’s is certainly a story that could exist in any time or place if you just changed a few details.

The questions this story presents are immense – and although this is one of the older books in the Bible, believed to be written some 2500 years ago – we still don’t have the answers to the questions it poses. Especially the big one. You know what it is: “why do bad things happen to good people?”

We don’t know the answer to that question. Honestly – I’m not even sure it’s the right question. I tend to think that God isn’t in charge of suffering, but that suffering just happens sometimes, and God, like the rest of us, can only control of how he reacts to the circumstances that present themselves.

The story of Job doesn’t answer the question of why bad things happen to good people. At least not in any serious way.

One thing you need to know about the Book of Job right from the start: Job was not a real person. Uz is not a real place. God did not actually sit around up in heaven and make some sort of cosmic wager just for kicks.

This story still speaks to us because all of us have known a Job at some point in time. All of us have known people who were blameless, righteous, good, people and still, despite their loveliness, had terrible things happen to them.

In the beginning of the book, we see God hanging out with other divine creatures and a character named ha-satan. This is not the Devil with pointy red horns that you might be picturing. Satan is simply the Hebrew word for an adversary or accuser. Or, as a seminary professor once told me, the best translation might be the Prosecuting Attorney. Now that’s not to say anything negative about prosecutors! It’s simply to say that the role of this character in Job is to accuse, just like a good prosecutor. And the Prosecutor’s accusation in the opening chapters of Job is that Job is really only a good guy because he’s had it easy. The Prosecutor maintains that if God were to allow Job’s picturesque little life to be wrecked, he would cease being such a goody-two-shoes.

That’s the case against Job. And in this fantasy story, God says, “Sure, let’s give it a try.”

I’ve heard a lot of people say that God comes off as a jerk in this story. And if you thought that the point of the Book of Job was to answer the question, “Why does God allow suffering?” then, yes, God seems like a terrible, terrible God in this story. Because God not only allows for Job’s suffering, but encourages it.

I honestly think that one of the things that happens when we examine Job is that we get to let that “why does God allow suffering” question take the back seat simply because the answer given in this book is so far off from the loving, compassionate, healing God that we know to be real.

So in this grand drama, the Prosecutor wrecks Job’s life – destroys everything he owns and kills his beloved children. And Job responds quite calmly, saying, “I came into this world with nothing and I’ll leave this world with nothing. God gives and God takes away – blessed be the name of the Lord.”

So the Prosecutor comes back for round two and afflicts Job with intense physical suffering. That’s where we find Job sitting in the pile of ashes, scratching himself with a piece of broken pottery.

Job’s wife comes up to him as he’s sitting there, in the midst of their ruined life. Remember, his fate is also her fate. She, too, has lost everything, including her children. And she has one simple response to the situation. She says, “Why are you still trying to be perfect? Curse God, and die.”

She knows what we know from the very first sentence of this drama: namely, that Job is perfect. He can’t seem to help it. He is described as being without fault.

Regardless of what happens in the rest of the book, Job maintains his “good person” status. His wife doesn’t think all this goodness is getting him much of anywhere at this point, seeing as he’s sitting in pile of ruins and using a broken piece of their former home to scratch his disgusting skin. She’s gotten a lot of flak for this short piece of advice over the millennia, beginning with her husband, who laughs her off for the time being.

But do you know what? She’s right. She really is. She knows her husband well and what she knows is this: even if he does curse God, he will still be good. Even if he dies, he will live.

Of all the righteous and God-fearing men in this book, this nameless woman may have the best piece of wisdom of all: Even if you curse God, you can still be good. Even if you die, you will live.

Although Job laughs at her from the ash heap when his sickness is just beginning, he changes his tune as the days go by.

Job does curse God. If you want to read some intense, angry, cursing of God, just read the rest of the Book of Job. For thirty-some chapters, Job and his friends argue back and forth about what’s going on. And Job’s constant refrains are some variation of “God is ruining my life. Why is this happening? I don’t deserve it. I didn’t do anything wrong.”

Job says some things about God that I am certain my Sunday School teachers would not have allowed me to say out loud as a child. Job says some things about God that many sick or dying person has said (or at least thought). And do you know what? It’s okay. It’s okay that he says these things. He has every right in the world to be angry, given the situation.

I read somewhere once that when people are telling you they’re angry at you, you should be thankful. The rationale is, “If they’re coming at you, at least they’re not walking away.”

Job was certainly coming at God.

The Hebrew word his wife uses when she says he should curse God is actually not curse at all. It’s the Hebrew word for bless – barak. It’s a euphemism that is used several places in the Bible. It’s as if it’s too scary to actually say the words, “curse God” so, instead, they would just say “bless God” but everyone knew what they meant – wink, wink.

I wonder, though, if God doesn’t experience it as bit of a blessing when we curse her? When we are engaged enough to come at her with everything we have? When we are honest enough with ourselves about what’s happening in our lives to be as magnificently angry as we have every right to be? Because when we simply are who we are – when we feel what we feel – and when we bring that to God, we are engaging. We are coming at God. We are not backing away.

You can say a lot about Job’s behavior in this story. But one thing you cannot accuse him of is walking away from the relationship. Enraged and confused and afflicted and broken down, he stumbles blindly, relentlessly, desperately towards God. The one thing Job begs for in the midst of his deep anger is to talk to God directly. Cursing and crying and groping, he seeks God’s face.

God is blessed by Job’s curses. God rejoices that his beloved child is continually stumbling towards God, not away from him. God can handle what Job is dishing out. God can handle anything you have to dish out. Despite the difficulties of this very old story, there are gleaming, solid pieces of truth to be found in it.

And one of those truths is this: no matter what happens, no matter how broken things become, God does not turn away from us. We can stumble and curse and shout all we want and God is simply standing there, walking towards us with open arms, ready to engage. Ready to be in relationship.

Ready to lead us through cursing to blessing, from death into new life. Thanks be to God. Amen.