We have come to the end of the Book of Job. The first six verses, like the words in the previous 39 chapters, are written in poetry. They are Job’s response to God. Time and again throughout this perplexing tome, Job has demanded that God appear before him. Finally, at the beginning of Chapter 38, God does speak to Job. And in very pointed and painful language, God tells Job that he, Job, has some nerve in accusing God of causing all his troubles. God reminds Job of many of the mysteries of creation, and asks the understandably disgruntled sufferer if Job understands the intricacies of the natural order. Without actually saying it, God seems to inquire of the man who demands answers from Him if Job truly comprehends the audacity of his demands. In effect God says, “You think you understand, Job my man, but do you understand --- really? Is it proper for any of the created seriously to question their Creator?”
Finally, after this blistering interrogation by God, Job realizes the level of his impertinence by demanding answers from God when no answers are possible to the questions that Job has asked. There are some things we simply shall never know, and at last Job makes his peace with that. He meekly responds to God, “I have uttered what I did not understand, things too wonderful for me, which I did not know” (42:3). Then, in agony, he repeats what God had said to him, “’Hear, and I will speak; I will question you, and you declare to me’” (42:4). Then Job says the only thing he feels is a proper response to God, “I had heard of thee by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees thee; therefore I despise myself, and repent in dust and ashes” (42:5-6).
Do not suppose that Job actually saw God with his eyes. God is, after all, “Immortal, invisible, God only wise/ In light inaccessible, hid from our eyes.” But in this magnificent portrayal of the divine/human dichotomy, God does not hold Job’s impertinence against him, nor does Job need to repent. God knows Job has suffered immensely, and that naturally he wants to know the reasons behind that suffering. But there are no reasons. It just happened.
However, that is not the end of the story. God is well aware that Job has been righteous, and that his demand for answers is not an example of sin. Rather it is the illustration of a man in great torment who wants to try to find some sense in his misery. Therefore God severely chastises Job’s three friends who tried to comfort him with totally improper advice. Then God – quote – “restored the fortunes of Job.” He got back all the livestock he had lost, plus much more. He had ten other children (whether by his shrewish wife the text does not say), and he gave an inheritance to his three daughters (which was a strike for women’s liberation long before anyone had even thought of women’s liberation), and after all that Job lived a hundred and forty years, which suggests he had to be at least 180 or 190 when he died. The final verse reads, “And Job died, an old man, and full of days” (42:17). To say the least, friends, to say the least.
In the first sermon I said that the first two chapters and the last chapter of Job are ancient, coming probably from Persia sometime between 1800 and 1500 BCE. A Jewish writer or writers took that basic story and greatly expanded it with the 39 chapters of poetry. But there is one thing about this book I find very dissatisfying. In the first two chapters it clearly states that Job’s problems were caused by Satan, who was a fallen angel whom the Persians were the first to believe in. Unfortunately later Jews also came to believe in Satan, as did Christians still later. But nowhere in Job 1 or 2 does it say God caused Job’s monumental troubles. However, in Chapter 42, verse 11, it says that Job’s brothers and sisters came to comfort him “for all the evil God had caused him.” Well, which is it? Did Satan cause the problems, or did God, or did this discordant symphony of calamities just happen?
It has been my contention throughout this sermon series that Job’s misfortunes just happened, that there was no rhyme or reason to them. But the book itself seems to be of at least two minds on this issue. The whole purpose of this homiletic exercise has been to try to help all of us deal with our own tragedies whenever they occur. But the question is this: When major troubles come, where do we turn? That, I think, is the main message of the Book of Job. And the answer Job found for himself is that he turned to God. In God alone was the answer, he believed.
Early April, 1865. A tall man dressed in black speaks on the front steps of the United States Capitol in Washington, DC. Referring to the war which had consumed North and South for four bloody years, he said, “Neither party expected for the war the magnitude or the duration which it had already attained….Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other….The prayer of both could not be answered. That of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes.”
There, Christian people, is an enormous truth! We cannot always know what God is doing when terrible things are happening, or even if God is involved at all! We must simply trust in Him, never being positive that our trust will be validated! “With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us finish the work we are in.” Likely Abraham Lincoln started early 1861 as an extremely thoughtful agnostic, and he started early 1865 as a much more committed, if also unorthodox, believer. He concluded there was no other way out of the bottomless morass the two sides had dug for themselves than to seek the will and wisdom of Almighty God.
Another way to address the main theme of the Book of Job or the main theme of the astonishing and evolving theology of our nation’s fourteenth President is to ask this: Is God an immanent God, or is He a transcendent God?
The word immanent, incidentally, is spelled i-m-m-A-n-e-n-t, meaning always present, always at hand, not immInent (temporally very close at hand but not yet here) or Eminent, highly lofty, worthy of great praise. To believe in the Immanent God is to believe that God is always here, always beside us, that we need only turn to Him and He automatically will be there.
By His nature, however, the Transcendent God, on the other hand, is inevitably removed from us, if only because He is God, and we are possibly only a minute afterthought in His creation. Greatly to overdraw the distinction, the God of the 18th century Enlightenment is the Transcendent God, while the God of later evangelical Christianity is the Immanent God.
But isn’t it possible to believe that God is both immanent and transcendent? Yes it is, and I suspect to one degree or another most people do hold the two concepts of God in a kind of lifelong, uneasy tension. But I also suspect that many if not most people lean one way or the other. That is perfectly acceptable to God, I suspect even further.
Job, I think, wanted an immanent God with whom he could enter into a spirited discussion, and he ended up discovering an eminent imminent transcendent God who was not in the mood for a friendly tete-a-tete. God is, Job realized, as Karl Barth said, “The Wholly Other,” and that is W-h-o-l-l-y, not H-o-l-y, although God is both the Holy Other and the Whhhholly Other. But certainly God is much more unlike us than like us - - - thank God!
The acclaimed novelist Kurt Vonnegut was an American POW in Dresden, Germany during the firebombing of that city by Allied airplanes. As result of that and other experiences, he came to write about what he called “The Church of the Utterly Indifferent God.” Some people who are utterly indifferent to God would say that God is utterly indifferent to us. To them God is so transcendent as to be meaningless. But that is unfair both to the concept of God and to the concept of transcendence. A transcendent God is not utterly indifferent, and if He is, such a God ought not to be trusted. Never put your faith in an indifferent God. Job always knew that.
Recently I read a short news clip about Jim Kelly, the ex-quarterback of the Buffalo Bills. It described Kelly as “the Job of the National Football League,” and said that he led the Bills to four straight Super Bowls and lost all four, he had a son who died of a rare disease when he was eight, he survived a plane crash in Alaska, and he got cancer and had his upper left jaw and all but two of his teeth removed. Nevertheless his wife said he engaged in serious self-pity only once. Jim Kelly says, “I’ve been blessed. I wouldn’t change a thing.” I don’t know if he concluded that because he believes in God, but I would think it would be much more natural to come to that conclusion if one did believe in God than if he didn’t. Where do we turn in situations like that?
Linda Ronstadt was a famous popular singer who later turned to opera for a time. Then she got Parkinson’s Disease, and now she can hardly sing a note. In an interview in USA Today, the interviewer commended her for her remarkably positive attitude. She said, “Well, that’s all you can do. Every day is a different day….Every day I go, ‘OK, I can do this today, and I’m glad I can do it and it’s not worse. Because it’s going to be.” I don’t know if she said that because she believes in God, but I would think it would be much more natural to come to that conclusion if one did believe in God than if she didn’t.
Christianmingle.com is a website which advertises frequently on television. Its company slogan is “Find God’s match for you.” An immanent God might match people, but a transcendent God would likely know it would be perilous to try to do that. How would it work successfully?
The musical Miss Saigon is about an American soldier in the War in Viet Nam who falls in love with a beautiful Vietnamese girl named Kim. They meet shortly before he is scheduled to be sent back home. As he is about to leave, Chris asks, “Why God! Why today?/ I’m all through here, on my way/ There’s nothing left here that I’ll miss/ Why send me now a night like this?...Why God! Show your hand/ Why can’t one guy understand/ I’ve been with girls who knew much more/ I never felt confused before….Why God! Why this face/ Why such beauty in this place?/ I liked my memories as they were/ But now I’ll leave remembering her/ Just her.” But before that last stanza Chris sings, “’Cause here if you can pull a string/ A guy like me lives like a king/ Just as long as you don’t believe anything.”
But that is just the problem, isn’t it? Chris does believe, or why else would he address God? Job does believe, or why else would he want to find out from God why he had so many agonizing tragedies? You and I do believe, or why would we be here most Sundays? What’s the point of it all, if we don’t believe anything? Faith can be an inexpressible gift, but it also can be a singular if also painful burden.
Several weeks ago Lois and I were speaking to a friend. Her elderly mother lost a leg and has been in a wheelchair since. The daughter was going to take her mother to a movie, but something came up, and they didn’t go. Days later Susan did pick up her mother, and off they went. Ten minutes later the building in which her mother lived caught fire. If she were there, she could not have escaped, because the only exit she could have used was blocked by smoke and flames. Was God, either the Immanent or the Transcendent, involved in that? Susan thought so.
Two weeks ago I participated in a sort-of memorial service for a man whom I have known for 35 years who almost made it to 60. He was a happy-go-lucky guy, but also a deep thinker and a caring individual. He had cancer of the lungs, liver, kidneys, and bones. His sister called me, and I saw him in the hospital in the days before he died. He insisted he had lived a very fortunate life. Would a man who believed nothing conclude that? If so, how?
Plainsong is a novel by Kent Haruf. It is about several people who live in or near the fictional town of Holt, Colorado on the plains of eastern Colorado. Hence the title Plainsong. Four of the people in the novel are a woman named Maggie Jones, a seventeen-year-old girl named Victoria Roubideaux, and two elderly bachelor brothers who run a hardscrabble cattle ranch. Victoria got pregnant, and refused to identify the father of the baby. Victoria’a mother threw her out, and Maggie took her into her home, where Maggie lived with her elder father, who suffered from dementia. Eventually he started to hit Victoria, thinking she was an intruder, so Maggie had to find another home where Victoria could stay until her baby was born. And that is where Maggie brought Harold and Raymond McPheron into the story.
When Maggie approached the two old codgers, explaining the problem, they asked if Maggie needed money. No, said Maggie, there was much more to her request than just that. She told them, “She needs a home these months. And you…you solitary old bastards need somebody too….It’s too lonesome out here. Well, look at you. You’re going to die someday without ever having had enough trouble in your life. Not of the right kind anyway. This is your chance.” “Hell Maggie,” Harold said at last, “Let’s go back to the money part, Money’d be a lot easier..” “Yes it would, but nearly as much fun.”
After Maggie left, the two brothers talked about her far-fetched idea. Raymond favored giving a refuge to Victoria, but Harold was very reluctant. “Why hell,” he said, “look at us. Old men alone. Decrepit old bachelors out here in the country seventeen miles from the closest town which don’t amount to much of a good (blank-blank) even when you get there. Think of us. Crotchety and ignorant. Lonesome. Independent. Set in our ways.” Finally Harold gives in, but not before he says, “I’ll agree. I shouldn’t, but I will….but I’m going to tell you one thing first.” “What is it?” “You’re getting (blank-blank) stubborn and hard to live with. That’s all I’ll say. Raymond, you’re my brother. But you’re getting flat unruly and difficult to abide. And I’ll say one thing more.” “What?” “This ain’t going to be no (blank-blank) Sunday school picnic.” “No it ain’t,” Raymond said. “But I don’t recall you ever attending Sunday school either.”
How do such rough-edged old cusses measure up in such circumstances? After some unpredictable twists and turns, it all turns out right in the end.
Every day all over the world decisions like that are made by millions of ordinary people. No one who believes nothing would do anything like that. Only people who believe in either an immanent or a transcendent God can ultimately transcend themselves. That’s what Raymond and Harold McPheron and Job and we can learn in the end as well. God awaits our decisions.