Job 42: 1-17

When we arrived at the home of people we knew, church members were already there with staple guns and plastic covering the shattered windows from the wind and the rain. Some were cleaning up the house, and I was sent with a group to rescue a terrified herd of cattle stampeding through the fields. Our youth group spent a week picking up debris in the fields to be replanted. It was one of the best experiences of community in my life. I later came across a book by Rebecca Solnit titled, “A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster.” Solnit writes about five disasters in-depth, such as the 1906 earthquake in San Francisco, the Mexico City earthquake of 1985, and Hurricane Katrina. She was fascinated by the stories of compassion, bravery, and community action that were far more powerful than reports of looting or selfishness. Solnit said, “Our response to disaster gives us nothing less than a glimpse of who else we ourselves may be and what else our society could become.”...

Since we have been hanging around in the Book of Job in recent weeks in the Year B Lectionary, inevitably I have referred to Terrence Malick’s brilliant—but usually misunderstood—film The Tree of Life, which is an extended meditation on the Book of Job. The film is shot through with theodicy questions (albeit not about a set of circumstances as severe as Job’s) but those questions are consistently framed in the film by the glories of creation, by grace, by beauty, by the overwhelming grandeur that just is creation. The final scenes in the film are the movie’s equivalent of Job 42...

In 1945, the poet Robert Frost published a short play called "A Masque of Reason" which he bills as nothing less than the 43rd chapter of the Book of Job, the additional ending we never quite got to read. Frost's play jumps to years later, at which point Job and Job's wife and God and Satan all reconnect and try to hash out all the unresolved stuff. Job gets to finally ask God the questions we're all asking: "I tried to think," Job says, "The reason might have been some other person's, but there is nothing You are not behind. I did not ask then, but it seems as if now after all these years, You might indulge me. Why did you hurt me so?" God even gives him half an answer - "I was just showing off to the Devil, Job," but even Frost can't put all the pieces back together. There's something unresolved in this story. Something fundamentally unresolved. Something fundamentally un-resolvable...

Two objects will help you preach the Gospel from Job—a Rubrics Cube and a Cross. Is Job like a Rubrics Cube, a puzzle that we must solve? Or does Job finally point us to the Cross where the Unseen God became visible as the One who suffered for us and our salvation? Questions are important and we should ask them passionately. But the ultimate answer is not a bunch of words that explain, but the Incarnate Word exhibiting God’s compassion and mercy by hanging on the cross.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that throughout history, it was often better to be a son than a daughter. And better to be a first-born son than a second (or third!) son. The eldest son sometimes got everything, but more often than not, he received at least more than any other son. Daughters may have inherited their mother's jewelry and perhaps the family china or silver (unless the silver was monogrammed, which meant the oldest son's family would probably get it). It's interesting, then, that the writer of Job is careful to record that when his fortunes were restored, Job gave his three daughters an inheritance along with their brothers...

In J.B., Archibald MacLeish’s 1958 dramatic retelling of the Job story, characters named Nickles and Mr. Zuss debate whether J.B. (the Job character) will indeed start again after all he’s been through. Mr. Zuss says he will. Nickles says he won’t. Nickles insists, “Live his life again?—Not even the most ignorant, obstinate, stupid or degraded man this filthy planet ever farrowed, offered the opportunity to live his bodily life twice over, would accept it—least of all Job…!” He continues, “It can’t be borne twice over! Can’t be!” Mr. Zuss replies, “It is though. Time and again it is—every blessed generation…”

G.K. Chesterton, early twentieth-century journalist, novelist, and Christian apologist, once wrote “[Our] age needs first and foremost to be taught the nature of wonder...” He believed this was best accomplished through religious faith which could “provide that longest and strangest telescope — the telescope through which we could see the star on which we dwelt.”1 More importantly, Chesterton helped his readers to recognize that “it is the gift of the strangest of all religions, Christianity, to reveal that our existence on this star is a chronic miracle, with further miracles in store.”...

Playwright Neil Simon has written a comedy, God's Favorite, based on a contemporary Job, a tycoon whom Simon names "Joe Benjamin" or "Joe B." for short. The setting is Long Island, where Joe B. lives in a nineteen-room mansion with his wife, a prodigal son, and a pair of kooky twins. The family's assets include priceless paintings, irreplaceable antiques, including a Gutenberg Bible, half a million dollars in jewelry, swimming pools, and domestic servants. Joe was not always wealthy, having grown up in a tenement. When he was a young man, the holes in his socks were so big that he could put them on from either end. Joe is now a prominent citizen and businessman, a patient and generous person, trusting that how we live and how we die is in the hands of God. He attributes all his success to God, believing that wealth is as much a responsibility as poverty is a burden...

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William Sloane Coffin, a well-known Presbyterian minister and social activist, was chaplain at Yale University and senior pastor of Riverside Church in New York a generation ago. His 24-year old son, Alex, was killed when his car plunged through a guardrail and sank into Boston Harbor. Two weeks later Coffin delivered his now famous sermon, "Alex's Death," exonerating God from any blame in his son's death and rejecting the platitude that human suffering is God's will. Coffin said, "God doesn't go around this world with his fingers on triggers, his fists around knives, his hands on steering wheels ... It was not the will of God that Alex die ... When the waves closed over the sinking car, God's heart was the first of all our hearts to break."...

("There is a documentary on at the moment about Dietrich Bonhoffer a German Lutheran Pastor who was the only person in his time that publicly confronted the evil ideology that Hitler and the Germany people believed, including the mainline Christian churches...")

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