Where is God?

Sermon as preached at Lambs and Evington UMC 10/14/12


Scripture- Job 23: 1-9, 16-17

 

When we last read about Job, we were in the second chapter of the book reading about the little wager between the devil and God; the devil claiming that any human could be turned away from God, and God offering his servant Job as an example of one who would always be faithful. We learned that Job had lost his livestock, his servants, and even his children, and now Job was afflicted with painful sores all over his body, that he would have to sit and scrape off throughout the day. And then we have his wife, who believes that Job is being punished by God for some sin he must have committed. She tells Job to curse God and die! And then we had Job’s response, “Should we receive the good at the hand of God, and not receive the bad?” If after last week’s sermon you felt like things weren’t tidied up into one nice, easy, clean sermon, then you are correct. As we explore Job we are going to be focusing just as much on learning with Job than we will on learning about Job. In essence we are journeying with Job through his struggles, and forcing ourselves to address some of the issues that Job wrestles with. Each week we will learn a little more about God and about humanity, but the full picture will only be clear once we are able to look at the whole story. If you leave one Sunday feeling like you have more questions than answers, if you leave feeling more somber than joyous, that’s ok; That means we are truly wrestling with the book of Job, and have faith, just as Job has faith, that in the end the glory of God will be revealed.

            With that being said, let us now continue to journey with Job. What has happened between where we left off with Job rebuking his wife, to where we are today? The answer to this is rather simple, it has been a lot of dialogue. The story does not progress as excitingly as it did in the first two chapters, we do not hear much from the devil or God, there is not much narration of events happening in the life of Job. Whereas the first two chapters of the book of Job are comparable to a New York Times bestselling novel, the following chapters remind me much more of the tedious theological and philosophical readings from seminary. This is because what we have in the chapters up to our passage for today is a debate between Job and some of his friends. His friends, like his wife don’t believe that Job has remained a righteous man. The tell him that he is being punished for some sin that he has committed, and that Job needs to stop lying to them, stop lying to himself, and stop lying to God. They tell him that he should just confess before God and accept his punishment. Another friend speaks right before our passage for today. He tells Job that there is forgiveness and that there is repentance that all Job has to do is change his ways and he can be forgiven. This friend differs from his other friends, this friend recognizes that God is just and loving; not simply condemning, but a God that truly cares for his children and wants all to be close to him.

            While this friend’s offer of repentance is a healthier view of God and of God’s mercy and justice, we are still left with just one problem. Job is innocent! There is nothing that Job needs to confess, there is nothing that Job needs to turn away from. All of this leads to our chapter for today, where we begin to see Job express his frustration, his fear, and his despair. Job knows that he is innocent, he wishes that he could just go before the Lord and plead his case, but Job feels as though God is not there. He says, “If I go forward, he is not there; or backward, I cannot perceive him;⁹on the left he hides, and I cannot behold him; I turn to the right, but I cannot see him.¹⁶God has made my heart faint; the Almighty has terrified me; ¹⁷If only I could vanish in darkness, and thick darkness would cover my face!” Here was have Job, a righteous man, a man who has always walked alongside God, a man that even God said the devil could not turn, and now a man who feels as though God is nowhere to be found. Job has hit rock bottom.

            We can all empathize with Job. Almost all of us have faced times in our lives in which things got so bad that we felt like God was nowhere to be found. Burdens continued to weigh down upon us, loss after loss was heaped on to us and we cried out to God and felt as if God was not there. It is a scary and lonely feeling, to feel as if God is not there. Usually after a while our depression subsides and we are filled with anger and doubt. We cry to God, “If you really loved me why weren’t you there for me?” We see tragic events such as 9/11 and we ask ourselves, or others are quick to ask us, “Where is God in this?” We search our souls, trying to find an answer to this question and we can’t figure out how God would allow these horrible things to happen in our lives or to our neighbors. All of this usually leads towards despair, doubt, anger and a whole array of emotions towards God.

            Then when we feel this emotion towards God we start to feel guilty. We say to ourselves, “ I am a Christian, I have been ever since I was a child, or I remember how God turned around my life, I can’t be angry with God. I’m not supposed to be angry with God. I’m not allowed to be angry with God. I can’t feel God in my life I am a horrible Christian, something must be wrong with me. I can see how God has blessed the lives of all of those around me, but I must be doing something wrong because I just cannot feel God in my life”. When we are faced with these times of doubt, times of despair, and times of anger towards God, we often start to feel guilty. We have been told that a good Christian always stands firm in their belief, we have been told there in no room for doubt or anger or despair because that is just allowing room for the devil to creep in. We have been told that if we don’t feel God in our lives then we are doing something wrong. Brothers and Sisters I tell you that this simply is not true.

            We find in scripture instances of people in the midst of despair, feeling as though God is not with them. The psalms for example are full of pain and despair. Take psalm 42, the psalm that we read in our responsive reading this morning. The psalm says, “¹As a deer longs for flowing streams, so my soul longs for you, O God.²My soul thirsts for God, for the living God. When shall I come and behold the face of God? ³My tears have been my food day and night, while people say to me continually, “Where is your God?”⁴These things I remember, as I pour out my soul: how I went with the throng, and led them in procession to the house of God, with glad shouts and songs of thanksgiving, a multitude keeping festival. ⁵Why are you cast down, O my soul, and why are you disquieted within me?” It goes on to say, “⁹I say to God, my rock, “Why have you forgotten me? Why must I walk about mournfully because the enemy oppresses me?”¹⁰As with a deadly wound in my body, my adversaries taunt me, while they say to me continually, “Where is your God?” ¹¹Why are you cast down, O my soul, and why are you disquieted within me? Hope in God.”  Where is your God? Why are cast down O my soul, Why have you forgotten me? This psalm like many others expresses the pain and the despair that the Israelites were facing. This despair found in the psalms is so important that even Jesus quoted the psalms as one of his last  dying words saying, “My God, My God, Why have you forsaken me?” If the Son of God can cry out words like these in times of his pain, why do we act as if we are not allowed to? It is not something new to doubt God. It is not as if we are the only ones who have ever felt all alone. It is not as if we are the only ones who have ever cried out in anger at God. We have read the psalms and heard the deep despair in the hearts of the Israelites. We have heard the cries of Jesus on the cross, and in our reading for today we have felt and experienced the emptiness of one of God’s righteous servants, Job. Expressing or fears, our doubts, our pain, our anger, or despair, and our loneliness is something that is not only perfectly acceptable for Christians to do sometime in their life, it is also something that is completely normal.

            So why have we been taught that all of these emotions are wrong as a Christian. Why do we feel so guilty when we are flooded with these emotions? Whoever taught these things to us did not do it out of ill intent, but did it because they truly cared about us. It is because there is a fine line between doubting God and rejecting. There is a fine line between asking Where is God, and saying there is no God. This may sound nit-picky but there is a huge difference between the two. One is expression of all of your pain to God, and the other is completely rejecting God. In all of the scriptural examples given earlier we see that even with all of the doubt and despair, there is still hope in God.  Right after saying Why are you cast down, O my soul, and why are you disquieted within me? The psalmist says, “Hope in God; for I shall again praise him, my help ⁶and my God.  In Jesus’ words we find that though they are full of anguish, they still say my God, my God recognizing that the Lord is still our God. In other Gospels we also go on to find that Jesus also said words of great hope, “Father into your hands I commend my spirit.” And then there is Job. Job who has talked about looking east and west and not being able to find God, also says this, “³Oh, that I knew where I might find him, that I might come even to his dwelling!⁴I would lay my case before him, and fill my mouth with arguments.⁵I would learn what he would answer me, and understand what he would say to me.⁶Would he contend with me in the greatness of his power? No; but he would give heed to me.⁷There an upright person could reason with him, and I should be acquitted forever by my judge.” Even though Job has no idea why these horrible things are happening to him, even though Job knows that he is innocent and feels as if he is being unfairly punished for something, Job shows that he trusts the Lord. Trusts that the Lord is just and that if Job only had the opportunity to plead his case before the Lord that the Lord would act with justice. Here we find Job in the middle of pain and anguish, of fear and despair, and yet through it all he still has hope in the Lord. This is how we should question the Lord. When we feel as if God is not there, or that God is not responding to our needs, When we feel angry at God or have times of doubt, that is ok, but we should not do it by rejecting the love, mercy and existence of God, but we should always do it with hope.

            So how do we do this? How do we live out this hope and despair at the same time? Our founder John Wesley faced a similar dilemma. We find in his journal that at one point of his life John felt a loss of faith. He asked one of his friends, a Moravian named Peter Boehler, if he should quit preaching since he himself was lacking in faith. Boehler responded, “By no means” So Wesley asked him, “But what can I preach?” He said, “Preach faith until you have it; and then, because you have it, you will preach faith.” This is solid advice. In times in which you feel as though your faith is dwindling, do the things that you would do if your faith was strong. By doing this though your faith may be weak, your hope is strong because you are putting your hope in Christ to strengthen your faith, and you may just come to find that some of those things that you did when you had faith, may help you once again find it. Through it all, we do not simply stop with our question of where is God, but even in our doubt we continue to look for him, and God will find you.