Life Itself Is Good (a sermon)
Life Itself is Good, and a lot has happened, and does happen, and continues to happen, and will happen as life goes on for whoever is here to live and love.
“Life Itself”, as film critic Roger Ebert titled his memoir, that I loved reading because in Roger’s life I found so many feelings and experiences of my own life. Life Itself is good, the joy and blessing that, in our first holy story, on the sixth day God says let us make אָדָם aDAM in our image, according to our likeness. And in our second holy story, the Lord God forms הָֽאָדָ֗ם ha-aDAM, an earthling, from the dust of the ground, and breathes into us his own Spirit, the breath and gift of life, and sets us free to live and love in our Time.
It’s a blessing also that this morning we read from Job, the drama of one man living life to the fullest until life itself overwhelms him. Job could be my hero for defending himself against God, except that when God himself shows up in Person, Job humbly knuckles under to God’s immensity.
God is awesome, and if you doubt that, you need to get yourself a telescope and peer out into the heavens any clear night: as our Eucharistic Prayer C says, “the vast expanse of interstellar space, galaxies, suns, the planets in their courses” - - as the Nicene Creed calls God: παντοκράτορα pantokrator, creator of all that is, seen and unseen.
I always love reading Job again, and I’m always glad to finish reading Job again. Job is a prime example that we cannot go back, we can never go back to life as it was before; and Job shows that, like Time, life only moves forward never backward; and that God is always aware of us, and present to us and for us, as indeed God sees Job through his misery.
I love reading the Job drama, which like my other favorite, Thornton Wilder’s “Our Town”, pulls no punches on life as it surprises us from day to day. Life is a gift, a risk worth taking, as Job realizes in Time.
Job is a theological and philosophical and psychological treasure that never stops giving, never finishes revealing God, and our standing with God, and God’s relationship with us.
Especially, Job exposes pietistic, sanctimonious nonsense - - σκύβαλον, rubbish, that Job’s “friends” would call "unquestioning, undoubting faith” - - trying to justify God, who is big enough and old enough and mature enough to justify himself if God cares to do so. In the Job story, instead of justifying himself to one of his creatures, God appears in an explosive burst of Shock and Awe that shows Job who is Alpha and Omega, and Job backs down. As Job says (13:6-12 The Message) God does not need us to get him off the hook, God does not need a lawyer to defend himself. God with Job is Who, in another explosive burst of theophany, reveals himself to Moses as אֶֽהְיֶ֖ה eh-YEH, "I AM." "I WILL BE".
With today's reading we complete Job, and the end of the Job story reminds me of a family memory I decided to share.
On Sunday mornings decades ago, my mother and father used to drive out of their way to pick up an elderly woman and ride her to church here at Holy Nativity, then drop her off back at her home after church. I do not remember the woman’s name (Gina would have remembered, John Thompson may remember). The woman was a character, whom I experienced for myself a few times when I was home on Navy leave and rode to church with my parents.
Arriving at church with her, my parents avoided sitting in the same pew with her, because she muttered and murmured to herself aloud all through the service, including commenting and responding to herself aloud all through Father Battin’s sermons. She was a distraction, but it was okay, this is Holy Nativity, where she was loved. Years later I’m still amused remembering her if for no other reason than that increasingly with aging, I see myself also going off somewhat eccentric.
Anyway, and this is my point, the woman liked for my mother to give her books when mama was finished reading them. Mama read voraciously, four or five novels every week. And this woman liked mama to give her the books when she was done.
But she was Absolutely Adamant that every story must have a happy ending. She would be extremely upset, emotionally shaken, if mama gave her a book with a story that did not have a happy ending.
So I think she would have liked the Job story. Because, for all the dirty tricks and horrifying tragedy; for all Job’s physical misery scratching oozing sores with a piece of broken pottery; and Job’s emotional devastation of losing everyone he loved; and the friends who in their foolish way tried to help Job but only disgusted Job and put themselves at risk with God - - in spite of it all, the story manages to wring out a happy ending for Job. And in spite of it all, salvation for Job's righteousness, which turns upside down an otherwise possible theological moral of the story (that we cannot earn our own salvation). And as the story ends, Job is satisfied even if I’m outraged, but a happy ending.
Regardless of all the shameful conniving between God and Satan (which places all the blame for life directly where it belongs: on the pantokrator), Job tells life as we experience life, and challenges us to examine our theology, and contemplate where we really are with God, and who and what God is for us.
Aside, and not to go any further with this, Job does, arguably, answer the question of theodicy (which if you don’t know the question, sorry, you’ll have to look it up yourself)*.
I don’t know, maybe the happy ending of Job even gives us a glimpse of the millennia-later Book of Revelation, its four-square New Jerusalem with streets of gold, where there is no pain, neither sorrow nor sighing, but the fullness of joy for evermore.
Maybe so.
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Art: William Blake (1757–1827) "Job and His Family". Pen and black ink, gray wash, and watercolor, over traces of graphite.
Homiletic endeavor in Holy Nativity Episcopal Church, Panama City, Florida on Proper 25B, Sunday, October 24, 2021, the Rev Tom Weller. Text: the OT book of Job, especially today's lesson:
A Reading from Job 42:1-6, 10-17
Job answered the LORD:
“I know that you can do all things,
and that no purpose of yours can be thwarted.
‘Who is this that hides counsel without knowledge?’ Therefore I have uttered what I did not understand,
things too wonderful for me, which I did not know. ‘Hear, and I will speak;
I will question you, and you declare to me.’ I had heard of you by the hearing of the ear,
but now my eye sees you; therefore I despise myself,
and repent in dust and ashes.”
And the LORD restored the fortunes of Job when he had prayed for his friends; and the LORD gave Job twice as much as he had before. Then there came to him all his brothers and sisters and all who had known him before, and they ate bread with him in his house; they showed him sympathy and comforted him for all the evil that the LORD had brought upon him; and each of them gave him a piece of money and a gold ring. The LORD blessed the latter days of Job more than his beginning; and he had fourteen thousand sheep, six thousand camels, a thousand yoke of oxen, and a thousand donkeys. He also had seven sons and three daughters. He named the first Jemimah, the second Keziah, and the third Keren-happuch. In all the land there were no women so beautiful as Job’s daughters; and their father gave them an inheritance along with their brothers. After this Job lived for one hundred and forty years, and saw his children, and his children’s children, four generations. And Job died, old and full of days.
* EXTRA-HOMILETICAL
The story of Job makes clear that the Creator does not bind himself to satisfy the imagination of the Created: "eh-YEH", I WILL BE signifies complete, independent self-definition.
Going further, our human theological "question of theodicy" posits, "If God is all good, and all powerful, why is there evil in the world, why do bad things happen?" For anyone willing to face it, the Job story shows logically that the question's basic assumption, its major premise stating the characteristics of God, is in error. The story proves God as all powerful, but Job witnesses that "all good" is not necessarily an appellation God might apply to himself; indeed, Job shows that God has been and can be devastatingly capricious, which is to say, not all good by human standards. A phrase in today's reading bears witness to this: "they showed him sympathy and comforted him for all the evil that the LORD had brought upon him". We can try to flatter God with our sanctimony that God is "all good", but God WILL BE.
Is God remorseful for "the evil"? Again, and again, and again, Carl Jung offers an answer: that the suffering, crucifixion and death of God the Son was God's penance for what God did to Job (who, indeed, is us). Remorseful? Perhaps, untold eons later, in our Time.
So, did God create evil in the world? Comparatively, C S Lewis, in "The Magician's Nephew" of "The Chronicles of Narnia" writes beautifully about the pitch black darkness in which Aslan (the Word) sang Narnia into creation, that the humans, happening onto the scene by chance, unintentionally brought evil with them in the story's person of Jadis the Witch. I love everything about Narnia, but Lewis' imagination is different to the JE writer's imagination in the Genesis (3:1) story that says the serpent (clearly, "evil", Satan?) was the most crafty of all the creatures that the Lord God created.
Anyway, contemplate. Think about it. Let the Bible speak to you, then figure it out for yourself. Problem solved: fear God. By the end of the story, Job sure as hell feared God anew. TW+