Worship March 21. 2021 German Church of Atlanta
Sermon Why do people have to suffer? Is it coincidence, fate, deserved Punishment? Does it have a deeper sense? And why doesn’t God prevent it? If he is all-kind and omnipotent? The question of suffering touches on one of the fundamental questions of our Faith. The biblical book job tries to answer the "Job messages" that have become proverbial today. Job from our Bible is not a historical person, but a literary figure. It is an example of how we can deal with the issue of suffering. The book of Job takes suffering seriously. It doesn't talk nicely, it doesn't make it small, it doesn't take anything away. This is not easy, because a clear answer to the question of why it doesn't provide. Not for Job or not in our lives. Why does it hit me? Why others? Why now? Wasn't I always good? Haven't I always tried? Suffering is also neither explained nor justified in the Book of Job. There is no answer on the "why", this question remains open.
Is suffering a punishment for a misdemeanor? Should he ask God for forgiveness for any sins? Is it a pedagogical measure of God, with which he educates and wants to do make us more pious? Understandable questions, questions that we all ask ourselves when we experience such situations of loss or suffering or even hear about them. Somehow it must be possible to understand what has happened and why. But it is not. No matter how much we crush our brains, we will find no sense and no explanation. And after long and many speeches, this realization also comes to Job. You are all too sorry comforters, so he comments on the explanatory attempts to comfort by his friends. They don't help him, they actually strengthen his suffering, he does not feel loved, not accepted, feels even more afflicted, perhaps to blame himself for all, even though he actually knows it can't be. He doubts and he despairs. That's where Job sits. He doesn't look good. The trousers are spotty, the buttons are missing from the jacket. Demolished. He himself has been demolished. The hair is uncombed. Unshaven for weeks. That's where Job sits. He stinks. When he opens his mouth, a disgusting smell rises. That's where Job sits. For days.
AND COMPLAINS.
“Make me right, God, and lead my cause against the unfaithful people and save me from the false and evil people.”
That's where Job sits. His wife turns away from him in disgust. His children despise him. His co-workers ignore him. The partners leave him. His neighbors mock him.
AND JOB COMPLAINS.
“Make me right, God, / and lead my cause against the unfaithful people and save me from the false and evil people.”
That's where Job sits. His friends are still there. His friends comfort him.
They talk to him well. They explain his suffering to him.
AND JOB COMPLAINS.
“Make me right, God, and lead my cause against the unfaithful people and save me from the false and evil people.”
His friends talk to him well. And then they put it on him: You speak of meaningful suffering. So, what is the point?
AND HIOB REMAINS SILENT.
His friends speculate. You always have to look at the situation From different perspectives. There are always two of them. How right they are.
There are always two of them. Job and God. God and Job.
AND JOB COMPLAINS. “Make me right, God”,
His best friends have turned into enemies. His best friends talk about him and have no idea. They talk about God and have no idea. They have never noticed how close one is to the abyss when God is near. They never felt God’s grip. They speak of the good God. They speak of the love of God.
AND JOB COMPLAINS.
Make me right, God, / Stuff their mouths, that their obscenities get stuck in their throats.
God is dark. God hides. God does not leave Job alone.
AND JOB COMPLAINS.
“Why did you cast me out? Why do I have to go so sad, when my enemy pushes me?”
Is Job the only one who rubs himself against God? The friends are blind to God's dark hand. They have not realized that God can hide from their hearts. They do not remember the anxious questions of little Isaac. They have forgotten the darkness in which God plunged Abraham. The friends are sure of their faith. Their God does them nothing. Their God is kind and faithful and good and compassionate and loving. Your God is a nice guy.
AND JOB COMPLAINS.
He rubs himself sore. The brain crushes itself without hearing an answer. God! This agony! The hunger, the sick and the dead, the many blood, the wounds and the fear. That makes no sense, God!
There sits Job, accuses God and shouts his despair in our faces. If we don't run away, he tears open the wounds in us that are hard to heal. We could do better than his friends. We could try not to teach him. We could try to trust his words. We could try to recite the words of his despair and memorize them. There sits this figure of misery and obviously wants exactly that. Job wants his plight to be remembered. His misery is to be written down. It is not the consolations of the friends that should be kept. Job wants to squeeze his pain and his lament into letters, letters that cannot fade or be deleted. Job wants his words to be fixed in our hearts. Job wants his words to be inscribed in the heart of God. If the friends do not understand his plight, then at least we should preserve the words with which he fights back against misery. God shall keep his words. That's where Job sits. Does he want us to borrow his words of lament?
Whenever we threaten to go mad in pain? If we can no longer bear it, how God is idly watching the bloodshed? When we despair of God? Shall we recite Job's words of contention against God? Job, don't you have better words for us if we don't penetrate the dark? In your words, the abyss around God becomes even more disturbing. How can we endure the darkness with your words? With your words my soul is grieved to the death. Job, you're sitting there. You could also call out the words of the Psalmists to us: “What do you grieve, my soul, and are so restless in me? Wait on God; for I will thank him, that he is my help and my God.”
Job, you're sitting there. We're not like your friends. We do not justify suffering. We do not make sense of the pointless. We fear pain and yearn for salvation. We are not like your friends who think that God is predictable. We are shaken by your need and the deaths around us. But we believe in God. We want to hold on to God. On the good days we have a sense that the darkness is not dark. Job, you sit there and have not given up on God. Job, you sit there and hold on to God against all reason. Job, you're sitting there. You suffer and still believe.
How do you endure that? Why don't you just dismiss God from his responsibility? What do you know your friends don't know?
AND HIOB REMAINS SILENT Job, you sufferer, what do you know about God? Job, what do you believe in? Job, so answer.
AND JOB SPEAKS
“But I know that my Redeemer lives, and at last he shall rise above the dust. After my skin is completely smashed, I will see God without my flesh. I myself will see him, my eyes will look at him, and no stranger. That is what my heart longs for in my chest. --------
Martin Luther once said that “one must flee to God against God.” The suffering makes no sense, but there is at least the One to whom I go and my pain can be unloaded. And as long as I quarrel with God, doubt, accuse him, argue with him, I won't let him go for so long. Like Job: In all doubts he clings to God. And then it can that the view also widens again, that hope and a new perspective enter. Not as a theological doctrine, but as experience and certainty that can only be experienced in faith. As an awareness that God is to be reckoned with in my life. Not in the sense of an old-fashioned relationship, according tothe motto: If I do good, I will be rewarded, if I do bad things, I will be punished. Job is the identification figure for all people who suffer. In him is shown what it means to suffer in this way, with all the pain, with all questions, with all external and above all internal wounds. Job wants to be a role model. An example of how we can deal with fate and can avoid suffering: Suffer, fight, explain, doubt, endure, accept – and hopefully trust in the end. I know, I feel, I hold onto that I am held and sustained in spite of everything, and that God is on my side: For I know that my Redeemer lives.
Amen